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As the commentor below stated, I do not believe humans will colonize anything but our own solar system. Things are simply too far away, even assuming there is s

As the commentor below stated, I do not believe humans will colonize anything but our own solar system. Things are simply too far away, even assuming there is some breakthrough that speeds up travel by two or three orders of magnitude.

dheera 5y ago
There have been several order-of-magnitude breakthroughs in travel speed for the past 200 years. We have several hundred million years of time on Earth to go, and a couple billion on the solar system, to figure it out. We also have plenty of time to figure out how to re-engineer and evolve our own bodies to deal with radiation and other hazards. We will figure it out.
- OmicronCeti 5y ago
  We simply exploited fossil fuels. You are extremely optimistic about having several hundred million years left on Earth, when the longest living hominid existed for only ~2 million years. I firmly believe that homo sapiens will self-destruct long before that point, as we have greatly overstressed the planet in only 200,000 years, mostly in the last 200.
  - Robotbeat 5y ago
    This is a pretty terrible argument, mostly because it seems to support Musk’s and Zubrin’s position that if we stop progressing we risk falling into stagnation, decay, and ultimately extinction and yet you’re somehow using it to say we SHOULDN’T try expanding to other planets or star systems. It doesn’t seem logically consistent! My view is that learning to master inhabitation of Mars and other places in space will enable us to revert Earth from a bunch of agricultural land and farms and suburban sprawl back into a garden (dotted with dense, luxurious cities) which we camp out in during the weekend. Space development shows how to thrive WITHOUT fossil fuels. It’s so strange to me that folks seem to have this backwards.
    - meepmorp 5y ago
      > My view is that learning to master inhabitation of Mars and other places in space will enable us to revert Earth from a bunch of agricultural land and farms and suburban sprawl back into a garden (dotted with dense, luxurious cities) which we camp out in during the weekend. How does that work, exactly?
      - OmicronCeti 5y ago
        We use the rare Martian mineral handwavium
      - Robotbeat 5y ago
        In space, any food produced would have to be grown inside, sealed away from the outside environment to protect it from the vacuum or near-vacuum of space or Mars. We will grow it in greenhouses or perhaps vats (staples like corn or wheat can be replaced by fermented foods like @solar_foods or @feedkind, using ultimately solar power, this is actually more efficient than photosynthesis and with a much smaller environmental footprint than agriculture) and certainly not have free grazing cattle (which is the biggest land use in the US). On Mars, we’re already beginning to master solar/battery-electric flight, so perhaps we may not need so many surface roads and we can place trains and such underground. Our footprint on the planet Earth could shrink by an order of magnitude even as our economy and quality of life improve (the density effect on economic productivity is well-established—and Mars will be really expensive to live on unless in large, dense cities... suburban sprawl being prohibitively expensive). These are all things that are fairly hard to prove on Earth as the whole system has an inertia due to developing with abundant fossil fuels, but on Mars we will be forced to rely entirely on renewable (mostly solar but perhaps wind and geothermal) or nuclear power, so a Martian society becomes a blueprint and a powerful proof of concept of how Earth life can be..
    - OmicronCeti 5y ago
