We need to go into space.

It may take a while, but the earth will inevitably become uninhabitable, and when it does, we will need to find another planet to live on, or it will mean the end of our species.

We've got people working on this. Prject to see if we could colonize a planet like, say, Mars, a potential moon colony, the ISS.

My name is Cu Chulainn. Beside the raging sea I am left to moan. Sorrow I am, for I brought down my only son.

Eventually, we do. But for the moment being, space colonization is technologically and economically unfeasible - much better to explore the solar system with automatic probes and concentrate on developing the necessary infrastructure.

The fact that many of the issues involved are the same that we need to solve in order to colonize further areas of Earth and stave off the impeding ecological disaster is an incentive to do that anyway...

Also, in before the today's xkcd comic

edited 2nd May '11 8:54:25 AM by Carciofus

But they seem to know where they are going, the ones who walk away from Omelas.

ninja'd

edited 2nd May '11 8:45:21 AM by Fish1

About escaping the solar system: we need to face one problem at a time. Leaving the solar system is likely to be many orders of magnitude more difficult than colonizing it, which is already harder than what we can expect to achieve in the foreseeable future.

Otherwise, we may as well raise now the issue of what we will do in order to escape the universe's heat death...

edited 2nd May '11 8:48:05 AM by Carciofus

But they seem to know where they are going, the ones who walk away from Omelas.

Check out the link to the Kepler mission in my sig. They're already finding "Earth-like" planets.

"You can only come to the morning through the shadows."

I hope we do find a way to escape the heat death of the universe. It would be the CMOA to end all CMO As.

Yeah, but if we do, I think that it is safe to say that we will use some sort of technique far beyond what we can even begin to speculate about now.

There are more urgent problems, and ones about which we can reasonably expect to make some progress. But I agree that it's a fun topic to think about.

edited 2nd May '11 8:52:53 AM by Carciofus

But they seem to know where they are going, the ones who walk away from Omelas.

Great minds such as Stephen Hawking agree with you.

I like the idea, but.... We best make sure we don't have space Holocausts first off. I think we need far more expansive human rights on Earth too, in fact even in most progressive countries. Not to mention disease and pain and depression. We don't want to be spreading yet, not like this. Life sucks for far too many people, subjecting our descendents to this is unethical.

edited 2nd May '11 8:57:57 AM by LoveHappiness

"Had Mother Nature been a real parent, she would have been in jail for child abuse and murder." -Nick Bostrom

SPAAAAAAAACE.

</obligatory>

We'll get into space properly either eventually or not at all. It depends whether we can significantly reduce the cost of getting shit into space.

edited 2nd May '11 9:02:08 AM by pagad

With cannon shot and gun blast smash the alien. With laser beam and searing plasma scatter the alien to the stars.

The problem is that in the short and medium term, it's difficult to see what return manned space exploration gives us that robot probes and satellites do not also give at less cost and risk. The economic cost/benefit ration is hard to defend for manned space flight, which is significantly more expensive and difficult than unmanned. It's actually quite likely that for the next decade or two, we will invest fewer resources in manned space exploration, esp. now that the space shuttle is out of service and no replacement is on line yet. NASA has plans for a replacement, but it's still in the development stage, and I personally have doubts that it will ever get deployed. I wish it were otherwise.

This is just one of the problems - the most immediate one, yes, but neither the only one nor - I think - the hardest.

Human beings, as they are now, are just not built to survive the environments of space or of most planets. Modern-day spaceships can ensure the continued good health of astronauts only for limited amounts of time, and only through a very complex regime, and are dependent on earth-supplied materials; furthermore, terraforming projects are only theoretical at this point.

To colonize extraterrestrial environments we first need to be able to either control our environments to a far greater degree of precision that we can now, or to modify the human body to allow it to survive a much wider range of environments, or some combination of the two.

This is not going to be easy.

edited 2nd May '11 9:13:12 AM by Carciofus

But they seem to know where they are going, the ones who walk away from Omelas.

...not because they are easy, but because they are hard, because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one which we intend to win, and the others, too.

Most of what we need to do, we know how to do, it's just a matter of getting it done.

Of course, the amusing thing is if we start doing it, then we render it all obsolete before we can recall anything...leapfrog!

That's a fine sentiment and all, but we have a limited amount of resources and a number of looming problems.

I am not opposed to investing a reasonable amount in space exploration; but let's not try crossing the Ocean before we have found out how to preserve aliments.

Yeah, no. Take terraforming, for example: we have some vague ideas about how it could be done, but we just know too little about climatology or system ecology to be able to attempt something like that with a reasonable level of confidence in the results. And terraforming, say, Mars*

^{Which would be a comparatively easy test case: try Venus if you dare.}

is way too big, costly, dangerous and time-consuming a project to just try it again and again until we get it right.

edited 2nd May '11 9:31:30 AM by Carciofus

But they seem to know where they are going, the ones who walk away from Omelas.

