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Abandon Earth Or Die, Warns Hawking
siliconbits writes "According to famed theoretical physicist Stephen Hawking, it's time to free ourselves from Mother Earth. 'I believe that the long-term future of the human race must be in space,' Hawking tells Big Think. 'It will be difficult enough to avoid disaster on planet Earth in the next hundred years, let alone the next thousand, or million. The human race shouldn't have all its eggs in one basket, or on one planet. Let's hope we can avoid dropping the basket until we have spread the load.'"
ME. Right now. Why would I want to have my tax dollars on this. I have to pay the mortgage. I have to pay the $320 Comcast bill. Going to Mars isn't going to get me anywhere.
Human mentality...
Just about when does Hawking think we should leave?
If it's something for which we may have the technology no sooner than a couple of centuries down the road, is this really something we should worry about now?
..for as long as I can remember.
We either leave this planet together, or we die on it divided. I think the greed inherent in human nature will prevent us from ever getting organized enough to leave this planet for another.
This actually kinda reminds me of a conversation we had last night....we watched the original V miniseries, and were talking about how stupid it was that they allowed the aliens into factories around the world simultaneously instead of just a factory or two at a time...but then, if they did that, countries would argue over who got to host them first. ::shakes head:: stupid human beings...
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What are the key technologies needed in order to do that and where do they stand today? How do we afford that while focus is on survival in much of the world - and on greater comfort in the rest of it? From where I stand it seems likely that we will have to wait for something drastic to get motivated.
Lost in space at an early age. Survived the vacuum. Now rebuilding castle in air.
What if Earth isn't the first human colony, and these disasters have merely wiped out the evidence of our migration...
The dude just wants to finally make this a reality.
but haven't many famed scientists and the like said this?
It seems like every sound bite out of Hawking is heralded as a message from the oracle.
The idea of spreading to space certainly isn't new.
For the french speakers, I advise Bernard Werber book: http://www.amazon.fr/papillon-%C3%A9toiles-Bernard-Werber/dp/2226173498
Not very serious, but a very nice reading.
Unfortunately, we really need to get our shit together on this planet before we start thinking about colonizing others.
Sarbonn's blog: http://www.sarbonn.com/blog
I don't want to seem like a total pessimist, but I don't care at all what happens to the human race. If every human dies because of a meteor or something, the universe won't even notice. I think it is a bit premature, since we have never publicly met any others, to believe that our species is worthy of being preserved and expanded beyond earth. Thanks for the books, Hawking, but there has to be higher priority things to do.
Okay, I'm quite happy to go find a new home amongst the stars, but at this point the only way that is going to happen is if the earth explodes and my ashes get distributed through space.
If our future is on worlds beyond earth, then we need to start with a space transportation, of the form of a single stage vehicle that can at least go to the moon and back repeatedly, with a turn around time of less than two days. Additionally the vehicle needs to be able to return from the moon without having to depend on an already established infrastructure.
I am a big fan of travelling to Mars and beyond, but the truth is we should establish a solid space flight foundation first. At the moment the technology we have is expensive and suitable in most cases only for one-way flights and of a crew of no more than seven people. Once we resolve the transportation issue, then we the Moon and Mars suddenly become relatively easy. One way flights are great for automated payloads, but for anything intended to transport humans, then we still have a ways to go.
I really believe that we need an x-prize designed for a single stage reusable space vehicle. The aim: launch into orbit with a single stage, do a full orbit, return to earth and do the same thing a second time within two days. The x-prize would be split into two parts: unmanned for the first offering and manned for the second offering.
Jumpstart the tartan drive.
Does anyone else read the part in quotes in a synthesizer voice?
"spread the load" sounds like a porno plot! Or title :)
A lot of people probably think the same. That's not going to make it happen. A close call might change our course, but until then people will always feel they have more important things to do. We'll keep working on massive amounts of distractions, luxuries and other instant gratifications, because as a species we're really not that bright.
Humans are mammals by the way
Commander Jeffrey Sinclair of Babylon 5 explains to an ISN reporter the fate facing mankind if it abandons space exploration. This monologue places the current problems facing mankind, such as global warming, war and disease in perspective.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xkj2lR9CT08
Whatever is born, must die. He seems to have forgotten Newton's third law. - "To every action there is always an equal and opposite reaction: or the forces of two bodies on each other are always equal and are directed in opposite directions."
Even if all of humanity was unified, we'd still die eventually if we stayed here. This planet has an expiration date. It's nice to pretend that if we were all hippies and lived like cavemen, that it'd last forever, but that isn't the case. Sooner or later we're gonna have to get out of here, or go extinct.
Earth's "best if lived on by" date is far enough away that I'm not terribly worried about it, but even aside from that, there are always asteroids out there that could blindside us. And I'm sure that's the sort of thing Hawking is referring to anyways.
What's wrong with dying? We all do it sooner or later as individuals. Why should the race last forever?
Nothing short of a earth destroying asteroid/comet hit would render this planet less inhabitable than even the most hospitable other planetary bodies within our reach. Even a Yucatan-sized hit would still leave the earth much more survivable than anywhere else. It would be WAY more practical to design underground bunkers and habitats here on earth than to try to move colonies to the moon or Mars. And nothing short of a hit that tears the planet into pieces is going to make earth less appealing than Mars or the moon.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
Back in 2006: Hawking Says Humans Must Go Into Space
And again in 2000: Hawking on Earth's Lifespan
From TFA:
"The nearest star [to Earth] is Proxima Centauri which is 4.2 light years away," says University of Michigan astrophysicist Katherine Freese, "That means that, if you were traveling at the speed of light the whole time, it would take 4.2 years to get there."
Wrong. It would take no time at all.
Dr Freese - you have failed your special relativity course.
Tubby or not tubby. Fat is the question
Who cares what a physician thinks? go back to popping hemorrhoids buddy.
Thank you, captain obvious !
Here's an even more insightful warning: abandon the universe or die.
Just need a way to ascend to a higher plane
his voicebox was hax0r3d hard
II've been telling people for over a decade (for many reasons...mostly having to do with our biological necessities) that we "need to get off of this rock"!
-Oz
No, he doesn't. He said that exact quote two years ago, to CNN. Of course, it may not necessarily be plagiarism, because he's been saying this for years, and it isn't like he types off the cuff.
First killer aliens that are going to kill us all and now this? He is starting to sound a lot like James Lovelock - once a useful scientist now just cashing in on his reputation before he retires or kicks the bucket.
You can't just live your life in fear of what could go wrong. sure bad things will happen eventually but things like the sun burning out and nuclear warfare are not really on the agenda these days. If some ecological disaster comes along it will most likely be easier to fix than finding a whole new planet and terraforming it
http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/anyways
Well and good, but where do we get the energy to boost enough humans and tools into space to create a viable life-supporting ecosystem elsewhere? Hawking is a physicist, so I'm a bit surprised to hear him proposing something like this without explaining where the lift capacity is going to come from. There's a reason why Pan Am never began the orbital shuttle service depicted in 2001: A Space Odyssey (aside, of course, from the fact that they went out of business).
I think a more realistic plan would be to seed suitable planets with bacteria and just let evolution take care of the rest. Simpler lifeforms are much more resilient to extremes of temperature and atmosphere and are suitable for cryogenic storage for the long journeys. Animals higher up the evolutionary chain are too closely adapted to Earth to survive elsewhere really.
"I bless every day that I continue to live, for every day is pure profit."
We will consume this planet trying to escape it. If we don't figure out a way to live with earth, then we will not be able to live without it.
!
How long would it take to set up a sustainable colony on Mars? Would we actually have more luck on the moon, or even building habitable orbital stations?
Domed settlements on Mars would be a short-term solution, but you'd probably need to terraform it at some point, to deal with the demands a species such as the human race would place on it. Wouldn't that take a few decades or more? We're not even sure if seeding an atmosphere with algae would work.
Likely some nutcase would sabotage the entire space faring race project by calling it a pox in the eye of God or something ridiculous like that.
And ultimately, by the time all this was done wouldn't Earth already be teetering on the brink of overpopulation, leading to wars for resources, global famine and zombie uprisings?
THE HONOUR OF THE KNIGHTS - CC Licensed Sci-Fi Novel
It will be difficult enough to avoid disaster on planet Earth in the next hundred years, let alone the next thousand, or million.
Right, because space and non-earthlike planets are so much less prone to disaster.
Like anyone can even know that
...the other planets don't want us.
It won't take too much technology to reproduce Hawking's voice saying "I told you so"
The problem with that sentiment is that the wars have actually helped technology evolve. China was advancing faster for a long time, until a large enough piece of land was covered by it that real wars became uncommon. In Europe we continued trying to wipe each other out and it caused a lot of technological improvements. Competing countries and corporations advance technology a lot faster compared to monopolies and true world powers.
The space race was sped up by the arms race between the USA and the USSR. Both just wanted to prove they were better.
War may be a costly way to advance technology and not a nice one, but it is an very effective one.
I would also prefer global peace as I do not think it's worth the suffering, but it would most probably hamper advancement, not speed it up.
Well, I might have a way, but it only works on a semi spherical planet in a vacuum.
Is someone here writing a paper for a grade, or for a job? No.. So take your grammar nazing troll ass and get back under your bridge.
You are entitled to your own opinions, not your own facts.
Me thinks that the future of the human race is where we belong, here. We are probably thousands of years away from workable space travel. Perhaps we are stuck here for a reason, and perhaps this is an opportunity for all of us to start working out our issues and learn to live together with reasonable differences.
I think we could easily manage to come up with the necessary tools/technologies required for sustained space travel if and only if we stop focusing our time/money/effort on trying to kill each other. Where you were born or what you look like does not make you better than somebody else. Just because somebody disagrees with you does not make them wrong, or worthy of being persecuted and/or killed. Others do not exist to provide you with everything you want. Desire is not an occupation.
Granted, I think that most humans will always have a competitive side. But it's a little ridiculous for the US to spend almost 37 times as much on the military budget [via the DOD] as they do on space exploration/research. And those numbers do not include anything like the FBI, homeland security, veterans affairs, DOE, and interest/fees from previous wars. If you include those numbers, the military spending is more like 60 times as much as the NASA budget. That's pretty ridiculous, in my opinion.
at $8-$16/m a box + Triple Play $120-$200 (120 promo rate for no HBO, Sports Entertainment Package, Cinemax, movie channel, and Showtime) + $5 emta rent + Movie Channel $18 yes comcast makes you pay more for moive channel and the top $200 package does not come with it. also stuff like MLB EI, NBA LP, NHL CI also cost alot as well.
Yeah, yeah, Stephen Hawking, we already know this! We saw those movies too.
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Don’t get me wrong, I’m all for using resources in an intelligent manner and getting the most out of them. The planet is a resource, eventually resources run out, no matter how efficient (or “sustainable” for the kool-aid drinkers) you make a process. Even if we destroyed every gasoline powered car, coal fired power plant and incandescent light bulb eventually we will use up all the resources on this planet. It won’t be in my lifetime, but it won’t be a million years either.
whos to say the ussr is not there now? or was there?
Wouldn't it be easier to just wear some condoms instead of moving mankind off of the planet? - j
It will be difficult enough to avoid disaster on planet Earth in the next hundred years...
Certainly, there are possibilities for many types of disasters - meteor/comet impacts, tsunami, volcanic eruption, global warmi...er....climate cha...um.... whatever the eco-freakos are calling it these days.
When I read that statement, I get the impression that there is some unavoidable, impending doom that Hawking knows about. Like "The next hundred years, holy crap - good luck! If you survive that - hold onto your hats, then it gets bad." as he escapes into a Hawking Hole
"Lame" - Galaxar
And why do we have to survive as a human race?
The space race was sped up by the arms race between the USA and the USSR. Both just wanted to prove they were better.
But this isn't really "war" in the conventional sense is it? And it was the period during which the fastest and most impressive aerospace advances came. So it would seem that a good dickwaving competition is at least as good as an actual war.
If libertarians are so opposed to effective government, why don't they all move to Somalia?
spread the load - Stephen Hawking
Sage advice.
The main goal of humanity should be finding a sustainable source of energy (e.g., fusion). Our entire economy, lifestyle, etc., is driven by cheap, abundant energy. Getting out of the gravity well, building and running orbital stations, transporting people to other planets, constructioning and maintaining habital environments and colonies are all going to require even more massive amounts of energy. Moreover, the source of that energy must be transportable and work in a variety of environments to accomplish those aims. Until we have such a source of energy, our future is in doubt, regardless of whether we stay here on Earth or not.
I think entropy pretty much guarantees that humanity (and thought in general) will eventually cease in this universe. Perhaps there is a workaround but it seems unlikely. We want to continue because it is consistent with our programming, but I really don't see sacks of mostly water working for future expansion. We need to be able to house human-like consciousness in more robust vessels to make it a go. That raises so many issues though. Copying people breaks democracy for one thing. At least as far as I can imagine.
refactor the law, its bloated, confusing and unmaintainable.
Unless a event occurs that is so impacting and unprecedented in known human history. Humans will never learn to unite and live in cooperation with each other. Like you said, it's not in our nature.
And with 'impacting and unprecedented' I'm thinking in terms of Divine intervention, alien visits (which might turn out to be the same thing), natural disaster killing 70/80+ percent of the human population, the made up Mayan prophecy turning out to be true after all..
That sort of stuff.
In other words, ain't gonna happen.
If we can hold out long enough hopefully technology will be so advanced and relatively cheap that at least the more fortunate in our society can get a second chance somewhere else.. (where they can start all over again)
Life starts at the end of your comfort zone.
Hey, by the title of this story on my news reader, it looked like the Earth was going to have a massive disaster, like that asteroid. I thought we were screwed. Instead, it's just about him saying we should get out more. Boooring.
Though an extinction level event is nearly guaranteed to happen on Earth at some point over a long enough time span, I don't understand why Dr. Hawking feels as though it's more likely to happen or more likely to happen sooner on Earth than it is on any sort of spacecraft.
It is true that the sun's gravity well will cause the likelyhood of a large object collision to be greater, but such a risk must be considered against the probability of an extinction level event on a spacecraft of some sort.
Personally, I think that colonization of the lagrange points by small outposts of humans and other terrestrial beings is a great first step. Make it so that life on earth can be reseeded if it fails. In the short term, back up seed copies of terrestrial life are a better goal than abandonment of the planet, IMO. Eventual abandonment will have to happen due to the death of the sun, but I think that can wait just a little bit.
09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0 is the magic number.
Sooner or later we're gonna have to get out of here, or go extinct.
Or... we could use Earth as our spaceship :)
If Pandora's box is destined to be opened, *I* want to be the one to open it.
Hmm never feel the wind on your face again, no more seasons, no more grilling steak on an open fire... I think I'd rather die here than live in space.
Hope is the currency of fools
As humans can't survive anywhere else in the solar system, and as travel outside the solar system is impossible, it's obvious that humans will eventually go extinct. So what? The wish-fulfillment of Trekkies notwithstanding, basic physics and engineering make it a practical impossibility. I find the level of debate on this very frustrating. For instance, I guarantee someone somewhere will post something like "If everyone had your attitude, we'd never have left the trees!" (which of course is a self-evidently vacuous and stupid response to my observation about physics and engineering.)
"None are more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe they are free." -- Goethe
and like fruit flies in a jar we'll get right on it before our supply of food paste in the bottom of the jar runs out.
Hawking, as with a few others are making a fair assessment of our situation. We're going to keep increasing in numbers until all our resources are consumed. Our only chance is to find new supplies of resources and those won't be found on this planet. We need to move out into space where there are more resources to consume. Maybe that's the point behind overcrowded cities. They're getting us prepared to live in the cramped quarters of a colony ship on our way to somewhere else.
Unfortunately, as someone here already said as an example, what's that going to do for us now? Most of the planet, animals and humanity (just another animal, really) are only concerned with where their next meal is coming from, where they're going to be able to sleep safely tonight and where their next sexual encounter is going to come from (or for the real nerds among us, where their first sexual encounter is going to come from. ;-) Just like fruit flies in a jar, no thoughts about the far future, just the now. Even those who manage to rise above the common hoard still extend this behaviour into the massing of personal wealth in order to guarantee their food, shelter and sexual options.
Our future is easily seen by those whose eyes are open to see it; further population increases, continued expanding rate of resource consumption (sustainability is a myth) leading to the exhaustion of the resources and the collapse of the majority of the population. A few will still eek out a living on the scraps but they won't have the wherewith all to move out and find new resources.
Even under the most optimistic projections, a vanishingly tiny percentage of "we" are going anywhere. This isn't really a problem, earth is pretty convivial compared to decades on a spaceship or just about any other rocky object of about the right mass that we know about.
The two big questions are whether any humans are going to establish populations on other rocks and whether we are going to be able to wind this one down more or less pleasantly, or whether we will be going out the hard way...
Sooner or later we're gonna have to get out of here, or go extinct.
Or... we could use Earth as our spaceship :)
Wasn't that how the Cybermen (from Doctor Who) got started?
You've failed, I'm afraid. It does take 4.2 years to get there. However no time (or very little time) will have passed for the ones accelerating there. That doesn't stop time, however.
You see, if they travelled there, then travelled back here again, that would take 8.4 years for the round trip.
The energy required to make time stop completely for the entire universe would be, literally, astronomical.
As to Chris Mattern (191822) point, the frame you have to use is an inertial one. Doesn't really matter where or how fast that inertial frame is going, it just has to be non accelerating at any time during the event you wish to find the time interval for. Find another star and look for the interval between the two events and you'll see 4.2 years there too.
because you know, it only makes sense to send up 10 females for every male.
Monstar L
Estuans interius Ira vehementi Estuans interius Ira vehementi Sephiroth!
>>>I think the greed inherent in human nature will prevent us from ever getting organized enough to leave this planet for another.
