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Human Survival Depends On Space Exploration, Says Hawking
thomst writes "The Winnipeg Free Press posts a story by Cassandra Szklarski of the Canadian Press about an email interview with Stephen Hawking in which the astrophysicist and geek hero opines, 'Our only chance of long-term survival is not to remain lurking on planet Earth, but to spread out into space.' The story also covers the upcoming Canadian debut of Hawking's new TV series 'Brave New World With Stephen Hawking,' and his excitement about ongoing work at the Perimeter Institute in Waterloo, Ont. investigating quantum theory and gravity."
So he wants us to explore space, but not talk to aliens.
Looks like he dyed his hair.
We're all going to become happy fluffy hippies and live a sustainable lifestyle in little teepees where we'll end all conflict by singing happy songs and shit.
Germs cause disease. I thought that the idea that our future was in space exploration was pretty common by now, and that politicians were the ones in the way.
To offset political mods, replace Flamebait with Insightful.
"Mr. President, I would not rule out the chance to preserve a nucleus of human specimens. It would be quite easy at the bottom of some of our deeper mine shafts . . . Naturally, they would breed prodigiously, eh? There would be much time, and little to do. But ah with the proper breeding techniques and a ratio of say, ten females to each male, I would guess that they could then work their way back to the present gross national product within say, twenty years."
"Doctor, you mentioned the ration of ten women to each man. Now, wouldn't that necessitate the abandonment of the so called monogamous sexual relationship, I mean, as far as men were concerned?"
"Regrettably, yes. But it is, you know, a sacrifice required for the future of the human race. I hasten to add that since each man will be required to do prodigious... service along these lines, the women will have to be selected for their sexual characteristics which will have to be of a highly stimulating nature."
Schroedinger's Brexit: The UK is both in and out of the EU at the same time!
Seriously, what we need is a good predator that preys upon the fat and stupid.
CAD? (Coronary Artery Disease)
People are always inventing religions. Most die, but the new (in the span of history) cults Scientology and Mormonism seem to be doing a good business, in the USA at least, other religions elsewhere. Since all religion does is answer the unanswerable questions of life, such as the purpose of it, just found a new religion where the answer to the meaning of life is to get the fuck off this planet. Maybe not using those exact words, I'm sure some more mystic and transcendental and pompous word choices can be arranged.
What motivated people is not cold rational analysis. Motivation is emotional. So just translate the valid motivation into the wacky language of religion.
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
If Earth is the Garden of Eden and we're forced to abandon it due to poor stewardship, would that make the book of Genesis prophetic?
Is it just the transmission of DNA?
Then if it is, then transmitting our DNA via high powered radio telescopes would be far cheaper than a space program. Next would be including DNA samples on anything leaving the solar system (pioneer, voyager, new horizon).
If it's our cultural heritage, we've been beaming a (lopsided) collection out into space for the last 100 years. We've even sent some physical artifacts.
If it's the survival of our MINDS that we're concerned with, well rather than build space ships capable of crossing the interstellar void (which'll likely take centuries) maybe it would be faster to figure out how to convert them into code and beam THAT.
Of course this assumes that there is someone out there on the receiving end. I don't think that's too unlikely a hypothesis but reasonable people might disagree. So let's get listening! (And maybe we'll figure out the answer to the Fermi Paradox).
(By the way, I'm all for a VERY aggressive space program, it's just that maybe we shouldn't think survival is the best reason for it!)
So he wants us to explore space, but not talk to aliens
Getting the human race into space does not necessarily mean zipping around from one solar system to another like in Star Trek. Getting the human race to colonize our solar system would be quite sufficient and quite plausible given our understanding of science and technology. We are not likely to run into aliens elsewhere in our solar system so there is no real inconsistency. :-)
The existence of our species is extremely vulnerable if limited to Earth. It's not about nuclear war or resource depletion. It's about an asteroid or comet, a gamma ray burst or God only knows. If life ended on Earth tomorrow, save for a few old spacecraft, it would be as if humanity never existed. At least if we spread out to Mars, those humans on Mars would remember those lost on Earth. If we spread beyond the solar system and something happened to both Earth and Mars, at least humanity would continue!
It's about our first duty, the continuation of our species.
Conservation can't work. The sun will distroy the Earth regardless.
Counterpoint:
"The universe is probably littered with the one-planet graves of cultures which made the sensible economic decision that thereâ(TM)s no good reason to go into space â" each discovered, studied, and remembered by the ones who made the irrational decision."
so we just need to find places to go and then with the stargate we can move to them real fast.
Fact of the matter is that humankind has not put much effort into developing food crops optimized for outer space. Genetic engineering can make growing food much easier in outer space, and survival of humans as well. It is all about sticking humans up in big rockets. Kay Bailey, and many pork coveting Texas House members want their big rocket pork, science be damned. What would Burt Rutan, or John Carmack think of this.
While I find the whole "let's escape our problems on Earth by migrating to space" fantasy interesting, I think it's worth remembering that, at our present rate of consumption, we will exhaust our planet's resources long before we're actually able to permanently survive somewhere else. For details, I'd suggest reading this excellent post from physicist Tom Murphy's "Do the Math" blog. It was featured on Slashdot a while back.
The basic point is that, given our current situation, proposing a future in space is essentially a distraction that ignores the problems we will absolutely have to solve here on Earth. Hawking is probably right in that, if we manage to survive long enough, we will eventually establish colonies on other worlds. But if we can't focus on immediate challenges here, we'll never get there.
Apparently Hawking is worried of our resources running out, but mining other celesatial bodies can be done without colonizing them. And even if we did colonize them, exponential growth would not be feasible indefinitely. I believe it's much easier to change our ways than to colonize space.
