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

I don't see much improvement unless some way to get out of this solar system is found.

Without some realistic version of FTL, I think the planet will pretty much do what it has always done: eat it's young.

Now, I'm not stupid enough to believe that the Universe deserves a bunch of bored loonies planting themselves on any habitable planet, trying to create their own utopias...

but I'm bored enough, of the rat race of ignorant b****ds recreating the same historical situations over and over again, to wish to believe that the Universe may be waiting for us to get off our butts.

They promised us a Future and all we got was regurgitated Past.

I too hope that we can some day get off this planet. We discoverd most of what there is already!

Hey, what's wrong with this solar system. Read the Red, Blue, and Green Mars series or look at some of the speculative fiction about the LeGrange points. Most of them have a central theme of a better form of government or society once we break free of this gravity well and it's repressions (politcal, societal, and physical). Terraforming is a living breathing science not to mention genetically changing man to live in another environment. There are dozens of possibilities and places all we need is the will.

Not to mention that we know more about the moon than we do about the bottom of the ocean.

MMmm..
Think that spending massive amounts of fuel and resources on firing things into space is only going to hasten the decline of the quality of life on this planet.

Dont forget that the money to do this comes from taxes, your spending, and eventually from people in underdeveloped nations working their fingers to the bone in order to provide the west with useless trivia for its insatiable markets.

Maybe they should just fire thereselves into space and leave us to worry about working together to improve everyones standard of living.



Winds me up, it really does..

I thought from the title this was going to be about the possibility of somebody coming along to this planet Earth and colonising us.

That would seem to be one of our best hopes for survival since any civilisation sophisticated ebough to have developed intergalactic travel would have had to have evolved a social system far superior to those which currently exist on earth and seem to be leading to mass extinctions rather than the possibility of looking outwards.

Lets hope they arrive in time.

Go back in time and tell the Vikings or Columbus not to explore and colonise in order to save the native population. Tell the British to leave Australia alone and leave it for the first nations. That way we could have all stayed and stagnated in Europe and have had vast reserves of land and resources under the feet of noble savages who had an infant mortality of 90%. Not to mention the cultural, political, and social freedoms that produced the scientific and technologial world you wallow in but hate.

Ackalon, I wasn't talking about under our current space technology.

I often think the whole fad of shooting things into space was not a very good idea.

Not to mention, every time I see a lift off I see old black and white footage of V2s superimposed in my mind.

No, I hope that some garden shed tinkerer will discover a way to get us out of this general galactic area without smoke and smog and flames and billions of dollars.

I hope we can get everyone off.

I think Earth needs a rest. I think the whole solar system would rest easier with us gone.

I'll drink to that..
Did you know that the Hari Krishnas think that they have cracked it

Hey, and who said that I hated anything

Sooner or later it'll all go my way anyway..

Gone to where though? That would only work if we left no-one behind to carry on the madness. It would also depend on being different people before we left - otherwise we'd just start up the whole nonsense-fest again when we got where we were going.

I can't recomend the Red (Blue, Green) Mars trilogy by Kim Stanley Robinson enough. It follows forward the thread of history that shows when you separate yourself far enough from the prevailing economic and political ills you are bound to come up with a better system. I'm amazed it hasn't become a rallying point for the anti-Globalization crowd.
Colonization of the solar system is within our technological grasp now and it will mean a better life for those who stay. Where do you think the next source of resources (physical and otherwise) will come from? Once you are out of our gravity well, everything you do is *clean*<!> The only other place around here where you can start a bloodless economic revolution is in Antarctica and Robinson has looked at that too.

Instead of blasting off into space using enormous amounts of precious resources, there is the option of using an elevator attached by the cable between earth and an orbiting satelite. I believe an idea of using enormous guy ropes with an elevator at the centre would be more practical, this would then merely involve a trip of 50 miles straight up somewhat like a Sunday drive after lunch before your into space.

Groovy eh!

Yes! Arthur C. Clarke wrote about it and it is used in the Robinson trilogy. As we speak it is being investigated as a possibility by several space agencies. What a fantastic idea, using gravity to power an elevator. *That's* the kind of thinking that will power our future. Incidentally Clarke also thought and wrote of the geosynchronous satellite decades before it happened.

But how are you meant to discover anywhere new if you need to aleady have a cable leading there to get there? And if you don't want us keep blasting vessels into space how do you propose to get a cable out there anyway? You're crazy!

The same technology we use to put a communication satellite into orbit would be used to place one end of the elevator in place. It would be on or near the equator to maximize the centrifical spin needed to offset gravity. Once the *cable* was in place the weight of the freight going down would compensate for the weight going up. Solar energy would make up the small difference. Once in orbit getting to another planet or the resource rich asteroids, comets, and moons would be simple and pollution free. There would be no need to process anything on Earth, it would be easier in space. Those of us who stay would receive finished products, water, or things that are unmakeable in the gravity well like pharmaseuticals. The colonies in space or on other planets would be economically able to develop their own way of life, society, and economics. Much like North America and other *colonised* places.

So you propose to filthy up space instead of our planet? What alot of respect you must have for the martians And don't forget that space junk in our orbit will eventually crash back down to Earth!
Plus, why would we want to create new cultures and economic systems anyway?

*filthy up space*? Do you have any concept of the infinity of near vacuum a short distance away? Do you think that space colonization would *litter*? I'm not talking about earth orbit, I'm talking about the vastness of the solar system. If you want to keep all cultures and economic systems they depend on growth which is limited by this earth. If not you need another place to grow in without rules and limits. Ultimately the only other choice is stagnation, no growth, and the continuation of a system that feeds on itself. Movement and colonisation has been the way of the past, why not the future?

As to the *Martians* one of the very serious considerations of present exploration of Mars is that we don't contaminate it with our lifeforms while we try to find even the tiniest hint of others. If others are found it is generally accepted the *Terrafoming* would not take place in respect of that life.

Well said, tonsil

I personally think it's our manifest destiny to get off this planet. There are too many of us for it, and it's a natural (and very fine) human urge to explore and discover new things.

One of the problems of the so-called "consumer society" that exists in all the world's developed nations is that it has sapped our will to do anything collectively. We forget that if we want to achieve great things, we have to have a desire to put our collective will and means together or it *will* *not* *happen*.