131–140 of 508 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I am not being sarcastic. Compared to terraforming, or even colonizing a planet to the point where it becomes a serious alternative to Earth, they are utterly trivial.
You're talking about philosophical and behavioral changes on a global and generational scale. Compared to those, scientific advancements in terraforming are positively trivial.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I can't tell if you're being sarcastic or not. None of those are simple changes.
I am not being sarcastic. Compared to terraforming, or even colonizing a planet to the point where it becomes a serious alternative to Earth, they are utterly trivial.
Terraforming another planet is an engineering problem (of course, not only an engineering problem), and in the end it's something that in theory can be accomplished as long as we "work it out".
Changing the human nature however, is not trivial by any measure.
It's very hard for individuals to change, and even more so for groups and even more so for societies. There are even those that say change in a person is impossible.
Whereas an engineering problem can (probably) be solved regardless of whether humans change or not.
One could even argue that advancing our technology has helped us change as humans (for the better hopefully), but the other way around doesn't necessarily hold.
Don't get me wrong, I'd love for us to be able to realize the damage we are doing to this planet, whether or not we colonize other ones (ideally I'd like both). However improving our engineering skills seems much more likely than improving our nature does.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I am not being sarcastic. Compared to terraforming, or even colonizing a planet to the point where it becomes a serious alternative to Earth, they are utterly trivial.
You're talking about philosophical and behavioral changes on a global and generational scale. Compared to those, scientific advancements in terraforming are positively trivial.
I think that, before colonizing other planets, we should start by realizing that Earth can easily sustain human kind for the foreseeable future, given some pretty modest tweaks to our way of life (compared to "going multi-planetary" that is). If we start valuing quality over novelty, stop eating animal-based foods and re-organize to live closer to where we work, we can stop the consumption and that is taxing our ecos…
> stop eating animal-based foods
Good luck with that. Sad true is that people don't want to change their life style. If you ask them for solution they will tell you exactly the same thing as you wrote, but most of them will not implement any of this solutions in their life. They want to eat meat, they want to consume, look at global warming, everyone know what is happening and what do they do on their own to stop that? Looking at my friends, people around me I see everyone recognize the problems, talk about solutions but no one is really doing anything.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I am not being sarcastic. Compared to terraforming, or even colonizing a planet to the point where it becomes a serious alternative to Earth, they are utterly trivial.
You're talking about philosophical and behavioral changes on a global and generational scale. Compared to those, scientific advancements in terraforming are positively trivial.
Also, it would require massive resources to get enough people to a colony to make it worthwhile in the first place. Deciding to allocate those resources (and deciding who gets to go) would inherently be a highly politicized process.
Alright, so currently we can't even predict how bad osteoporosis becomes after a flight to Mars (will astronauts break their hips on the first step out of landing module?), what would radiation exposure outside Earth's magnetosphere do to our bodies, yet we should hurry up to Titan. Currently even human space flight to Mars is a pipe dream, our practical knowledge constructing vehicles capable of reaching Moon and su…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Elon Musk's ticket to Mars will be less meaningful (if we take the word 'colonization' seriously) unless somebody can stick several thousand people into a hermetic sealed box and they are still alive and thriving after 10 years. I've been disappointed with the lack of progress in closed loop systems to date. There was Biosphere 2, a great ambitious start. Then a few years ago there was Kamen's Slingshot (outcome unkn…
The thing is, they don't need to be hermetically sealed for 10 years on a small scale. They just need to be self-sufficient long enough for the next supply wessels initially, until they can build up sufficient scale to be able to start solving the problems themselves and the environmental scale is sufficient that you buy time to fix problems that pop up. Scale "solves" a lot of these issues by buying time and providi…
You need to bootstrap the process but due to changes of government, economic troubles, you have a finite window in which to scale successfully. Building that biosphere becomes important fast.
Even the most exacting monarchs had limited control over what happened in the colonies due to distance and time. The further you extend your reach, the more autonomy you have to give to the peripheral. It's like a law of nature.
Talking of giving up control there's a funny book by Wernher von Braun (of German rocket science fame) where he claims the leader of the Martians will be called 'Elon'. I wouldn't have believed it if I had not seen it.
They almost had me until ... On the surface, vast quantities of hydrocarbons in solid and liquid form lie ready to be used for energy. Although the atmosphere lacks oxygen, water ice just below the surface could be used to provide oxygen for breathing and to combust hydrocarbons as fuel. Riiiight. And you're going to get the power to electrolytically split that water into hydrogen and oxygen where, exactly? (Whoever…
But when we'll figure out how to build something in Venus atmosphere, it's quite likely we will already have working fusion reactors. And they open the way both for faster space travel and for heating and industry on Titan, which means that it's more comfortable option for us than Venus. Still, not a second choice, because we'll have to build a base and some industry on the Moon anyway.
Alright, so currently we can't even predict how bad osteoporosis becomes after a flight to Mars (will astronauts break their hips on the first step out of landing module?), what would radiation exposure outside Earth's magnetosphere do to our bodies, yet we should hurry up to Titan. Currently even human space flight to Mars is a pipe dream, our practical knowledge constructing vehicles capable of reaching Moon and su…
Osteoporosis can be easily solved, just exercise on the plane. That is one of the least pressing problems in my opinion.