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It's how we get to the moon and Mars and how we survive as a species. This is unbelievably pessimistic. You're literally saying that Earth is beyond repair and

It's how we get to the moon and Mars and how we survive as a species. This is unbelievably pessimistic. You're literally saying that Earth is beyond repair and the only way for humans to survive is to move to a rock in orbit that we've spent a total of 3 days on in the past 70 years, or to a planet no one has visited that has radiation that makes life essentially impossible for us. Assuming that's true, let's run some numbers. Assuming we can get to 3 launches per day (weather, launch sites, Mars being in the wrong place, etc are limiting factors), and we get 100 years of launches before everyone dies, and we can fire 100 people in to space at a time, that means the future of the human race rests on slightly more than 10 million people. The other 6,990,000,000 of us will perish with the rest of life on Earth. Damn. If you're right then humans are going extinct.

dheera 5y ago
I don't think it's pessimistic at all. The Earth is fucked. Not by humans, just by itself. It will be fucked within a few hundred million years simply because the sun is going to get bright enough to boil away the oceans. If we want any hope of our legacy to carry on in the universe, we need to begin exploring the possibilities now, because we have the scientific knowledge and technological capabilities to begin that exploration process.
- onion2k 5y ago
  Mars and the Moon will be unusable long before Earth in that scenario. Our atmosphere is a really good shield.
teawrecks 5y ago
That's not what they're saying at all. Imagine if at some point in the history of the human species we just stopped exploring, stopped adapting, and just focused on preserving what we had and nothing more. We wouldn't be who we are today. Not just in the technological sense but in the human sense. The drive to explore the unknown is fundamentally human. The challenge of space and mars is the "final frontier". The real criticism I have is that it's a false dichotomy. We need BOTH exploration and exploitation. Both greed and fear. Both mutation and rote replication. A species can't survive without a balance of both.
ncallaway 5y ago
> This is unbelievably pessimistic. It's not pessimistic, it's realistic. It's just that what the parent poster means by "how we survive as a species" and what you mean are...different things. Going to the moon, going to mars, are necessary for the survival of our species...on a 100,000 year time horizon. At some point, something catastrophic may happen to earth. An asteroid impact, or a Gamma Ray Burst, or some other unexpected cataclysm. If a GRB happened to hit earth in 10,000 years, we only survive as a species if we're self-sufficient on other rocks by then. If your time-frame of "how we survive as a species" is the next 100 years, then colonizing the moon or mars isn't on the list of potential solutions. I know of very few people who advocate that the moon and mars are the solutions to our climate change issues. Climate change is a crisis that we have to confront within the next 100 years. It's extremely unlikely that any moon or mars base would be self-sufficient within that time frame. To survive as a species, the human race has to eventually be able to survive a fatal blow to earth and keep going. Hell, eventually we have to be able to deal with a fatal blow to this entire solar system.
- aeturnum 5y ago
  First, I favor space exploration and think we, as a society, should spend more money on it than we do now. Second, calling this 'realistic' is nonsense: >It's not pessimistic, it's realistic. [...] on a 100,000 year time horizon. It has been 65 years since Sputnik was launched, so you are projecting out 1,565x that duration into the future. I'm sure you picked a nice, big, round number, but I think it's really important to grapple with how immediate all of space travel has been against how long our horizon is as a species is. The first record we have of homo sapiens is from 300,000 years ago[1] - so 3x your time horizon. The founding of civilization could be pegged around 4,000 years ago with the founding of Babylon[2]. 100,000 years is about 25x the duration of the existence of civilization. So I agree that space exploration must come at some point, but I actually think the most "realistic" approach would be to *ban* space exploration until climate change is under control. Fixing our impact on our own climate has fewer technical barriers and is a larger limiting factor to human survival than space. If the time horizon is really 100,000 or 10,000 years, then addressing climate change would be a blip on that timeline. [1] https://theconversation.com/when-did-we-become-fully-human-what-fossils-and-dna-tell-us-about-the-evolution-of-modern-intelligence-143717 https://theconversation.com/when-did-we-become-fully-human-w... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Babylon https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Babylon Edit: accidentally a word
m4rtink 5y ago
You are never gonna evacuate the Earth with even reusable rockets. With launch loops and space elevators? Yeah, no problem, totally possible. :) For fictional yet science based scenario see this Orions Arm article: https://orionsarm.com/eg-article/49b46fd2198ed https://orionsarm.com/eg-article/49b46fd2198ed The biggest problem is actually not to lift all the people out of Earth's gravity well, but where to put them afterwards...