No "long-term survival / Hawking" jokes yet?
'When the Going gets Weird, the Weird turn Pro.' - Hunter S. Thompson
I think getting rid of as much of our flesh as possible is the key to survival. A more adaptable species is going to be easier to do than hunting through billions of planets to find one that fits our fragile bodies.
The "threats" to humanity are pretty easy to enumerate, because we know them from the geological record: glaciation, global warming, pandemics, meteorites, and volcanoes. All of these have extinguished many species in the past, but humans are adaptable enough to survive any of them. Even if they happened, earth would still be a more hospitable place than any planet we are likely to be able to travel to, or any space habitat we can build in the foreseeable future.
If the long term survival of our civilization is a concern, what we should focus on is creating time capsules that will help humanity to rebuilt more quickly after the inevitable collapse of our current civilization. We know that works because it has worked before. The technology is simple, reliable, and predictable. Such time capsules should include things like writings, seeds, tools, and recordings.
Manned space travel, on the other hand, will just happen by itself, or it won't, depending on whether it makes physical and economic sense. It is not a rational thing to bet on or worry about.
"Go west" doesn't work anymore. You can't just rest all your hopes on being able to continue life on another planet. It's a romantic idea, but actually doing so would require efforts that are by far much larger than ending world poverty or convincing people to care about the environment. A manned mission to mars would cost $40-$80 billion. Here are some problems, each enough to explain why we won't be anything near this in the next 50 years (just some examples, I'm sure there are more):
Space expenses don't scale well. While development costs do scale, things like transport, fuel, assembly of rockets, etc. does not scale very well.
Full Autonomy is extremely hard. If earth goes down the toilet, you can't rely on yearly shipments of equipment and technology. You'd have to build *everything* in your colony, which would require a huge colony indeed (so that you have a factory that makes the robots that manufacturers your mp3 players and *everything else you rely on nowadays*) and thus an even greater effort.
Humans just love earth. Even mild changes to our environment can have extreme consequences on our health. Thinking about going to Europa, that trendy Jupiter moon? Well, it only has 0.134 g, so you need to put *everything* in giant centrifuges. And that's just one factor. Building a huge shell that keeps the pressure of 1 bar earth atmosphere and 10^-12 bar Europa atmosphere separate is another one...
Seriously. He magically appears on every space story, but still remains anon. Lame!
-- Let us endeavor so to live that when we pass even the undertaker shall be sorry. -- M. Twain
Nothing short of zero population growth is going to do anything but slow down the inevitable. Suppose we discover a means of building colony starships capable of moving ten billion people at the speed of light. Further, suppose there is an empty, habitable "class M" planet around every star.
Now, the human race has been expanding exponentially at the historic average of 2% per year. That means that, on average, the number of people doubles every 35 years. It's crowded here, and we've got a starship and an empty planet only 4 light years away. So we load half the population and take them to Alpha Centauri. It took (according to some estimates) 20,000 years for homo sapiens to get where we are today. Do you know how long it will take us to populate Alpha Centauri to today's levels? Only 35 years.
Okay, it's 39 years later (Four years transit time plus 35 years of growth), 2050, and now you have two crowded planets. No problem, Barnard's Star is only 6 years away from Earth, and Wolf 359 is 8 years from Alpha Centari. So we pack up half the population of Earth and send them to Barnard's Star, and we take half the population of Alpha Centauri and send them to Wolf 359. Again, it will only take 35 years to fill each of the planets. By 2093 we will need to find 8 more planets. We now have a colony on each of the stars within ten light years. 35 years after that, and we will need 16 planets, 70 years and we'll need 32, then 64. By 2200 we will have colonized all the stars within 20 light years.
By 2360ish we'll hit a snag. We will have populated all of the stars within 35 light years of Earth. Colony ships leaving Earth at this point will not arrive at their destination before it is time to send out another colony ship. Of course, all the other colonies will be sending out their colony ships as well. We'll need another 512 planets. At the end of another 35 year cycle, we'll need 1024, another cycle and we'll have used up all the stars within 50 light years.
Scientists estimate that there is about one star per 280 cubic light years. In 800 years or so, our empire will need 34 million new planets. However there are only some 19 million stars within 800 light years. In other words, we will have outgrown our ability to travel.
Today we have 7 billion people on the planet. By 2150, your target date, we will have 36 billion people. Your 50/50 by 2150 plan would result in each person having only half an acre of land on which to live and support themself. This suggests 2 acres per person are needed. 50/50 by 2150 would result in 3/4 of the population starving to death.
It's basic mathematics. A fixed resource cannot supply an ever increasing population. Any plan that does not include zero population growth and 100% recycling will eventually fail.
When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
the distances are just WAY TOO VAST
Politics is Treachery, Religion is Brainwashing
Because I can't stand living so close to tree huggers. BTW the definition of a tree hugger is 'someone who already lives in the forest but doesn't want anyone else to be able to live there too'.
-- I ignore anonymous replies to my comments and postings.
Who's the alien. Ahem. "To Serve Man".
-- I ignore anonymous replies to my comments and postings.
if the human race can not make life great on this planet then living in space where being even more efficient and much more benevolent is required to survive will never succeed.
humans are just inherently too stupid and greedy to survive for generations in some space ship or artificial planetoid type thing considering the track record we've made here on earth.
Politics is Treachery, Religion is Brainwashing
Our bodies are not adapted, evolved, or designed for space.
We are vastly better off concentrating resources into robotics, AI, and technologies that will allow for the imaging and transfer of brain state. Those next creations - or evolution of intelligence - will be free to explore the universe.
