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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...
..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...
Living With a Nerd
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.
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
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?
I think the point is that since, in addition to all those people, someone like Hawking is saying it as well just adds credence to the idea. No one is claiming that Hawking invented the idea; they're just pointing out that Hawking is one of the many who follow this particular line of thinking.
Living With a Nerd
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
Just need a way to ascend to a higher plane
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.
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."
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
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.
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.
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?
Yeah, he's just totally riding off of the fact he managed to become celebrated as one of the smartest people in the world and helped millions become interested in astro-physics, all whilst dealing with a crippling disability.
He clearly needs to get over himself! You can totally hear the smugness in that voice synthesiser of his!
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.
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
>>>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
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.
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.
Pretty sure Hawking never said we should ALL live on a spaceship. His point is that we need to begin colonization of space, and give humanity a much higher chance of continued survival.
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...
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.
The problem is that one of the problems is this
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."
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
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.
"The Earth is the cradle of mankind, but one cannot remain in the cradle forever."
- Konstantin Tsiolkovsky (1857-1935)
This is stating the obvious. Not exactly sure why this is news.
That wouldn't be an accurate statement. They've cataloged about 10% of the local sky.
http://www.space.com/news/earth-asteroid-impact-congress-commision-100719.html
We don't know what's out there, and won't catalogue every object for a very long time. There will always be unknown and unmapped objects, at least in the foreseeable future. Even when they do see these objects in advance, the accuracy for impact zones, although improved, still has a rather large variance until a rather short time before they actually hit.
Although you might have a warm fuzzy about such ambiguity, I don't, and I don't imagine many other do either.
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
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.
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?
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?
I stand by the statement, your paranoia notwithstanding. I fear my great grandchildren dying not of something falling out of the sky, but by the effects of ecosystems gone bad, the dying ocean then bereft of fish to eat and poisoned by fertilizer and pesticide runoff.
They'll die because some idiot took up the battles of their ancestors, hijacked a nuke, and used it to settle some perceived debt that's hundreds of years old.
The doomsday sayers have been using the excuse to leave, find a new nirvana, only to have the new one turn into dissention, turmoil, and conflict. Outward migration fixes very little. This is a dying planet, but it could be rejuvenated. No one wants to spend the energy to do that, it seems.
---- Teach Peace. It's Cheaper Than War.
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.)
This presents a false dichotomy - there are more than enough resources available to work on both. Achieving extra-Earth travel and "fixing" the problems that plague us here require different solution sets. Neither is completely insolvable.
The only true problem is that humanity as a whole has yet to determine that either is as or more important than their self-centered point of view.
He doesn't talk about "migrating off" so much as "spreading out" we would still need to solve the class of problems you discuss. but it makes sense to get *some* of the population off this rock, and as far away as possible, as soon as possible...
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.
Presumably your enemies.
The migrations to the US are a great case in point. Get those (fill in these blanks) away from here, they're apostates, heretics, and they dress funny and have bad breath.
It gives a whole new meaning to Gleason's "To the moon, Alice!"
---- Teach Peace. It's Cheaper Than War.
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"?
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.
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.
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.
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!
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?
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
Once you move off the continental shelf area, the ocean is in some ways far less hospitable than the surface of the Moon. You have tremendous pressures and have to go outside in some kind of environment suit. You can't grow your own food outside and there is no life to speak of.
Contrast this with the Moon, where low-pressure atmosphere in tunnels would provide almost unlimited living space.
Being in the ocean also wouldn't offer any protection against drastic seismic or impact events. While it was popular to think of the oceans as a vast toilet where anything we dumped would be recycled harmlessly, that is not really the case once you get beyond some pretty small quantities. This is mostly a result of a huge population - the ocean could absorb all we could throw at it in 1700 but not 2010. So habitats in the ocean aren't going to be immune to that either.
Add in the low gravity on the Moon, and it sounds like a really good starting point for an interplanetary or intersteller civilization.
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
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.
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.
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
It's simple, then. We'll just have to declare war on Mars.
Random Thoughts From A Diseased Mind (Not For Dummies)
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.
>>>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?
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?
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.