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From: Dave Garland on 16 May 2010 03:23 Peter Flass wrote: > What are we going to do, stay on this god-forsaken dirtball until the > sun turns into a red dwarf? Our species is maybe 250K years old. The sun has what, a couple of thousand M years left before red giant time. It's extremely unlikely that our species will still be around at that point. (And to pick a nit, I think that our star will become a white dwarf after the red giant phase, it's smaller stars that become red dwarfs.) In P2P, current uptime is usually considered the best predictor of future uptime. I.e., if you've been up for 250K years, bet on another 250K years. That seems excessively optimistic to me. Maybe an asteroid will snuff us, or we'll manage it without outside help, but we're not likely to be here in a million years, much less a billion. Dave
From: Morten Reistad on 16 May 2010 04:36 In article <ic4oi88z3l.fsf(a)verizon.net>, <despen(a)verizon.net> wrote: >Peter Flass <Peter_Flass(a)Yahoo.com> writes: > >> AES wrote: >> >>> >>> >>> [How can anybody on a _computer_ group, for God's sake, even think >>> that at this point a manned excursion to the Moon it's worth wasting >>> funds on.) >> >> What are we going to do, stay on this god-forsaken dirtball until the >> sun turns into a red dwarf? Or should we just wait until someone >> invents FTL drive? If we're not expanding, we're dying. > >When the sun starts expanding, Mars may warm up for a while. >Only then would sending a few people to Mars make any sense. Now, wrap your mind around the concept "deep time". This will take a _long_ time. As solar physicists theories go, Earth will be habitable for at least another billion years. If whoever inhabits the planet by then decides to go, they will not be humans. The distance in development is huge. Almost all mammals have developed the last 100 million years. A billion years ago there weren't any vertebrates, no fish, reptiles birds, dinosaurs or mammals. There were only rudimentary plants, none that we would recognise as such. Fungi ruled the world. So we have time to explore. Lots of time. >Even then, it can only be done for a short term extension of human >life, moving any significant part of the population is out of the >question. After Mars warms up, it will then be bathed in radiation >and after that get colder than it is now. No inner planets will >remain. > >Expansion into the Solar System makes no sense. > >To expand beyond the Solar System: > >1. Find habital planets. Either with telescopes, or robotic missions >or a combination of both. This may take thousands of years. > >2. If there is no life on a potential habital planet, we'd need to >"seed" that planet with life forms we are compatible with. This may >take tens of thousands of years and is still robotic missions. > >3. Once the target planet is ready, we can figure out whether to >send a live crew on a thousand year voyage or whether we just want >to send eggs or DNA to be raised by robots. > > >The future of space flight is clearly robotic. >Man is too fragile for the trip. Indeed. We also have a step 0; get our science and engineering up to the task. This is where we must spend the next century. Manned Mars missions now are just futile publicity stunts. I MAY accept a moon base; on the side facing away so they can use telescopes and other listening devices away from the noise the Earthlings keep making. -- mrr
From: Morten Reistad on 16 May 2010 04:27 In article <siegman-ADDAA2.18385315052010(a)bmedcfsc-srv02.tufts.ad.tufts.edu>, AES <siegman(a)stanford.edu> wrote: >In article <0cp3c7-02a.ln1(a)laptop.reistad.name>, > Morten Reistad <first(a)last.name> wrote: > >> >> We are on a decent track with unmanned missions. We just need to >> scale that up a thousandfold. >> > >And since unmanned missions are at least a thousand times less expensive >(or more productive) than manned missions . . . Exactly. And for such science (not engineering) projects humans onboard are mostly in the way. And to those who want to terraform Mars; we don't even know how to terraform Earth, or we would get rid of that pestering global warming problem in no time. When we DO know how to terraform places, we could try Mars. But not before exploring the place throughly for something useful, like surviving martian microbes that could produce oxygen. -- mrr
From: JF Mezei on 16 May 2010 05:45 Dave Garland wrote: > Our species is maybe 250K years old. The sun has what, a couple of > thousand M years left before red giant time. It's extremely unlikely > that our species will still be around at that point. Speak for yourself. I fully intend to be present when it happen to witness it. (OK, I may need a lift in the Tardis to do that :-( It is quite possible that our species will still be around. But it will have evolved significantly. Lifestyle will also be quite different, and we will have spread out to other planets by then. And the race will begin to split off and evolve slightly differently on each planet due to different environments. There will be periods of serious social unrest due to people from other planets not treated equally, not allowed to participate in Olympics because they would be at an unfair advantage (or disadvantage) because they grew up on a different planet with different gravity, different oxygen levels etc. And if certain portions of society develop telepathic skills (perhaps with the help of the Vorlons), there will also be much social unrest due to the telepaths feeling superior to the unevolved ones and the unevolved ones wanting to prevent telepaths from taking over the world.
From: JF Mezei on 16 May 2010 05:48
Lewis wrote: > Probably not, but civilization has effectively put a stop to any process > of natural selection. Further evolution will almost certainly come from > genetic engineering. Or we may stay the same. While modern medecine now allows many more "deffective" humans to live to reproduction age and thus pass on their genes (removing the "natural selection" portion of evolution), there is still the accidental evolution where new combinations create a better human being, and accidental modificatiosn create improvements. Not all accidental gene modifications (radiation etc) are bad. Some are good, but people don't notice/realise that a baby which looks good is an imperfect mix of the parent's genes. |