Alternatively, mastering genetic engineering may allow us to create organic lifeforms that ARE adapted to those environments, and have or exceed our own intelligence. That is also possible within a short timeframe.
As the Dr. already indicated, it's not likely we are going to make it the next few hundred years as-is. That'll be ok, we'll all be at the feet of (insert deity here) in eternal paradise, right? *laughs*
..don't panic
Does Hawking have a background in behavioral genetics, evolutionary psychology, environmental risk assessment, demographics, or aeronautical engineering? Why is he opining on subjects that he's not particularly expert on?
Any here more interested in Dr. Hawking's thoughts on the possibility that neutrinos are faster than light ? Seems a bit more timely concern, though I do see his point about human survival.
well why should we even leave the ocean as we all know land is vast hostile empty and barren and it is a radition basted void, why should we leave the tied pool that is where all the evolution is happening... said on premordial fish to the rest,
You know the beach is barren compared to the tied pool, an atmosphere is a vacuum in comparison to a pool of water, it is also blasted with all sorts of UV radiation and electro magnetic radiation that is hostile to life.
---Saying gnome 3 is better than windows 8 not so much a compliment as it is damning with light praise.
Any plan that does not include zero population growth and 100% recycling will eventually fail.
The reality is that the people at the frontier will survive because they always have new places to go and new resources to use, while those stuck in the core will die. You cannot build a 'sustainable' society that will survive for billions of years, because one mistake will wipe you out.
Which is why those who choose to stay on Earth are doomed.
Interestingly, did the ambition of a robust space dream for the US die when the US had no real competition from the Russians or anyone else in the world? It looks like the US accumulated all the technical know-how (probably in some super secret programs) while never really unleashing its full potential. What a shame. Obviously, it's not clear if even with all the technical knowledge, how viable colonizing other terrains is. But having all that technical knowledge gives humans an edge without doubt. And to make a U-turn in my comment, it all goes back to basic human distrust. If the countries could actually agree and work on this together, there would be proliferation of knowledge and a better chance at space colonization. That's not happening any time soon. Space colonization is an issue that probably cannot happen with some basic human unity and cooperation between the countries.
Imagine the technology that would be needed to build a self-sufficient lunar colony. You would need to be carbon-neutral, recycle all your water, and pollution would generally be out of the question. Any dangerous byproducts created by the colony would have to be dealt with on-site.
Sounds like technologies that would be important here on Earth also, and setting up a lunar base would create a need for such technology. The moon also has the advantage of allowing an emergency return to Earth, which makes it a good first step for living in space.
Of course, the expenses are pretty high, and the technologies that would be developed would not be useful on Earth for a long time after the initial investment. Without any real profitable reason to live on the moon, it would be hard to justify spending that much money. Now, if we discovered some useful resource that could be profitably mined, that would be another story.
Palm trees and 8
Why Mars? There is a nice big rock orbiting the Earth that we could establish a base on, and it would be much cheaper to get to it. Granted, there is not a lot there, but so what? There is not a lot on Mars either, and any technology we used to establish a lunar base would be equally applicable to the establishment of a Martian base.
Palm trees and 8
If you had, you'd know they could not possibly live in outer space.
This has been showing on Channel 4 in the UK for a while now, I really recommend giving it a watch. Some pretty good episodes of Hawking's tv show, with lots of scientists hosting various sections.
Human survival depends on birth control.
A pessimistic interview given by someone named "Cassandra". How nice.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cassandra
All this talk about Space Exploration is great, and I agree that in the future, we will one day have to colonize space.
But what about right now?
Space Colonization is simply not practical today and may not be for another century or longer. So why not look the other way? What about Oceanic Colonization? No exotic technology like carbon nanotube space tethers are required, no worries about intersteller radiation, bone mineral depletion, obtaining drinking water, fuel or breathable air. We have all the technology to build floating and underwater structures, we know who to make artificial island communities (look at Dubai)
All this is right here, right now. Why don't we stop focusing so hard on the long shots and start looking at what we can start doing today to alleviate the population crises and making better use of our existing resources? It seems our astrophysics community really has a hard-on for space exploration while Oceanic dwellings are merely the pipe-dream of young architects as part of design competitions, but is mainly regarded as a novelty and not really taken all that seriously.
70% of the earth is covered in water, scientists predict this will increase within the century.
Does it not make sense to start adapting and learning to exist on the largest resource available on the Earth?
The Matrix Trilogy had an excellent line, that really isn't played up enough.
> There are levels of survival we are prepared to accept.
This implies the machines were ready to separate (some programs) into compartmentalized versions to ensure survival and to start over, as in the beginning of their ascension to dominate the earth's surface. This strategy seems particularly applicable to deep space exploration as it speaks to practicality and the machine equivalent of transhumanism.
A form of space ark is currently, our best bet. Haul organic material (maybe just DNA) or a machine capable of synthesizing appropriate material from raw materials and send it off, piloted by an advanced AI and + digital copies of human minds. Based on our current understanding of physics, people born in the solar system will never get out of the solar system. The idea of self-contained craft that "lug around" energy is really silly and prone to failure. It's incredibly risky and there's no good model for how to do it. When you take the idea of minimizing organic maintenance and we already assume we're willing to invest a relatively large amount of inorganic components, we have a couple near-practical solutions. After we arrive at a habitable planet, we have a new set of problems. Say there's (likely) a ubiquitous pathogen that our human bodies can't defend against in the planet's environment, we better have the technology to adapt our bodies. There's not as many hurdles to cover as one would think, they are just different hurdles than most people think about and it's within reach.
Often wrong but never in doubt.
I am Jack9.
