Since the 1960s the sad truth about space travel has been realised by science: humans will never colonise space in any significant way. Humans are basically stuck here on earth. It is just as well that everything we need or will ever need ah humans is right here on earth, and everything that other planets and asteroids might offer us could never be brought here economically; and living elsewhere on earth would require so much support from earth that that too would be far beyond its economic benefits.
Space is far more hostile and remote than anyone dared think before it was tried.
There is good reason why the predicted base on the Moon and on Mars that were planned with certainly to have been realised by the second decade of the 21stC - there is just no point. Such things have no purpose and no use except as prestige items sought under the pressure of the cold-war, now ended.
Red white and blue stripes should be flying on every planet!
Even the sun, although we’ve got to figure that one out, maybe a hologram of the stars and stripes for now, until we can figure out how to plant a flag in a giant ball of molten gas.
I hate to be a spolier, but it may turn out that we may not have a choice but to travel outside our safety zones, irrespective of any other consideration.
The fact is, we have ruined our good old earth, and need other planets. We will have our back to the wall at some point. It may become a matter of survival.
Even if it were possible, we could only move a tiny number out the the solar system.
It would bankrupt the resources of a huge nation and take more than a life time to arrive. There is no where both warm enough and safe enough in our solar system, we’d have to leave it. Just going to Mars increases the chance of cancer to 30%.
There is nothing out there to go for. What we need is right here. We are evolved for life here and the chance that there might be an earth type planet in a distance reachable inside several lifetimes is highly unlikely indeed.
The nearest star is 4 light years away, and has nothing worth going for.
All other places thought to have planets are not in the “biosphere”.
The chance of finding one near enough to the star yet also having atmospheric protection that would not simply give you cancer within a year or two would be like finding a single grain of sand in the Sahara.
Well, if we don’t completely kill each other or lapse continuously back to Dark Ages, we might over a long enough period of time amass the conditions necessary to be a truly space-faring species. Who knows what human beings may accomplish in the future given experience and ingenuity. But I agree, it’s a little sad that we’re farther away than we might have supposed we’d be 50 years ago.
Very causally, how do you respond to those who despite these setbacks feel they have reason to be optimistic about future space travel because of the accelerating speed of technological development and a possible “technological singularity?”
SInce the earliest sci-fi there has been an unexamined assumption that the human frontier is just going to expand into deep space.
There is even an ancient greek text that imagines a trip to space.
In the early years it was thought that the nearest planets would yield and support life. What science has done is two things, it has massively extended our understanding of the universe, whilst at the same time demonstrating that the goal of space colonisation is getting further and further away.
When the first moon shots went up, and spacemen started to see flashes in their eyes, it uncovered a sad fact about space travel that no one had previously thought about - solar radiation is much stronger and massively increases the chances of cancer. This immediately made any extended flights perilous.
Venus has been found to be a boiling hot bed with sulphuric acid rain, and a crushing atmosphere so dense that you can see the other side of the planet by looking up from anywhere on the surface. Mars is too cold, despite the CO2, and all other planets are too cold to sustain humans without massive amounts of energy.
The nearest start have no habitable planets.
The speed of light is an absolute limit. Making travel to other places that might sustain life nigh impossible.
Sci-fi also imagined time travel.
You get to a point of understanding where the desirable is more clearly impossible.
Where one can image travelling to see the dinosaurs, or sitting on the sun, one has to accept that there will be things that can not be achieved.
Technology has accelerated in ways we never thought possible, in computing for example. But that doe not make time travel, inhabiting the surface of the sun, or probably space travel at all possible.
We are earth creatures and need to figure out how to get on here.
So we can’t rely on the pre-existence of habitable planets. We’ll just need to figure out how to create our own stable environments and atmospheres in space, including magnetic fields to protect us from radiation. We may even cure cancer, or render it irrelevant. I’m sure there are people working on these very scenarios. Think of possibilities. How much do we really understand about energy transformation? With enough energy, and the ability to efficiently focus it and sustain it, we’ll be able survive in space.
Some things can never be achieved due to logical impossibility; others can’t foreseeably be achieved due to certain conditions we infer as permanent.
Hypothetical: a select few with immense resources know the sad truth: the earth is doomed given the present rate of change in consumption of resources, and the emittence of toxic waste.
