Will we find another planet or run out of space? (Congress, Obama)
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- Teleportation: I would never get in one of those machines. They disassemble your molecules here, and reassemble a copy of you at the destination point. The "you" that is here will cease to exist, and a different consciousness will occupy your copied self. No thank you.
- terraforming Mars and Venus: we may have this technology in 100 years or so. Locate a giga-ton rock of frozen water somewhere in space and drop it on Mars, thus creating an ocean, clouds, rain, and a habitat for plants. Then seed the planet with billions of trees, bushes, grass, etc (no poison ivy, please), they'll convert the mostly CO2 in the atmosphere to O2, and in 20 years you'll have a low gravity paradise.
- Venus is gravity-normal to earth, but unfortunately it has the annoying little detail that the atmosphere is full of sulfuric acid. Plus, the surface temperatures are around 860 degrees F. We'd need to basically blow the atmosphere out into space and start over, maybe using mega-hydrogen bombs.
- Earthlike planets circling other stars: well, that's a nice concept but good luck getting there. Like I mentioned, teleportation's not the best option, and conventional propulsion is only going to get you to some fraction of light speed, requiring years if not centuries of travel. For the foreseeable future, our best bet will be sending millions of tiny (coke bottle sized) exploratory robots powered by light. A few of these little guys will reach another star in a few decades, and send back interesting pictures and data.
- Earth population: we're overdue for a massive plague that will wipe out substantial portions of humanity. Medical science advances apace, but we're still just one nasty mutation away from a new, hyper-replicating virus that will rip through the crowded cities and kill millions before a cure can be found.
- Colonizing the Earth! We still have lots of room. I drove through the Southwest a couple of times, from AZ to OK, and the amount of vast empty lands is simply staggering. Probably the main issue is water. Desalinate it and pipe it in from the Pacific or the Gulf, problem solved. We could put ten new cities of 20 million people each in that space and hardly even notice them. Why not? Plenty of room at least for us Americans. We just need a few more babies to fill the new houses up with
...that is still very conceptual and has not been approved yet. Nothing like that has been tried before. What makes you think it will work through that vast distance without succumbing to one of the many violent elements in the harsh environment of deeps space.
My worries rest with a shrinking world population!
Nevermind the high fertility rates in Africa, where are skewing the projections, as how many of those being born will even reach the age of 1, 5, 12 or 18?
Alarmed at the low fertility rate in Iran, the government, recently, banned vasectomies!
...that is still very conceptual and has not been approved yet. Nothing like that has been tried before. What makes you think it will work through that vast distance without succumbing to one of the many violent elements in the harsh environment of deeps space.
It's been proposed and is being discussed and planned out. The advantages are many: cheap, easy to manufacture thousands of them, easy to propel them, and the redundancy almost guarantees that a few will make it all the way. What's not to love?
fusion reactor - Annoyingly, that dream is always 25 years away. When we get there, great. Meanwhile, we'll just have to muddle along - huge solar receivers/transceivers in NEO? Beam the power down or wherever needed? Sounds good to me, & we understand the engineering, & I think the materials science is pretty much there.
The problem is containment. And that won't be solved until we get room temperature superconductors of electricity, to develop magnetic fields of high enough intensity to hold the plasma inside the reaction.
Of course with that, we would alos have super capacitors, to replace batteries and the ability to transmit power with no loss. So there would be no need to have storage of power. And on the weapon front, we could have laser weapons of hand gun side, and laser weapons that could burn thru steel the side of a large packing box, which would completely change warfare.
My worries rest with a shrinking world population!
Nevermind the high fertility rates in Africa, where are skewing the projections, as how many of those being born will even reach the age of 1, 5, 12 or 18?
Alarmed at the low fertility rate in Iran, the government, recently, banned vasectomies!
I had not heard that.
It's true. The fertility rate in Iran is 1.92
Fertility rate is easy to understand:
Only half the population - women - are able to have children.
So to replace her, she must have a child and to replace her male partner she must have another.
Factor in the fact that not all children live to be adults and wars and early death from other things and you have a fertility rate of something like 2.3 that is necessary to maintain the population.
Russia is another country who is trying to encourage the fertility rate.
It almost never works. In fact, long term, it never has. Once women realize that they are not really expected to have a bunch of children they quit doing so. Like in Japan.
Population explosion will not fuel space exploration.
As the video pointed out, the entire population of the earth could be contained comfortably in Texas. One huge city, just like Singapore or Hong Kong. The rest of the world could be used to provide everything else.
A lot of people will need to live in places other than Texas in order to run "everything else". Sort of like what we have today.