Everyone knows me.
http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2003/09/12/health/main572833.shtml
http://www.diabetes.org/diabetes-basics/diabetes-statistics/
Smoking killed 4.83 million people in 2000, And the diabetes rate is rising, so I think that shit food and smoking will take care of all of the stupid and fat for you nicely. With 2.5 million Americans dying from smoking every year, we do not need wars to kill off the people.
liberare massarum ex ignorantia, clausa descendit molestie.
Entropy.
Now that it's clear that the "goal" is impossible from a Naturalism perspective, I suggest widening the scope of possibilities for consideration.
~ Whence do you come, slayer of men, or where are you going, conqueror of space?
SH is a shill anyway. His theories are crap (and we know it). The role of electricity is not mentioned for stellar dynamism, odd since it finds parallel in water flow analogies and other action-reaction scenarios. Seeing how the observable universe is a stack of macro-microcosms it only makes sense to be willing to drop all of our theories about stellar dynamics and try stepping outside the box to come up with something that fits our observations or just be happy in determining that our observations are limited and therefor incapable of yielding correct conclusions--or data for that matter. The laws or Newton and his equations work great in certain contexts but are known to "not work" in others. A perfect example of our observations yielding practical data and conclusions that are NOT CORRECT. Stevie needs to clam up, or he'll end up looking foolish like Einstein at the end of his life. His contributions have been made, it's over.
I object to power without constructive purpose. --Spock
I've been saying the same thing for decades (as have others), but why would anyone heed the words of someone who's neither a celebrity nor a published expert? I could live with being ignored if the message finally got heard because of Hawking... but I doubt it will. Most humans plan no further than satiating their stomachs and gonads. Space exploration doesn't improve the majority's prospects for either, so....
Smokers typically die around retirement age, after their productive life is over. Nonsmokers, on the other hand, may linger on unproductively for decades in nursing homes with around-the-clock care, or requiring family members to leave the work force to care for them. Sure lung cancer is costly, but it is a one-time expense.
The "cost of smoking" numbers you see are not offset with the cost of not smoking due to longer unproductive lives that burden society. It would be interesting to see some unbiased calculations.
The most important technology you need for any serious space colonization is the ability to manage a closed ecosystem with no internal inputs except energy. If you can't do that, you might still be able to get to Mars using less complete recycling, and you can park in Earth orbit with occasional resupply, but you can't do anything significant out in asteroid belts and you certainly can't run a generation ship out to other star systems. Even Mars colonies are pretty sketchy - you've got spare CO2, sand, iron, and maybe water, but those are just the crude raw materials, not the fancy stuff like dirt or vitamins, and the Moon's got even less.
Running a terrarium like Biosphere 2 is something we don't know how to do without cheating yet. Terraforming a whole planet is much harder - we've done some experiments on one of our nearby planets which haven't been successful - we don't even know where the thermostat is yet, though we seem to keep turning up the heat, killing off the local vegetation, and making holes in the ozone and leaving big patches of desert where there used to be vegetation and planting monocultures in place of jungles and prairies. A spaceship's ecology is somewhere in between - simpler than a planet, so maybe we don't actually have to have figured out how to fix Earth before we build one, but out in the asteroid belt you can't mine for dirt - you have to know how to make your own.
The other way to colonize space is to radically simplify the ecosystem's requirements by sending robots instead of canned apes. That's useful for data collection and mining, but unless The Great Nanotech Singularity In The Future!! lets us all upload onto better hardware, that's not going to let humanity migrate off the planet in case of a dinosaur-killer asteroid or a nuclear winter. So we're going to need to do some serious work on this ecology stuff first.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
We started a project with a planet that was mostly habitable, found ways to make it habitable for far more humans, but did immense amounts of damage in the process, and it may not be able to support that many in the future. There are projects going on to adjust the atmosphere a bit, reducing the quantities of several simple gasses that we've been adding, and not only do lots of people think that doing so will be too expensive, some of the companies that have been providing the raw materials think it's worth convincing half the population that science is evil because letting other people mess with the thermostat may interfere with their business.
Basically, until terraforming Earth is profitable, it's not going to get done.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
I think before you start talking the talk, you better start walking the walk.
My favorite:
http://dilbert.com/strips/comic/2009-02-24/
You're an idiot. The population of Earth doesn't expand by 2%, has not for many years, and population growth is not projected to be anything like that high. In fact, population growth is falling rapidly, and population will be nearly stable by midcentury. Your numbers are total fictions based on nothing. Why not use some real data?
Once, I would have written it off to deja vu and went on with my life. But the same article, 3 times? I might be human, but my memory is not that terrible, Slashdot!
Yes, we need to get off the planet and out of the solar system before the Sun blows up 4 billion years from now. We've got time. We also need to get off the planet before the next dinosaur-killer asteroid hits, probably somewhere between 0-100 million years from now. We've got time for that too. Meanwhile, our first step needs to be Not Being Dead, which means we not only have to find ways to not have a major nuclear war or an interesting biological war, and our next step needs to be to avoid rendering Earth uninhabitable before then. Working on both at once is just fine.
Space technology is useful for building measurement systems to understand what's going on here on Earth. It's also useful for understanding what's going on in the rest of the solar system, so we can identify any dino-killer asteroids pointed at us and deflect them or blow them up, though even Tunguska-sized events are pretty rare - it'll be a much easier project if we let Moore's Law crank our electronics development for a couple of decades so we'll have much better and lighter-weight equipment. But to do anything serious out in space, or to terraform Mars into an emergency backup planet, we need to develop serious understanding of ecosystems, because we need to bring ecosystems anywhere we're going to bring humans. (You also need them even for robots, but they can use much simpler ecosystems.) All of that biology's a lot more difficult work than merely getting rockets that can go halfway across the solar system.