You won't accomplish anything with a reasonable investment.

Sometimes you have to burn your boats behind you.

But as I said, it could just go in unexpected directions anyway, so who knows what the right thing to do is? Not like any of us ARE in the position to make any decisions.

And no, we should not terraform Mars, that would be stupid. Only people who have no idea of the challenges think THAT is worth doing. I'm sure they're happy with their stories, but then there are plenty of stories that believe there were great civilizations there. Those are junk, ignore them. Ignore the planet itself unless you have some real use for it.

edited 2nd May '11 9:33:56 AM by blueharp

Of course, if we burn our boats behind us there's a heightened risk of drowning. Then we get eaten by crocodiles.

Can't really put all our eggs in one basket with this space colonisation thing, especially during a global recession.

edited 2nd May '11 9:36:01 AM by DanEile

"You can only come to the morning through the shadows."

Can't leave all our eggs in one basket either.

But the risk of burning our boats behind us would be Starvation over drowning. Possibly exploding if you burn the boat while on it.

edited 2nd May '11 9:39:04 AM by blueharp

I will accomplish everything I set my mind up to, with a reasonable investment and a sensible time-scale and proper risk estimation. Slow and safe beats quick and risky any day.

And burning the boats behind you is a dumb move, as would be investing most of the resources of the mainland in some uncertain colonization business and hoping about things going in some vague "unexpected direction".

There is a place for high-risk enterprises, and there is a place for enterprises which require a significant fraction of Earth's GDP. These places are different.

edited 2nd May '11 9:40:58 AM by Carciofus

But they seem to know where they are going, the ones who walk away from Omelas.

I think we've reached as far as we can with space exploration at the moment without a significant technological boost. I don't think we'll see a Martian landing within the next 50 years.

With cannon shot and gun blast smash the alien. With laser beam and searing plasma scatter the alien to the stars.

@ Dan Eile, Re: your sig. I know I am!

Along with the issues with terraforming mentioned above are the continuous roadblocks run into with another concept, despite the backing of folks like Hawking and the comparative amount of progress made with research. When the press get to blog on it, the conclusion tends to be: "Don't get your hopes up. It's hard enough on Earth after all."

edited 2nd May '11 9:43:23 AM by TheSollerodFascist

I think you underestimate the value of commitment to a task, as well as the magnitude of scale. It'll take a considerable effort to accomplish anything, even if you go by baby-steps, there will be a lot. And barring some unlikely chance, there will be some point where the safety line will be gone.

Admittedly, it may happen that all of that investment would be obsoleted through some leapfrog of technology, but that itself is taking a gamble.

Doesn't matter, none of us is likely to live to see any real choice. If that happens, it'll be because somebody did something entirely unexpected, or we find some way to significantly prolong life.

edited 2nd May '11 9:44:57 AM by blueharp

We need carbon nanotubes!

I'm sort-of serious. If we can get long carbon nanotube manufacturing working properly, that leads to space elevators, which leads to cheap LEO transport, which leads to SPAAAAAAAACE. (Or at least, makes SPAAAAAAAACE a far easier proposition).

Is there a material engineer in the house?

edited 2nd May '11 9:53:02 AM by Yej

Da Rules excuse all the inaccuracy in the world. Listen to them, not me.

I think we'll need space colonization loooooong before the earth becomes uninhabbitable. The human population keeps growing, and we'll reach a point which we'll need more space and/or resources than what we'll find on earth.

something

That's not how demography works. Malthusian disasters have been predicted for a long, long time, and they never happened; instead, there have been many examples of populations (many island populations, for example, or some tribes of hunters-gatherers) which kept themselves stable for long periods of time in order to avoid resource depletion.

In any case, we are nowhere close to true overpopulation. Tell me again about overpopulation when we have colonized all deserts, the surface of all oceans, the oceans themselves, and perhaps even all Earth's crust for all of its 30 km of depth, and I will be more interested.

As an happy advantage, doing these things would allow us to develop, in a relatively safe environment, much of the technology that we will eventually need for space colonization...

edited 2nd May '11 10:06:23 AM by Carciofus

But they seem to know where they are going, the ones who walk away from Omelas.

I still think that we can start on the first steps of terraforming mars/venus right now. We already know of several extremophile bacteria that might survive the environments, all we have to do is tweak them a bit (or find ones we already know of) to start producing waste gasses that are benificial to normal life and then spamming the planets with cheapie carriers.

And I think that the first steps to re-starting mars's magnetic field might be feasabile within our lifetime. Assloads of burrowing nukes to reintroduce some heat to the core and re-liquify things might make a good start.