Of course if we're arguing purely about how to build faster rockets to take us to other planets, we could easily overlook other schools of thought. There is an idea out there that in order for us to get enough energy to start advancing into the stars we must advance our collective position as a race of people by becoming a "Type 1" civilization. This is according to the classification scale created by a Russian physicist Nikolai Kardashev. According to this system we are still a "Type 0" civilization not having yet registered on the Kardashev scale yet. Consider the quote below from this article:
Quote:
"A Type I designation is a given to species who have been able to harness all the energy that is available from a neighboring star, gathering and storing it to meet the energy demands"
A spaceship that can move us to another star system would require vast amounts of energy such as that harnessed from the sun. Apparently in order to have that capability it possibly lies in our world becoming a Type I civilization, then having the capacity to harness such an energy.
1. We (the World) can learn to control our population growth, to throttle it down to what Earth will support @ an acceptable lifestyle - which would likely be a reduction for most people in Western Civilization. Unlikely, for that reason.
There is virtually no limit to the number of people Earth could comfortably support, given a high technology civilization which is able to exploit vast, yet untapped, energy resources. The main threat to the planet's carrying capacity is technological collapse, most likely caused by mass migration out of poor, backward countries, overwhelming the developed world.
There is virtually no limit to the number of people Earth could comfortably support, given a high technology civilization which is able to exploit vast, yet untapped, energy resources. The main threat to the planet's carrying capacity is technological collapse, most likely caused by mass migration out of poor, backward countries, overwhelming the developed world.
Of course there are limits. Even with relatively cheap energy, you have to grow or manufacture food somewhere. The current model of seafood & meat animals & crops on land isn't sustainable - it takes too long, doesn't produce enough, the water's becoming contaminated, the water requirement & other inputs for meat is too high, & so on. I expect we'll turn to soya or some kind of vat culture - but Western Civ. tastes will have to change.
@ the point that we're into 10s of billions of humans, it's not the Earth supporting us - it's humanity directly managing the biosphere. That likely means the end of big animals outside of zoos & aquariums, & possibly even there. We can take tissue samples & hope to eventually solve the space question - but if we let it go too long, people won't even have the memory of animals in the wild. We'll also have to lay down the expertise to manage a large natural biosphere - a rainforest, a large lake, a veldt/savannah, a small sea - & probably multiples, just to be on the safe side.
It's not clear what the effects are of living in a totally technological environment all the time, generation after generation. We co-evolved with the natural environment, but that's going under rapidly all around us. We should be looking @ these issues now, while there's a chance (vanishingly small, & very unlikely, but still) to reverse course, if we need to.
We should probably run a lot of closed environment studies, like the biodome out in the Southwest, & test them to destruction - to determine the parameters & whether or not that kind of living is sustainable in the long run. Ideally, a couple of generations. Maybe we could sentence some hardened criminals to be our pioneers on this kind of effort.
Of course there are limits. Even with relatively cheap energy, you have to grow or manufacture food somewhere. The current model of seafood & meat animals & crops on land isn't sustainable - it takes too long, doesn't produce enough, the water's becoming contaminated, the water requirement & other inputs for meat is too high, & so on. I expect we'll turn to soya or some kind of vat culture - but Western Civ. tastes will have to change.
@ the point that we're into 10s of billions of humans, it's not the Earth supporting us - it's humanity directly managing the biosphere. That likely means the end of big animals outside of zoos & aquariums, & possibly even there. We can take tissue samples & hope to eventually solve the space question - but if we let it go too long, people won't even have the memory of animals in the wild. We'll also have to lay down the expertise to manage a large natural biosphere - a rainforest, a large lake, a veldt/savannah, a small sea - & probably multiples, just to be on the safe side.
It's not clear what the effects are of living in a totally technological environment all the time, generation after generation. We co-evolved with the natural environment, but that's going under rapidly all around us. We should be looking @ these issues now, while there's a chance (vanishingly small, & very unlikely, but still) to reverse course, if we need to.
We should probably run a lot of closed environment studies, like the biodome out in the Southwest, & test them to destruction - to determine the parameters & whether or not that kind of living is sustainable in the long run. Ideally, a couple of generations. Maybe we could sentence some hardened criminals to be our pioneers on this kind of effort.
Eventually humanity is going to have to move into orbit and to the other planets, and let the Earth go back to a natural kind of place. Humans will be happy and prosperous and will have a rich variety of lifestyles from which to choose -- cavorting around the solar system in yachts, or staking out a homestead on Mars, Venus, Moon, etc.
After a few centuries the Earth will have recovered from the poisonous humans and will be as it was in a more pristine age, a natural balance of meat eaters and herbivores, massive primeval forests, huge herds of bison, horses, antelopes, elk, etc. roaming North America, reconstituted sabre tooth cats, large carnivorous birds, etc. recreated from the Pleistocene, and the air will once again be fresh and clean and free of pollutants.
That's the best outcome I can envision. The worst outcome would be to have us just keep multiplying until there's literally no more room -- trillions of humans standing shoulder to shoulder, to crowded even to breath.
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advance civilization not propulsion systems.
