Posted on 05/05/2017 7:27:22 AM PDT by Phlap
Nope...some will stay and vegetate on the earthball, but some will emigrate to space, with "evil capitalism" providing the means. Elon Musk and SpaceX are leading the charge.
I agree more with Hawking than not. I suspect that in a couple of centuries, there will be more humans off earth than on it.
Babylon 5 and others showed how that can be done by spacefaring species. Mass drivers routinely used to send cargo between satellites and ships get used to throw mass at high speeds onto planets, destroying them like multiple major meteor strikes would at low cost to the space farers.
I think the threat of this was used in “The Moon is a Harsh Mistress” to get independence from Earth.
“A world out of time” by Niven had a gas giant powered atmospheric rocket used to move Neptune in a controlled orbit to then move the Earth after the Sun was pushed to red giant phase early in an interstellar war.
Everything else aside, the man could think up EPIC scifi.
An indication of liberal hubris, that only socialism will “save” humanity.
That book is just one of many to point out what I am describing. I was thinking of it and the others when I posted.
One world government or escaping the earth. What a genius.
Really turned me off to what was otherwise a pretty good book. Too bad the author had no one to tell him he was wrong...
In reality there is no advantage to “going to Mars”. In the absence of a magnetic field the planet cannot be “terreformed”. So there is no advantage to growing potatoes on Mars over growing potatoes on a platform in space. In fact, Mars just adds a gravity well into the equation making the potatoes just that much more “expensive”. The only thing Mars offers is gravity and that can be simulated with angular momentum. No reason to go to Mars whatsoever outside of archeology and anthropology.
All a "generation ship" is is a space habitat with a drive system. Space habitats will be among the very first fruits of man in space.
Once the tech has developed sufficiently to be "semi-closed", I suspect that some humans will say "who needs planets". Once "habitat civilization" reaches the Oort cloud, it is pretty much a given that some will take the jump to the Oort cloud of the nearest star system.
What a bunch of clap trap....at the speed of light it would take five years to get to the closest object outside our solar system. Can one imagine the cost. It’s not even known one can even obtain the SOL!!!
The guy is a philosophical dunce. Before we discovered that time and space itself had a beginning the theists had already realized that God transcended both. Atheism had asserted that the universe did not need a cause because it always existed (Aristotle and others agreed the universe always existed but realized it still needed a transcended cause even on that view). The theist view was confirmed. The Atheist view was falsified. Hawking is trying to assert that the universe did not need a cause because there was no time for it to have had one. But the fact there was no time for it to have had one does not absolve it from the need for a cause, it simply rules out that the cause could be one that happened before it in time. Thus the cause was from outside of time and space.
Recently my reading had me wondering about the “UFO” phenomenon. I find it curious that “believers” claim our detonation of nuclear weapons attracted them. If you look at the history of the whole thing there was almost no interest in UFOs during the war. Sure there were observations of “foo fighters” but these were not even heard of until long after the fact. The real peak in UFO sightings comes AFTER the war.
Sure, a spacefaring civilization might want to put up sensors to detect when another civilization “became nuclear” but such a civilization would certainly know to detect that civilization BEFORE it did. If they could erect gamma detectors that could detect a detonation they could as well detect scattered gamma sources being collected into “near critical mass” lumps and would be smart enough to realize the value of the more sensitive detectors.
So IF we were “being visited” because of becoming a “nuclear civilization” those visits would likely have been much more prolific just before the fact. Now I grew up in the 50s and recall even then youngsters were encouraged to frequently scan the skies and identify every flying object. I still remember the cards everyone had to aid in “airplane identification” with silhouettes of all the planes. Imagine, during the war such efforts were really made. Folks educated highly in what to expect when they look up and reason to be scanning the skies at every opportunity. Yet during the war outside of a few “foo fighters” no UFOs were seen.
Yet years later when much less effort was being expended to encourage identifying objects in the sky there were thousands of sightings and Project Bluebook had to be started to look into it. Logically, I think one can rule out UFOs as actually existing. If there were UFOs and IF their interest in us were stimulated by our technology then there should have been a flurry of visits observed DURING the war when we had literally, armies in the air looking for them.
The UFO phenomenon comes not during a time of great unification of national purpose when it should have but afterwards during a time of upheaval and stress. That tells me the phenomenon says more about US than them.
Fellowship and the possibility of rescue is what will inhibit taking the “show on the road” to another star, in my opinion. If “space” is a lonely place inside the solar system how much more lonely will “light years from home” be? I think it is just an insurmountable threshold emotionally. Especially contrasted against the hope that if you had waited just a few more years the journey could take hours not centuries.
The best case is that a few humans get to live their lives on Mars, the sky above Venus, or under the ice of one of Saturn's moons. Then if Earth suffers a massive asteroid hit or supervolcano eruption there will still be some humans about.
However, it will always be much easier to move lots of people underground or underwater to survive even the worst imaginable disasters. There are probably already a sufficient number of fully stocked underground bunkers to guarantee the survival of the human race from anything short of the Earth spiraling into the Sun.
In any case, we are eventually going to be replaced by genetic mutants, cyborgs, and/or robots. So humanity is doomed regardless.
One only need to read a couple sentences. “In the beginning God...”
I think the hilarious thing is that the physicists are coming to grips with the reality that all these things they are describing as a “new idea” are found there in the first sentences of Genesis.
I read the other day that the smart people realize that there is a “lattice of space” that is necessary underlying the particle physics they pursue. Shades of Ether! Also, notice the theory they are using to pursue FTL drive starts with the old failed interferometer. Hilarious!
Don’t be so cynical. I am constantly amazed at what humans can survive. We seem to be the cockroaches of the universe. Have you seen “Touching the Void”? Great book/movie. No food, no water, broken leg (seriously broken, not just fibula fracture) the guy crawled miles at something like 17,000 feet elevation.
I've seen a dozen or so shows listing all the ways that humanity can be destroyed including gamma ray bursts, and yet I believe that even today we have in place what's necessary for humans to survive.
However, I do believe that technology will be the final undoing of humans. We will ultimately transform ourselves into something other than human either by integrating technology into our bodies or using retroviruses to selectively mutate our DNA.
Unless the Second Coming happens first, Jesus will be welcomed by the spawn of Dr. Frankenstein.
This year marks the 40th anniversary of the launch of Voyager. It has reached the edge of the solar system and has nothing to report.
I just don’t want to come down on the side of “the end of humanity” in response to an as yet unknown threat faced by folks with unknown resources. Maybe it is hope that makes us human.
I get where you are coming from in wondering whether by the time we are actually able to “greet a new, alien species” we may have become something even we wouldn’t recognize as human. I can’t help but wonder if that is not more likely than the “end of humanity”. Especially when I look at Berkeley...
Once mankind learns to build large habitats and adapts to life thereon (and he will), there will be no "loneliness" involved. A segment of mankind will decide "who needs planets", and spread throughout the solar system and beyond.
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