dheera 5y ago

I don't think it's pessimistic at all. The Earth is fucked. Not by humans, just by itself. It will be fucked within a few hundred million years simply because the sun is going to get bright enough to boil away the oceans. If we want any hope of our legacy to carry on in the universe, we need to begin exploring the possibilities now, because we have the scientific knowledge and technological capabilities to begin that exploration process.

onion2k 5y ago
Mars and the Moon will be unusable long before Earth in that scenario. Our atmosphere is a really good shield.

teawrecks 5y ago

That's not what they're saying at all. Imagine if at some point in the history of the human species we just stopped exploring, stopped adapting, and just focused on preserving what we had and nothing more. We wouldn't be who we are today. Not just in the technological sense but in the human sense. The drive to explore the unknown is fundamentally human. The challenge of space and mars is the "final frontier". The real criticism I have is that it's a false dichotomy. We need BOTH exploration and exploitation. Both greed and fear. Both mutation and rote replication. A species can't survive without a balance of both.

ncallaway 5y ago

> This is unbelievably pessimistic. It's not pessimistic, it's realistic. It's just that what the parent poster means by "how we survive as a species" and what you mean are...different things. Going to the moon, going to mars, are necessary for the survival of our species...on a 100,000 year time horizon. At some point, something catastrophic may happen to earth. An asteroid impact, or a Gamma Ray Burst, or some other unexpected cataclysm. If a GRB happened to hit earth in 10,000 years, we only survive as a species if we're self-sufficient on other rocks by then. If your time-frame of "how we survive as a species" is the next 100 years, then colonizing the moon or mars isn't on the list of potential solutions. I know of very few people who advocate that the moon and mars are the solutions to our climate change issues. Climate change is a crisis that we have to confront within the next 100 years. It's extremely unlikely that any moon or mars base would be self-sufficient within that time frame. To survive as a species, the human race has to eventually be able to survive a fatal blow to earth and keep going. Hell, eventually we have to be able to deal with a fatal blow to this entire solar system.

aeturnum 5y ago
First, I favor space exploration and think we, as a society, should spend more money on it than we do now. Second, calling this 'realistic' is nonsense: >It's not pessimistic, it's realistic. [...] on a 100,000 year time horizon. It has been 65 years since Sputnik was launched, so you are projecting out 1,565x that duration into the future. I'm sure you picked a nice, big, round number, but I think it's really important to grapple with how immediate all of space travel has been against how long our horizon is as a species is. The first record we have of homo sapiens is from 300,000 years ago[1] - so 3x your time horizon. The founding of civilization could be pegged around 4,000 years ago with the founding of Babylon[2]. 100,000 years is about 25x the duration of the existence of civilization. So I agree that space exploration must come at some point, but I actually think the most "realistic" approach would be to *ban* space exploration until climate change is under control. Fixing our impact on our own climate has fewer technical barriers and is a larger limiting factor to human survival than space. If the time horizon is really 100,000 or 10,000 years, then addressing climate change would be a blip on that timeline. [1] https://theconversation.com/when-did-we-become-fully-human-what-fossils-and-dna-tell-us-about-the-evolution-of-modern-intelligence-143717 https://theconversation.com/when-did-we-become-fully-human-w... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Babylon https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Babylon Edit: accidentally a word

m4rtink 5y ago

You are never gonna evacuate the Earth with even reusable rockets. With launch loops and space elevators? Yeah, no problem, totally possible. :) For fictional yet science based scenario see this Orions Arm article: https://orionsarm.com/eg-article/49b46fd2198ed https://orionsarm.com/eg-article/49b46fd2198ed The biggest problem is actually not to lift all the people out of Earth's gravity well, but where to put them afterwards...