In Robert's Heinlein's "Man Who Sold the Moon" it was greed that propelled humans to the Moon and Mars and outer planets. In fact that's pretty much true in every science fiction universe, even the utopian Star Trek. People don't do things for rational reasons like "we might go extinct" - they do them for personal gain, or a desire for a better life than the crappy one they have now.
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - historian Evelyn Beatrice Hall
I don't believe Hawkins has ever used the word "Abandon", has he?
Got any advanced physics ideas on reducing the cost to orbit? We really sort of need that before any sort of mass migration into space, even just LEO, can occur.
You can abandon Earth and die, and you can also not abandon Earth and not die (as a species). In fact, Abandoning Earth (leaving no one on Earth) seems like a faster way to die as a species than not abandoning Earth.
I think the greed inherent in human nature will prevent us from ever getting organized enough to leave this planet for another.
Sorry, what? If anything, "greed" (as you want to put it) would most certainly help people get organized to go for another planet if there was one available. Have you heard of a thing called resources? I assume another planet would have those....
The temperature range, atmospheric pressure, protective magnetic field of earth are far superior to anything anywhere else in the solar system, except for a certain altitude in Venus' atmosphere, but Venus has virtually no hydrogen. Outer space requires too much work to be survivable. There are no fossil fuels in outer space. We can't even live without fossil fuels here on Earth. Space colonization is madness at this point.
I think the greed inherent in human nature will prevent us from ever getting organized enough to leave this planet for another.
We are social animals, and each of us has a different amount of greed. Most of us aren't like the sociopaths that run the world.
Free Martian Whores!
The fact that wars have helped technology evolve suggests a defect in resource allocation, rather than a virtue of war.
Quite obviously, during any war worthy of the name, much of the population busies itself with the neccessary-but-useless tasks of filling catridges and emptying them. Substantial amounts of human and physical capital are reduced to rubble. Oil wells get set on fire, roads, rails and bridges get bombed, fields and forests get mined, etc, etc.
Wars represent a vast quantity of resources simply thrown away(in many cases this is the rational act on both parties' part, given the costs of being conquered; but from the overall welfare numbers, war is expensive), compared to peacetime. If, in fact, more R&D gets done during wartime, despite the reduced resources available, this suggests that peacetime could dedicate the same R&D resources, with less sacrifice(because a smaller slice of the bigger pie would be needed) or even more R&D resources for the same level of sacrifice(because getting X% of the larger pie is better than getting X% of the smaller one).
That's bullshit. Did the numerous people that died in WWII really make it any quicker? What it did do was provide some stimulus to the efforts, but it also wiped out a lot of people who could've been the one to figure out fusion by now or any number of unimagined future technologies. Not to mention that entire countries are destroyed and the labs, factories and libraries which they contained gone up in smoke.
War is one impetus to evolve technology, but it's hardly the only one. Pure curiosity is one that would as well, just not when people are behaving in such a belligerent, greedy fashion as they do currently.
I made a very similar argument a couple of years ago. I'm positive hundred of other people have: "If you are one in a million, there's a thousand like you in China".
But here's the rub: while sticking to Earth is dangerous, we don't know yet that we have any physical mean to leave it. So it doesn't really matter if Hawkins is saying we should abandon Earth, if he doesn't provide a credible way to actually do it.
So I guess the question becomes: Who is actually working on faster-than-light travel, life extension or other aspects of the problem? And if we don't know how to leave, what do we do to survive either until we figure it out, or forever if it happens there's no way to leave?
-- Did you try Tao3D? http://tao3d.sourceforge.net
Two one-in-a-million events are one-in-a-thousand-million events. If you're on three planets, that one-in-a-million extinction event becomes one-in-a-million-million-million event.
Any ONE going down will kill off all the humans ON THAT PLANET, but that won't kill all humans.
Stephen Hawking is taking the survival of the species slant to preserve human space exploration. Let's look at it another way. Who gets to go? Only the wealthy? The 'geniuses'? The 'artists'? Random sampling?
Human beings are arrogant enough to think that the universe couldn't go on without them...
These comments are my own and do not necessarily reflect the views or opinions of my employer or colleagues...
After all, there are only so many jobs _THAT_ will tolerate semi-literate
jackasses like you.
http://www.grammarbook.com/grammar/whoVwhVt.asp
(Blue Book)
Seems like we could incrementally approach this goal by doing less-expensive, lower-risk things first, like colonizing harsh terrestrial environments (Ocean bottoms, antarctica, salt flats, sterile deserts, etc.).
If we can make a self-contained, self-sustaining colony on the earth, then our species is more robust (we can survive the loss of all the plants, for instance, or if we've colonized the ocean floor, we can survive when supervillains ignite the atmosphere), and we get some experience learning the ins and outs of closed ecosystems.
Once they work reliably, then we can add "in space" to the project description, with all the additional cost and complexity that implies.
2*3*3*3*3*11*251
Not greed but fear. There are a lot of people who live in the same 25 mile radius all their lives. The idea of moving away from this area and from their friends family and other protective sources makes them scared. Why did Europeans Colonize the United States Was it because they were less greedy then the others... No. There were people who were more Greedy who wanted Gold, or people who were more afraid to live in their homeland then to move.
If I were Greedy enough I would form a group of people who are just as greedy as me to move to Mars and mine for materials. Or go to a place with others of like minded to start a new civilization, free of those ideas I find scary and wrong.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
At least a dozen Science Fiction authors have already done plenty of books on this subject.
Including the little known, obscure, Arthur C. Clarke.
So yeah, welcome to the party, next time get somebody else to bring you along.
What a waste of time and energy, spending time and effort developing technology beyond our current levels. Hawking needs to get his head out of the clouds.
Incidentally, my company's decided to take our backup system at offline indefinitely. It was costing us way too much money, and no one ever really uses it anyway. Also, we've decided not to upgrade our SAN on schedule next year, since we've never had a failure in the 4 years it's been running. Best of all, we get to spend all that extra money on leather-backed chairs, K-cups, and office parties! Let the good times roll.
Some people, however, are likely to misunderstand your post because, quite simply, they don't even begin to appreciate how much energy it would require to colonise another planet, or how likely we would be to exterminate ourselves by destroying our atmosphere if we even diverted significant resources to putting lots of stuff outside it. Basically, between "let's get off Earth" and "oh look, space colony", they engage in lots of vague handwaving about nonexistent technologies, nonexistent methods of energy generation, and nonexistent materials, the ability to create any of which in great enough quantities would imply a civilisation that really wouldn't need to waste them on a colonial experiment.
From scarped cliff or quarried stone she cries "A thousand types are gone, I care for nothing, no not one."
Seriously, we could get hit by another planetoid like we did when the moon got formed.
I don't think any amount of underground concrete is gonna help you out there.
I am all for getting off this rock. Sure..people will die trying, but who cares. Greater good and all that.
Before you ask, yes, I would be the first in line.
Yeah... except using an incorrect adverb doesn't qualify one as semi-literate. And fact of the matter is, the average individual does NOT have a full and complete understanding even of his or her native tongue. Hell, I'd say that even an individual with a doctorate in linguistics is likely to occasionally misuse words.
As far as "only so many jobs" goes, theres always government...
>>>This planet has an expiration date.
Yeah 5 billion years into the future. During the previous 1 billion we evolved from amino acids to cells to amphibians, lizards, and intelligent mammals. So by the time the earth expires, we'll likely have moved into Q-like beings. Even if we stayed on this planet, its eventual scalding by the nearby star wouldn't affect us.
As for asteroids that caused massive extinctions, the previous one was 70 million years ago. And 250 million years ago. During that timespan we evolved from small rodent-like lizards into modern mammals. Who knows where we'll be in another 70 million years.
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - historian Evelyn Beatrice Hall
As we have seen, the interests of business and profits are far more important than our safety and survival. There is no one in control that is willing to take that brave step because it will surely mean that others with shorter vision will immediately beat him down.
Going into space is expensive because the desire for profits are too great.
And as far as I can see, the number of people who will actually make it out there will not likely be large enough to form a gene pool.
Before we can make any progress, we have to get rid of this profit motive. We need the "star trek" economy to exist where people only work if they want to and everything is free.
What's wrong with dying? We all do it sooner or later as individuals. Why should the race last forever?
Because we may be the only chance for life on earth to spread to other planets, ... ever.
If we botch it this time, life may not have enough time to evolve another space faring civilisation. Think about it. Though doing nothing we may seal the fate for all of life.
We are part of a much larger ecosystem, without which we cannot survive. If we travel to the stars, so does life - which will continue to evolve.
If there is some great project humanity should try to tackle, it would be this.
Meme of the day: I browse "Disable Sigs: Checked". So should you.
Yes it probably would work at least as good. But the OP reasoned that cooperation would be the best and only way. The Cold War wasn't really about cooperation now, was it? He reasoned that greed was preventing true space development, while greed (a common cause for war) usually spurs development. Again: it's not perfect, but it really works.
It may be that this need for war has ceased because the corporations and their competition have replaced it but the big corporations seem to be interested in war, since it can be very profitable.
Well, I might have a way, but it only works on a semi spherical planet in a vacuum.
"The Earth is the cradle of mankind, but one cannot remain in the cradle forever."
- Konstantin Tsiolkovsky (1857-1935)
So was I thinking as well, and a lot of other geeks who like to philosophize about things probably too, and SF books & movies of course. So it's simply because this is Stephen Hawking thinking it that this is news?
Why is this insightful? It's repeated endlessly like a mantra EVERY discussion about space exploration.
Better insight is to recognize that we will probably never "get our shit together" as a race. All the nonsense happening today has been happening for millennia, and will keep happening for the forseeable future. Human minds still, in general, do not function well. Seriously, look at the utter crap that happens every day all over the world, or even your own town. Something is terribly, terribly broken, or simply underdeveloped. The advent of civilization and technology may drag the human mind into the light eventually, but we're talking evolutionary timescales here. From that viewpoint, the world's first city was built a couple eye blinks ago.
While we wait for that to happen, we might as well muck about some other stuff like space exploration and eventually colonization.
This is stating the obvious. Not exactly sure why this is news.
He needs to make space for his race of hyper-intelligent cyborgs.
Some day I wish to share Bender's optimism:
...but it's doing long-term damage to the planet.
Leela: And Bender, that aerosol head spray makes your head smell nice...
Bender: Thank You.
Leela:
Bender: So? It's not like it's the only one we've got!
How about Project Orion, a variation of Project Daedalus or Longshot, or maybe even a mixture of the space elevator and solar sails?
I know! I know! We can teleport a giant squid-looking thing directly into New York city, and set it up so it broadcasts horrible imagery to the entire human race moments before it dies, thus convincing the world that aliens are invading and uniting us against a perceived common threat!
We might have a few casualties, though. You okay with that?
End of lesson. You may press the button.
depressing
"Let's hope we can avoid dropping the basket until we have spread the load.'" Sounds a little messy and sticky doing this space.
jsut athnoer menagiensls ltitle psrhae for you to dcoede. Why do we wtsae our tmie dnoig tihs?
Apparently you've hit some nerve with your remark, as someone couldn't stomach the fact that preserving mankind is as pointless as everything else.
You are not a good human, you, you... you troll !
Most of those rules were invented AFTER the language was invented, by people with anal tendencies. Such as outlawing the double negative. Prior to ~1700 the double negative was not only an accepted part of language, but often ran into triple or quadruple negatives. The purpose was to add additional emphasis.
The blue book claim "Who refers to people. That and which refer to groups or things," sounds like an invented rule, not a reflection of the actual speakers of the language. i.e Prescriptive rather than descriptive. Real wordsmiths like ee cummins, Shakespeare, and Chaucer didn't give a fuck about rules. They wrote whatever they felt like writing.
- "Ther nas no man no wher so vertuous" (i.e., "There was not no man nowhere so virtuous")
- "He nevere yet no vileynye ne sayde / In all his lyf unto no maner wight." (i.e., "He never yet no vileness not said / In all his life to no sort of man.")
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - historian Evelyn Beatrice Hall
Yeah, but no one wants to or likes to face reality. This type of delusion, that we *must* get off this planet, is a delusion of the mid 20th century onwards, which I like to call Space Nuttery.
The fact that space is utterly empty, devoid of anything to support life deters Space Nutters not at all. They get their engineering and biology from sci-fi.
As you point out, we do not have the energy for this. We don't have the technology or resources. Period.
The reality is simple. We are born on this planet. We will die here. This wounds Space Nutters for some reason. They're also usually the same people who are against life-extension technology, but think the vastness of space is somehow proportional to our ridiculously short life span.
If the Earth can't support life in the long term, what makes them think the dead hulks like the Moon or Mars, or the metal-melting Venus and Mercury are of any help?????
Anyways, we can't get there. And even if we did, we'd be so utterly and ridiculously dependent on Earth that it in no way answers their argument.
We can't even fix a pump in orbit with all the industrial might of the Earth just a few kilometers away.
Hell, our technology is in decline, besides making faster computers, what has progressed in the last few decades? Nothing fundamental.
We don't need to boost ourselves. We need to figure out the earliest life forms that we evolved from, and then blast great numbers, but small lightweight quantities, of that stuff towards any apparently habitable planets. If it takes a few billions years, so what. By spreading the human-precursor lifeforms we can colonize a larger number of planets and take advantage of evolution to ensure that the resulting lifeforms are suited to each venue.
Correct me if I'm wrong; but isn't that true of EVERYTHING?
Let's say we manage to get a bunch of humans living on Mars. Just hypothetically speaking. Well, everyone is still going to die. Right? I mean, maybe an asteroid hits Earth and kills everyone and the people on Mars live longer. But doesn't the sun eventually expand/burn out? Then everyone is dead?
I mean, at some point, using our best scientific models, isn't the entirety of everything scheduled to end?
Evolution has played out countless thousands of battles to the death, and only the very best survivors are left. So we will inevitably continue the tooth-and-nail fight to survive and pass on our genes, because that is how nature has made us.
Which is why I would prefer we spend our effort on asteroid deflection. The earth will serve us for a long time as long as it is not hit by something to wipe us out.(or we kill ourselves) Even deflection doesn't need to be done today. The only real reason we are in space is to fight new levels of war and national egos. Living there is not going to be useful for centuries. Look at the space station problems. Toilets, A/C, constantly needing more fuel/food/water. Its not like they plan on making stuff there and shipping it to earth.
Much better to spend the money on fixing the problems here (but that might cost corporations profits so not likely to happen).
I don't read your sig. Why are you reading mine?
This article implies I care what happens after my death. Truly, it doesn't matter, people will still die, here or on another planet, there is just no incentive to care at this point. Now of course if scientists would stop fapping and decide to do something about fixing the death problem for good one could be more motivated; in the meantime, anything you gain during life is lost anyway, so moving to another planet is a huge effort for not much reward. Nihilist here.
It amazes me that people can stand there and that war has some unique property that causes development.
The only reason that 'war' advances development is that we're willing to spend tax money on development during war.
We could get all the effect (In fact, more, as war sucks resources.) and none of the deaths if we'd just spend money on development.
Of course, I live in the US, where we can't even spend tax money on bridges. War is about the only thing we're willing to spend tax money on at all.
If corporations are people, aren't stockholders guilty of slavery?
It's rather philosophy than physics. Don't mix them up.
no doubt there's plenty of trouble afoot. it should be interesting to note however, that our behaviors are being modified for us by the (self cleaning) planet we've tried so hard to dispose of. the odds of 'most of us' 'making it' decrease with each day that we treat our gifts as garbage. the odds of any but a few of us finding habitat elsewhere is staggering. that then, for all intents, leaves us all as disposable, partly in order to preserve....???? the ability for the potential escapees to finish trashing the place (saving the 'chosen' people), with our 'blessing'. talk about being hoodwinked, bushwhacked, hyped into stupidity etc...? yikes almighty.
meanwhile (time to sell at least a few million copies of some books); the corepirate nazi illuminati is always hunting that patch of red on almost everyones' neck. if they cannot find yours (greed, fear ego etc...) then you can go starve. that's their (slippery/slimy) 'platform' now. see also: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antisocial_personality_disorder
never a better time to consult with/trust in our creators. the lights are coming up rapidly all over now. see you there?
greed, fear & ego (in any order) are unprecedented evile's primary weapons. those, along with deception & coercion, helps most of us remain (unwittingly?) dependent on its' life0cidal hired goons' agenda. most of our dwindling resources are being squandered on the 'wars', & continuation of the billionerrors stock markup FraUD/pyramid schemes. nobody ever mentions the real long term costs of those debacles in both life & any notion of prosperity for us, or our children. not to mention the abuse of the consciences of those of us who still have one, & the terminal damage to our atmosphere (see also: manufactured 'weather', hot etc...). see you on the other side of it? the lights are coming up all over now. the fairytail is winding down now. let your conscience be your guide. you can be more helpful than you might have imagined. we now have some choices. meanwhile; don't forget to get a little more oxygen on your brain, & look up in the sky from time to time, starting early in the day. there's lots going on up there.
"The current rate of extinction is around 10 to 100 times the usual background level, and has been elevated above the background level since the Pleistocene. The current extinction rate is more rapid than in any other extinction event in earth history, and 50% of species could be extinct by the end of this century. While the role of humans is unclear in the longer-term extinction pattern, it is clear that factors such as deforestation, habitat destruction, hunting, the introduction of non-native species, pollution and climate change have reduced biodiversity profoundly.' (wiki)
"I think the bottom line is, what kind of a world do you want to leave for your children," Andrew Smith, a professor in the Arizona State University School of Life Sciences, said in a telephone interview. "How impoverished we would be if we lost 25 percent of the world's mammals," said Smith, one of more than 100 co-authors of the report. "Within our lifetime hundreds of species could be lost as a result of our own actions, a frightening sign of what is happening to the ecosystems where they live," added Julia Marton-Lefevre, IUCN director general. "We must now set clear targets for the future to reverse this trend to ensure that our enduring legacy is not to wipe out many of our closest relatives."--
"The wealth of the universe is for me. Every thing is explicable and practical for me .... I am defeated all the time; yet to victory I am born." --emerson
no need to confuse 'religion' with being a spiritual being. our soul purpose here is to care for one another. failing that, we're simply passing through (excess baggage) being distracted/consumed by the guaranteed to fail illusionary trappings of man'kind'. & recently (about 10,000 years ago) it was determined that hoarding & excess by a few, resulted in negative consequences fo
Theoretical Physicist != Applied Physicist
One's a monkey spending it's days imagining all the useful tools it could create, while the other is perfecting the art of cracking a nut.
