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

[egoff]

We'll carry any conflict that does happen on Earth to where we go next, Mars, asteroids, etc. Look at how the Napoleonic wars in Europe led to the French/Indian wars in North America. The War of 1812 was also started by European politics. At the time, colonists tried to escape those issues. Any nuclear war would surely spread to the colonies.

Overpopulation is also a critical issue. But the vast majority of people involved in the population boom couldn't afford cost-prohibitive colonization. The option of forced colonization is inhumane, as was effectively argued by free blacks in opposition to the American Colonization Society in the pre-civil war United States.

The only serious concern left is an astronomical disaster, such as a meteor strike. It seems that the reasonable thing to do would be to focus resources on a defense system for that.

I'm not arguing that all off-planet development is bad by any means, but it isn't the answer to all of our problems.

Re:Amen.

[BrynM]

My hat is off to you! I've often thought about the same thing. Get more involved. Every time I think about it though, I realize that one of the best ways to get involved in exploration is to inspire others. I think the popularity of science fiction in the past 20 years or so has done some of this, but it has too much of a "eventually we'll be here" attitude. The average person has no idea what the current technology is capable of or how to implement it to further the goal of exploration. If space exploration were a popular cause, we might not be having this discussion with such a morbit (our extinction) spin. Thus, I have been looking into animation as a means of storytelling. We can't afford to let the next couple of generations grow up with a "someone else will do it" attitude.

Re:Just another alarmist wacko

[frenchgates]

I'm a bit surprised that the late Julian Simon, professor and "Cornucopian," didn't predict he would never die. He would have been as correct as any other of his predictions until the exact moment of his death.

The problem with this kind of convenient optimism is the following:

Let's say you are a frog who lives in a pond. One day a weed blows into the pond. This weed is very successful and doubles in size every day. As it does so it strangles the all the other life wherever it has grown in the pond. But you don't mind because as the first few days go by, most of the pond is weed free. Even when the pond is half full of weeds you've still got plenty of space. The problem comes the day after pond is half full.

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.