Meanwhile, getting to the Moon was a fun way to demonstrate our military-industrial complex's skills that are layered on top of the heavy industry business. But right now we have to figure out how to get the heavy industry folks to stop cranking up the planet's thermostat, get the military-industrial complex to stop drumming up new business for themselves, and get a bunch of farmers to have better technology than slash-and-burn agriculture or petro-business-based fertilizers, and it wouldn't hurt if we can find something productive for the 50% of humanity that are no longer farmers to do.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
Unless you plan on living a few hundred years, it's their children's children who will be doomed. However, this is only assuming exponential growth. Looking at first-world countries, there is a clear peak that is attained, after which population actually decreases. We don't know for sure, but there's good reason to believe that other countries will reach a similar peak and then Earth's population will stabilize.
If it does not stabilize for good reasons (ie. general enrichment of the population and diminishing desire for large amounts of offspring), it will through calamities. It's inevitable.
Learning how to live underwater would teach us how to live in space, and will get us used to living underwater on planets/moon such as Europa. Since 3/4 of the planet is covered in water, maybe we can spread "West" into the ocean? It's prettier down there anyway and chicks dig dolphins. Running out of air down there would be less consequential than in a vacuum. Most likely we will be shooting for a planet outside our solar system only if it has water. High radiation levels etc would be easier to avoid underwater, and I think it would take a long time for oceans to evaporate should global warming become global boiling.
Namaste
As humans, we often think we know all the benefits (and costs) of doing something before we do it. In our daily lives this is very useful because things ARE predictable. This isn't the case with space exploration. You can debate till you are red in the face about the costs/benefits of space exploration, but you will never actually know it until you do it, so get off your lazy asses and do it already.
We'll never make it.......oh! we made it! http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SWf3iJjqYCM&list=FL7kKrE4eTs17mQl7eyvJIOg
This requires money, long term thinking and wide consensus. These are things our politicians are not capable of even dreaming about. This is not even taking into account all the fiddly vested interests.
Lets not forget that deciding what to do with this worlds changing climate has stalled for the good part of 30 years.
Unless our governments are transformed to autocratic beurocracies we're simply doomed.
There's a reason why autocrats can build beautiful cities while democracies can't put forward the planning for a new building without decades worth of argy-bargy.
The launch was a rush. That railgun they drilled through the planetoid accelerated me at 50G, or 490m/s/s. With only 487km of railgun it was over in just a few seconds and I was off to the stars. It's cold out here and dark, with not much to do as I sleep almost all of the time. They keep pushing. The high-energy lasers in orbit around Venus still fluff my solar sail and deliver power so I don't have to activate my nuclear engine. I'm supposed to be seeing some time dilation at this point, but really, not so much that it can't be accounted for.
I understand launching so much mass shifted the orbit of the planetoid significantly, but was timed to do so in a way that moved it into a more convenient orbit around the sun. Not that they fill me in on the details.
They laid my way with resupply years before of course. I'll be docking with one of those probes soon to boost my xenon and hydrogen - that's why I'm awake to make this log. I've five of these resupplies to do, and this next one is the fourth. I'm halfway to my destination, and still have all of this resupply inventory. It's for deceleration, and I may not need any of it if the L2 solar sails work to spec. I'm glad for the backup plan because we all know how low bidder contracts kill.
It's been 40 years, and it feels like a week.
There's not much to do out here except wonder if tech innovations will have people stopping by to pick me up on their way to the stars with new drive tech. It's nice that my mental donor wasn't too introspective - some replayed vids and a little virtual dolphin flogging and we're ready for sleep again. That will be handy when we get to Tau Ceti if we've got to do some terraforming before it's fit for men. That could take a few million years even with my well-designed spore toolkit. Sleep will be a blessing.
Twenty years and it seems like a week. Frankly I'm glad they vary my clock at need. I wonder what meat people would feel like by turnaround. Perhaps it's best not to go there. It's not like they could survive the launch acceleration anyway.
They said this personality is rated for 18 months of subjective time before it's overcome by a psychotic desire to kill the manipulative bitch that made me volunteer for this program. That may have been optimistic.
End log.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
Seriously, what we need is a good predator that preys upon the fat and stupid.
CAD? (Coronary Artery Disease)
Zombies to keep us fit, and aliens to give us a common enemy - the human race can be saved in only two horror movies.
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Maybe he just drives an SUV back and forth between work and his 2500 sq ft house?
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The link goes to a site dedicated to "50/50 by 2150". Interesting concept.
One major flaw I can see, right off the bat:
How, exactly are you going to get 3.5 billion people to let the other 3.5 billion people move into their living/working space?
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I never thought of that. Honestly, just when I thought I had a justifiable troll going.
-- I ignore anonymous replies to my comments and postings.
Ya know, you sure do make a lot of fuss about stuff you haven't got a clue about.
I know you don't have a clue, because most humans don't have a clue. Hell, we can't even agree on what electricity is, nevermind what might be required in a space-faring vessel intended for colonization - with or without human cargo.
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The world population is not growing exponentially but linearly at most
Source
(+1, Disagree)
There always was religion, and always will be. It's a psychosocial phenomenon that is never going away. So you can sit in your Ivory Tower and cast scorn on it, or USE it to actually promote the future of mankind in outer space.
“Religion is regarded by the common people as true, by the wise as false, and by the rulers as useful.”
-Seneca
Stop warring with what you cannot change, accept it, and use it for something positive. And yes, it is useful, as there is a lot of grunt work needed to get us into space, and not all the grunts are Einstein. They need religion to guide them. So do you want to guide them or feed your ego by pissing on them? Seneca's quote is correct, although I really wouldn't call people wise who can't see what is part of life, and prioritize a sense of smug superiority over what it takes to make something work.