Why do you think we'll have to bring everything with us? There's plenty of material already out there.
When did parents stop telling their children wastefulness is bad and it became only a 'hippie' thing? Is this like one of those old blame everything on the Jews things so that people can do what they want without feeling guilty? Or was there some commercial on TV stating that if you use less than 5 tubes of toothpaste a day that you're a hippie that I missed?
Once you start despising the jerks, you become one.
Let's face it: humans are poorly adapted to live anywhere but here on earth. We don't like no/low gravity, we need a huge biosphere to support us, we need a plethora of symbiotic intestinal bacteria just to digest our food, etc., etc., etc. It's very hard to take all that stuff with us and keep it all functioning in a self-sustaining (except for energy) way. The various biosphere projects have shown how difficult it is to keep a small environment balanced. I do not think we could do it long term in a reliable way.
If we want to go somewhere else, we have to become very different. Perhaps migrate our consciousness to a silicon-based implementation, or solid-state anyway, so we can deal with cold, radiation, and "eat" sunlight directly. Or at least bio-engineer ourselves to deal gracefully with zero or low gravity, high levels of radiation, etc., so we can live in orbital habitats, perhaps in the asteroid belt. It would be much easier to travel between the stars in such a form, too.
In the end, I do not think that the "humans" that end up leaving Earth will much resemble us except in intelligence. I think changing ourselves to make us more portable would be much simpler than trying to re-create all that Earth provides to support our life.
--PM
Nazi'ing. It's a nonstandard construction. You should probably just select a different grammatical construct that makes your point.
Also, just because we are not preparing a thesis, that does not mean that we should degenerate towards netspeak.
"He's only saying that because, if *disaster* did *occur*, he’d have the hardest time running away." http://www.theonion.com/articles/stephen-hawking-warns-of-aliens,17343/
The real problem is the frailty and ongoing degradation of human infrastructure, especially in the US. Every "natural" disaster or shortage of rescoures is a result of human incompetence and corruption. The willful destruction through hate and war might even play a larger part. Dr. Hawking, don't become another Paul Ehrlich, or worse, Al Gore. This we don't need
For justice, we must go to Don Corleone
When Keanu hears we want to take our little horrorshow on the road, he'll be coming back to finish what he started.
-- How I want a drink, alcoholic of course, after the heavy lectures involving quantum mechanics.
There are things that will take long till "expiration" (i.e. sun turning into white dwarf), things that we can predict with enough time to take measures, and things for what we won't be ready in the time they will take to happen (i.e. this asteroid with 1 in 1000 or 500 chances to hit Earth next century, if it were be big enough to wipe us all, would we have enough time to do something serious about that if we start to prepare now?).
Maybe we should take life like there is no future, we will be happier, at least until the future reaches us.
It's not an expiration date... It's a sell by date. They recently read the rest of the print that was across the south pole because of the global warning...
We hope to be able to read the UPC code within 3 more years.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
Use electricity to create liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen. No, really, it's just that simple.
Well, now you're moving the goalposts - first you ask about energy and then you blame it on lift capacity, which isn't the same thing at all. But the answer is equally simple - if we need that much lift capacity, we simply build that much lift capacity. As with energy, it's just an engineering problem.
The real problem has nothing to do with engineering, or cash, as many posters like to think. (Mostly because it lets them get their Twenty Minutes Hate in, using the current or past Administrations as the topic.) It's that there isn't anywhere to go in space. It's all about economics. Transport grows and prospers because it fills a need in moving people and goods from point A to point B, and in space there is no point B. (This is why the 'colonization of North America' and 'subsidize rockets like the government did railroads and airmail' models so beloved of space enthusiasts won't work.)
So does everything else actually. The solar system, then the galaxy and eventually the Universe itself. So, sooner or later, humanity is going bye bye. I guess the question merely is which mass extinction event is going to be our ride out, and the challenge therefore to dodge as many as possible.
Good thing we have Ares V in the works!
oh, wait...
I actually think talking about human colonization of space is misguided and horribly naive. Consider the effects of microgravity on human physiology. Unless you found a planet with gravity pretty similar to Earth's, you'd have to do some really freaky genetic engineering to create a human(?) that was adapted to say Mars or Moon gravity. At that point you're talking speciation anyway, I suspect. You could simulate Earth gravity on a very large space station, but I can't imagine that's a fun place to live in perpetuity.
The reason our space exploration is currently robotic is that it makes economic and practical sense. They don't have most of our frailties and needs. If we want to reach the stars, it would be a lot easier to figure out how to port ourselves to silicon than it would be to create space-faring human-like creatures. Sorry for invoking the Singularity, but I think it's a lot more likely than the space monkeys scenario.
Ask me about my sig!
What's the big deal if our species dies on this planet? What makes us so special that we deserve to go on forever? All we do is exploit other organisms and each other, and trash up the place.
What this will all come down to is profit. If a big enough corporation (or group thereof) thinks it can make a profit in space, it'll do so. Unlike humans, corporations don't have to worry about lifespans, they can take the bigger picture, but the payoff would need to be incredible for them to make the investments required (which is why it's still vital that governments support research spending on space projects, the governments might never shell out the money for a space mining facility, but they might just uncover the motivation for someone else to do so).
.... I'm just waiting for my ride which should be here in the next couple years.
Even if all of humanity was unified, we'd still die eventually if we stayed here. This planet has an expiration date. It's nice to pretend that if we were all hippies and lived like cavemen, that it'd last forever, but that isn't the case.
Unfortunately, everything you say is also true of the Universe as a whole. Eventually, heat death will mean that thought itself will become physically impossible. Is it possible to escape into other universes? Maybe. Does that mean we should forget about space travel and put all our efforts into figuring that out?
But wait a minute. Supposing we had descendants traveling around space a billion years from now. It is far from certain they would be recognizably human. They might not even be mammals.
So should we give up on the future?
I think the notion that we should explore space in preparation for abandoning the Earth is misguided. I have no doubt that people sincerely believe this, and I even recognize that interesting philosophical arguments can be made for it. For example, the idea we might have to move off the Earth prematurely because we'd fouled our own nest raises the question why we might survive in hostile space when we could not survive on the benign Earth. The answer might be that humans are not very good at dealing rationally with plenty, but we have our minds wonderfully concentrated by imminent death.
Even so, I think that it is somewhat unnatural to be all that concerned with the fate of the human race in the distant future. How many of us let our day to day actions be guided by a concern for humanity ten generations in the future, much less ten thousand?
The real reason to explore space is not for the extension of the human species' longevity, but for the maximization of human experience. Imagine human experience as a rectangle which sits on a two dimension axis. The X-axis is time, and the "escape Earth" position seeks to maximize the area of the rectangle by stretching it as wide as possible. I have no fundamental objection to this, but it should not be undertaken at the expense of the Y axis, which is the personal growth of individuals in any single generation. At some point humanity will be facing the end of its term and can rationally seek the extension of the species' lifespan, but that is not anytime soon. When that point comes, we will be best served by developing a culture which is creative, informed, and adventurous.
That's the real reason we want to explore space. Space exploration is an adventure both metaphorically and manifestly so. That it is a multi-generational adventure only makes it better. When we have lost the zest for exploration, we have lost the capacity to grow, and are running on the momentum of prior generations.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
Stephen Hawking has been hawking this idea for several years. This is not newsworthy.
As smart as Stephen Hawking is, this is not really a good idea. Assuming that we can overcome a boatload of technical problems (too numerous to list here). The probablility for human survival is still much greater on this planet than out there in the universe at large.
Our money would be much better spent working out the technical solutions to prevention collisions with Near Earth Objects, dealing with climate change, preventing pandemics, and dealing with all of the other problems that Mr. Hawking thinks we should run away from.
The Earth, and the Solar System, is liable to become uninhabitable quite a lot sooner than the universe as a whole. We might not be able to beat entropy forever, but we can feasibly imagine moving onto some other planets or away from the Sun when it turns into a red giant.
If Armstrong reported back from Applo 11 he saw precious gems the size of beach balls we'd had bases on The Moon long ago. If Viking 1 and Viking 2 turned on their cameras and saw the ground was litered gold and silver we'd have bases there too. But the truth at the moment turns out they are just barren. On Earth people avoid vast stretches of barren "bad lands" and consider them mostly worthless. Why go out to The Moon and beyond just for really expensive "bad lands"?
I spread the load twice a day.
Shouldn't we do the universe a favor and not spread?
The only job I ever /really wanted/ was one involving getting off this forsaken planet, and twit arsed people like you just keep mucking it up for me. I could care less about all your capitalistic corporate profit mongering evil smegging stuff your going on about. Now go back to kneeling before your symbol of torture and your imaginary friend called 'dog'. And if you get that, maybe you won't be here when another one of your kind decides it's more profitable to drop a planet buster behind them when they follow the rest of us off of here.
[Now, I'm off to lift my le... Um, visit... at another place.]
So you only use correct spelling, grammar, or punctuation when you're being evaluated on it or paid for it? Isn't that much like politicians who are honest and ethical and decent – but only when the cameras are rolling?
Karma fed to this user will be promptly burnt. Be warned; be wary.
Ass about face but never mind ...
For Athiests, life here on Earth is of the ultimate importance and should be preserved as long as possible, precisely because there is nothing to come afterwards.
You'll note that every time you hear about a war on TV, it's the Catholics vs. Protestants, Jews vs. Muslims, Shia vs. Sunni etc etc ... never Athiests vs Anyone.
We either leave this planet together, or we die on it divided.
The best progress we made towards leaving this planet, from the space race during the Cold War, came about because of our divisions.
Check out Project orion
I am sure it can be made even more risk free in terms of radiation spread ( which is already very small), and it absolutely can get us to mars or launch heavy stuff for constructing O'Neil cylinders. And with a large enough space vehicle/station, asteriod belt can practically provide all the material we need for making more orion crafts.
This is our survival plan: We'll build 2 ships. We'll fill one with telemarketers, marketing, and zealots. We'll fill the other with scientists, engineers, and workers. Then we'll hope none of the first ship has read Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.
Here here. Without space nuts the cosmic squirrels would starve, or turn to cheerios. (http://lemurking.wordpress.com/2008/09/11/hadron-collider-move-over-for-the-squirrel-smasher/)
I think therefore I can't be ~TTNH
Actually our technology, unification, and civilization is leading to our undoing. Most people would die by the time they're 23 or so if it wasn't for medical technology and overpopulation wouldn't be a problem. We wouldn't have as many kids, less of them would survive, and we'd be ok as a species long-term.
Between wisdom teeth complications, broken bones, cavities, malnutrition, resulting infection, and injuries from hunting and inter-tribal conflict, 30 should be a ripe old age.
Our ability to keep ourselves alive, not kill each other on sight, etc has resulted in the overpopulation problems we are seeing. We are *too* unified.
Good luck deflecting asteroids without a major manned manufacturing center in space. Without a presence in space, deflecting asteroids will not be feasible because we just can't launch enough fuel out of this gravity well.
Even if humanity does colonise other parts of the solar system, we're still dead when the Sun goes nova. Even if we do move out into the rest of the galaxy, it's bound to collide (catastrophically) with another one at some point. Even if we get as far as becoming transcendent beings and occupy the universe as a whole it'll still end in some sort of heat-death / thermodynamic fizzling - if gravity doesn't win out and it collapses back on itself.
So, ultimately we're all doomed anyway - what's the point in just prolonging it a few more decades / millennia / eons. By that time the beings we've evolved into won't be human any more and might just be bored out of their intergalactic skulls.
politicians are like babies' nappies: they should both be changed regularly and for the same reasons
Yeah but the expiration date is in 4.5 billion years. In this time A LOT will happen.
eg Evolution will not stop at 20th century Humans for billion of years just because of our Greatness. Even if we don't die out, you wouldn't call our ancestors in just 10 million years humans anymore.
It's our mess, we need to live with it. The planet is still *exceptionally* salvageable, in the lifetime of genX even. No matter how cool we make the spacecraft, they'll still need raw materials from time to time, which would still mean strip-mining another planet somewhere.
Also, and I'm a cold-hearted bastard for saying this (obviously), but I think Hawkings underestimates the value of going hiking, climbing a mountain, going surfing, rolling around on the beach under a blanket just after watching a sunset, etc. Would there be new activities avail in space? Sure, but if we can't "sustain" our environment when it has massive automated systems for cleaning our air, producing food, breaking down waste, cleaning water, etc...then what makes us think we'd do better in a metal can where we have to recreate all those systems ourselves? The Earth should never be left because it's not sustainable. If it should ever be left, it should be because we want to learn and explore. G-d, why can't we have pure motives.
Didn't they establish that God was helping them way back in the first season when President Roslin started seeing visions and such?
She was on drugs - Chamalla extract, which is what the oracles used to allow them to see visions. God wasn't really established until later in the series.
Putting moderation advice in your
Hawking is right, but not only do we need to leave the Earth, but we need to leave this solar system and this part of the galaxy.
Why? Simple. Disaster Recovery. If you work in IT, hopefully, you have a DR plan to allow the business to continue. That means having duplicate servers, networking, services, some distance away from the primary location. Across town is better than nothing, but doesn't address a regional issue like an Earthquake or hurricane or flood.
The same idea applies to human kind continuing.
An asteroid will hit Earth and destroy all major life eventually. When is open for debate, but every 10,000 yrs is the standard answer.
The Sun will become a red giant and that will be the end for every planet & planetoid in this solar system. That gives us 5bn yrs or so.
There are gamma-ray sources that randomly spray those deadly rays across entire regions of space, so we need to spread out in many directions to avoid that problem too. This is like the asteroid problem. We won't know about it until it is too late and we are all fried and dead.
Eventually, our galaxy will hit another galaxy. When that happens, we can hope that all the empty space will help our tiny area avoid sun-on-sun death.
Sadly, there is no way to avoid the big crunch when it comes. Perhaps by that point, we'll have learned to time travel and humans will be able to go back in time and find places to live or travel to alternate universes? Putting off the inevitable for another few million/billion years.
Not only is the Earth a death trap, but pretty much every area of the universe is, so spreading out like ants across the universe is the best that we can do for the species to survive as long as possible.
People don't do things for rational reasons like "we might go extinct" - they do them for personal gain
Yet somehow, the people who control government are magically exempt from this law of human nature?
Make no mistake, if the elite at the top of the power pyramid decide to "save us all" with a plan like this, it will be precisely for their own personal gain.
Frank Herbert explained this back in 1965.
Yeah man. I like Metallica too.
Yeah! Why just fuck up the earth, when we can fuck up the GALAXY!
Change yourself? Too hard! Let's just filthy another nest.
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
There are seven other planets in this system. None have significant resources for allowing humans to live on them. They may have some mineral resources that we'd like to have here, where it's cozy for us to live; we'll send robots out to collect them for us.
In a thousand years, maybe -- if we haven't wiped ourselves out or knocked ourselves back to feudalism -- we can talk about terraforming Mars and Venus. But if we make it through the next thousand years as a technological species, it'll be because we figured out sustainability, and will have made the Earth a nice place to live -- who'd want to move somewhere else?
(This is part of the problem of the supposed "Fermi paradox" -- it assumes the civilizations will maintain the cancer cell ideology -- "growth for the sake of growth". But in fact any species that survives its technological infancy is going to have to adopt technology and philosophy that allows sustainability.)
Tom Swiss | the infamous tms | my blog
You cannot wash away blood with blood
I'm sure Stephen Hawking totally stole the idea from you.
This actually kinda reminds me of a conversation we had last night....we watched the original V miniseries, and were talking about how stupid it was that they allowed the aliens into factories around the world simultaneously instead of just a factory or two at a time...but then, if they did that, countries would argue over who got to host them first. ::shakes head:: stupid human beings...
To be fair, the V aliens looked like this: http://enjoy.eastday.com/e/20081014/images/01415100.jpg
I'd let her in my factory any day.
Comment of the year
In fairness, quite a bit has expanded in our understanding of the fundamental building blocks of life. DNA was first described in 1953... 57 years later, we are mapping genomes (with some organisms fully mapped), manipulating, replacing and removing genes, and discovering the genetic basis for numerous diseases and other traits at an ever-increasing pace.
Just because it ain't silicon & metal doesn't mean it ain't technology.
Today .... "your paragraph."
I'm an aerospace engineer and realist. We aren't going to find a way to get off this rock without trying. Leaving this area of the solar system is necessary and it won't be easy, especially if we never try.
"Man will never walk on the mooon" was stated for hundreds of year too.
Well, there's the ethical question then of whether or not this is justified when there could be other forms of life already there on the planets we've targeted with our life-form "bombs".
And besides, wouldn't you feel foolish if all we did was manage to evolve cockroaches and influenza everywhere? They suck enough here on Earth, let's not help them colonize other planets!
Sooner or later we're gonna have to get out of here, or go extinct.
Or... we could use Earth as our spaceship :)
Even though you end with a "smiley" this is really a serious point.
The technologies required to survive in space would generally work equally well on Earth, and given the natural optimality of Earth conditions for human life, anything likely to happen to Earth much before stellar expansion should be fairly easily compensated for by controlled environments, if not direct biosphere control (it is intrinsically easy to "terraform" Earth).
