I missed where your quote started and who “I” referred to, and had a good time imagining Carl Sagan saying “But for me? I love that shit.”
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post by him from 2015 (thanks cory and @lastchance;
These and other findings make a contemporary evaluation of the starfaring plan rather startling: one begins to see it can’t be done.
Oh no! For some people this is a disturbing and deeply pessimistic conclusion to come to
hi there @Mister44 
two, as of last year; weird stuff, but both films are insane eye candy.
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I was coming to say the same thing.
Couple that with the “Wait Paradox” – the longer we wait to develop these future rockets and biodomes, the better our technology will be, and we will be able to do it even faster then.
Obviously the reason why it’s a paradox is that it can be used to justify putting things off indefinitely, but I think it’s reasonable to say that now, at the very, very dawn of the space age (we launched our first rocket to the moon just 60 years ago, a blink of an eye even for modern human history), we can justifiably say that our future space exploration plans 1000 years out really won’t look much different if we start today vs starting in 100 years.
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I too question the feasibility of traveling to another star. But I am sure 2000 years ago no one thought we would have the power of flight, much less rockets.
Still, we could explore some of the solar system. I just wish I would be alive to see what we find.
(And to be clear this isn’t to shirk our duty of being good stewards of the Earth. Earth will always be our one, best chance to live prosperous, happy lives.)
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But we are actively exploring our solar system. We just got some good photos of Pluto for the first time less than 10 years ago, and also have pretty impressive nuclear-powered, laser-wielding robots driving around Mars right now. This is a good time for exploration!
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Again? 2026?
Will it take that long to rebuild the set to fake it again?
Right right, you’re right. We finally got to see PLUTO not that long ago! Mars rovers are still churning out amazing pics and interesting discoveries. India just landed a probe on the moon. The Webb telescope is returning amazing images.
I just want it, you know - more and faster. I want to find fossils on Mars.
It was quite carefully preserved for a long time, but then they leased it out to make Capricorn One and most of it got trashed…
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I know you’re joking, but that’s not really funny. There are too many idiots spreading conspiracy theories and crackpot lies about the world and the universe already.
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World’s biggest scanning electron microscope, and roomba demo room, all you gotta have is a wall for Out There and another for the solar wind (the Roomba can for itself just make an effort to slag fun 3D prints out of the dust and you know, pet hair. They said no humans, not no arthropods. Jump locust, jump! Aw suited locust…you were too good.)
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Place the mask on yourself first before helping small children or others who may need your assistance.
– Batman
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some sci fi books depict spacefaring humans chowing down on crickets, and yet i think nobody has ever mentioned how they stop the crickets from achieving orbit
carl sagan said also this:
There are so many examples of human misuse of the Earth that even phrasing this question chills me. If there is life on Mars, I believe we should do nothing with Mars. Mars then belongs to the Martians, even if the Martians are only microbes.
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Exactly. There’s a higher grade vacuum than we can achieve in all but the most specialized labs just lying around unused. Beneath the nothing there is a lot of very fine dust, or as a mining engineer would put it, ore that’s been pre-pulverised prior to separation, which probably has also been done via gravity as part of the whole being vaporized and falling back to the Moon thing.
Speaking of craters, here on Earth, some of the richest ore deposits are under craters, where a large enough puddle of rock was created and then solidified slowly enough for gravitational separation and crystallization to do their thing. On the Moon, without an active atmosphere or hydrosphere cooling things down, and even with the lower gravity, the effect is believed by some to have been even greater than here on Earth, preserved better as well by the lack of oceanic erosion and plate tectonics.
As for timing? I think we’re right where we should be. It was just over a century that heavier than air flight took off, and unless there’s a number of huge breakthroughs in physics and other sciences it will be centuries before we are capable any sort of really established permanent colonization of even just the local bits of the solar system. A lot of these technologies will come from, essentially, the critical issues facing us today: how to recycle water in areas with limited supply; improvements in agriculture to reduce waste and increase efficiency; keeping an ecosystem clean and self-sustaining; keeping a panicky population safe in an emergency when things go wrong and they need to take steps to protect themselves.
And as NASA and the other space agencies discovered, when you ask your best and brightest “how can we do this already hard thing, but in microgravity with no replacement water or air, cooling limited to these radiators sitting in a vacuum, and maintainable by a person wearing welding gloves over ski gloves that they probably can’t even see?” you get answers that often make the hard thing here on Earth a lot easier and cheaper.
Sometimes, “Nothing” is what you need.
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… grandpa must be so proud of us
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A figure I heard years ago was that on an evolutionary timeline, most mammalian species get about 25 million years. In our current form, we’ve had around a half-million years so far.
By coincidence, I recently read an article talking about how life on Earth, in any form, has about a billion years left. The sun gets about 10% brighter every billion years, and the next billion years will shift temperature on Earth above the boiling point of water. My reaction to the news was pretty much the same as yours:
And if the factoid I recalled about evolutionary biology is correct (25 million years), then you could dial that down to 0.05 billion years (50 million) and you’d still be right.
(edit: punctuation)
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Definitely too high for us. 25 million years ago was before the Miocene epoch – you can look up some pictures and immediately see that while many are related, none of the mammals are ones we would recognize as living species.
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The back fell off?
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