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If you want an insurance policy against a large asteroid strike, then the best bet would still be on Earth - but perhaps deep under the ocean, or deep undergrou

If you want an insurance policy against a large asteroid strike, then the best bet would still be on Earth - but perhaps deep under the ocean, or deep underground. The arguments for this project (and against) are largely the same (e.g. it's not likely to be economically viable because of trade). Space is for robots. Earth is for life.

senko 5y ago
"Air is for birds and gods. Ground is for people." -- unknown person, AD 1000 Why are we so shortsighted? The future is an incredibly long time. If self-sufficient human settlements on, say Mars, are out of the question with our current level of technology and are unlikely in the next few centuries, does that imply they'll be just as unlikely in 10,000 years? Will our descendants be so stupid they won't be able to solve new technology challenges? Today is not the end of history.
- blooalien 5y ago
  Bad impression of announcer voice: Will humanity survive long enough to find out the answers to these questions and more? Tune in next time to find out! Same Bat-Time, Same Bat-Channel!
  - chii 5y ago
    given that humans took less than 100 years to get powered flight, less than 50 yrs to get rocketry, i expect interplanetary colonization to not be in the too distant future...
    - arminiusreturns 5y ago
      I mean isnt the main question if we destroy ourselves before that time?
    - blooalien 5y ago
      I'ma have to see a viable colony on Earth's moon before I'ma able to even consider the possibility we have a snowball's chance in Hell of surviving someplace like Mars. Problem is… Can humanity survive itself long enough to even get a colony on the Moon?
- javajosh 5y ago
  Yes, well, that's the trouble with analogies - they are misleading. "After all, we broke the sound barrier, so breaking the light barrier is only a few years away!" I'm sure people made that argument. Just as they made the same false-generalizing in the early days of X-rays - imagining Vita-rays and superpower rays and so on. You can do the same thing with digging. Well, we can dig 10m down, why not 100m? Why not 10000m? Why not all the way through? I mean it's easy physics to show you can move between any two points on a planet through an evacuated tunnel with no energy price, so why don't we do it? Is it because the downers like me don't think we have the materials to actually build the tunnels, and that we'd have to spend a great deal of energy to cool them because the Earth's core is really hot, and if only we'd shut our cynical traps the dreamers would get 'er done? I blame science-fiction for really and truly warping our intuition of what is physically possible. A small moon base is certainly possible, but does that mean a sun base is possible? No. Cars revolutionized transportation, and phones communication. Does that mean teleportation is possible? No. Do insights about spacetime make time-travel possible? Except in the Ted Chaing sense (where time-travel has a lovely, inevitable symmetry to it), no. Chemistry - so we can create matter from nothing? No. Theoretical physicists play games with math - so free energy from vacuum? No. But nanotechnology? Yes. AI? Yes. Full control over the genome? Yes. It's not that I think history is over, it's just that our stories are misleading about which branches of history we can travel. No ancient thinking person really ever doubted the earth was round (because there are easy experiments anyone can do), and they didn't think that heavier-than-air flight was impossible (because birds). It's true