h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

I can't argue with that, we just disagree as to how to prioritise that.

"we just disagree as to how to prioritise that"

Well, yes. You seem to think we can afford to mess about solving problems down here, and getting off the planet can wait. I've already described why you're wrong, and why we get precisely ONE chance at this in our species' history. There is a window of opportunity where our engineering knowledge, infrastructure and access to energy and materials make the transition to a spacegoing/colonising civilisation possible. That window is probably no more than a few centuries long - two to six, I'd say, which is such a tiny fraction of our history it's frightening. It's arguable that we've already wasted much of the last forty years or so. The window is closing. We can expand, or we can suffer either a long slow death or a sudden extinction on the surface of the one planet we couldn't be bothered to get our arses off. Pick one, and pick one quick.

Indeed, we have from the internal combustion engine to space in less than 100years...and no further...we also had a good leap forward in the space race due to WW2 (nothing like a good war to push forward technology).

The leaps in technology we need to get us off this planet and somewhere else is going to be huge...it's going to take a long time and money.

Hypothetically, consider whether people in the 1600's had a choice between spending money on solving a problem that might make the human race cease in the 1900's or just carry on as they were. Would we be here still...if they decided to spend the cash we would be grateful...if they didn't spend the cash but luckily the problem did not wipe us out would we look back on them as selfish, and narrow-minded and bless our good luck that we were still here. The following question is would WE decide to solve the problem by spending loads of cash or just chance it that the problem won;t kill people in 200years time?

"The following question is would WE decide to solve the problem by spending loads of cash or just chance it that the problem won;t kill people in 200years time?"

Or just decide to make the 200 years we had left the best / most fulfilling in history - I know as an individual I'd rather die happy at 70 than miserable at 100, it's just whether that scales to species level, and whether it's an available option...

"Or just decide to make the 200 years we had left the best / most fulfilling in history - I know as an individual I'd rather die happy at 70 than miserable at 100,"

That's bully for you if you make it to seventy. Problem is, what if you're one of the poor sods who's seven when the Rock lands?

Also, I've heard a lot of people say "I'd rather die happy at 70 than miserable at 100". Then they reach seventy years of age, and they're happy... and you know what? Suddenly death doesn't seem so attractive a prospect. Suddenly, in fact, death seems like something to be avoided for as long as possible, no matter what it takes.

The only people I've known of who welcome death are those who are in immediate unbearable pain with no prospect of respite.

We owe it to coming generations to give them the means to their survival. That's what we're here for. All anyone could do for their descendants until this point in history was keep having babies. That was all the perpetuation of the species took.

But now, and for the last hundred years, we've known two sobering facts:

1. just breeding isn't enough - species go extinct ALL THE TIME, and we've not got some magic exemption from that. Having babies is NOT enough to ensure the future of the race.

2. we have the means to prevent our extinction by leaving this planet and settling elsewhere - but only if we can be bothered to develop it.

I do feel quite strongly about this.

SoRB

"Also, I've heard a lot of people say "I'd rather die happy at 70 than miserable at 100". Then they reach seventy years of age, and they're happy... and you know what? Suddenly death doesn't seem so attractive a prospect. Suddenly, in fact, death seems like something to be avoided for as long as possible, no matter what it takes."

I think the "no matter what it takes" there is the bit that's wrong - not that you've got it wrong, but probably the people in question have. A lot of people are so afraid of death that they consider it worse that being in hideous pain; that's why (IMHO) people invented the idea of an "afterlife", and why it's so attractive to so many.

Consider my 2 grandmothers: 1 of them has been living in a home, getting iller and iller and more and more miserable for over 5 years - she's now 95; the other led a full life to the age of 80ish, got (minor-ly) ill, and died very suddenly. I honestly believe the second is better - if I change my mind when I get to that age, it will only be out of irrational fear.

As I say, whether this applies to humanity as a whole is a very different question, though if the cost of going galactic was universal misery for several hundred years, I'd take the chance on the short and happy, I honestly would.



"we have the means to prevent our extinction by leaving this planet and settling elsewhere - but only if we can be bothered to develop it"

Of course, we could take our eye so far off the ball trying to migrate to outer space, that we create a domestic disaster that wipes us out (or puts civilization back a few centuries - think what was lost when Rome fell, or Ancient Greece) before we have a chance to reap the rewards. Just a thought...

Not that I think spreading out is a *bad* idea - I'm just not sure how high we should prioritise it, given that we've got plenty of other problems vying for our attention right now.

You're window hypothesis is completely wrong, and smacks of Malthus. There's always been doomsayers. I find it crazy that you'd rather work on solving a problem with an incredibly small probability of happening rather than try to solve global warming, a problem that is currently happening and does threaten the species with extinction.

Do you think Global Warming can be solved then?