The only kind of threat to long term human existence on Earth until its physical destruction is form a malicious process - one that is carefully tuned to evade all protective measures and bears an effective process to destroy humanity.
It could be a deliberately designed weapon, or an evolutionarily developed artifact - perhaps an analog to biological evolution in some advanced technological system.
Starships were meant to fly, Hands up and touch the sky - Nicky Minaj
The federal budget would like to disagree with that statement. The majority of our federal budget is tied up in providing social programs and infrastructure, not in "war". Yes, the defense department gets a comparatively large portion of the budget. NO, it does not comprise all or even the bulk, of government spending. This is a facile talking point that is, unfortunately, entirely false as well.
Of course, as all the recent administrations have shown us, not having the tax money to spend doesn't mean you can't rack up a hell of a credit card bill. Why let things like "insufficient tax revenues" ruin the party?
When you can go to Mars you can go a little farther... And hopefully you begin to make bigger and better spaceship... And maybe after the colonisation of the solar system we can try a bigger jump.
But I don't see a big inter-stellar jump with humanity staying on Earth until then.
(\__/) This is Lapinator
(='.'=) copy it in your sig
(")_(") so it can take over the world
>In Europe we continued trying to wipe each other out and it caused a lot of technological improvements. IIRC, During a World's Fair in 19th century London an attendee said to Hiram Maxim, "Want to make a fortune? Invent something to let these Europeans cut each other's throats with greater efficiency." and then started on a path to develop the first true machine gun. Gatlings were well known, but not a true automatic weapon, since each shot was actually tripped off by the manual operation of a crank. In fact, the ATF treats Gatling guns as semi-automatic.
Many of the most powerful sociopaths in the world are elected from the masses of "most of us." There is very little evidence to support your conclusion that "most of us" are nothing like "them."
how does he play Starcraft II with his cheek?
Resources are part of it, but incentive is a big one too. Sure, pursuit of profit is an incentive for development, but nothing quite focuses one's efforts like the likelihood of being killed and/or enslaved, along with your entire family/community/nation, if you fail.
I have a solution for this. Let's start up the Spanish Inquisition again, and make people so afraid of living on earth that they develop a way to colonize other planets!
Well, I guess it's something he really believes in... Though I wonder if this is just for the sake of ensuring the human race's survival... Perhaps Hawking expects a new step in our evolution to be triggered once our souls are no longer bound by Earth's gravity?
Bow-ties are cool.
Hell, I'd say that even an individual with a doctorate in linguistics is likely to occasionally misuse words.
I completely agree. I am often a grammar nazi myself, but even I missed 'anyways'.
not with comcast!
Only several thousand people will make it to other planets or moons in our solar system... but the rest of humanity will stay here and die with the Earth. Before our Sun expires, the survivors descendants will have to get out of the solar system. I predict several huge ships the size of of a small moon like the "Death Star" will be built and hurled at different solar systems around us. We will live and evolve on them for thousands of years until we reach new planets... and they don't have to be like Earth because we got use to live in space for so damn long.
We could also expend a lot of energy inventing technologies that are less likely to screw up the earth. Renewable energy, for example.
Colonising another planet is a dream. We'd do better to fix this one.
Even if it did somehow work, a trip through space and starting out on another planet would create a large selection bias. Those who got off Earth wouldn't be properly human for very long.
Give the fellow a break. He's dying, very slowly, from a disease that must mean that most of the time, he probably feels simply trapped and bored. Yeah, he puts a brave face on it, with a chipper smile and a media stunt or two now and then, but not being able to get a hair out of your eye must get kind of old after the first twenty or thirty years. Since he's billed as the "world's smartest man" (taking over the mantle from Einstein), it's not unusual that he's often been asked by the press to impart some Great Wisdom.
There's every reason in the world for him to be bearish on the human race. Predicting a dying world is almost cheery in the face of his own situation: since there's going to be little to live for, there's no sense his in feeling sad about what he's going to be missing if he dies tomorrow, or even holds on for another twenty years of not moving and barely being able to breathe -- even if he gets to experience it in some new version of virtual reality. Then, too, he's one of the Baby Boomers, who've been in a petulant mood since Nixon was elected, and are rapidly aging into a bunch of cranky old men and women.
Tomorrow the sun will rise, and it will set, and perhaps the world will be better and maybe not, but it's not going away any time soon. At fifty-two, childless, homeless, and penniless, I'm optimistic -- even if things aren't going to work out for me, perhaps the rest of the world will be luckier.
Whether Hawking is going to be, or not, is another story. Have pity on him.
I have no problem donating to plans/projects for these kinds of things.
My problem is that you never really know where your tax dollars are going, so it makes it really hard to support government funded projects like this.
I think our tax system needs overhauled/updated. I think we should be able to pick and choose what projects our money goes to...at least a percentage of it anyways.
Don't get me wrong...you couldn't let everyone just throw every tax penny at say education reform or transportation or something, but how about giving us the option to appropriate say 25% (or heck even 10%) of our tax dollars how we see fit.
At least then we could support government projects like this and at least have a sense that some of our money was going where we wanted it to.
And for those who don't care, let them just pay taxes as usual...100% just goes wherever the higher ups decide.
Yes we can! But be sure to RTFM!
For justice, we must go to Don Corleone
... when we can go down? Colonizing the deep ocean or digging tunnels seems easier than Mars, and would protect our species almost as well. But of course we need to figure out cold fusion before we consider leaving our cozy planetary surface. Or maybe instead of going anywhere, mankind may create virtual worlds so marvelous we won't bother much with everything else.
War is about the only thing we're willing to spend tax money on at all.
Congress just reconvened in a special session to try and buy votes in the midterm election with a spare $26B they found laying around. So national defense isn't the only thing money's being spent on, unions are doing quite well with the current administration.
You can only vote for who's on the ballot.
Free Martian Whores!
Did Hawking real uses those words: 'Abandon Earth or Die'? If he didn't actually use those words the headline is wrong and should be changed.
http://www.acetonestudio.com
1) There is no hurry; the sun and the planets will be around for a LONG LONG time and we've only just begun.
2) Without trying that hard we will eventually advance to the point where we can move on - no need to rush\
3) The dire situation is what we are doing to ourselves today; even that won't make humans extinct and it will take generations
4) Since when is the eternal preservation of humans so critical? Everything has its time. You will die. The species will die (maybe evolve.) The solar system will die. Eventually the galaxy will spread out and burn out and die or get sucked into a black hole and die. Then I suppose it all pulls back in again and creates a big bang? Or some alien makes a mistake and creates a big bang or black hole nearbye...
You and your species are not the center of the universe nor are you critical to existence and you are not currently contributing anything positive to the process called life - probably for the last few 100 years. Who's to say that the pinnacle of life is to be the smartest thing at the top of the food chain? Your philosophy may be incorrect and it certainly has BIAS.
You can't create something new without destroying something old.
It's a fundamental rule of nature. You can't build a new building without destroying the thing that was once on the piece of land the new building is supposed to be. You can't create new engineering techniques if your old ones are sufficient for your needs. Now, the new thing may not necessarily be better. But without destroying the old and creating the new, you'd hardly be able to know.
War just accelerates the destruction process. It's like the occasional forest fire. It brings about great tragedies on an individual level, but it's probably not a bad thing on a larger, longer scale. After all, natural selection itself is a constant state of warfare. Certainly, taking warfare over the top may be a bad thing. But humans are a very resiliant species, as adept at surviving as rats and cockaroaches. I doubt that short of the sun ballooning into a red giant and swallowing the planet, we'd be threatened as a species.
As individuals, we like to live comfortably, peacefully, without worry. But what's good for the individual has time and again, shown not necessarily good for the whole. A bit of worry, a bit of discomfort, these are the things that drive progress.
As an example, if we lived under the constant threat of nuclear winter and MAD, we'd be better prepared collectively should a supervolcano blow in our lifetime. As you've no doubt seen, without the threat of nuclear winter, we'd otherwise use those same resources only to increase our level of comfort. That's not just how human beings work, but nature itself. If there's no selective pressure, then even the undesirable traits get propogated among a population, and when the selective pressure returns (or a similar one appears), the entire population dies off.
"If a nation expects to be ignorant and free in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be."
Well and good, but where do we get the energy to boost enough humans and tools into space to create a viable life-supporting ecosystem elsewhere? Hawking is a physicist, so I'm a bit surprised to hear him proposing something like this without explaining where the lift capacity is going to come from. There's a reason why Pan Am never began the orbital shuttle service depicted in 2001: A Space Odyssey (aside, of course, from the fact that they went out of business).
The most important reason why nothing like the Space Clipper was ever built is not due to the launch energy required. It is the cost of building and maintaining an incredibly complex vehicle. Even if the energy used to launch the Space Shuttle were free its launch cost would be virtually unchanged. It costs NASA 450 million dollars per launch, the cost of actual LH2/O2 fuel (not just energy) is on the order of 40 cents per kilogram (for example) so the total fuel cost is on the order of one million dollars (!).
The ticket price for the 30 passengers of the Space Clipper would be $30,000 or so if energy was the only cost, still quite steep compared to air travel, but nothing like the $15 million of the Space Shuttle launch bill.
Starships were meant to fly, Hands up and touch the sky - Nicky Minaj
LOL, another human hater.
Probably would have foamed with orgasmic joy at Professor Pianka's speech.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mims-Pianka_controversy
Probably another new age cult GAIA, Gerogia Guidestone, worshipping Neo-druid.
http://www.radioliberty.com/stones.htm
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georgia_Guidestones
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neo-druidism
The current batch of religions are bad enough without bringing back more
whacked out bogus BS to further enslave the ppl.
Reminds me of the nut jobs carving the hearts out of living ppl in Central America.
The point Mr. Hawking is trying to make is that most organisms
on Earth were almost wiped out by one super volcano in the pacific.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toba_catastrophe_theory
There are plenty of other things that have us in their cross hairs
such as the theory that there is a 26 million year repeating reset
on this planet due to something in space that keeps making return visits.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nemesis_(star)
We have done a lot of bad things, on this planet, and we are
learning better ways to do things.
As Gandhi said, be the change you want to see in the world.
Between the half a dozen Super Volcanoes and threats
from off planet we will be getting a reduction at some point.
Right now the Neo-malthusians are moving ahead with their plan
to make you happy, hope you know how to speak Esperanto !
google "32 trillion offshore needs IRS attention"
Indeed. You should commit suicide now and save yourself some tedium.
Greed. Although a collaborative and unified effort on a large scale aimed at colonizing a new planet is highly unlikely for reasons already stated, its my personal opinion that if some substance or new material was discovered on Mars that was more valuable than crude oil and cell phone market share combined, we would start terraforming it tomorrow. Its sad that the simple welfare of our race and future generations is not enough incentive to plan for the future, but in no way is it surprising. Say what you will about individual aspects of human nature, but as a whole we are quite dysfunctional and destructive.
The problem with that line of thought is the leaders elect achieved that position through a competitive process, part of which included making themselves visible to begin with. Leaders are not elected from a perfectly lateral sample of the population. I have no chance of becoming President, nor my neighbor, or professor.
The candidate group is pre-screened to be a group of people who want to be elected, are capable of making themselves visible to the public, can reduce, eliminate, or discredit opposition, and can convince constituents that their election is in the best interests of all. That is a custom recipe for selecting "powerful sociopaths."
So I would submit that indeed, the popular elect represent the grossest extent of greed and power hunger in a context including the general population.
Why does that matter? If Barack Obama hadn't run for office, he'd still be Barack Obama, lawyer/community organizer from Chicago. If George Bush hadn't run for office, he'd still be George Bush, oil company executive.
They had money & a political organization backing them, but there were no special qualities they brought to the table that "most of us" don't also have. Point is, they're much more like us than they're not, as much as we'd sometimes rather view them as some sort of evil/sociopathic anomaly.
Use electricity to create liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen. No, really, it's just that simple.
Shit, don't let the oil barrons catch you uttering such blasphemous statements.
Boredom is bliss.
It no doubt is just better than self-named homo sapiens goes the way of the dinosaur.
PS there are 2 reasons [at least] that I post as Anonymous Coward: I have too many login accounts already & there just aren't any neat nicknames left...:-)
This may sound like a troll, but hopefully it won't be seen that way..... In the overall scheme of things...what is the point of preserving the human race? Has Dr. Hawking ever shared his ideas on what the ultimate goal is, other than basic self-preservation?
- Donny was a good bowler, and a good man.
Personally I think the odds of an earth destroying event increase exponentially if we ever do get it together enough to colonize another planet. War is one of the few constants in the history of mankind. Interplanetary warfare is not going to be pretty. Consider that you couldn't even talk real time to "those damn Martians". The potential for misunderstanding and unstoppable conflict is huge.
And the difference is one of small degrees, not one of fundamental makeup.
Well, "that asteroid" isn't big enough to wipe us all. Those that are, hit us less often. And the parent already gave you the time scale of those occurrences.
"Just because it ain't silicon & metal doesn't mean it ain't technology."
Yes but it speaks to the fundamental limits we have reached in matters of energy. The 747 had its maiden flight in 1969 and since then ,except for DVD players in every seat nothing has changed, the flight still takes the same time, using the same fuels, burning in the same engines. A few % of efficiency improvement is all we've gotten for decades worth of work.
We're on the plateau of the progress "S-curve". It ain't happening, and an iPod won't help you in space, it won't help you get there. It's fundamentally far away and hostile. Bring all the cell phones you want, that ain't the problem.
USSR?
There is a good argument that humans are done evolving. To evolve, the strong survive and the weak die out. That is no longer occuring with humans, so it's unlikely we'll move onwards to Q-like beings without a catastrophic event or two.
Adidas To Bring Back Sneakernet
People like yourself are exactly why the rest of us have been trying to GTFO this planet for our entire lives.
I RTFA as much as I could tolerate. The near-term examples I saw Hawkings using were global warming and nuclear war! This guy is pretty much a nut job. Giving oil supplies and the usual warmist assumptions, why would anyone honestly claim that global warming was a human extinction event. Yeah, I have seen it done, but come on. Nuclear war is always a good boogie man, but I suspect a spasm still would not be a human extinction event. Hawking actually cites the cuban missile crisis, apparently as a close call to a human extinction event. For perspective, there was a near event about 70K years ago. Might have reduced the population to say 10k. A really big mt st helens event in Indonesia. Nobody really notices anymore. Now astronomical events are fine as human extinction events. People worry about silly local rocks, but we are close to solving that. On the other hand, there might have been a stellar nova a 100 light years away and tomorrow we will be deep fried. I applaud the possibility that Hawkings is apparently trying to think, and space capability is what is needed, but we are not getting clear thinking from this guy. Of course, if he is lying through his teeth, I can respect that.
please remember that we are willing to spend money on saving speculators.
Should humans instead stay on earth and continue these neverending wars over religion, money or resources?
Many educated people abandon medieval religions since those have stretched their suspense of disbelief too thin. Magic and mircales don't sell anymore but people will still need some great purpose for their lives. What could be better than an attempt to push humanity off this rock en large?
Getting in space won't end wars but it could offer new dreams for mankind. New hope for finding answers to those big questions like: "are we alone?".
Otherwise.. why even bother living if there's no reason to live, or have offspring for no other purpose than pointless repetition?
Is someone here writing a paper for a grade, or for a job?
Yes.
Security is mostly a superstition... Avoiding danger is no safer in the long run than outright exposure. - Helen Keller
It's that there isn't anywhere to go in space.
Agreed. In this economic system nobody is going to build spacecraft if there's no profit involved, and what is there in space? Nothing, unless you go really far and mine the asteroids. (Although bottling lunar water and selling it as "lunar water" might actually work; most people see the difference between distilled water and distilled water).
The only reason the USA went to the moon was to show the Soviets who has the bigger dick.
captcha: oblong
Better get cracking on those anti-gravity drives!
Space elevator. Obviously, that has its own engineering challenges, but it's the only way.
Who knows where we'll be in another 70 million years.
Maybe dead? Asteroids are rare, but they aren't timed occurrences. We don't have them every 180 million years. We have them when we have them - could be 100 million years from now, could be next week. We may never be hit with a species-killing asteroid again. So far our technology is such that we can only find and track the largest asteroids, but there are billions of them of species-killing size that we cannot track.
You're committing a classic logical fallacy*, but it's ok, you're probably right. We'll probably be just fine.
* This one is practically built in to the human consciousness - it's the same reason gamblers go broke and people don't wear seatbelts.
Security is mostly a superstition... Avoiding danger is no safer in the long run than outright exposure. - Helen Keller
We either leave this planet together, or we die on it divided.
Live together, die alone? Lost was right.
ZERG RUSH LOL!!!!!
:D
seriously, no one else made a sc/sc2 joke yet? turn in your geek cards!!!!
Complaints about spelling or the misuse of a word in an internet argument is simply the mediums way of say "I agree with everything you say, and have nothing more of value to add to the conversation."
Beyond that, it is incredibly stupid to try and use that particular fallacy, since (as you said) EVERYONE eventually makes a spelling or grammar mistake, and thus the complainer ends up showing themselves as a hypocrite.
The computer was developed during World War II to break codes and calculate firing tables.
The nuclear reactor was developed for the nuclear bomb.
The nuclear bomb was developed to vaporise.
The ballistics missile was developed for destruction from afar.
Heck, the knife was made to kill. Not only animals, but other humans. Remember the start of 2001, with Moon-Watcher first using the club to hunt, and next using it against another tribe?
Human beings were not design to live in space. We need mother earth, we need a clean environment, we need biodiversity.
The solution is not to go to space, the solution is to save the earth. It's that simple.
And, BTW, if we've managed to trash the entire earth so comprehensively, what makes Mr. Hawking believe that we will not trash a space ship or a space colony?
