On the one hand, yes, by not getting off the planet, humanity must resign itself to eventual extinction (sometime before the sun goes Red Giant).
On the other hand, even if we do get off the planet, humanity must resign itself to eventual extinction (the heat death of the universe).
Those are both are on such a long-term scale that they’re not worth worrying about at this point, but if you’re being pedantic enough to claim that not leaving the planet is “resigning ourselves to extinction,” then, without reversing entropy or finding another inhabitable universe, extinction is inevitable anyway.
That being said, it seems to me that means that it makes sense to do the best you can with what you already have; ie the planet that we already inhabit.
Dreams of Star Trek are nice, but at this very moment that’s all they are. As you and Brainspore both already pointed out, going to Titan is even less of a viable possibility than terraforming Mars.
So sorry if that spoils the scifi fantasy that so many people seem to have of just abandoning the Earth for “greener pastures” once we’ve completely fucked it up beyond all recognition… but the reality is that we just don’t currently have the capability or resources that would be necessary to undertake the immense endeavor of colonizing another planet.
Also I find it interesting that such overzealous posters as the one who addressed me previously just skipped over yours and Brainspore’s comments to try to attack me for my snarky meme.
I didn’t say nor even imply that you personally had to “give up,” on anything, ever.
Last time I checked, the only person that I have any control over is me.
But maybe I’m mistaken, and my mere snark has more power over faceless, histrionic randos on the internet than I could ever imagine. Perhaps I should look into that, see if there’s any way to market such “incredible influence.”
I keep hearing this. What about a very large, long-period comet? We would spot it a couple months before impact, and there would be no way to deflect (as is often discussed with asteroids, where we would have decades to prepare).
Couldn’t we get the oxygen from Europa? I mean since we are already in the “neighborhood” and figured out how to travel that far in a reasonable amount of time? Europa does have the most epic ice fishing w/ the leviathan and all…
You mean because of its oxygen atmosphere? With a surface pressure of some 0.000000000001 atmospheres – enough to lift a whole 75 picometers of water in the small local gravity – I think it is unlikely you will get enough to justify the decade trip between the two.
Yep. It’s not that I think it would be impossible for humans to colonise Titan/Mars (I don’t really have an opinion on that), I just think that this is only possible when having a self-sustaining colony in Antarctica is easy, and we’re successfully controlling climate change and our resource usage. When all countries in the world can sustain economically disadvantageous policies for centuries to ensure long term survival here. The fact that the main reason we need to find a new home is because can’t even manage a self-sustaining colony on Earth that can comfortably last indefinitely at the kind of technological level that we’ve had for the past few decades doesn’t encourage me to imagine that we could colonise one that isn’t hospitable to life to start with.
Just like everyone else here, I didn’t RTFA,so here’s my semieducated take on that part about not much clothing needed.
Air, aka gas-phase atoms and small molecules, is a great insulator. What that means is the heat transfer rate is very slow. And that’s what matters, not just the temperature difference. So apparently if you wear a windbreaker body suit on Titan, to avoid any hint of a breeze on your skin, the heat loss to the rather dense atmosphere is minimal.
It’s sort of the opposite of Space Shuttle tiles: they can be so hot they’re glowing red but you can hold them in your hand because, again, they don’t transfer heat.
I sort of agree, but find it nearly the opposite. Work in space has been the only endeavor in all of human history which has gotten them to strive to manage resources. Probably because in that setting there is no alternative. Since people predictably follow paths of least resistance, I don’t expect them to do so on Earth when there is any option which seems easier.
FWIW I think that “economy” is the dangerous superstition of the modern age. There are what resources there are, and the belief that we can/should try to manage symbols for resources instead of actual resources as a way of getting something from nothing is only wishful thinking on an epic scale. There is no “advantage”, it’s pre-scientific primate games.
ETA: The foundations of all popular form of economics are based upon the wants and needs of the individual, and as a consequence make their use in managing real-world resources completely ineffective. If it dealt with resources first it would be ecology. I see their reality/fantasy content in that economy is to ecology what astrology is to astronomy. The supersets take precedence over subsets because the converse is not possible. Resources need to accommodate first the biosphere, then human societies, then the individuals.
I wonder if ultimately it will be easier to:
a) create life AI or GE that can survive the various conditions in our solar system
b) adapt these climates in a way that they can host fragile human life
I’m leaning towards option A as being the easier of the two…but humans likely won’t consider any plan that leaves what we identify as humans behind. i think we would resist that type of “evolutionary jump”.
A prophetic book, written in 1997 or so. It starts with space shuttle Columbia crashing on re-entry in 2004.
Luckily some predictions from the book have also turned out to be wrong, so I still have hope for humanity…
Our experience with soviet-style communism has shown that we are too stupid and/or too corrupt to manage resources directly. Economy is playing a game with symbols, so that when everyone plays only their own game, a rough approximation of sensible resource allocation is the result. Too rough an approximation, to be sure, but it will be hard to agree on an alternative that (a) works and that (b) we can switch to without destroying any of the other things we have become accustomed to (standard of living, low child mortality rate, democracy, individual freedom, economic freedom, …). Not enough room in this thread to discuss this, though.
This post brought to you by rocket surgeons, who have a gift for understatement. Remember, these are the folks who have been known to refer to such things as ‘rapid unscheduled disassembly’ and ‘high energy chemical reaction’ for things we mere mortals would call ‘rocket blew up’ and ‘explosion’.
top shelf joke…thx.
