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In order for the human race to survive, we need a foothold in space. The Earth, or even our solar system, won't remain habitable forever.
by jmckib 13y ago
In order for the human race to survive, we need a foothold in space. The Earth, or even our solar system, won't remain habitable forever.
- erikpukinskis 13y agoThere's no hurry though, waiting 100, or even a million years won't have any impact on that, right?
- misnome 13y agoAnd waiting a couple of generations won't matter re: >Massive environmental destruction, humanitarian disasters. Right?
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- Houshalter 13y agoThat isn't anywhere near enough to cause extinction, and the vast amounts of resources, engineers, scientists, etc required to do that would be much better spent solving those problems instead.
- erikpukinskis 13y agoIt absolutely will matter, because in the course of those generations, people will die or suffer or both. I'm talking about triage. We don't need to worry about the sun exploding just yet.
- humbert 13y agoRegarding cosmological expansion, a million years has virtually no impact on us reaching ~4.8 billion galaxies at 0.99c. [1] [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zQTfuI-9jIo#t=1670 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zQTfuI-9jIo#t=1670
- aortega 13y agoYou saw what that tiny 20-meter asteroid did to that town on Russia last year right? this one http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chelyabinsk_meteor http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chelyabinsk_meteor How many time do you think you have?
- Houshalter 13y agoIn that case it would be more rational to spend money on asteroid detection and deflection. That would be orders of magnitude cheaper and easier than building a completely self sufficient space colony.
- kamaal 13y agoThat's equivalent of patching a legacy code base and delaying the problem not exactly fixing the root cause.
- Houshalter 13y agoYour self-sufficient space colony can still be destroyed by asteroids too, so that doesn't solve the problem either. Deflecting asteroids is entirely possible so it isn't a "patch" either. And building a self-sufficient colony would be so ridiculously complicated and expensive, it might not even be possible at all. That sounds more like a "patch".
- louthy 13y agoThe whole human race is currently running off one hard-drive that has been in EarthPC for 10000s of years.