a few believed faster-than-sound travel was impossible, but I don't think that was ever a majority view (could be wrong on that, though). Back to space. Space sucks. I don't want to live there. The Expanse was/is a great show, and it's certainly more realistic than most space-faring SF -- but it is still deep fantasy. The impact of living outside of gravity and outside of the magnetosphere is enormous and even with perfect medicine it would be uncomfortable because of the atmospheric constraints. The Epstein drive is fantasy. It is admittedly more plausible than most SF drives, but still non-physical. Of course, the alien stuff is pure fantasy. Places like Mars suck even more than space, IMHO. Mars is a lifeless, cold rock without atmosphere or light, or proper gravity. I mean, Mars right now is still infinitely worse off for supporting life than Earth in the worst case, struck by a 20km asteroid. Or post-Yellowstone caldera. Another way to put it, Mars could take 100 meteor strikes like that and be no worse off. That's how bad it is. (There wouldn't even be much of a nuclear winter since there's no atmosphere to keep ejecta suspended. Although maybe if you strike it just right and with the right rocks you could give it an atmosphere of sorts?) So, there is hope for exotic effects! Quantum phenomena at scale is basically magic. Black holes are quite mysterious! So is the origin of the universe - and I believe, contrary to most, that cosmological questions could very well have practical applications. "Metamaterials" (a kind of cousin to nanotech) can open up a lot of cool options for building things. And so on. But yeah I wish people would give up the childish Star Trek/Star Wars fantasies about the possibilities of technology and embrace the reality of what we know. I too want FTL, teleportation and sexy humanoid aliens to seduce as much as the next guy, but despite the aesthetics its fantasy. And while shows like The Expanse seem more real, they still sneak in enough fantasy to invalidate it. (I do appreciate them not abandoning kinetic energy weapons for the massless junk in other SF, though!)
deviledeggs 5y ago
We didn't know what electricity was 300 years ago. And the best way to get around was riding on the backs of other animals. We're maybe 70 years away from being a multi planet species if technology keeps advancing at the same rate. We just need better ways to get into space. If the Sabre program works out or we figure out fusion power we'll be ready to roll in 20. Or we could figure out self replicating robots. Nature has been doing it a billion years so we already know it's possible. Or, just create a robot species in our image to explore for us. And hope they keep their meaty parents around and happy There's multiple paths for humans to get off the planet. Out of the solar system, maybe not. But it's damn hard to predict farther than 100 years into the future
- javajosh 5y ago
  >Or, just create a robot species in our image to explore for us. And hope they keep their meaty parents around and happy Indeed, I think this is the most plausible scenario. And I think a robot civilization would want to keep Earth living and breathing for reasons other than sentiment. Life has been around a long time, and has solved problems a robot civ hasn't thought of yet. Also, there are certain catastrophes that could wipe out a robot civ, but not Earth (and vice-versa) so we could be each other's backups. Of course, Earth is just an absolutely beautiful place, worth maintaining for that reason alone. And the bots might even choose to maintain pockets of life elsewhere in the solar system, just in case, but that is a very different scenario to the one in the OP's article.