Apparently you haven't met many people with the authority to hire... or anyone for that matter.
Hard to meet people from the water side of an abutment.
For large sets, this will be our guide even unto death, for the LORD will work for each type of data it is applied to...
Wasn't it only like four months ago that Dr. Hawking was direly warning us all to stay as far out of the interstellar limelight as possible? Another flip-flop from the liberal elite intelligentsia!
MSIE: The world's most standards-complaint web browser.
You're underestimating tourism.
A few short years after we put the ISS in orbit, while still unfinished, Dennis Tito paid $20 million to go there as a tourist. Other rich people followed. Burt Rutan is close to bringing people a sub-orbital joyride into space for $200,000 or so. He's got hundreds of takers so far.
That's the way it goes for any new transportation method. First the rich, then the near-rich, and then everyone else. As more and more willing buyers pony up, more and more people can afford it as economies of scale reduce the cost. Horses, automobiles and airplanes all began as the province of the wealthy. Look where we are now.
Space Tourism has begun, and that's all you need. Transportation infrastructure will grow as Tourism grows. Eventually acess to space will be cheap enough and pervasive enough that various businesses like asteroid mining become profitable.
Then apparently what we need is Space Mormons. If they will colonize Utah, they just might succeed at colonizing Mars.
Tell that to the people of Ketchikan, Alaska: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gravina_Island_Bridge
The majority of our federal budget is tied up in providing social programs and infrastructure, not in "war"
The federal budget would like to disagree with that statement: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Fy2010_spending_by_category.jpg
The pentagon's budget is the #2 slice of the pie. 3/4 of a trillion dollars of that budget is spent overseas.
You're right about social programs, they make up about 65% of the budget* (which is absolutely fucking insane), and with defense spending added in you get about 85% of the budget, but transportation and the department of the interior only make up about 3% of the budget.
We are not spending much federally on infrastructure at all.
* It kinda depends on how you slice it. The department of veteran's affairs is welfare tied to defense that accounts for 16% of the budget - nearly as much as the defense budget itself (18+%). I included it in the welfare programs, though it wouldn't be entirely improper to include it in defense spending (it is taking care of the soldiers, after all). That would make the defense/welfare split about 50/50, with social programs being slightly higher. In either case, we spend very little on infrastructure, relative to the rest of the budget.
Security is mostly a superstition... Avoiding danger is no safer in the long run than outright exposure. - Helen Keller
a) where are we going to go?
b) how are we going to get there?
c) when would we ever agree on a and b let alone actually do it?
Nah. We're just a bunch of ignorant monkeys who ought to know better. But don't. Something else will evolve out of the mess we leave.
Learning to live in space is the key to rejuvenating this planet. Earth is dying because we do not know how to live without killing it. In space we must survive on our own without the Earth to exploit. We will have to learn how to create habitats which are completely independent from the Earth's biosphere. Once we know how to do this we will be able to live in any ecosystem without killing it.
check it out. Cool stuff.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
What difference does it make if we all die here or we all die spread out through the universe? If the big bang theory is correct, the universe will eventually collapse in on itself, so who flippin' cares if we ever get to colonize planet FD54 in galaxy Z9123?
Some one clearly so intelligent. And yet he must be painfully aware that humans are tragically badly adapted to spaceflight. And at this time, we have limited ability to ever just hop in planets within our solar system. And even if and when we do, the environments are so enormously hostile that 99.9% of the effort will nominally end in some form of a disaster.
Frankly, such people and minds need to find the core solution of planetary escape and orbital issues. Until we find a way to be orbital thats far less painful than current methods, we can forget any large scale spacial travel or ideas. Enormous rockets carrying tiny packages with huge fuel use. I don't think so. That won't method humankinds space travels.
So, a question in light of this to the scientific amongst you. Can humans build a structure that is 2000 miles tall. Monumentally incredible. A space ladder? If not, then far as I know, people think we might get down to moving 1Kg at $20000. Which however we cut it, its never ever going to work.
Hilarious. Ten years ago, bicycles were made almost entirely of carbon fiber, including the wheels. You can't find these wheels anymore, because they break. Bike shops are once again filled with traditional metal rim wheels with metal spokes, with a paper-thin carbon fiber "trim" to give a profile to the wheel. This trim could be made of paper for all it does.
We can't even build a carbon-fiber part to sustain the tremendous stresses of cycling, but you think we can build a space elevator?
Get some help, preferably in the form of some reality-based engineering classes. Oh, and also prepare for living the rest of your life right here.
If Armstrong reported back from Applo 11 he saw precious gems the size of beach balls we'd had bases on The Moon long ago. If Viking 1 and Viking 2 turned on their cameras and saw the ground was litered gold and silver we'd have bases there too.
That's an interesting thought. It's still probably not cost effective, though the collector may get a "space gold" or "space gem" premium over the same stuff found on Earth. Ironically, if there were more basic necessities - (relatively) easily accessible water and raw materials from which we could build sustainable habitats and breathable air - we'd definitely have bases there.
For the really great view!
Sounds a lot like BSG to me, you know it aint funny when sci fi starts to sound a lot like what you are living day to day, if we do this, we do this right...no networking of our computers for some scylon invasion to overtake us, mmmk?
You do realise who Stephen Hawking is? Look him up on Wikipedia. He has more letters after his name than you do in yours, and almost certainly does more thinking in a day than many of us do in a week. Personally i'm glad that someone on this planet has decided to look past his own selfish interests and actually think about our future as a species. The funny thing is that as soon as something threatening does appear, people like you will be whining about why the government didn't pour more money into contingency planning.
Just a small aside: I'm no expert, but don't think Hawking could be referring to asteroids "blindsiding" us - Wikipedia's articles relating to the Apophis asteroid seem to indicate that: 1) intrasolar asteroids have an extemely low chance of hitting earth, and 2) if/when one does have a significant chance of hitting earth, we'd know about it decades in advance.
It's simple, then. We'll just have to declare war on Mars.
Random Thoughts From A Diseased Mind (Not For Dummies)
A big asteroid would take out Earth, but our Mars colony would survive. The sun expanding to a Red Giant would wipe out the solar system, but our colony in that solar system past Betleguse (sic) would survive. The more spread out we are, the harder it will be to kill all of us.
Slow down, cowboy! It has been 4 hours since you last posted. You must wait another few hours.
we watched the original V miniseries, and were talking about how stupid it was that they allowed the aliens into factories around the world simultaneously instead of just a factory or two at a time...
You bastard! Thanks for the spoiler now I don't have to watch it, asshole.
Yeah, Hawking would be an excellent slashdot editor.
Unfortunately, everything you say is also true of the Universe as a whole. Eventually, heat death will mean that thought itself will become physically impossible. Is it possible to escape into other universes? Maybe. Does that mean we should forget about space travel and put all our efforts into figuring that out?
An economist saying: "in order to survive in the long term, start by surviving in the short term".
Of course, that can be taken incorrectly as being short-sighted, but it's not meant like that. We need to solve the following problems in roughly the following order before being worried about escaping to another universes:
1) finalize economy globalization & bring climate problems and unsustainable resource exhaustion under control
2) colonize planets from the solar system
3) colonize planets from another solar system in our galaxy
4) colonize planets from other galaxies
As you see, long way to go before worrying about the *theory* of heat death of the universe. Only the first item is gonna take us probably a couple of centuries.
For example, the idea we might have to move off the Earth prematurely because we'd fouled our own nest raises the question why we might survive in hostile space when we could not survive on the benign Earth.
Simple: we'll leave behind the people who fouled the nest and caused the most problems.
But wait a minute. Supposing we had descendants traveling around space a billion years from now. It is far from certain they would be recognizably human. They might not even be mammals.
I would love to be some Transformers-like being. Immortal shapeshifter travelling through space, exploring strange foreign cultures, and helping them.
Right now the expected life-span of humanity as a whole is less than 200 000 years.
A lot less then the million years Hawking mentioned.
And a lot less than the up to 5 billion years that the solar system has left.
I agree, we should explore space because we can, out of sheer curiosity and adventurousness, not because of some questionable ulterior motive.
In the short run, yes. In the long run, I'm not so sure.
In a big wartime situation, basic research is slashed, and the people doing it are usually working hard on applying what they already know. This leads to greatly increased capabilities in the short run, which is accentuated by the changes in what cost, safety, and reliability (in WWII, Soviet tanks were built to last six months, on the principle that if they hadn't been destroyed by the Germans they could be replaced anyway) is acceptable. It also leads to a lack of development postwar, because there hasn't been the same basic research to keep innovation going, civilian standards of acceptability become more common, and people are spending resources on rebuilding, because a major modern war is extremely destructive.
The advances in radar between 1939 and 1945 were truly remarkable. If we hadn't had WWII, though, perhaps radar would have been more advanced in 1960 or 1970 than it was.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
He asked where we're going to get the energy from.
Not how to use it.
Sooner or later we're gonna have to get out of here, or go extinct.
Or... we could use Earth as our spaceship :)
Or we could remember the laws of inertia instead.
Actually, everything you're discussing there concerns either energy, or energy storage.
1. Where does your electricity come from?
2. Lift capacity is related to both energy and energy storage density. The vehicle needs enough energy to lift its payload out of Earth's gravity well, and the energy needs to be stored in a dense enough form that you're not wasting energy just to propel energy.
This is not "just an engineering problem," as you so glibly assert. There are fundamental technologies that we lack.
"there isn't anywhere to go in space" -- have you been there? Interesting that you should use the colonisation of the Americas as an example, since the first European expeditions were simply exploring to see what was there -- look at the ROI they acheived! The first companies to successfully engage in commercial space flight within the solar system will make enormous sums of money. I'd wager the same is true of intra-galactic travel also.
The 747 had its maiden flight in 1969 and since then ,except for DVD players in every seat nothing has changed, the flight still takes the same time, using the same fuels, burning in the same engines. A few % of efficiency improvement is all we've gotten for decades worth of work.
Not exactly correct. Flights take longer now than they did in 1969. Planes fly slower now in order to conserve fuel, so there's actually much more than "a few %" increase in efficiency. It's actually quite significant. But it comes at a cost: it takes an extra hour or so to get from LA to NY.
Every industry and technology reaches a plateau at some point, where further progress is slow compared to the early days. It's been like that with cars for quite some time. Gasoline engines haven't changed that much since the 1920s, until recently with the addition of hybrid-electric motors. Aviation hasn't changed much since the 50s and 60s, except for the addition of glass cockpits and GPS navigation. But computers have improved exponentially in the last 50 years, though they seem to be plateauing now with clockspeeds stuck around 3GHz and ever more cores being added instead. Computer software seems like it could still use a lot of improvement though.
It's the same with space travel. So far, all we've done is chemical rocket engines. Recently, however, we're now making ion engines, which work great for long-distance space probes. Other new technologies would be groundbreaking: nuclear rockets, space elevators, etc. There's a lot of new technologies in space exploration that have yet to be developed.
As for iPods, modern electronics and computer technology is making a lot of things possible (or much more feasible) than before with space exploration. The Mars explorers have been a major scientific success, and are the product of modern computer technology. They wouldn't have worked with 1969-era technology.
The *universe* has an expiration date too. One way or another, we're all going eventually.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
The problem with that sentiment is that the wars have actually helped technology evolve.
This statement is demonstrably false.
The only technologies that wars helped evolve were pre-existing technologies that got refined for the purpose of breaking stuff and killing people.
Other, more diverse and beneficial technologies about to emerge, got scrapped because of the more immediate needs.
Air ships for example: Not as useful in a war as aeroplanes. Where is the budding airship industry now?
More fuel efficient helicopters: Not as fast, and therefore not as useful.
Thorium reactors: Safer and more efficient than Uranium reactors, but useless for building Bombs.
Asteroids come close to Earth all the time. You don't have to go very far to catch one and mine it. They're full of valuable minerals, worth many trillions of dollars.
"there are always asteroids out there that could blindside us."
Not only can blindside but has blindsided. Seems almost like a certainty that an asteroid hits us before its expiration date.
...The federal budget would like to disagree with that statement. The majority of our federal budget is tied up in providing social programs and infrastructure, not in "war". Yes, the defense department gets a comparatively large portion of the budget....
It depends on how you qualify various aspects of federal expenditures. If you are counting defense spending as only the budget for the DOD, maybe your statement holds true. But that is only roughly half of defense spending. Many weapons programs (chemical & nuclear, for example) are not funded by the DOD. The current military actions in Iraq and Afghanistan are "extra" budget items, not included in the DOD budget. Veterans benefits I'm sure your model counts as "social programs" as they are also not in the DOD budget when realistically they should be counted as military spending. If you add up all spending as a result of military purposes you are suddenly looking at close to 50% of government expenditures.
Exactly. For evolution to work (as fast as it had to get us here) we need natural selection to work as well, i.e. we need only the fittest (to survive) to reproduce. But nowadays almost everyone survives and reproduces. Natural selection forces on humans are lowest of any species on this planet. This means we are evolving very slowly and for all I know we could be degenerating into lower beings.
As the island of our knowledge grows, so does the shore of our ignorance.
Huh, what bike shops have you been going to? Carbon fiber is very common--it's just expensive. The latest fashion is the cheap hipster fixie, which costs $300. That's less than the cost of a single carbon wheel. So the reason you don't see carbon wheels is not that people aren't using them--it's that they're not in fashion.
Having said that, your fundamental point is valid--despite being extraordinarily strong, carbon fiber is about an order of magnitude weaker than it needs to be to support a space elevator. More's the pity.
Yeah, I like acid too.
... you'll see this response to the GP. It's hardly "human-hating" to point out that it would make a lot more sense to stop screwing up our own planet than it would to use this one up and throw it away. For one thing, it's a lot cheaper. Not to mention the fact that in any conceivable space colonization strategy, a LOT of people are going to remain on earth. Which means ceasing to foul our own nest is not exactly the human-hating thing to do.
Colonizing space may or may not be a cost-effective strategy for currently living humans, but whether it is or not, it's definitely a smart idea to take better care of this, the only planet known to have the capability of supporting billions of us.
Your original statement was that the US spends most of its money on social programs and infrastructure. He's pointing out that you're wrong. The US spends most of its money on social programs and war. Infrastructure is a tiny, tiny portion of government spending, and as a result, we have bridges collapsing, and many more in danger of collapsing because they're so old. He's arguing that we should be spending far less on war and social programs, and more on infrastructure.
VA programs aren't infrastructure. Infrastructure is things like roads, pipelines, bridges, etc.
Okay, where are you going to get enough *electricity* to boost enough humans and tools into space to create a viable life-supporting ecosystem? Lift capacity and energy are the same thing. The energy embodied in electrical potential that you get from your wall outlet comes from somewhere--it doesn't just appear by magic.
Later Hawking was seen putting a small baby in a rocket ship.
How much should today's population of humans sacrifice for the good of future humans? We know that at some point, the universe is going to experience heat death, so our species (and every other one) is guaranteed to die out eventually. If what we're talking about is moving the survival date of our descendants from 1,000,000 AD to 2,000,000 AD (by which time we are not likely to even be the same species any more)... well, suffice it to say that I wouldn't be interested in paying higher taxes to support that.
I didn't say we'd have to bring everything with us. I didn't even mean that. I asked where we will get the energy to boost enough humans and tools into space to create a viable ecosystem. Of course we would use the resources we find at whatever destination we reach, but how would we get to that destination with enough equipment to exploit those resources?
Hell, our technology is in decline, besides making faster computers, what has progressed in the last few decades? Nothing fundamental.
Off the top of my head, in no particular order:
*Enhanced understanding of genetics and genetic engineering
*Higher efficiency solar panels and other power generation methods
*Improved battery technology
*Stronger, lighter, and all-around better materials
*Safer cars
*No more leaded gasoline anywhere.
*Improved telescopes, such as the Hubble
*Awesome mars rovers
*Atom-level manipulation of compounds
*Reduced pollution in pretty much everything
*The internet.
*GPS
A better question might be "what hasn't progressed?".
Hawking is a physicist, so I'm a bit surprised to hear him proposing something like this without explaining where the lift capacity is going to come from.
I read his comments as a call to arms to get off our asses and work on developing the ability to move somewhere else.
FTFA (emphasis mine):
We need to start seriously thinking about how we will free ourselves from the constraints of this dying planet.
---
"I can't complain, but sometimes still do..." Joe Walsh
There were a lot of important technologies developed and improved during WWI and WWII: airplanes, computers, radar, radio, etc.
However, that activity seems to have pretty much stopped. What important technologies were developed for the Vietnam War? What important technologies were developed for Gulf War I, or the current wars? None that I can think of. More precise bombs don't really have any peaceful applications, and the electronics and computer technologies used to develop them came from the civilian sector.
What an incredibly stupid idea ? What we need to do is to act responsibly to live in harmony with our planet so we can continue living here. What we must to is not trash this planet, deplete all resources like we were some plague of locusts descended from the desert and try to fly away to another planet or space. If we cannot managed to live on earth with all its resources and where we have evolved to survive and thrive, what makes Hawking or anyone else think we can survive in the constrained spaces and limited resources of interstellar travel ? We are more likely to repeat the same mistakes we have made on earth and go extinct-at that point -deservedly forgotten in the debris of space.
... to worry about your children and grandchildren. But what obligation do we have to far distant descendants? "Short-sightedness" when discussing payoff times in the very, very distant future don't actually sound so bad after all. And the fact that we can't know how long we have before some species-ending disaster makes it that much harder to figure out how seriously to take this problem.
I actually think the American electorate is more rational about this topic than you give them credit for.
Did you even read what Hawking said? He's encouraging us to not put all our genetic "eggs" in one basket. If the species is spread out among multiple planets, then if the Earth dies, the human species will NOT die along with it. If we remain on this planet and no other, we are certainly doomed.