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
i'm w/ the good doctor,
but also my thinking is that we should raise our heads out of our shapely buttocks for a moment
and think about spreading life of any form, not only human, to the rest of the galaxy.
i'm a good science boy and have no doubt that there is life out there,
but so far there's no signs of anyone except us.
we're on the cusp of wiping ourselves out in one way or another,
and when we do it's by no means certain that this planet will ever again attain space-faring capability
before it gets eaten by the sun. given this, i think we have a huge moral imperative to send out
large numbers of cheap life-bearing probes into the galaxy. little infectious bombs.
primary producers wired to chill out until there's a reliable energy source, and then mutate like crazy.
For Stephen Hawking speaking is a painful and long process. He knows he's going to die soon, and that the things he can say to us are limited so he takes care to avoid trivia in a way we can't. He's one of the greatest minds the world has ever known. If he takes some of the few words available to him to say "get off this rock or die" we should listen to him. Unlike most of our other sources of information he can't be compromised nor exploited. He's telling it like it is. The choice is simple: we explore the stars, or some future alien race digs up our bones and makes of it what they will.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
He's right in one sense: the first thing a motile organism achieves is the ability to swim in the direction away from its waste stream.
Keep in mind that All newborns have NO religion. We're born atheists (scientists/explorers).
"depleting all our resources within 100 years"
This guy seems to be more in the League.
www.tno.nl/downloads/Metal_minerals_scarcity.pdf
Je me souviens.
We already know this, The purpose of life is,
Evolution of biology.
And evolution of passed-on information.
(at times, they even blend a bit)
There was a cost-benefit analysis done by Philip Morris for the Czech government that showed economical "benefit" of smoking.
It is not unbiased, but it is interesting to read about it.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_Finance_Balance_of_Smoking_in_the_Czech_Republic
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/1442555.stm
Off course, I guess that a value of human life is more than just how much they can produce (or perhaps we should all agree just to kill our grandparents and parents as soon they retire to stop them from being a burden on our economy, Philip Morris style).
The link goes to a site dedicated to "50/50 by 2150". Interesting concept.
One major flaw I can see, right off the bat:
How, exactly are you going to get 3.5 billion people to let the other 3.5 billion people move into their living/working space?
Hopefully, the phase in period of 100+ years could make the transition less abrupt... haven't we added 3.5B people over the last 100 years, too? I suppose the real challenge is in dropping the birth rate, but security from hunger, disease and war seems to do that pretty automatically - so, all we need is world peace, universal health care, and a continued farm subsidy.... is Jimmy Carter still alive?
And the sun will rise in the east, fire is hot, ice is cold, and water is wet. Got any other obviousness to impart to us Dr Hawking?
Seriously, it's pretty widely known that the only way to survive a variety of extinction level events is to get off this rock in a manner such that off-rock locations are completely self sufficient and independent of the rock. But doing so is a century or more off at best.
In there beginning there was nothing
not even time--
no planets, no stars, no hip-hop, no rhyme.
But then there was a bang like the sound of my gat:
the universe began and the shit was phat
The universe began as a singularity.
Nobody knows what went on then, G.
For ten million trillion trillion trillionths of a second,
the state of the universe cannot be reckoned.
The fundamental forces were unified--
we've no theory to describe that,
though I've tried. Then the forces
split and the universe was born--
it was hotter then a priest watching
kiddie porn.
Protons, neutrons, and electrons came to pass
as photons collided, changing energy to mass.
Three minutes go by, temps to cool one billion
down from one hundred million trillion trillion.
This reduced heat allowed a new event:
the formation of heavier elements,
still it was millions of years 'fore the first star glowed.
IF YOUR DOWN WITH THE BANG SING ALONG HERE WE GO!
It was the big pow piz-ow bang a dang diggy diggy boom diggy boom pow boom the Big BIZANG.
the big pow piz-ow bang a dang diggy diggy boom diggy boom pow boom the Big BIZANG.
Hold on now, what about inflation?
That's a little tricky and could use some explanation.
Inflation, one could barely state,
was the time when the universe expanded at a rate
that was faster then the speed of light, but that over-simplifies and it ain't quite right. Still the for purposes here, it will have to do, 'cuz I ain't got the time to explain it to you
ROCK
DAMN
It was the big pow piz-ow bang a dang diggy diggy boom diggy boom pow boom the Big BIZANG.
the big pow piz-ow bang a dang diggy diggy boom diggy boom pow boom the Big BIZANG.
The beginning of time, and the birth of all matter
Say it took seven days, you're as mad as a hatter.
It was millions of years 'fore the first star glowed, if your down with the bang sing along, here we go
It was the big pow piz-ow bang a dang diggy diggy boom diggy boom pow boom the Big BIZANG.
The big pow piz-ow bang a dang diggy diggy boom diggy boom pow boom the Big BIZANG.
the big bizang...
The big bizang...
BOOOOOM....
the big bizang.
Utilizing the synergization of benchmark e-solutions to pre-workaround action items!
That is exactly why my favorite Science Fiction title is AquaNox. Post-apocalyptic / cyberpunk atmosphere aside, the story is so well thought-out as to be downright scary, in exactly the same sense as 1984 is scary.
[SHOW SOME LENIENCY TOWARDS
So, it takes a Hawking to tell the world about this? I mean, how many common sense people have already known this since ecology, history, and sociology classes in high school? I hate the word spread (waxing 'The Matrix' where Hue compares humans to virII). How bout a shift to 'develop'? This is as bad as a couple years ago when Madonna 'discovered' starving children in Africa and made it her point to publicize it. I think its about time we started asking ourselves who our leaders really are, and who started calling them leaders. I mean, haven't you noticed with all the funding and money being spent on advanced physics, that it really doesn't end up in the end user's hands? We are paying these people to think they are great thinkers. Yes, lets colonize space. Duh....
