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

Conflict is human in nature

[egoff]

We can't assume that just because we go live somewhere else, everything will be okay. Granted, that's a simplistic argument, but humans will tend to carry conflict with them, or create new conflict elsewhere.

Re:Conflict is human in nature

[BrynM]

Ahhh, but in space there is more room to blow stuff up without exterminating humanity as collateral damage (no, orbit doesn't count - we can do a LOT of damage in orbit).

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.

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:Conflict is human in nature

[barawn]

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.

No matter what you do, you are never going to develop a defense system against resource depletion. While many people constantly say that there's plenty of X on Earth for humans to use (where X is anything consumable), they're crazy. Helium, for instance, is a decidedly depletable resource, and one that is being used up quite rapidly. It's doubtful that the Earth's helium supply will last much past the end of the 21st century - and yes, this is true, even with people using helium to lift balloons.

There are plenty of other resources that're being heavily depleted as well. Yes, there are more sources for them, but it will not be economically feasible to recover them. Which, of course, means that they might as well not exist.

Plus there are other disasters to be concerned about: a magnetic pole reversal, an Ice Age, a sudden rise of the sea levels, etc. - none of which you can reasonably protect against. Earth is fragile, and it will always be fragile. It's also not permanent. It will die. It has a finite lifespan in the neighborhood of a few hundred million years left before the oceans boil off. The reasonable thing to do is get the hell off the planet.

Once people migrated to North America, suddenly oceanbound travel started to explode. And likewise, ship technology increased dramatically. There's no reason to believe that the same thing wouldn't happen here.

There's also no reason to believe that colonization wouldn't provide the same benefits it did in the 1600s-1700s: a fresh view of the world from a different perspective.

There've been many people that have said that the reason the Internet boomed so well in the US was due to free local phone access, because the phone infrastructure in the US is so good. This is because the US is a large country with lots of open land - certain technological advances started here because it was best suited for them. There's no reason to believe that a Martian colony wouldn't be subject to the same pressures.

The point is that human beings do best in adversity - "necessity is the mother of invention." There are surely people working on radiation treatments, space health issue, space transport mechanisms, etc., but there's no real need for them now. If there IS a need, then those sectors of science will literally explode, and the secondary benefits will be very hard to imagine.

It's important to realize that one can -never- estimate the benefit of a colony to the home country, virtually by design - a colony is a new settlement, with new needs, and new ideas. And nothing - nothing - is more valuable to the human race than new ideas.

So maybe you're right. Maybe off-planet colonization isn't the answer to all of our problems. But it might be the answer to a whole, whole lot of them. You simply don't know until you go there, and find out.

Talk of the Nation

[PD]

NPR had a show on Talk of the Nation Science Friday about this too. The link to the show is here. The segment is in the second hour, so scroll down.

Martin Rees

[ralian]

I just got a new interview with him in my email from edge.org, where he speculates on multiple universes, alternative formulations of physics and the Matrix (hehe). It's here, for all of youse enjoyments. (N.B. RealPlayer format)

Re:A solution to many problems

[PD]

Thanks to being a vacuum, pollutants can be better contained or cleaned up after leakage.

And that's a good thing too. We wouldn't want to turn space into a lifeless place full of radiation and harsh substances that would require a person to wear a protective suit just to survive.

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

[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.

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.

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.

Rees is too much of an optimist

[Anonymous Coward]

All matter will decay. This universe will end in a big crunch or expand forever into nothingness. It won't matter if we escape the solar system. There is no place for us to go. We will all die and the matter we're made of will decay and the universe will end and there is NOTHING we can do about.

Re:A solution to many problems

[BrynM]

"The problem is, where do we go and how do we get there?"... "we'd much rather spend billions on weapons research then on the space elevator (which is think is the first step to utilizing the resources of space)."

You've just answered your own question. We need to inch our way off the planet. We've gotten used to orbit, now let's get used to being on the moon (I know, some of us are quite used to being "on the moon" ;) ). Then we pick a planet in our solar system, or build some type of solar orbiting station. Right now, we've been so wishy-washy about the international space station. Why? Because there's no public pressure to make it work. The knee-jerk public just wants it to work or get scrapped. They have no idea that it's a step among many.

B.S.

[barakn]

China is the only country to have made significant progress in controlling birthrates and that's because they are a totalitarian government.

You ignore a large number of countries in Europe and Japan whose birth rates have dropped so perilously low they are in danger of losing population. Eastern European countries' fertility rates, while higher than those of Western Europe, dropped dramatically after the fall of the Soviet Union, a totalitarian government. The female literacy rate correlates better than the type of government with low growth rates.