And yes, you're a cold-hearted bastard. Hawking knows exactly how important it is to go hiking, surfing and rolling around on a beach because he hasn't been able to do that for decades, and I'm sure he tries not to think about it very often because he'll never do it again. He has to worry every day when he wakes up whether or not it will be his last day to live. He imagines a day when the entire human race might be gone because he projects his own fears of mortality upon the rest of his kind. How much purer a motive do you need?
Simple: precious metals. Asteroids are loaded with them. Not just things like gold, but things like copper, iron, cobalt, titanium, and many others. They're much more pure than that found in the Earth's crust; in fact, all these materials in the Earth's crust came from asteroid impacts. All the naturally-occurring ones migrated to the Earth's core when the surface was still molten.
Oh please, don't be such a defeatist. It *is* possible to do what Hawking proposes. And we *are* making technical progress in that direction. But we have yet to identify the resources and technology we need to get there. The ISS is the pinnacle of our space habitation, and it's held together with bubble gum and bailing wire.
All I'm saying is that right now, we can't do what Hawking proposes. I'm not saying it's nutty to want to do it. I agree that there are a lot of people who see space colonization as a wish-fulfillment fantasy, and have entirely unreasonable expectations about it. But the wish to colonize space isn't fundamentally nutty. We just need to be realistic about it.
Solar sails won't get you to orbit. Nuclear explosions won't either, unless the ecosystem here is already wrecked, in which case it's probably a better investment to re-terraform earth, as someone else suggested.
At about $10000 per pound launch cost I estimate that it would cost an average of about $1,000,000 per person minimum just to get into orbit. Never mind how much it would cost to make an extraterrestrial colony be self sufficient. If we were just to shoot the population of the US into space and forget them it would cost 300 trillion dollars.
We either leave this planet together, or we die on it divided. I think the greed inherent in human nature will prevent us from ever getting organized enough to leave this planet for another.
YeAh, MaN, wE sHoUlD jUsT gEt AlOnG aNd HaNg OuT aNd WaTcH sOmE mOtHeRfUcKiNg MiRaClEs. WaNt SoMe SoPoR pIe?
There is no way "we" are able to "abandon" earth in the near and not so near future. Earth is all we have got. Keep it in good shape or prepare to die.
Looking at how Earth is not being kept in good shape at all, ai am a bit skeptical.
You ask the last question 40 years early.
Not exactly. It can be argued that the threat of war or the buildup to war spurs technological advancement, but war itself tends to shift all resources to production. The most notable exception is of course the a-bomb, but there's a couple of big caveats on that. First E=mc^2 predated WWII be a bit and presaged the era of nuclear power. Second a-bombs are of dubious value to society, and third, actual nuclear power only got off the ground after the war.
Now the cold war moved technology along at quite a pace, but again, I'd call that preparation or build-up. If it became a hot war, we'd be less interested in sending a man to the moon, and more interested in building tanks and planes that we had already developed.
Dude, the entire western budget for NASCAR and porn (and all other hollywood products, and the rest of the entertainment budget, and a lot of currently useful social services, etc, etc) wouldn't get you a self-sustaining Martian colony. Getting all the stuff to Mars that that would require would be astronomically (so to speak) expensive - consider how much it costs just to get automated probes there... and those are very small and light. You'd need to haul lots of people, life support equipment, greenhouses, plants, fertilizer (not much fixed nitrogen on Mars), capital equipment, buildings, energy generation systems - an entire ECONOMY - to Mars. If you think you're going to get that done by cutting back on NASCAR and porn... better look at the numbers.
I tend to doubt that colonization could be done at a cost any currently living population could bear, given that they'll see none of the benefits.
>>>As for asteroids that caused massive extinctions, the previous one was 70 million years ago. And 250 million years ago. During that timespan we evolved from small rodent-like lizards into modern mammals. Who knows where we'll be in another 70 million years.
This is the kind of guy that should be looking for building opportunities after a "hundred year flood event". After all, he's got another hundred years without a flood. Right?
The universe has an expiration date. When do we start building wormholes?
Eventually humanity goes away and nothing of value was lost.
You are quite right about there being no point B. I remember reading somewhere (and I don't want to take the time to find the source or verify the math) that if a ton of gold inexplicably showed up in LEO it would actually cost more to go up and get it than the value of the gold itself. What is needed is a 'killer app' for microgravity. As soon as there is some material that can only be produced in microgravity that has some vital purpose to future technology, then suddenly there is a reason to look at space as a resource.
The other big possibility for an extraterrestrial economy is lunar deposits of He-3 which could be joined with other mining operations.
I support the Slashcott and will not be reading or commenting from 2/10/14 to 2/17/14. Beta is steaming pile of dog shit
Solar, nuclear fission, nuclear fusion, hydroelectric... Any one of a dozen sources that should occur to anyone with an IQ above room temperature.
Normally, I'm very much in agreement with those who point out false dichotomies. But in this case - do you have any idea how much establishing a self-sustaining colony on another planet would cost? We're talking about establishing both a functioning economy and ecosystem in a very hostile environment millions of miles away. There's no way we can afford that by itself.
Do you need a refresher in elementary math & logic?
Social Programs Budget + Infrastructure Budget > 50% -- thus, "a majority";
AND
Social Programs Budget + Infrastructure Budget > Military Spending -- thus "significantly more money being spent on the first 2 than the last."
The original post I responded to made the statement that "the only thing we're willing to spend on is war." I responded that this was false, because stuff outside military spending accounts for much more than military spending. In fact I offered NO statement as to whether or not I felt the infrastructure spending was "enough".
Then a second person came along and said, "NUH UH, Infrastructure is a small part of the budget." In essence, arguing (like you) against a point I never made, because I never said that Infrastructure was better-funded than the military, or that it comprised a larger part of the budget on its own.
And I said that VA programs such as the GI Bill could be considered at least as much "infrastructure / social program" as they could "military spending." Did you bother to read my post before you decided you were a lawyer, or do you just fire from the hip and hope that something you say is relevant?
So whether we leave or not, we're still all going to die eventually. So why not live for the moment? Particularly given that extra-solar system travel is all but certainly infeasible - we've got a few hundred million years before the sun starts to expire.
[obscure reference]
You must be a Pierson's Puppeteer. :)
[/obscure reference]
(Obscure for those who aren't Larry Niven fans, anyway ...)
Cogito, igitur comedam pizza.
If we are serious about persisting through the ages, we will first need to "get our shit together". As far as best case scenarios go, I dream the future will either look something like Isaac Asimov's "The Last Question" or some fantastical world where human consciousness radically explodes into limitless hyperspace. But if we are to not put all our eggs in one basket we should probably work on "getting our shit together". What better way then to build a hyper-intelligent nanny? Yes, with your very own Multivax Poppins, a distributed, open-neural-network, intelligence and dare I say, emergent life form, to assist with our every whim while making sure we do not infringe on each others' innate human "rights". Your bully-ish capitalist and fascist systems has gotten you just far enough to develop your robot savior overlord, it's all about the future of open libertarian socialism to propel humanity into infinity and beyond! Thank God for dreamers, the Internet and brilliant engineers. Now get to work!
Yes - at some point, our descendants aren't "us" anymore. Do we owe them anything? Particularly, are we required to significantly lower our own quality of life (and that of our more immediate descendants) for far-future post-humans? It's far from clear that we do.
Sacrificing lots of our current taxpayer dollars to blast distantly related life-forms to other planets is roughly equivalent to leaving your fortune to someone else's dog. Why?
Oh, got it. And we'll just send you the bill, ok? Because of course the real issue isn't engineering, it's economics. Why should currently living people expend huge amounts of money for this when neither they nor any of their near descendants are likely to see any benefits from it?
I've seen lot's of people make claims about lift capabilities and return trip vehicles. ... Gravity ...
..
But as far as I know, there is just one force that is working against us here
Too bad the LHC hasn't given us any more clues so far, but the way I see it, conquering gravity will cause the biggest technological advancement in human history.
What if we discover that gravity is quite controllable ?
Say you can generate some sort of anti gravity field like we see in some S/F.
I'm not exactly a physics expert, but iirc, the higgs-boson is supposed to react with some sort of field, and the result is gravity ?
Develop some sort of field generator that insulates the higgs-boson so it can't react ?
Or even generate our own field causing our own little gravity well that is giving us momentum due to the created gravity ?
The latter probably won't work due to the same reasons a magnet in front of your car doesn't work ?
But it might be able to project the gravity well a certain distance away from the vehicle, and re-projecting it once the vehicle is close enough ?
Once you're working in space even small forms of momentum generation is going to get you to high speeds eventually
This will change the way we think about any form of transportation / building.
No more problems with lift capabilities, generate a field to neutralize the mass / gravity, and you just need a tiny engine to give it momentum.
Oh, and btw, cudos to hawking for pressing this matter again and again.
Our existence on this earth is much more fragile then people would like to believe, it's about damned time some figureheads speak up.
But as long as we keep thinking as nations / races / religions, instead of realizing we're all human, we ain't going nowhere.
... or discover oil there.
If libertarians are so opposed to effective government, why don't they all move to Somalia?
Someone on here did the math on this kind of thing awhile ago (can't find the link now). It turns out that using reasonable values for the costs of transportation to and from Mars, you couldn't, in fact, turn a profit even if Mars was littered with platinum ingots. But your underlying point is correct: there's no way for Earth to profit from economic activity in space (or we'd be doing it already). Which means that realistically, colonization isn't happening.
Yeah... except using an incorrect adverb doesn't qualify one as semi-literate.
Uhoh everybody run. The offtopic grammar nazi's just arrived.
"We are just a war away from Amerikastan. When god vs god the undoing of man." Dave Mustaine
I think you're right. Compared to wishful thinking like space elevators, almost infinite supplies of hydrogen from fusion-derived electrolysis, and all the other schemes invented by physicists to get funding for blue-sky projects, greed is actually a pretty credible propellant. Though, looking around, I have to say it's just as environmentally destructive as oil.
From scarped cliff or quarried stone she cries "A thousand types are gone, I care for nothing, no not one."
Why are you grouping infrastructure in with social programs? Again, infrastructure is a tiny portion of spending. By grouping it with social programs, you're implying that infrastructure is a major portion of spending, which it is not.
In essence, arguing (like you) against a point I never made, because I never said that Infrastructure was better-funded than the military
Social Programs Budget + Infrastructure Budget > 50% -- thus, "a majority";
Yes, you did say that, by implication.
And I said that VA programs such as the GI Bill could be considered at least as much "infrastructure / social program"
There you go again. VA programs are NOT infrastructure. For some weird reason, you keep trying to slap infrastructure and social programs together, when they're obviously two very different things.
What minerals would you mine? How would you mine and refine them? How would you (profitably) get them to market? Who would finance your expedition? Bear in mind that Mars is for the most part made up of the same materials as earth - various iron oxides, silicates, etc.
People like to talk about exploiting other bodies in the solar system for their supposed mineral wealth, but I can't imagine a way you could do it profitably.
Who knows where we'll be in another 70 million years.
The same place the dinosaurs are now?
Did you ever consider that living in an environment like space would actually require human beings to better manage resources, and be far more ecologically-mindful?
You do realize that it's not exactly The Garden of Eden up there, right?
Quo usque tandem abutere, Nimbus, patientia nostra?
Nicely said. This whole exercise is pointless. The universe doesn't need humanity. If earth is destroyed in a million years, people living here won't be comforted by the knowledge that other humans have colonized Alpha Centauri. People who argue about humanity's need to expand and explore ignore the fact that all previous colonization paid dividends to those who financed the efforts, there's no payback to us for the sacrifices we'd have to make.
Never let a lack of data get in the way of a good rant.
II Peter 3:10-14
But the day of the Lord will come as a thief in the night; in the which the heavens shall pass away with a great noise, and the elements shall melt with fervent heat, the earth also and the works that are therein shall be burned up.
Seeing then that all these things shall be dissolved, what manner of persons ought ye to be in all holy conversation and godliness,
Looking for and hasting unto the coming of the day of God, wherein the heavens being on fire shall be dissolved, and the elements shall melt with fervent heat?
Nevertheless we, according to his promise, look for new heavens and a new earth, wherein dwelleth righteousness.
The space transhumanists may take on the responsibility of preventing incorporations on Earth if there is no other way.
See Bringing Life to the Stars by David Duemler for some discussion of this kind of potential.
Seastead this.
When we're talking about the unimaginably huge sums of money it would cost to establish a colony in space, "shortsightedness" makes perfect sense. It would be a substantial impact on our current quality of life, and it's highly unlikely that any of our near descendants would see any benefit. So why should we sacrifice for distant descendants, who may not even be the same species as us by that time?
Less than 1 bn years, according to this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sun#Life_cycle
The sun will last another 5bn, but life on Earth won't.
There is nothing wrong with this. But it makes me a little unhappy that he's so ready to provide rent-a-quotes outside his area of expertise. People are confused enough about what scientists actually do, how they work and what they know about. Scientists have a duty, because it's their calling, to be very clear about what they can, and cannot, talk about with authority. (I don't always succeed in this myself but nowadays I do try to make a point of saying, when necessary, "actually I don't know anything about this" in a technical meeting. It's surprising how often that other people then admit, well, they don't really know either and we have to go off and do the research.
From scarped cliff or quarried stone she cries "A thousand types are gone, I care for nothing, no not one."
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Why should I want to expend lots of resources that could be put to use for me or my immediate descendants on this? What am I getting out of it?
What's the point?
"Yeah 5 billion years into the future."
If you're thinking of the Sun's transition to red giant phase in approximately that timeframe (5 or 6 billion years), no, actually, the Earth will have serious problems for life long before that. Due to long-term increasing solar luminosity as more He accumulates in the Sun, the Earth will probably achieve temperatures high enough to boil the oceans in "only" about 250 million years.
Of course, that's still a LONG time from now (250 million years aught to be enough time for anyone), but don't put things off for billions. You'll be unpleasantly surprised.
Once the earth has been engulfed by the sun, Mars ain't exactly going to be a resort town either. When the sun goes, we're done.
stop making fun of Uranus; it may be your home someday.
Table-ized A.I.
FACT: the original point I was discussing was that, and I quote, "War is about the only thing we're willing to spend tax money on at all."
My point was that other non-war-related things made up the bulk of our federal spending. In NO reality is it correct to say that "war" is about the only thing we spend our tax money on. That is, and was, the ONLY point I made. So, what can we conclude here:
1) Infrastructure and Social Programs are both *Non-Military* spending;
2) Infrastructure and Social Programs make up "the bulk" of the spending in the budget that is NOT accounted for by the military;
3) Infrastructure and Social Programs (or, "Non-military spending", if you are an anal retentive jackass) are therefore the majority of the federal budget.
This whole point is aimed at the conclusion that "all we spend on is war and the military." This is demonstrably false by comparing what we spend on the military versus what we spend on "everything else". Infrastructure and Social Programs are two broad categories that cover "just about everything else" in the federal budget.
You are arguing against a point I never made, and doing so quite poorly, I might add.
For god's sake, what is wrong with you? In the context of this discussion (military spending vs. other spending), "Infrastructure and Social Programs" are lumped together because they describe the bulk of non-military spending.
Tuition and other VA benefits like that can certainly be well-argued to fall in the category of "non-military" spending, as they have no specific military application, and in fact serve to build an educated workforce - thus falling into the "infrastructure and social program" categories, rather than the "military and war" category.
I truly fail to see how you can be so monumentally dim-witted as to not understand the context of this discussion, yet argue so vehemently for any side of it.
Why do I need to spend a lot of money to get life started on other planets? What are we getting out of it?
Which is funny (the "nowhere to go" bit, and I agree with you that that's the problem), because the massive advantages of space are that there is a) fantastic amounts of room, b) fantastic amounts of energy, and c) fantastic amounts of raw materials (asteroids). The planets are a misguided venture in this respect - they block the energy and constrain the room, and we can't get things off them.
After all, you can argue that there's pretty much nowhere to go on Earth, except off it! The same argument could have been used for any colonization effort ("but... it's nice here! My friends are here!").
Once we're seriously in space, then lots of problems go away. It's like trying to build factories with your bare hands - once we've got the industrialization, making more is easy.
I caught this from good ol' Eric Drexler: space has everything we want. Forget the planets.
A disaster on Earth would have to be truly fantastic in scope to take us all out at the same time, too. As someone pointed out above, Earth could get hit by an asteroid the size of the Yucatan impactor and still be WAY more hospitable than Mars. In fact, any impact short of breaking the planet into pieces would STILL leave it more hospitable than Mars. So tell me again why we need to do this?
Out of all the races in the universe, do we really want to keep one that stockpiles nuclear weapons around? The rest of you might enjoy hitting each other over the head once in awhile, but it's pretty obvious to me that the sooner we go extinct, the better off things will be.
Nope. The Soviet Union had, as a major ideological objective, "the elimination of religion and its replacement with atheism as a fundamental ideological goal of the state. Toward that end, the communist regime confiscated church property, ridiculed religion, harassed believers, and propagated atheism in the schools.". Marx even said, " Religion is the opium of the people". And yet, we had the Cold War, and many people here will remember their invasion of Afghanistan.
- David A. Wheeler (see my Secure Programming HOWTO)
"Let's hope we can avoid dropping the basket until we have spread the load."
That's what she said.
Should I feel dirty that I applied that to a Hawking quote, or does that just make it funnier?
It looks like mass extinctions are occurring on an accellerated scale. 250, 70, ... means we are long over due since the next one should have occurred after 19 million years. We would need to know what the previous extinction before 250 million years to know that this is reasonable. It could just be an average and then we would still have about 90 left. Or maybe the average determines the bound and that would leave us 230 million years at best. In that vein in a million years the earth will be far over populated at current growth rate doubling on an exponential scale (meaning rather quickly). Just to have enough land to survive on earth with no other problems we need to start populating other planets in the next millenia or two. And that is assuming that we populate the space occupied by our oceans as well.
