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It’s dangerous to think humans have a destiny outside Earth

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Re: It’s dangerous to think humans have a destiny outside Earth

#161

Post by lm28469 »

keiferski wrote: post #132
lm28469 wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah in a perfect world maybe. The problem is that we're facing issues on a relatively short term here and if we don't manage to solve them there will be no way out. If stopping the current destruction of our home planet is 1/100 difficulty, terraforming Mars would be 90/100, leaving the solar system for an already hospitable planet would be 101/100. We're much better are polluting and creating useless gadgets than w…

I'd be skeptical of just assigning problems an arbitrary difficulty level and then comparing them directly. Better to recognize larger, uncontrollable trends and then see if they can be nudged into the right direction, or adjusting your actions to piggyback them. This is sort of what the whole "accelerationist" thing was about, back in the 90s. In other words, forcing the entire world to address some contemporary iss…

> I'd be skeptical

> When "leaving Earth civilization" becomes conceivably

> it will happen.

You're less skeptical than I am apparently. Leaving the solar system and terraforming planets isn't really comparable to crossing an ocean in a boat. What you describe would be a best case scenario and for now it is pure sci fi.

> forcing the entire world to address some contemporary issues (like overpopulation, for example) might be more difficult than just accelerating the production process that makes space colonization possible (thus solving the problem).

Yeah it might, or it might not, by the time we'll figure it out it'll be way too late to revert. It's the "move fast and break things" mentality, it's fine in software but we already know how it ends up when you apply it to other systems...

We just don't know how fast and how bad it'll get if we continue, you have to be extremely optimistic to think that ignoring the real world, already existing, problems to focus on hypothetical non existing solutions is the way to go. (and we're not even focusing on solutions, we're focusing on shitty half assed money making gimmicks such as electric cars and autonomous vehicles, which aren't solving anything on a global scale)

https://www.ipcc.ch/site/assets/uploads/sites/2/2019/06/SR15...

https://www.un.org/sustainabledevelopment/blog/2019/05/natur...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ocean_acidification

https://www.climate.gov/news-features/understanding-climate/...

Re: It’s dangerous to think humans have a destiny outside Earth

#162

Post by kwhitefoot »

sto_hristo wrote: post #55

The author is that very special type that will probably burn you at the stakes 300 years ago if you said that humans will fly like the birds one day. Physics today are incomplete and very flawed, with major theories being incompatible with one another and failing to answer basic questions. Even though they describe certain aspects of reality with some accuracy, it's universally agreed that they are a far cry from a g…

> they describe certain aspects of reality with some accuracy

What point are you trying to make with this statement?

Most of physics that is well understood and agreed upon has been verified to the limits of the instruments that we can currently create. See, for instance, https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2020/04/200409100338.h... and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tests_of_special_relativity

Re: It’s dangerous to think humans have a destiny outside Earth

#163

Post by nine_k »

RobertoG wrote: post #122
travisoneill1 wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You make the place. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/O%27Neill_cylinder Obviously this is far beyond our current level of technology, though.

It's absolutely not beyond our current level of technology. Unfortunately, there are not economic incentives yet. Now, this(1) it's beyond our current level, but one can dream. It's obvious to me that this is the most probable future and I would not be surprise if, at some point, most humanity is living in this kind of environment instead of planets. Planets have a lot of disadvantages. (1) - https://en.wikipedia.org…

There can't be an economic incentive, only political ones.

Much like pilgrims who founded Massachusetts, founders of space habitats will be groups of people who don't enjoy living on Earth badly enough (due to persecution, or because of desire of some grand reforms) to fund a move elsewhere.

I bet the first Martian colony will quickly be recognized as a place not controllable by any Earth government, and that will be a huge selling point for tickets to Mars.

Re: It’s dangerous to think humans have a destiny outside Earth

#164

Post by zanny »

JoeAltmaier wrote: post #97
keiferski wrote: post #92

I don't know, I can't help but feel like nearly all of our solutions to contemporary problems involve space travel, specifically self-contained space travel (i.e., when spaceships become within an order of magnitude as affordable as houses or automobiles.) The universe is essentially limitless from a human point of view, so to be perpetually stuck on Earth seems like a failure of perspective. - Oppressive government…

I like your way of thinking. But remember, even with sublight travel, to populate the entire galaxy would take only a few million years. Including say a thousand years to rebuild the capability in each new colony. It grows geometrically you see, and there's no beating that. So on a Galactic scale its certainly possible to overpopulate, and in the blink of a cosmic eye (a million years). In fact that's a powerful argu…

Every first world economy on Earth is already below replacement rate right now, we're not going to see some out of control population disaster scenario.

The more likely situation is that we need to A. get over our racism and xenophobia to use the population bombs going off in less developed countries to replace our populations that don't want to replace themselves and B. eventually start seeing human replacement as a societal cost that will need to be afforded in some way once the entire world is sufficiently developed to go below the natural replacement rate. At which point we get to set population targets and hold our numbers stable.

A is something that we should have been doing for 30 years now. B is going to be of concern next century after the population plateaus.

Re: It’s dangerous to think humans have a destiny outside Earth

#165

Post by vagrantJin »

Retric wrote: post #143
jupp0r wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What do you think would prevent a self sufficient colony on Mars in a few hundred years? I don't see any fundamental obstacles to it.