      I totally accept extinction. It's natural. Homo sapiens will burn bright and briefly, and the planets will continue to spin. I would argue that it would be much more worthwhile to spend money improving Earth for humans while we can, than dumping trillions of dollars into spaceflight (which I say unironically as someone who is currently paid by NASA). >Space development shows how to thrive WITHOUT fossil fuels. Not sure how that's the case given the staggering emissions of Falcon 9 for example.
  - throwaway0a5e 5y ago
    >We simply exploited fossil fuels. This hand waves away all the accomplishments in seafaring prior to the 19th century.
    - OmicronCeti 5y ago
      What were the order of magnitude speed developments in seafaring before 1800? I'm not familiar with the topic.
      - throwaway0a5e 5y ago
        Navigation techniques improved substantially. While not inherently a speed improvement it increased the effective range of mariners by a ton resulting in effectively the same thing.
        OmicronCeti 5y ago
        Navigation is irrelevant to the space flight argument though, we know how to navigate between planets and stars (in theory). Speed is the limiting factor.
        kergonath 5y ago
        > While not inherently a speed improvement it increased the effective range of mariners by a ton resulting in effectively the same thing. There were loads of innovations around the shape and profiling of ship hulls depending on conditions in which they operated. Same for sails and stuff, not to mention doing away with rowers. This improved speed quite a lot on top of range.
        OmicronCeti 5y ago
        Thanks, that's more insightful!
  - aaronax 5y ago
    We could learn how to "simply exploit" atomic fuels. That should be good for another magnitude or two, right?
    - kergonath 5y ago
      The funny thing is that we know already quite a bit about how to exploit them. Now, putting that into practice is another matter.
  - kergonath 5y ago
    > We simply exploited fossil fuels. Not simply, but mostly: progress started before the steam engine. But yeah, pop sci is hyping a lot of things that are very, very unlikely in the near future, and it looks like we won’t have much beyond that.
  - qq4 5y ago
    If you firmly believe that homo sapiens will self-destruct in such a time, then why would there be any value in preserving Mars?
    - psd1 5y ago
      If I may: homo sapiens has self-destructive tendencies, which we acknowledge and for which we sorrow. But we love them anyway, and wish to see their continued survival, if it happens. We accept that populating another planet does not fix our psychosocial problems, but it may help us get through the great filter.
tlb 5y ago
Which parts of our solar system do you think we should colonize?
- OmicronCeti 5y ago
  None besides Earth.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - sigg3 5y ago
    Not even a cozy hotel on the moon, overlooking the earth?
    - OmicronCeti 5y ago
      I'd be down, but it's more likely going to be an awful penal mining colony armed with nukes pointed back down at us.
      - valuearb 5y ago
        The moon is a useless place to locate military weaponry for use against earth. It would take those nukes three days to reach earth, which is a huge amount of time for countermeasures to target and destroy them. And a handful of responding nukes could easily wipe out all lunar military sites and personnel, while lunar weapons could barely nick Earths military capabilities.
  - bobsmooth 5y ago
    Why?
    - OmicronCeti 5y ago
      Why should we spend trillions of dollars to put a few people on a distant rock when we could spend that money to help many more people right now, and potentially avert the need for a colonial life raft? It feels self-evident to me.

