Space Development And Earth's Future

apsmith writes "In the New York Times' Sunday Book Review Dennis Overbye reviews British Astronomer Royal Martin Rees' new book: Our Final Hour - A Scientist's Warning: How Terror, Error, and Environmental Disaster Threaten Humankind's Future In This Century--On Earth and Beyond. The book paints an exceedingly grim picture of our future - Reese gives humanity only a 50-50 chance of surviving the 21st century, with all the potential for calamity we have unleashed (and that nature may have in store for us too). But the book isn't just doom and gloom - we CAN do something, and the answer lies in space. But NASA has been doing it all wrong. Interestingly enough, this coming weekend is the International Space Development Conference in San Jose, where you can find out the latest ideas on how we really should be settling space."

Comments

Re:Conflict is human in nature

[Strange Ranger]

It's not about living somewhere else. It's about living in lots of somewhere elses. Such that if one somewhere else were destroyed there would still be humans left in the universe/galaxy.

You're statement seems to miss the point. Of course you're right that any other place will likely eventually have huge problems similar to those we now have here on earth. The point is that earth is a single point of failure. We should work to fix that. AKA, we shouldn't keep all our ova in one basket.

Just another alarmist wacko

[Roto-Rooter Man]

"This is my long-run forecast in brief: The material conditions of life will continue to get better for most people, in most countries, most of the time, indefinitely. Within a century or two, all nations and most of humanity will be at or above today's Western living standards. I also speculate, however, that many people will continue to think and say that the conditions of life are getting worse." - Julian Simon

Re:Just another alarmist wacko

[arpad1]

I'm a bit surprised that the late Julian Simon, professor and "Cornucopian," didn't predict he would never die.

Why? Would that have made the job of misrepresenting his views easier?

I suppose that sort of name-calling is necessary though when you want to divert attention from the uniform record of failure of the alarmists and the uniform record of success of the "Cornucopians". Does the name "Paul Ehrlich" ring a bell?

While it is true that a lot of doom-and-gloom predictions have failed to materialize, most famously the "Club of Rome" report in the seventies which predicted running out of oil ludicrously soon, it is silly to ignore the clear signs of environmental and social degradation simply because we've been fine up until now.

And there's the whole issue wrapped up in one sentence. Oh sure, sayeth the alarmist, we've been wrong about everything up until now but is that any reason not to believe us this time? After all, any minute now our losing streak might break and then you'll be sorry.