senko 5y ago

"Air is for birds and gods. Ground is for people." -- unknown person, AD 1000 Why are we so shortsighted? The future is an incredibly long time. If self-sufficient human settlements on, say Mars, are out of the question with our current level of technology and are unlikely in the next few centuries, does that imply they'll be just as unlikely in 10,000 years? Will our descendants be so stupid they won't be able to solve new technology challenges? Today is not the end of history.

blooalien 5y ago
Bad impression of announcer voice: Will humanity survive long enough to find out the answers to these questions and more? Tune in next time to find out! Same Bat-Time, Same Bat-Channel!
- chii 5y ago
  given that humans took less than 100 years to get powered flight, less than 50 yrs to get rocketry, i expect interplanetary colonization to not be in the too distant future...
  - arminiusreturns 5y ago
    I mean isnt the main question if we destroy ourselves before that time?
  - blooalien 5y ago
    I'ma have to see a viable colony on Earth's moon before I'ma able to even consider the possibility we have a snowball's chance in Hell of surviving someplace like Mars. Problem is… Can humanity survive itself long enough to even get a colony on the Moon?
javajosh 5y ago
Yes, well, that's the trouble with analogies - they are misleading. "After all, we broke the sound barrier, so breaking the light barrier is only a few years away!" I'm sure people made that argument. Just as they made the same false-generalizing in the early days of X-rays - imagining Vita-rays and superpower rays and so on. You can do the same thing with digging. Well, we can dig 10m down, why not 100m? Why not 10000m? Why not all the way through? I mean it's easy physics to show you can move between any two points on a planet through an evacuated tunnel with no energy price, so why don't we do it? Is it because the downers like me don't think we have the materials to actually build the tunnels, and that we'd have to spend a great deal of energy to cool them because the Earth's core is really hot, and if only we'd shut our cynical traps the dreamers would get 'er done? I blame science-fiction for really and truly warping our intuition of what is physically possible. A small moon base is certainly possible, but does that mean a sun base is possible? No. Cars revolutionized transportation, and phones communication. Does that mean teleportation is possible? No. Do insights about spacetime make time-travel possible? Except in the Ted Chaing sense (where time-travel has a lovely, inevitable symmetry to it), no. Chemistry - so we can create matter from nothing? No. Theoretical physicists play games with math - so free energy from vacuum? No. But nanotechnology? Yes. AI? Yes. Full control over the genome? Yes. It's not that I think history is over, it's just that our stories are misleading about which branches of history we can travel. No ancient thinking person really ever doubted the earth was round (because there are easy experiments anyone can do), and they didn't think that heavier-than-air flight was impossible (because birds). It's true a few believed faster-than-sound travel was impossible, but I don't think that was ever a majority view (could be wrong on that, though). Back to space. Space sucks. I don't want to live there. The Expanse was/is a great show, and it's certainly more realistic than most space-faring SF -- but it is still deep fantasy. The impact of living outside of gravity and outside of the magnetosphere is enormous and even with perfect medicine it would be uncomfortable because of the atmospheric constraints. The Epstein drive is fantasy. It is admittedly more plausible than most SF drives, but still non-physical. Of course, the alien stuff is pure fantasy. Places like Mars suck even more than space, IMHO. Mars is a lifeless, cold rock without atmosphere or light, or proper gravity. I mean, Mars right now is still infinitely worse off for supporting life than Earth in the worst case, struck by a 20km asteroid. Or post-Yellowstone caldera. Another way to put it, Mars could take 100 meteor strikes like that and be no worse off. That's how bad it is. (There wouldn't even be much of a nuclear winter since there's no atmosphere to keep ejecta suspended. Although maybe if you strike it just right and with the right rocks you could give it an atmosphere of sorts?) So, there is hope for exotic effects! Quantum phenomena at scale is basically magic. Black holes are quite mysterious! So is the origin of the universe - and I believe, contrary to most, that cosmological questions could very well have practical applications. "Metamaterials" (a kind of cousin to nanotech) can open up a lot of cool options for building things. And so on. But yeah I wish people would give up the childish Star Trek/Star Wars fantasies about the possibilities of technology and embrace the reality of what we know. I too want FTL, teleportation and sexy humanoid aliens to seduce as much as the next guy, but despite the aesthetics its fantasy. And while shows like The Expanse seem more real, they still sneak in enough fantasy to invalidate it. (I do appreciate them not abandoning kinetic energy weapons for the massless junk in other SF, though!)

deviledeggs 5y ago

We didn't know what electricity was 300 years ago. And the best way to get around was riding on the backs of other animals. We're maybe 70 years away from being a multi planet species if technology keeps advancing at the same rate. We just need better ways to get into space. If the Sabre program works out or we figure out fusion power we'll be ready to roll in 20. Or we could figure out self replicating robots. Nature has been doing it a billion years so we already know it's possible. Or, just create a robot species in our image to explore for us. And hope they keep their meaty parents around and happy There's multiple paths for humans to get off the planet. Out of the solar system, maybe not. But it's damn hard to predict farther than 100 years into the future

javajosh 5y ago
>Or, just create a robot species in our image to explore for us. And hope they keep their meaty parents around and happy Indeed, I think this is the most plausible scenario. And I think a robot civilization would want to keep Earth living and breathing for reasons other than sentiment. Life has been around a long time, and has solved problems a robot civ hasn't thought of yet. Also, there are certain catastrophes that could wipe out a robot civ, but not Earth (and vice-versa) so we could be each other's backups. Of course, Earth is just an absolutely beautiful place, worth maintaining for that reason alone. And the bots might even choose to maintain pockets of life elsewhere in the solar system, just in case, but that is a very different scenario to the one in the OP's article.