>>>This planet has an expiration date.
Yeah 5 billion years into the future.
Actually it's going to be around 1 Million years. We're slowing moving out of the "Habitable Zone", which we're already on the inner edge of to begin with, and that will happen much sooner than when the Sun begins to expand during it's Red Dwarf stage. http://www.spacedaily.com/news/extrasolar-99m.html
Also the Moon is moving away from us and in about 1-2 Billion years our axis wont be stable which will cause profound weather changes. http://www.seti.org/Page.aspx?pid=769
Sometimes, the answer is to just destroy it all.
It's not cost effective in Antarctica, yet it's somehow magically going to become MORE cost-effective on freaking Mars? How is that, exactly?
Well, the Russians were able to send Luna 16 to the Moon AND BRING BACK ROCKS AUTOMATICALLY in 1971. NINETEEN SEVENTY ONE. You don't need a quad core 3GHz processor running shit-bloatware to accomplish this.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luna_16
Please take a look at what is running in the Mars Rover. It would have been possible already in the '60s, and just a bit easier with '70s tech. There's no way to get an iPod level of electronics to be space certified. Much better to go with fat transistors on sapphire and get some real programmers, ie engineers coding in assembler, than the shit-ass retard-level drag and drop script crap kids do these days. I wouldn't trust that to flash the power LED.
It doesn't have to be gold or gems... what if it were Titanium, or some other mundane material that, while plentiful off-Earth, is fairly rare here? Hell, Helium-3 comes to mind right off the bat.
Quo usque tandem abutere, Nimbus, patientia nostra?
... of being semi-reasonable. But an important point to consider: we're not actually doing any of this stuff now, although we could. Why? Answer: it's not cost-effective to live this way. And in any reasonable scenario, establishing colonies on Mars is going to be orders of magnitude more expensive than colonizing, say, the Gobi desert.
This planet has an expiration date. It's nice to pretend that if we were all hippies and lived like cavemen, that it'd last forever, but that isn't the case. Sooner or later we're gonna have to get out of here, or go extinct.
As long as it doesn't happen in the next 50 or 60 years, I'm happy.
But this giant colonization project would require astronomical (so to speak) sums of money, and really - why should we reduce our quality of life now to buy a few more years far, far in the future?
Comparing Luna 16 to the Mars rovers is idiotic. Luna 16 did nothing more than land in one spot, automatically drill a hole and collect a sample, and blast off again. It never made any decisions regarding its environment.
The Mars rovers actually travel on the surface of the planet using vision. You can't do that with 1971 technology.
Ill be right along.
Here is the actual fiscal budget.
http://www.gpoaccess.gov/usbudget/fy11/pdf/budget.pdf
http://www.gpoaccess.gov/usbudget/fy11/sheets/hist01z1.xls
http://www.gpoaccess.gov/usbudget/fy11/sheets/hist03z1.xls
As you can see, you are wrong. National efens and benefits consume a large portion of the pie. In fact national defense is listed as the first line item and bolded. There are other significant entitlements but the don't compare to national defense.
I believe that it was Arthur C. Clarke who wrote that if the human race is to survive, then for the vast majority of time the word "ship" will be synonymous with SPACE-ship.
Odd. I see road construction through most of every summer, most notably on an overpass (aka bridge) I would very much like to use to get to work in the morning. Do you live somewhere that tax money only goes to somewhere like Afghanistan like, say, Afghanistan? If so, I'm pretty sure if you look hard enough can see US tax money going to bridges there too.
It's funny ... your first paragraph actually answers his "moved goalposts". You don't "get energy" by using up electricity to make hydrogen and oxygen.
As for there not being a "Point B" in space .... that's just silly. There are plenty of places to go - the only question is what do we get out of it. Exploration of the Americas was worthwhile for the people involved because it brought back plenty of shiny metal. Colonization was worthwhile because it gave the various empires a chance to have a pissing match far away from home (and taxing the colonists to death didn't hurt the coffers, either). We just need to figure out a way to make space either profitable or attractive in some other way, and there will be plenty of governments and corporations getting involved. Hell, it's already started. Tourism alone seems to have the potential to fund companies like Virgin Galactic. Give them a few decades and they'll be mining the moon.
>The human race shouldn't have all its eggs in one basket, or on one planet.
What makes him think we do?
Yes, in your universe where totally spending is somehow unlinked to how much people put in.
So, yes if you run around including Medicare spending and Social Security spending, it sure looks like social spending is high, doesn't it.
Of course, Social Security is currently running a net profit from collection of payments.
And Medicare, while not running a profit, is just barely losing money. Maybe $30 billion a year. Because it's insurance, which is just barely subsided by the government. People pay money to be on it.
Those two systems are programs where people pay in and then get money back. They are not spending 'taxes', or at least not more than a tiny amount.
And let's not forget unemployment insurance, the same thing. Unemployment benefits aren't coming from the general budget, they're coming from people and companies paying unemployment premiums. Although that's not a very big chunk of the budget.
In other words, social programs mostly have to pay their own way. The sole exception is Medicaid and some welfare.
If you look at actual spending of tax money from general revenues, um, yeah, the defense budget is pretty damn close to social spending.
So I will correct: War and disabled suffering children (Medicaid) are about the only things we're willing to spend tax money on at all.
Which is slightly more noble, I guess. But still no bridges.
If corporations are people, aren't stockholders guilty of slavery?
"Comparatively large" in this case meaning just shy of the rest of the world's defense budgets combined. Last year it was also bigger than Social Security or Medicare & Medicaid. link
If you didn't come to party don't bother knocking on my door. Prince '1999'
Obviously, it is necessary to build point B.
how is that a pure motive? we should become an invasive species on an entirely different planet? Like I said, it's our mess - we should fix it. We shouldn't leave because we broke this place and want another place to break, we should leave because exploration and learning is fun and cool. His ideal of preservation of the species is silly, because the problem isn't going away just because we go to another place; we need to learn to have more sustainable activities. This is *phenominally* more true if living in space. If this planet goes belly-up, what the hell would it really matter that our species ended? Why...does that matter at all? Why on Earth (err...off Earth?) would you care?
A space elevator is probably too ambitious for a first skyhook. Probably we should start with either the star-whale of the pin-wheel. I prefer the pinwheel.)
The pinwheel is an orbital mass with several arms that rotates sufficiently to bring the arms around. It can be in various orbits (and probably should be, to enable one pinwheel to "hand off" to another. For the lowest one, one arm rotates down into the high stratosphere, where a cargo pod is attached. (This may contain people, but it's basically unpowered.) At a certain point, the capsule is released from the arm and is flung off at a target destination. As with all sky-hooks, it's important that as much mass is lowered to the ground as is lifted. (Or it drifts out of orbit.)
The starwhale is an electromagnetic brake (or accelerator). You shoot the payload up to orbital height, but not to orbital velocity. The starwhale swallows it, and the electromagnetic brake accelerates it to orbital speed. It can then act as an accelerator to direct you to any destination you choose. (It may need to be quite long in order to use reasonable G forces for this.) The trick is, you've got to enter the electromagnetic brake properly. This can be quite tricky, especially if you're coming in from, say, Jupiter's moons. You've got a huge velocity, and you need to be properly aligned. If you miss...ugh! Both of you could be destroyed.
As I said, I prefer the pinwheel. There you don't risk destroying everything if there's a slight orbital hangup. (But you'd better have enough delta-V to be able to take another pass at the hook. But that's a much smaller problem.)
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
According to some research the Sun is getting warmer, which means the habitable zone is moving out. One of the estimates I heard put it at only a few million years till Earth is going to be too hot for humans, or much of anything else.
...but about proper adaptability to environment. We live in a highly technological environment. It is easy to adapt ot such an environment, and I'd suggest leads towards greater genetic variability.
By not tending towards social darwinism (and its effects like the holocaust... yep, this thread did just get too long), we maintain genetic variability that might otherwise be lost. Do I have any expectation that being born with one arm will have any particular special benefit to society? No. And I would definitely encourage those involved in the relevant fields to continue to work towards helping those with such disabilities. BUT... lost of variability is potentially rather dangerous.
No matter how cool we make the spacecraft, they'll still need raw materials from time to time, which would still mean strip-mining another planet somewhere.
Or an asteroid. There are 1 or 2 to spare.
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
Basically, you're right. In the short term. It needs to become possible to maintain a closed ecology before space colonization is practical, and until then there's no place to go. (Also, don't expect it to be libertarian when it arrives. Things are going to be much too critical for that.)
This doesn't make it less important, but it does mean that expecting it right now is unreasonable. Biosphere 2 rather proved that.
Additionally, it's going to be important to improve the generation of power from solar sources. And energy storage needs to be improved. And extraction of resources from low valued ores...without using water. Etc. Lots of things need to be developed...but the thing is, most of them need to be developed anyway.
When it actually becomes possible, I expect a massive increase in interest. Even before that a permanent Lunar observatory on the far side will probably happen. That will be used to work out the final problems. (But we're aways from when that's practical.)
As to why? I don't know. Political or religious dissidents fleeing repression? Not impossible. Exporting prisoners is unlikely. I think the first colonists will need to be quite wealthy.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
Pray tell - how exactly do you "pay in" to Social Security? Medicare? Medicaid?
Think deeply for a moment, I can wait.
Give up? You pay into those systems with TAXES which are imposed on your paycheck (and in some cases, your employer), by the government.
Thus your tax money, paid into those programs, (plus a little interest that's been earned when & where the government hasn't been too busy raping the general fund for pork barrel spending) is being paid back out. It's all tax money, and it's all collected & spent by the government.
If you want to parse "spending tax money" to mean "spending some fractional percentage of tax money that the government collects from paychecks", then sure, the "only tax money" we spend is on the military.
I'm not arguing that the money we spend on infrastructure is sufficient - I live outside Boston, and I see plenty of shitty bridges and roads every day on my drive to work. But to claim that the only thing we spend on is the military is completely incorrect, and does nothing to help your argument that "more" should be spent on bridges and other infrastructure.
Because, we're not a "pure" species. We are not of one mind.
I want off this planet because I want to explore.
You want off this plane because you want to learn.
Boonhicks wants off because he's afraid of asteroids.
Shily wants off because she wants to touch the face of God.
Kalie wants off because she wants to roll around under a blanket just after watching the sun rise over a Martian mountain. (Yeah, she's a freak.)
If you want to get something done that is going to require the buy-in of a large host of people, you'd better come up with a large host of reasons for doing it.
Aah, change is good. -- Rafiki
Yeah, but it ain't easy. -- Simba
I have some familiarity with the guy. I think he first came to my attention with something about evaporating black holes. Way back when. Go his name attached to the theory and it is still a pretty well accepted theory. I do not have much use for black hole theorists. They end up wanting to introduce unlawfulness into the universe and often have a belief in physical singularities. Warps them all over the place.
I notice you really liked to do an appeal to authority of some sort. On the other hand, you did not deign to offer an opinion on any aspect of terrestial human extinction events. But Hawkings must have good intentions, so let us all praise his arguments. Oh, and he is a bit of a popular celebrity in a way. Maybe he will eventually attain the status of Elvis and we can hope for a second coming.
I do not recall proposing government money for mitigation. I do want to push for manned space exploration, but not particularly for some sort of contingency planning. Perhaps you like straw men arguments too. To be fair, some of my letters are MSE, so I would have to admit to sometimes doing risk mitigation, and I suppose this might fall under that rubric.
So, given the great validity of your arguments, I suppose the question is: Just how slimy are you?
That was never in question. What's the point?
The question was not "Do we spend lots of money on the military?" The question is "Do we only spend on wars and the military?" And the answer to that question is, and remains, "No, we spend far more on non-military spending than we do on the military."
Why is this a big deal? Shit happens.
Yeah 5 billion years into the future. During the previous 1 billion we evolved from amino acids to cells to amphibians, lizards, and intelligent mammals. So by the time the earth expires, we'll likely have moved into Q-like beings. Even if we stayed on this planet, its eventual scalding by the nearby star wouldn't affect us.
It's extremely unlikely that the human species, or even the entirety of life on this planet, shares that same "expiration date".
There's a small but non-zero chance that we could get creamed by a comet on a hyperbolic orbit next year, or a radiation front washes over us that sterilizes a fair portion of life on the surface, or... and that's just two of the more likely external possibilities. There are all sorts of ways that we could kill ourselves off.
What Hawking is trying to say here is that we should not trust the future of the human species to chance, now that we have potential of changing that, and he's absolutely right.
Although I agree that unscientifically founded optimism is frustrating, so is pessimism based on unnecessarily limiting the options. The choices are not limited to 1) find liveable planets outside the solar system or 2) make other planets in the solar system liveable. That's Planetary Chauvinism:
Planetary Chauvinism
Back in 1976, Princeton Prof Gerard K. O'Neill and a NASA sponsored study designed some alternatives. Human colonies in space
Would you do me a favor and go back and read what I wrote?
In the context of this discussion, "Infrastructure and Social Services" can be just as easily classified as "non-military spending." The question at hand was whether or not "wars" are the only thing we're spending money on, and the answer to that is definitively "NO," as Non-military spending programs (i.e., those which are "infrastructure and social" in nature) account for the majority of our federal spending.
Well and good, but where do we get the energy to boost enough humans and tools into space to create a viable life-supporting ecosystem elsewhere?
We can and have already done that. Doing it on a larger scale just requires scaling up the technology we already have. It's highly likely that a large effort to scale it up would result in improvements in existing technology - as is already happening albeit on a much smaller scale - and perhaps technological breakthroughs Historically massive R&D efforts have nearly always resulted in breakthroughs. Self-supporting ecosystems in space are certainly possible - difficult, but possible even given today's tech. We just have to get really serious about it.
When JFK proposed going to the moon, we didn't know how to do it. We made the effort and did it anyway. It took a lot of work by a lot of people, and cost remarkably few lives - but we did - and it really didn't even cost that much, not as a function of our GNP. The problem with doing it is not technology, it's money and willingness. We can certainly do it better and cheaper nowadays, if we care to do so (and quit porking out our aerospace industry) because the tech has improved - and it's improved rather slowly because we haven't been trying very hard. Look at the massive improvements in technology (military and civilian) that came about as a result of WWII and tell me I'm wrong.
Hell, if we *really* needed to move massive amounts of material into orbit, fast, there's always Orion. It's not like we have a shortage of nuclear weapons to use as a booster technology. Unfortunately the argument as to where to launch the thing would rage for decades. As a way of shortcutting that process, I propose using Washington, DC for a launch site. We could even encourage some of the less savory inhabitants there to stay and watch the most spectacular engineering achievement of the human race from the front row seats.
It's that there isn't anywhere to go in space. It's all about economics. Transport grows and prospers because it fills a need in moving people and goods from point A to point B, and in space there is no point B.
I disagree with this. From an economic standpoint, the resources available to us in the solar system massively dwarf the resources available here on Earth, and we won't be destroying our ecology or people's homes in order to get at them. Just the amount of metals/silicates/organics available in the earth-crossing asteroids are thousands of times more than we can possibly ever mine out of the earth's crust. Energy is free - solar arrays, with no worries about day/night cycles or storage - need more, just make the array bigger. Industrial pollution is not a problem. NIMBY is not a problem (save for perhaps some misguided individuals who worry about "polluting space" - snort)
I'm not talking about shipping food back to earth - we can do that easier here, especially if we have enough energy and materials. I'm talking about metals, which is our worse future resource problem. Transporting the metals back isn't hard, either once one has the mining facilities up there - just kick them out the door on the proper vector and they'll eventually end up in earth orbit.
All this has been hashed out many times by a lot of smart people over the last few decades. It's not impossible, just, as you point out, an engineering problem. The first century's worth of explorers of the north american continent did it on a lot less, with a lot less of an idea what awaited them there (save for perhaps slaves...) and with fewer resources.
We worry about colonizing space *after* we build the infrastructure necessary to do so up there. By the time that's done we'll likely not have to worry about colonization at all, it'll be taking care of itself...
GSVEMR
Alien monsters are coming to steal our women!!
"MIT betrayed all of its basic principles."
Yeah... except using an incorrect adverb doesn't qualify one as semi-literate.
Uhoh everybody run. The offtopic grammar nazi's just arrived.
Nah, they doesn't get have no chance, when you hits them with much double negative's. From orbit! Only smokin' crater remain.
This planet has an expiration date. It's nice to pretend that if we were all hippies and lived like cavemen, that it'd last forever, but that isn't the case. Sooner or later we're gonna have to get out of here, or go extinct
Sun has an expiration date, but Earth doesn't, at least not in a very very long time (proton decay timescale). All that is needed is technology that is a bit more above caveman level than what we have now. Plenty of time to develop that before Sun starts getting too hot for comfort (which is likely to be much sooner than the red giant phase in about 5 billion years, even under 1 billion years according to some figures I've read).
Use electricity to create liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen. No, really, it's just that simple.
Shit, don't let the oil barrons catch you uttering such blasphemous statements.
Oh, no worries. Electricity will be provided by coal power plants, and diesel generators, billowing blessed black smoke into the sky, blotting out that ancient enemy, the Sun, and leaving those blasphemers who use solar energy to shiver in the cold and dark.
Nice troll. Despite being blatantly obvious, you're bound to get a few bites.
I won't join Slashcott. OTOH, If Beta goes live, I just won't be back until it's fixed. Sorry Dice.