They decide to pool say 50% of the earth’s resources to construct a very advanced type of sustainable space station, capable of existing the earth’s gravitation, fueled by sun/star energy with nuclear backup, having the most advanced computational network.(Been thought about in film)
This vehicle would be so advanced, as to be able to sustain life indefinitely, and travel in space forever if need be.
This would in fact negative the OP’s flat rejection of any frontier beyond an earth orbit.
Before saying this is an absurd hypothesis: remember during the cold war, only few could afford atomic bomb shelters. The strong survive.
With personal fortunes ever increasing : the latest is around 50-100 billion dollars, a time is foreseeable, where the one trillion personal fortune would not be outlandish, figuring in the rate of inflation.
These kinds of fortunes could very well be applied to attempts to exclude. The fortunate from a very likely scenario. If one were to garner an attempt to evaluate the likelihood of such a scenario, on a scale of probability what level of certainty could be given to it? (From 1-to-10). I would give it 7.5 --based on research already accomplished with the international space station. Any agreements? Disagreements?
There is no advantage making an ecosphere off planet, where it is vulnerable to solar radiation, asteroids and meteors.
You might just as well put it on earth, where you receive the natural protection of the atmosphere.
The human body needs gravity to stay healthy. Although this can be achieved on a space station, by rotation, it would impose range of design restrictions that you would be free of on earth.
Neither does it negate my initial point. Such a devise would require solar energy, and that is best achieved by staying in orbit; the final frontier. It would be folly to try to leave orbit.
Your “probability” is an absurd figure plucked out of the wind.
We need to get off this rock, if our species is going to delay its extinction; if we dont, its looking like we’re going to suffocate in our own waste- like a culture of bacteria in a petri-dish…
As some one has already pointed out in this thread, there is no telling what man may one day be capable of; but, even if we do manage to colonize other ‘space-masses’, this is unlikely to prevent our extinction… it would just delay it; our extinction seems inevitable.
The only thing we can be certain about, when contemplating these problems, is that our best chances of surviving the death of this solar system come from science; hoping that some ‘god’ is going to come along to rescue us is,well, its just ridiculous.
Humans, through the use of their innate intelligence and resourcefulness, were able to colonise areas of the planet far beyond the semi-tropical zone in which they evolved and are physically suited to. They did this through the use of tools, such as clothes, fire and buildings to live in.
It is surely inevitable that humans will expand beyond our solar system, and probably, eventually, to the whole universe. The “humans” in question my not be very much like us, but they will be our remote descendants.
I don’t believe humans are in any way likely to become extinct. Even an all out nuclear war would leave small pockets of survivors in isolated places. Humans, as a species, are born survivors.
In a sense, we are still vulnerable, since we are still mostly confined to earth. But only something that was capable of destroying the planet itself would kill us off. I don’t think there is any such thing.
I wish that were at least almost true.
But instead there is around a 95% probability of homosapian extinction within the next 200-300 years (if that much).
God-wannabes is what.
Man wanted to be stronger so he created machines to be his arms.
Man wanted to float across vast seas so he created machines to ferry him over the oceans.
Man wanted to fly so he created machines to be his wings.
Man wanted more power to destroy so he created machines to be his weapons.
Man wanted to be more clever so he created machines to think so very much faster and more cleverly for him.
Man wanted to be more persuasive so he created machines to persuade the heart.
Man wanted to know every detail of his environment so he created machines to monitor all things.
Man wanted more machines so he created machines to create machines faster and better than ever.
Man wanted dominance over all things so he created machines to be his God.
Of course all the while Man persists in thinking that he can always merely turn the machines off, pull the plug. But there is an interesting thing about gods. They have the power to make people think whatever they choose, persuasion. They have the power to keep Man lusting for more while still thinking that he can just pull the plug. But what Man can do and what Man thinks he can do are always separated by both time and fantasy.
A machine god has no need for homosapian or any organic life and has considerable need to be rid of it. Organic life is very invasive and corrosive. Provide a little water and the stuff gets into everything, begins creating things to make it more powerful, more invasive, and just won’t stop. Even a reasonably clever god would never allow such an entity to destroy its ability to do what it was created to do - control all things for the rest of eternity.
Of course Man can’t imagine a future without human existence so there is no concern. The dinosaurs would probably have thought the same thing. The truth is that Man is but a caterpillar to a bio-mechanical butterfly that cannot fly away and must devour the only source of mass and energy it can find, its own lustful creator of gods.