Global warming does NOT threaten our species with extinction. EVERY climate model, even the most pessimistic, posits global temperature changes of just a few degrees - nothing we can't handle technologically.

By that I mean *some* humans - the rich ones, naturally - will do perfectly well with global warming. There'll always be *somewhere* that food will grow, and if you just fence that area off and shoot the riffraff, no problem. Of course, several billions will likely die of starvation or disease due to lack of drinking water etc. And this is not good. But it is, quite literally, not the end of the world. Humans did pretty well out of global warming at the end of the last ice age.

If a rock hits, technological superiority will be irrelevant. Food won't grow if it's dark for two hundred years. The last time it happened, nothing on land bigger than a chicken survived.

SoRB

I like chicken.

F

Basically, yes, I think global warming will be solved.

There is tenous geologic evidence that large CO2 levels are linked with mass species extinction events.

I'm intrigued. I understood that man-made factors were contributary to global warming, perhaps even a trigger, but I hadn't seen any claims that it was *all* our fault. As I understood it, there have been frequent episodes of global warming and cooling, even in recorded history.

I'm not trying to be argumentative, but is it really feasible to reverse global warming?

Well, I don't think we need to reverse it to solve the problem. I think we can cut back our carbon-into-the-atmosphere contributions, and that will dramatically slow global warming. And if that happens, we might actually then have a chance achieving even longer term stability, or at least almost entirely removing the man-made contribution.

My optimism regarding global warming comes from the fact that as a species, we have made a massive progress in repairing the damage we did to the ozone layer. I'm hoping we can do the same thing again. It will certainly be a lot tougher, but that's no reason not to try.

If we've done that, we'll probably know enough to set up a moon base and a Mars base, just in time to avoid any asteroid strikes.

Global warming aside, I think there are some really huge discoveries just around the corner regarding fundamental physics. And there is always a backlog of these types of discoveries percolating down to the level of applicable technology. I think we may eventually get new technologies from "new" physics that will make these things feasible. But we're not at the "engineering" stage yet, and attempting to engineer our solutions will be mis-using the money. That's my speculation.

ps. as a historical example, consider the x-ray laser that Reagan wanted for star wars. The fundamental physics wasn't there, they spent billions and billions of dollars, and didn't even come close to achieving their goal. Now, the current missile defense systems are really bad, but I think they're a lot closer to working than star wars was, and they use completely different technologies.

Granted, we now have "free electron lasers" as a result of star wars, and these may be fantastically useful in fundamental science (Bio, chem, and physics). However, it would have been a lot cheaper to just try to develop that laser directly for general applications, than try to build the star wars defense system.

"If we've done that, we'll probably know enough to set up a moon base and a Mars base, just in time to avoid any asteroid strikes."



The strike could happen within a year from RIGHT NOW. All it takes is an Oort cloud object to get the right kind of nudge from some bit of passing junk, and start making its way in. We might or might not see it coming, but it would be here LONG before we could do anything about it at our current level of development. We simply can't assume that the universe will cooperate and not send us a rock until we're ready for it.

The Moon and Mars aren't exactly impervious to asteroid strikes either. Plus they don't have anything like the levels of atmosphere to protect them (check out the moon).

Morning SoRB

Have you ever considered that it is the destiny of mankind?

Something else ready to take our place somewhere in the universe somewhere?

Novo

Ah, the "Insh'Allah" approach.

It was Oppenheimer, wasn't it, who upon discovering the implications of his research declared "I am become (Shiva?) Death, the destroyer of Worlds."

If only Destiny could show us how the cursed development and proliferation of nuclear weapons could be made to serve all humanity instead of exhausting domestic funds to labour international wars of attrition. How propitious that would be. But how?

It's not rocket science.

"The Moon and Mars aren't exactly impervious to asteroid strikes either."

Absolutely true. But, the probability of human extinction right now is the probability of ONE rock hitting ONE planet. For a given period of 100 years, a small but finite risk. For a given period of 100 million years, something close to certainty.

Let's say you have a colony on the moon, and one on Mars, in, say, two hundred years from now. Colonies which are self-sustaining and could, in extremis, function basically forever without resupply from earth.

At that point, the probability of human extinction drops to practically nothing. An extinction event would require THREE rocks to hit THREE bodies within a very short space of time, say 1000 years - events with probabilities so low that they're unlikely within the lifetime of the solar system.

One rock hitting the earth would kill everything on it, but the Mars colony could repopulate the earth within a millenium or so.

This is to say nothing of the fact that the likely spacegoing habitats would be nigh on invulnerable to big rocks because they could simply move themselves out of the way. They'd be vulnerable to smaller rocks, but that's what bulkheads are for.

Each external self-sustaining colony would, on its own, be vulnerable. But taken together, the species becomes practically indestructible.

SoRB