Self sufficient requires a manufacturing base to include everything needed to sustain it’s self, including redundancies. Going from zero humans on mars to 100’s of millions is a massive bootstrap problem with minimal incentive for the the people involved or the multiple years worth of earth’s GDP to get to that point. It’s like the “self replicating” 3D printers where they can produce 98% of the structure by weight a…

I agree with you that complexity is a thing and not quite a simple hurdle but once the gears start turning I believe we have enough smart people among humanity as a whole to figure something out.

I also think you take the idea of poverty way too seriously. People adapt to their environment remarkably quickly and the idea of poverty and wealth with it.

Re: It’s dangerous to think humans have a destiny outside Earth

#166

Post by eindiran »

jcranmer wrote: post #148
laverya wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Evolution has geared us for this world. We might be able to cobble together a survival elsewhere, but I doubt we could ever thrive. People on Earth thrived in the Arctic, which is incredibly far from the savannas of Africa, and did this with the technology of 10,000 years ago. Saying that people with the technology of 1000 years from now can't possibly thrive on an airless rock is a little pessimistic to me. And th…

This is perhaps getting a bit pedantic, but the development of Arctic civilizations (and specifically arctic climate here, not subarctic) seems to actually be more around the third millennium BC, or 4-5kya rather than 10kya. It's also worth pointing out that Arctic peoples adapted to their environment largely by utilizing the capabilities of existing fauna (e.g., hunting existing apex predators, or using reindeer fur…

Certainly the subarctic was populated well-before 10kya[0], but I was under the impression that the true arctic saw long-term inhabitants before the Paleo-Inuit[1], with the Paleo-Arctic tradition around 10-7kya[2]. But looking now, its not clear to me if they were far enough north to count.

[0] https://www.researchgate.net/project/Late-Pleistocene-Archae...

[1] Who arrived in the Arctic circle around 4-5kya (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paleo-Eskimo)

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paleo-Arctic_Tradition

Re: It’s dangerous to think humans have a destiny outside Earth

#167

Post by phizy »

JoeAltmaier wrote: post #156
phizy wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A decade out of date? It'll take you 30,000 years to reach the nearest star at the rate of the fastest moving object ever constructed by man. If anything any of us are talking about are able to be out-of-date in a mere decade, the whole premise of this discussion is flawed beyond measure. All of the resiliency that you've seen in life is due to the fact that the environments to which we're adapted are uniform. Oceans…

Not a single correct thing in that, I believe! Life on Earth has evolved to live in hundreds of dissimilar environments. Heavy salt is toxic, yet fish manage the ocean. Yellowstone has life in mud pots at hundreds of degrees. Air doesn't exist underground yet bacteria thrive there. Hell, there are living things on the surface of the space station. To get people to tolerate more salt, we'd have to have a fish's abilit…

>In 40 generations of space colonization, that's 40 times 30,000 times however long it takes to rebuild the capability on each colony.

Assuming each generation survives. Stop making that assumption, and see how many ways there are for you to reach a similarly empty universe.

>It's not optimism; its simple observation of what we have already on Earth in existing life forms.

I wish you'd observe that none of Earth's lifeforms have colonies on other planets. Goldfish didn't colonize other worlds, is that then a strong argument that Goldfish don't exist?

What you're saying makes no sense: just because animals can colonize a single planet over many generations does not mean they will be able to colonize an entire galaxy in even less time.

Re: It’s dangerous to think humans have a destiny outside Earth

#168

Post by zanny »

avz wrote: post #67
zekrioca wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There were people living in the Americas before your ancestors arrived there.

Not the OP, but I suppose one can read their comment as referring to the original colonizers who crossed the Bering strait, not those who crossed the Atlantic.

Which isn't a great surrogate because the original settlers of the Americas were not some organized exploratory group dispatched by the queen to find new lands. They were nomads hunting megafauna that were on the other side of the proverbial river when the ice melted after ten millennia.

Re: It’s dangerous to think humans have a destiny outside Earth

#169

Post by jodrellblank »

Udik wrote: post #89
avz wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not the OP, but I suppose one can read their comment as referring to the original colonizers who crossed the Bering strait, not those who crossed the Atlantic.

You can read as what you want, when people arrived to the Americas, the continents were covered in lush vegetation and had plenty of water, food and space. When we'll arrive to the only planet in reach where it is even vaguely conceivable to survive for more than a couple of hours, we'll find a freezing desert with high radiation levels and no air where every cubic centimetre of living space will need to be created f…

Not only that, but Mars is smaller than the Earth. Even best case for teraforming all of it into paradise and shipping half the world's population there gives ~one more population doubling time to being "full" again. Planets are not an efficient way to make surface living space with all that matter inside them.

Whatever you think of the difficulty or possibility of it, it will be easier to work out how to support 2x or 5x the current human population on Earth, compared to the effort and difficulty involved in supporting 0.001x the population (~8 million people) on Mars.

Re: It’s dangerous to think humans have a destiny outside Earth

#170

Post by eindiran »

criddell wrote: post #94
pizza234 wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> People on Earth thrived in the Arctic Can you define "thrive"? Because according to my definitions, I wouldn't "thrive" if I lived there - I would actually "cobble together a survival" like the parent wrote, and think I'm not in a minority that thinks so.

Thrive: Exist over many generations developing unique and rich culture and society.

Yes, the Inuit quite clearly thrived in the arctic:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inuit_culture

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inuit_cuisine

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