> There is a good argument that humans are done evolving. To evolve, the strong survive and the weak die out. That is no longer occuring with humans
That's a misunderstanding of evolution. Control of our surroundings may exempt us from the traditional version of natural selection, but selection continues; it's now based on the things we don't control yet, and on things we decide ourselves (whether consciously or not). Or, to borrow some of your terms, the definition for "strong" is changing. Selection doesn't require absolute binary survival vs death, either; it still works if there is a difference in success rates. It is not just whether you survive or whether you survive to have children; it is also how fit your children are, and how fit *their* children are, and so on; you may breed extravagantly, but it's all for nothing if your line dies out. Just like, in the larger discussion here, it doesn't matter how many billion humans there are if the species dies out anyway. And your line may live, but if others are more successful than yours, your genes will represent an ever-shrinking slice of the whole.
For an example of ongoing change, our brains have continued to change over the last few thousand years. We are still thinking beings, and quality of thought still strongly influences survival and relative success. IIRC some of the rapidly-changing areas are the language parts, but we haven't figured out the exact effects of the changing genes yet. Other examples that come to mind of selection factors in play *today* would be health into old age; since there are benefits to grandchildren if their grandparents stay healthy longer, then, now that so great a percentage of people can live to be old enough to get cancer and go senile, there will be pressure on those genes.
Still true today.
The government stranglehold on space travel is crippling research, it's only in recent years that a little sanity has prevailed, and commercial ventures are starting to make their mark on a bold new horizon for humanity.
Visit CryptoGnome in his home.
I have been saying this for years, but when I say they think I am crazy or worry too much when he says it people listen and respond. how do we expect to accomplish life together in space when we can't live together here on earth. Space is a life that is only truly fit for the selfless not the selfish.
Nuclear propulsion can do it. It has the unfortunate side-effect of leaving behind a trail of waste though...
"Honey I have to go to the moon Io and work at the DR site for a few weeks. Unfortunately the trip is 10 years"
Mostly good points, but you have mischaracterized the driving force completely.
Even before history, men have always had the itch to migrate and tame the great wilderness. In the 19th Century, it was called Manifest Destiny. Today, it's denigrated as mere science fiction. The itch is still there. It hasn't changed. Our eyes have simply refocused on the next great wilderness.
I won't join Slashcott. OTOH, If Beta goes live, I just won't be back until it's fixed. Sorry Dice.
We could transfer out intelligence to machines and send them....
Yes, but mass extinction-causing asteroids don't happen at regular intervals. There could be one coming in 20 years or 200 million years, we don't know. We may spot such an asteroid a few decades in advance, but would we be able to do anything about it in that amount of time? I'd say that would be a resounding "Maybe.....".
One thing you forget about humans is that we have pretty much brought our physical evolution to a stand still. Instead of culling the herd and letting the humans with genetic diseases, mental disorders, high probability of getting cancer, or whatever die off we protect them and allow them to breed and pass those problems on. Now I'm not saying we shouldn't do that but as our technology allows us to live with more but do less survival of the fittest becomes a thing of the past. I know there are a lot of people in 3rd world countries right now but look at what we have done in the last 200 years if we ever get passed our societies based on wealth and power less and less people will be held down below others standards b/c the rich won't need the poor. On top of that the Q-like beings are always shown as hyper intelligent when in my opinion if there were such creatures the would go through space and time more like a fish swims through water based on instinct.
Erm.... wouldn't it be cheaper to just have people on the moon or ISS ? Space is extremely inhospitable for us.
He sounds like Colonel Graff
>>>This planet has an expiration date.
Yeah 5 billion years into the future. During the previous 1 billion we evolved from amino acids to cells to amphibians, lizards, and intelligent mammals. So by the time the earth expires, we'll likely have moved into Q-like beings. Even if we stayed on this planet, its eventual scalding by the nearby star wouldn't affect us.
As for asteroids that caused massive extinctions, the previous one was 70 million years ago. And 250 million years ago. During that timespan we evolved from small rodent-like lizards into modern mammals. Who knows where we'll be in another 70 million years.
I know where I will be.
Dead.
Be seeing you...
you missed the point. He wants off because we're doing unsustainable things and our species is doomed to kill itself off. I'm saying that the problem should be solved, not duct-taped; moving to another planet isn't going to suddenly make us start living more sustainably.
ps, I said "learn and explore" not just learn. Also, with the extremely massive cost of actually colonizing space, reasons for doing it should be analyzed. We don't become invulnerable to asteroids in space, and instead become extremely vulnerable to teeny tiny rocks. Rocks that burn up in the first second of entering our atmosphere would take out the ISS. We don't quite have energy shields working yet, after all.
We got to the moon with a very short list of public reasons for going; people had personal reasons they wanted to see us there, but it wasn't a long list that got mass acceptance.
I was responding to your last statement. "Why can't we have pure motives?"
We can't, because we're all different people motivated for different reasons. If you waited for "pure motives" it'll either never happen or will be "OMG! The sun is exploding" 8*)
Aah, change is good. -- Rafiki
Yeah, but it ain't easy. -- Simba
Well, I believe that the will was essential, and not just the fact that you threw in more money. Most progress happened after the war, mind you.
That should be probably attributed to experiences of recent war, which gave people (at least in Soviet Union) really unique and hard-to-reproduce feeling of being able to achieve any goal. Those people then moved on to rebuilding their country, and they carried on that boost of energy. My granddad told me that in 1945-1946 he lived in some ruined basement without running water and electricity, had three part-time jobs at once to make enough money, but it felt great. People were working like crazy, because they were used to work 16h daily during the war - some were brought up like this.
They all shared the spirit probably similar to that of Americans in 1776 or Israelis in 1948 - they felt that they accomplished something really great as a nation, they understood their own role in that accomplishment and they were partly compensated by the participation in organizing their life anew.
To sum it up, that generation was completely different and I don't believe that you can easily create the same conditions by increasing the funding. You need a major stressful, but ultimately successful event in population's life to motivate them like that.
P.S. Of course, I come from Russia where money is traditionally considered a "dirty" and "sinister" thing, and explaining people's behavior in purely financial terms may be subconsciously unacceptable for me (although I'm pretty cynical otherwise), so your mileage may vary.
Coding etudes
Yeah... except using an incorrect adverb doesn't qualify one as semi-literate.
At least he contributed to the conversation.
All you did was waste our time, and now you made me waste more time. Just look at the mess you caused!
Okay, where are you going to get enough *electricity* ...[snip]... the energy embodied in electrical potential that you get from your wall outlet comes from somewhere
You just answered your own question. The place that electricity comes from is able to make a set amount, thus you use this neat thing called multiplication to figure out how many of those places you need.
There is so much underutilized energy potential around if we cared to expend the time and resources needed, or more correctly if it was worth doing.
Besides, not only are you wrong in that electricity doesn't exist (it does), but you are wrong for suggesting the worst possible method of generating it as a scalable source (oil fails at scaling)
One of the many other methods that is cheaper, more plentiful, and scales WAY past what we currently use is the obvious choice.
I'm sorry you don't believe such things exist, but reality doesn't care.
We could leave right now.
Anything we put our minds to we can do, if we can get past tyranny, oppression and poverty. These will keep us from developing solutions to our problems of food, environment and the vast spaces that exist between worlds. Believe it or not, we can solve that problem as well.
Like a parasite, these issues never seem to go away. Now however we have reached a very special point in our development. Tyranny can no longer be outrun. We can no longer flee to a far away place. Oppression now encompasses the globe now that the last republic of the free has fallen. Tyranny with its Death Grip on our future, it seeks to reward us with poverty and the inevitable outcomes it brings. War, hopelessness and our eventual destruction.
For in these last days, we no longer fight with guns, battle groups or planes. We fight with the power of the Universe and the ability to hurl it like a thunder bolt across the heavens to bring destruction on every living thing on this earth. Blazing like a thousand suns and turning everything to ash in a single afternoon.
Evil people plan war for their own ends as the populations of this world, already weary with the endless fighting now must endure the final war that will end all wars.
There will be no place to go, no place to hide. Even the rich and powerful, who even now plan for it by building seed vaults to replant on the ashes of the dead and build earnestly their vast underground cities, will not escape this destruction. Revenge and Justice are also human ideals, and many will seek justice and seek them out.
No we must change. Leaving the planet is a simple matter of wishing to do so. Unlocking the entire Universe and its resources to everyone will finally end tyranny and the power of the few.
It begins with one individual that looks out among the vast humanity suffering on our globe and decides it is time to change.
It will take courage. It will take Faith. It will take all of those things that human beings seek to possess but do not have in this age: Love, Kindness, Knowledge and Wisdom.
Who out there has just one of these qualities let alone all?
Where is this person? Where are these people?
The clock is ticking and the hour grows late. Soon a new world war will be upon us and it will be too late to change.
-Hack
Got Geometrodynamics? Awe, too hard to figure out? Too bad.
Hah I see what you did there, you tried to paint me with a very broad brush.
Perhaps I see no reason to be 100% grammatically correct on a pesudo-anonymous forum. I dont see a logical reason to waste the extra time and effort to do anything besides get my point across.
You are entitled to your own opinions, not your own facts.
Hah I see what you did there, you tried to paint me with a very broad brush.
Perhaps I see no reason to be 100% grammatically correct on a pseudo-anonymous forum. I don't see a logical reason to waste the extra time and effort to do anything besides get my point across.
FTFY.
Karma fed to this user will be promptly burnt. Be warned; be wary.
have u ever lived on an oil rig or in a submarine? Let me guess, yes you have...
Most humans couldn't adapt to to that kind of life permanently even if they wanted to, and we don't seem to have the tech to make it any other way. Have u seen the inside of th ISS - looks like a township. We'd need some kind of miracle MIRACLE grow to terraform Mars like a virus and then then genetically engineer people to withstand solar radiation (Mars has no protective magnetic field)
No, I think we'll be living and dieing here for the next half a millenium. The elite of the world probably already have a base on Mars for when the shit hits the fans. I'd say it's very nice in comparison to a submarine as it's only for the few. Probably stocked with cuban cigars and rum too.
Perhaps you didnt notice I said I see no point in being 100% correct. You didnt fix that for me, you fixed that for yourself.
You are entitled to your own opinions, not your own facts.
If it's a matter of moving slowly until we reach another suitable planet, why not keep on living on earth -customized for the next idea of course-, and invent some mind bogglingly massive system that will move the whole planet out of its orbit and take it on a search for another habitable planet.
Earth will need to be customized for the journey, cities will need to be closed systems to travel away from the warm son, etc, but it is as far fetched as traveling for a zillion years in space with many shuttles that can survive for unknown time span until it finds a place to land.
You insufferable Pinisless Trogladite.
Mark V. Hurd is the poster child of what is wrong.
Mark V. Hurd, Wife, Children, His-Her sbilings, His-Her Great and Current Grand Parents, His-Her Aunts and Uncles, His-Her Cosins by Six-degrees should be exterminated.
Ridding and culing Homo Sapins of the Virus of Mark V. Hurd would be a Saintly and Profitable Enterprise.
The moto can be, "Kill a Hurd, Save The World!"
Lovely.
But, as you say, war DOES have a unique property that it makes it easy to justify development.
Yes, it would be great if we DIDN'T need war to get that. Many things would be great if human nature weren't what it is.
Ayjay on Fedang
I was once told I had $150 credit coming my way...then got a $200 bill 10 days later all for $40/month cable modem
The only thing the world runs on is Power and Profit.
Governments and Corporations don't look long term enough to consider leaving the planet.
Combined with the basic human instinct to kill each other, driven by primal greed, envy and lust etc.
Add in religion the alternate method of controlling people without force and using supernatural rules.
We are pretty much screwed until we play nice in the sand pit (earth)
It really depends on what kind of extrapolating function you use. The way I see it, in 70 million years we will be small rodent-like lizards again.
There's a lot of things that can go wrong that we'll have no control over, no matter how eco-friendly we manage to become.
Of course, it's inevitable we'll end up living on more than one rock when we have capability to do so, so I'm not sure the point of this. Obviously any single planet is going to be uninhabitable given enough time.
I posit that if gold or precious gems were found on the Moon, the relative cost of those materials back on Earth would plummet. Scarcity is what gives such things value. (Remember the third book in the 2001 series, where they found the giant diamond on one of Jupiter's moons?)
Now, if the Moon was covered in fuel, that might be a different story...
For optimal comment enjoyment, take red pill now.
The tiniest effort of research will show that Charles Laveran (discoverer of the cause of malaria, Joseph Lister (discoverer of antiseptics), Alexander Fleming (et al discoverer of penicillin), Joseph Bazalgette (construction of the London sewer system) and John Snow (father of epidemiology) to name only the men I can think of that will mean something to slashdotters, saved the lives of untold millions and were directly responsible for the civilisation that exists today.
Somewhere, possibly in China or India (but really, who knows?) an investors spreadsheet contains a particular value that is incrementing every day and when that value reaches a particular number it will become financially viable to mine the asteroid belt, build a space mirror, populate the local moons and planets or any other grand idea.
The system requirements for this are: sufficient numbers of individuals, seeking to improve the quality of there lives and prepared to collectively achieve a common purpose.
And no, I haven't included the URL's to wikipedia because I don't doubt the curious reader's ability to look these up for themselves.
"We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars."
(Oscar Wilde)
Sign on, young man, and sail with me. The stature of our homeland is no more than the measure of ourselves. Our job is to keep her free. Our will is to keep the torch of freedom burning for all. To this solemn purpose we call on the young, the brave, the strong, and the free. Heed my call, Come to the sea. Come Sail with me.
John Paul Jones.
Posts, MyBio or Sig, may contain satire, sarcasm, bolded nouns be sardonic or even witty & be Church of SD
So by the time the earth expires, we'll likely have moved into Q-like beings.
Judging by the average american, we'll be more like Jabba the Hut.
Space enthusiasts don't want to hear this sort of thing. They want to hear that an asteroid has 20 trillion of metals in it. Or that He3 is on the moon and could power pretend fusion reactors (never mind the 0.01ppm).
The best reason for a "manned" base on the moon right now it tourism, not science.
But its not all bad. Sooner or later things like fusion and fully automated construction (eventually also in space) will happen. Then building some kind of Standford tours or other such thing, just for fun, will be possible. Think about how far we have come in the last 100 years! Think about how much we now spend on fun!
The Grey Goo disaster happened 3 billion years ago. This rock is covered in self replicating machines!
More like half a billion years. As the sun ages it gets hotter. One of the reasons we could have so much more CO2 during the carboniferous era was that the sun was substantially dimmer then.
Current stellar evolution theories put the sun as hot enough to cause run-away greenhouse effect and boil the oceans in about a half billion years.
Of course, if we put up sun screens in cis-lunar space we may be able to buy a few million years more.
***
In the long run it doesn't have to be a cooperative effort of all of humanity. Once it becomes economically viable to be in space, some company will do it. After that I would expect a permanent self sufficient space going culture within a thousand years.
Third Career: Tree Farmer Second Career: Computer Geek First Career: Teacher, Outdoor Instructor, Photographer.
Space is empty?
Let's see:
1. Energy density of about twice that at the surface of the earth, running 24/7.
2. No gravity.
1 and 2 mean that making kilometer sized aluminum coated plastic film mirrors to concentrate sunlight is relatively easy.
3. Asteroids that run better than 45% Fe + Ni. (Essentially stainless steel)
4. Whole moons made of ice.
5. Comets of dust, water ice, methane.
6. Whole planets of dirty hydrogen.
The energy to get to space is trivial. Rockets are exceedingly inefficient, as the vast majority of their energy is used to move the fuel/oxidiser.
We're not good enough at engineering to make a rocket engine that will run 8000 hours between major overhauls. (Which is the mandated overhaul interval for a typical small plane engine.)
Third Career: Tree Farmer Second Career: Computer Geek First Career: Teacher, Outdoor Instructor, Photographer.
He wants us all to leave, so he can have the earth to himself.
Q-bert was rather intelligent being
We don't spend money on infrastructure, we spend money on pork. Infrastructure would be building out fiber optic networks like the TVA did with electricity. Pork is spending a few hundred million on a bridge to serve a very small number of people, just because it happens to be in a state of a very old senator.
This is true; but wars(unless your opponent is a putz), tend to destroy the relatively new, rather than the relatively old.
Casualties are disproportionately among the young, who would otherwise be enjoying their most productive and creative years, with the old being destroyed only as an afterthought, if the enemy has the resources for overkill, if at all.
Similarly, in terms of material damage, any competent enemy is going to focus their limited resources on damaging the most valuable infrastructure first, leaving the junk for last, if at all.
By contrast, the processes of competitive pressure and controlled demolition, along with death by old age and age-related-ailments, tend to selectively pick off the outdated, inefficient, and old, quite the opposite pattern of war.
This has been studied. Spending a dollar on war and space research produces the same benefits for civilian life as spending $0.20 for civilian research. And this is just for the research. Funding for actually building and using the death machines invented by the research, and cleaning up afterward to the extent possible (nice prosthesis, soldier!), is pure waste. Space research at least has a huge advantage over war research of not creating such a mess when it's used for its intended purpose, but we'd be a lot better off just funding civilian research instead of the other two.
"If you're not passionate about your operating system, you're married to the wrong one."
before spreading your load is very messy, believe me.
I have a son who existed as a frozen embryo for a few months thanks to IVF. I wonder if we could thaw out an embryo that has been frozen for 50000 years...
Unexpect the expected!
I think someone already did that, with the result that we are here today.
Let's send convicted criminals on 4 supercarriers to Koprula Sector first!
Time to revive Elon Musk's Life to Mars project? http://www.spaceref.com/news/viewsr.html?pid=3698
Either Steven Hawkings has lost his faith in humanity, or he forgot this MUCH simpler alternative: cap the population, come up with a clean energy source and learn to eat healthy. If we can't do those 3 basic things, then moving to space is a child's fantasy.
that's fine. I was responding to the fact that he's not solving the problem, and the problem will still exist, only moved to another location.
Doesn't preclude us (the general public) from having pure motives, though. Got us to the moon well enough.