Rockets don't burn cash $$$ to reach trajectory. You don't stuff life support systems with pennies (well... unless you're using them as a reactant in the production of vital gases, but you know what I mean.) Pressurized domes aren't constructed out of stock values. Etc.
There are a lot of great arguments here about how expensive it is just to lift weight into orbit, or do a manned flyby of a gas giant (why the hell would we do that, I don't know).
But, realistically, by the time these efforts are undertaken, money will have little to do with it. You can quote the cost of taking a five-hundred year trip to another sustainable planet on a vessel capable of sustaining ten generations of the inhabitants.
Or, my preferred plan: you invent artificial wombs and just send them with some robotic nanny/professors and a sperm and egg library to whichever planet or itinerary of planets. You could get there and discover it's not as habitable as the astrophysics wizards predicted it should be. Maybe there are bad animals or some kind of noxious gas or germ.
So, maybe you should be prepared for multiple centuries-long journeys before hitting 'jackpot'. Or, maybe you should bring along extinction-event weapons to "cleanse" the planet, and accompany the human-genetic library with an Earth life-form library, but the logistics behind robotically replacing the generational training most animals undergo in order to survive in the wilderness is mind-boggling.
And life would be crappy without animals. But you can't do a selective extinction event, not without a robotic laser-sniper sitting in orbit for a long time selectively studying and then shooting dead just certain animals.
And you don't want to risk your valuable cargo's life by plopping them down in a germ soup their evolution hasn't prepared them for, so you'd have to bring all of the Earth germs along with you somehow. So, another genetic library enters the mix, and there's no sure gaurantee the germs will thrive on the new planet. They're pretty unique to Earth.
But, you *need* the germs, so... you almost may as well have sustained the human occupants the entire time. Even if it was just an "Adam and Eve" model system, reproducing from the sperm bank instead of with each other. Of course, such a low number doesn't bode well for the survival of the species. If Eve cuts her hand changing an air supply fan, and the fan turns out to be coated with the sort of strange-ass organic gunk that grows on space vehicles occupied by humans, and she gets seriously fucked up and died, you're fucked. You'd hope you brought your artificial womb for backup....
My apologies, I digress.
Any way you look at it, it's so "expensive" that you won't find the needed assets in the hand of any one person.
So, the only way you'll ever get out to populate space is if you dedicate the entire population to the effort, and you'd have to have a population that finds itself conducive to a single, unified effort, and also conducive to taking a gigantic hit to the entire concept of private property. You'd need to resurrect Adam Weishaupt. You'd have to lead the world with a resurrected Illuminati zombie. I mean, since we're being imaginative, and all.
You'll have to dedicate all of these mineral resources, engineering and labor resources, time and energy to the effort of producing the mechanisms, launching them, all of it. And there's not going to be any way to afford it unless you either pay just for the human effort or pay just for the mineral rights.
People are going to argue for the former, and so you're going to have to secure the mineral rights through governance. But that ultimately means all the private enterprises, hopes and dreams of individuals that those minerals represent is all going to be squashed. People are going to go without those minerals, so the money you're paying them is going to mean less than it would have before the project started.
So, in real terms it's not going to be about dollars, it's going to be about number
"Stratigraphically the origin of agriculture and thermonuclear destruction will appear essentially simultaneous" -- Lee
If he really wanted to light a fire under our ass he could claim he screwed up his equations on Hawking radiation and claim that the earth will be swallowed by a black hole in 20 years.
You figure they're going to get on a camel, tie the nuke between the humps, and ride it over here? Seriously, even if they do develop nukes, the only reason they could possibly be a threat to us is if we let them be by not maintaining radiological monitoring at/near our borders. And we're not going to do that, because this threat is not new (at least, if you don't limit the field to the middle east.)
Face it... they are going to get nukes. And when they do, they will use them. On Israel. Probably immediately. While shrieking "Allah Akbar!" And Israel will respond in kind. And we'll finally have to seriously pay attention to developing non-petroleum energy here in the USA. (but the good news, such as it is, is that we can channel the money that used to go to middle east foreign and military aid into non-petroleum energy development.)
The thing about nukes is delivery isn't a matter of calling UPS or Fedex. ICBMs are a technical challenge of a higher order than nukes (the "difficulty" of fission weapons is mainly about refining materials to a particular degree of purity... the rest can be done by any competent machine shop by any decent physics nerd... fusion weapons -- crowd pleasers -- are something else entirely), likewise, radiologically shielded aircraft that are capable of intercontinental travel while carrying these very heavy objects... very tough, technologically speaking. And while they may hate us, they hate Israel more. A lot more. That's where the nukes are going to go. You watch.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
Also, genetic engineering is coming... one almost immediate consequence of this will probably be no more stupid babies, followed shortly by no more stupid adults. I rather expect that in its turn to put an end to a number of problems all at once: religion, overpopulation, faux news, racial prejudice, and political correctness, to name but a few.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
Money. Plain and simple.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
No, the human race - and all other breeding populations bellow any limited threshold - is on a logisic curve. Historically it just looks looks exponential because we have been near the origin. It's also a much scarier curve when you consider the growth period is the 'good times.'