dheera 5y ago

There have been several order-of-magnitude breakthroughs in travel speed for the past 200 years. We have several hundred million years of time on Earth to go, and a couple billion on the solar system, to figure it out. We also have plenty of time to figure out how to re-engineer and evolve our own bodies to deal with radiation and other hazards. We will figure it out.

OmicronCeti 5y ago
We simply exploited fossil fuels. You are extremely optimistic about having several hundred million years left on Earth, when the longest living hominid existed for only ~2 million years. I firmly believe that homo sapiens will self-destruct long before that point, as we have greatly overstressed the planet in only 200,000 years, mostly in the last 200.
- Robotbeat 5y ago
  This is a pretty terrible argument, mostly because it seems to support Musk’s and Zubrin’s position that if we stop progressing we risk falling into stagnation, decay, and ultimately extinction and yet you’re somehow using it to say we SHOULDN’T try expanding to other planets or star systems. It doesn’t seem logically consistent! My view is that learning to master inhabitation of Mars and other places in space will enable us to revert Earth from a bunch of agricultural land and farms and suburban sprawl back into a garden (dotted with dense, luxurious cities) which we camp out in during the weekend. Space development shows how to thrive WITHOUT fossil fuels. It’s so strange to me that folks seem to have this backwards.
  - meepmorp 5y ago
    > My view is that learning to master inhabitation of Mars and other places in space will enable us to revert Earth from a bunch of agricultural land and farms and suburban sprawl back into a garden (dotted with dense, luxurious cities) which we camp out in during the weekend. How does that work, exactly?
    - OmicronCeti 5y ago
      We use the rare Martian mineral handwavium
    - Robotbeat 5y ago
      In space, any food produced would have to be grown inside, sealed away from the outside environment to protect it from the vacuum or near-vacuum of space or Mars. We will grow it in greenhouses or perhaps vats (staples like corn or wheat can be replaced by fermented foods like @solar_foods or @feedkind, using ultimately solar power, this is actually more efficient than photosynthesis and with a much smaller environmental footprint than agriculture) and certainly not have free grazing cattle (which is the biggest land use in the US). On Mars, we’re already beginning to master solar/battery-electric flight, so perhaps we may not need so many surface roads and we can place trains and such underground. Our footprint on the planet Earth could shrink by an order of magnitude even as our economy and quality of life improve (the density effect on economic productivity is well-established—and Mars will be really expensive to live on unless in large, dense cities... suburban sprawl being prohibitively expensive). These are all things that are fairly hard to prove on Earth as the whole system has an inertia due to developing with abundant fossil fuels, but on Mars we will be forced to rely entirely on renewable (mostly solar but perhaps wind and geothermal) or nuclear power, so a Martian society becomes a blueprint and a powerful proof of concept of how Earth life can be..
  - OmicronCeti 5y ago
    I totally accept extinction. It's natural. Homo sapiens will burn bright and briefly, and the planets will continue to spin. I would argue that it would be much more worthwhile to spend money improving Earth for humans while we can, than dumping trillions of dollars into spaceflight (which I say unironically as someone who is currently paid by NASA). >Space development shows how to thrive WITHOUT fossil fuels. Not sure how that's the case given the staggering emissions of Falcon 9 for example.
- throwaway0a5e 5y ago
  >We simply exploited fossil fuels. This hand waves away all the accomplishments in seafaring prior to the 19th century.
  - OmicronCeti 5y ago
    What were the order of magnitude speed developments in seafaring before 1800? I'm not familiar with the topic.
    - throwaway0a5e 5y ago
      Navigation techniques improved substantially. While not inherently a speed improvement it increased the effective range of mariners by a ton resulting in effectively the same thing.
      - OmicronCeti 5y ago
        Navigation is irrelevant to the space flight argument though, we know how to navigate between planets and stars (in theory). Speed is the limiting factor.
      - kergonath 5y ago
        > While not inherently a speed improvement it increased the effective range of mariners by a ton resulting in effectively the same thing. There were loads of innovations around the shape and profiling of ship hulls depending on conditions in which they operated. Same for sails and stuff, not to mention doing away with rowers. This improved speed quite a lot on top of range.
        OmicronCeti 5y ago
        Thanks, that's more insightful!
- aaronax 5y ago
  We could learn how to "simply exploit" atomic fuels. That should be good for another magnitude or two, right?
  - kergonath 5y ago
    The funny thing is that we know already quite a bit about how to exploit them. Now, putting that into practice is another matter.
- kergonath 5y ago
  > We simply exploited fossil fuels. Not simply, but mostly: progress started before the steam engine. But yeah, pop sci is hyping a lot of things that are very, very unlikely in the near future, and it looks like we won’t have much beyond that.
- qq4 5y ago
  If you firmly believe that homo sapiens will self-destruct in such a time, then why would there be any value in preserving Mars?
  - psd1 5y ago
    If I may: homo sapiens has self-destructive tendencies, which we acknowledge and for which we sorrow. But we love them anyway, and wish to see their continued survival, if it happens. We accept that populating another planet does not fix our psychosocial problems, but it may help us get through the great filter.

tlb 5y ago

Which parts of our solar system do you think we should colonize?

OmicronCeti 5y ago
None besides Earth.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- sigg3 5y ago
  Not even a cozy hotel on the moon, overlooking the earth?
  - OmicronCeti 5y ago
    I'd be down, but it's more likely going to be an awful penal mining colony armed with nukes pointed back down at us.
    - valuearb 5y ago
      The moon is a useless place to locate military weaponry for use against earth. It would take those nukes three days to reach earth, which is a huge amount of time for countermeasures to target and destroy them. And a handful of responding nukes could easily wipe out all lunar military sites and personnel, while lunar weapons could barely nick Earths military capabilities.
- bobsmooth 5y ago
  Why?
  - OmicronCeti 5y ago
    Why should we spend trillions of dollars to put a few people on a distant rock when we could spend that money to help many more people right now, and potentially avert the need for a colonial life raft? It feels self-evident to me.