Slashdot Mirror
Interstellar Ark
xantox writes "There are three strategies to travel 10.5 light-years from Earth to Epsilon Eridani and bring humanity into a new stellar system : 1) Wait for future discovery of Star Trek physics and go there almost instantaneously, 2) Build a relativistic rocket powered by antimatter and go there in 22 years by accelerating constantly at 1g, provided that you master stellar amounts of energy (so, nothing realistic until now), but what about 3): go there by classical means, by building a gigantic Ark of several miles in radius, propulsed by nuclear fusion and featuring artificial gravity, oceans and cities, for a travel of seven centuries — where many generations of men and women would live ? This new speculation uses some actual physics and math to figure out how far are our fantasies of space travel from their actual implementation."
If you want to propose something, like space colonization, you should sell the audience things that will actually work. Ensuring the survival of our species in case life on Earth is wiped out is a valid motivation. However, saying that space colonization is a cure for overpopulation is just wrong.
Life is an "accident" that cannot be repeated. We have engineering capabilities at the nano-scale today, but we cannot produce a single, primitive living cell despite knowing almost everything about them.
The reason why there is nobody else out there is because the elementary chemical interactions necessary for the first living cell to exist and reproduce, have very little probability of occuring. It's like playing a video of a glass of water being shattered, only BACKWARDS. How likely is it for conditions to exist so that the shards and the water molecules to pick themselves up off the floor, come into contact with each other just the right way and finally form a glass of water? It *is* possible, but the probability is so low it probably could not happen in the entire history of the universe/multiverse as we know it.
Even if the planetary conditions, chemical environment, temprature and everything else that resulted in the formation were to be replicated(and we can do this easily in a lab), a large number of extremely delicate structures need to form in the same place and into contact with each other in JUST the right manner to produce a SUCCESSFUL organism with DNA, cell wall..etc. Remember, there is no evolution involved with the first cell. It's either dead or reproductive. There are no second chances.
As for theology, I talked to several people who, in this almost abstract realm of probablistic philosophy, see God as not only a plausible reason for the development of life as such, but indeed the only one. Theories vary. Some will tell you that the entire history of the universe was planned/calculated for this to happen, meaning the basic physical entities and properties(energy, matter, the 4 "forces") of the universe were designed to produce this result. Others will say that there is a constant divine intervention operating at unseen levels to "fine tune" natural events. I currently to not subscribe to any of that, and quite frankly don't know what to say. Just thought I'd chip in to tell you it is not as simple as you make it to be.