In a natural population the number of breeders explodes until it hit some limit and loss suppresses any more gains. It is a simple consequence of reality. With the ever changing environment that is the natural world, any species able to rapidly expand when one of their limits is removed becomes numerically dominate. Since evolutionary success is simply having more grandkids than the other guy, leveraging these opportunities is built into just about every living thing from bacteria to Redwoods. You breed and spread during the happy times until the limit. Then you replace spreading with horrible churn: for each who is born, someone must die.
The unanswered question is: what limit will keep human population from growing? Very poor economists and armchair sociologists trot out the 'limited space' arguments based on totally unrealistic understanding of not only 3D space and what 'food' is, but also territorial needs of humans and how they can overlap. People who have looked into the matter discovered an amazing thing.
Give education and rights to women and your population grown slams to a standstill.
Why?
It's simple: you have most if not all your children surviving to adulthood and educated, wealthy women women able to tell their man/cleric/priest/culture NO to unprotected sex. There is less successful coercion of women into walking-baby-factories for men by accident or purpose. The world is long past the need for huge families to keep the farm running or fight that war. (Starvation is a logistics and distribution problem.) Also, consider the improved access to medicine available to educated, non-poor mothers. Birth is no longer a lottery in which both the future adult and its mother gamble their lives. There is a lot behind this topic and Google is your friend.
It turns out that humans are more than dumb animals. At least some of us. And by definition what people do is unnatural. Long before starvation or disease limits human growth we do it ourselves. Cut the mechanism behind rapid population growth and it stops. Long before you need government mandates, starvation lotteries, colony ships, O'Neil colonies or Logan's Run our women stand up and conveniently have a headache tonight.
We won't over populate this planet let alone the solar system if we can just do one thing: raise women out of poverty.
It's basic humanity.
(And if that doesn't work in the end, just putting all the women on the ship and forcing the men to stay at home will. Motes we are not.)
"You cannot have a General Will unless you have shared experiences. You cannot be fair to people you don't know."
If what we have is something akin to logistic or bounded growth, it will eventually stop.
(+1, Disagree)
Read Plagues and Peoples by William H. MacNeill and then tell me if you think going off planet to some place humans can actually live for a short time is anything but insanity. Leaving the planet is scifi nonsense and I'm sick of hearing it from scientists who should know better. Jules Verne was correct in "War of the Worlds." Microparasites (bacteria and viruses) would kill an alien species. And the ones found in amenable environments off planet would kill us too. And wipe out the Earth population of humans when brought back. Hawkins is either naive, or wilfull.
E Proelio Veritas.
did we really need a scientist to tell us this? I think this point has been obvious to every 10 year old since we knew we could into space.
Not to get overly political... But this is one of my personal problems with the dissolution/re-positioning of NASA. IMO, NO for-profit organization will ever spend the money to figure all of the things out that would need to be figured out for this to happen. They *will* figure out how to (cheaply) put satellites into orbit, mine asteroids and potentially inhabit the moon. But anything beyond that would require technologies that they themselves wont have desire/need to research. Thus we will have to depend on college professors working on donation/funding - severely limiting the rate at which such discoveries will be made.
You totally missed GPs point. GP was suggesting that colonizing the moon has benefits on earth. Not only, do we learn how to get people living off the earth, but we glean knowledge which can be used back here to make our planet better.
Rule of thumb here. Anyone, I repeat anyone, predicting exponential growth forever is wrong. Your scenario in particular is clearly nuts. In the first world, populations are either stagnant or shrinking. Wealthy people just don't have that many children. If we had the technology to travel at the speed of light and round up half the earth's population in massive ships, nobody would be living in the kind of poverty seen in parts of Africa or Asia. By that time the earth's population will definitely not be growing exponentially.
For simplicity's sake, let's say that the current lack of will to explore space among the general public is gone, and we are going to take Hawking's words seriously. Even then we're a few generations away from being able to cut loose from Earth, going by the current state of the space programme.
There was a story here about a company planning to set up a fueling depot on the Moon by 2020. Whether they may succeed is one thing, but they're thinking in the right direction. We cannot obviously send another Apollo style one-shot mission, the costs are too high. And ultimately it has to be a commercial venture. My idea is to make lunar travel commercially viable first, both for practice in space travel/setting up a base (yeah I know that Moon and Mars are totally different environments, but it will still provide considerable experience in running a space base).
Here's one path I can think of, over perhaps the next 70 years (partly inspired by Kim Stanley Robinson's Mars trilogy):
- Set up the fuel depot on the moon - mining ice at the poles and converting to hydrogen/oxygen. Use robots if need be, at first. Build an underground lunar base, and let it be manned the way Antarctic research stations currently are. Over time, Earth-Moon trips should drop in price. Perhaps lunar tourism can also take off.
- In parallel, develop another Earth-Moon capable ship that can possibly do the trip faster than Apollo's 3 days. By now, the tourism should hopefully raise more money for other things, (He-3 mining, or mineral prospecting for one).
- Start building a spaceship in orbit, using discarded rocket boosters or similar. Let this ship fly to the moon and stock up on fuel.
- Send an advance mission to Mars comprising a prefabricated base, some sort of nuclear reactor, and robots to assemble everything. This will be used by the humans when they subsequently go there.
- Finally, send the spaceship along. This would have to be a pretty advanced ship that has spinning sections for artificial gravity, and perhaps hydroponic gardens for growing plants during the long trip, not to mention heavy duty radiation protection for its living cargo.
The last step above can easily take half a century from now. The mistake being made is the assumption that we have to get to that stage immediately, which we obviously cannot.
"..One hosts to look them up, one DNS to find them, and in the darkness BIND them."
we're talking about memetics: the ideas that evolve and grow in the realm of language and society, and we are just their vessels
memetics has superseded genetics in terms of "where it is at" in terms of evolution and transmission of information on planet earth
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it