Things I Take For Granted: Part I

[Person Man]

Here are my thoughts:

>Eventually and probably even if our society collapses, a new one will take its place and they will explore and settle deep space. I do not think people will go extinct anytime soon and I do not think people will give up technology for any more than a couple of generations. One thing I think is probably accurate about the game Fallout is the timeframe they have technology and civilization reemerging in a worst case scenario. All of this being said, I'm guessing people will have visited Mars by 2050, the Outer Solar System by 2100, and the Proxima system by 2400-2500 if our civilization is the one that does. If ours doesn't do it, maybe the next civilization will.

>Other things to consider besides being able to go far enough fast enough is that there are hazards in space such as solar radiation and the deleterious effects of microgravity on astronauts. These are hurdles that can probably be solved by getting spaceships big enough to have some sort of radiation shielding and some sort of centrifuge-based artificial gravity. Another way to protect against the rigors of space travel and to make the decades/centuries long missions feasible would be life extension technology regarding cellular repair, in vivos gene editing, and regenerative medicine. This would all be needed for people to actually be able to go some where. All in all, there IS a way to get to at least the closest 100 or 1000 stars to us. Which leads me to my biggest concern.


> Where will we go? Beyond Mars, the Asteroid belt, maybe the sky of Venus, or a large moon on Saturn or Jupiter, there really isn't anywhere that we know of that humans could visit. Maybe engineering projects such as JWST and the ELST will be able to finish the investigations started by Kepler and COROT and find actual planets that we can visit. There are, at this time, with our limited ability to find these planets, several dozen planets that could be habitable. If the next generation of space telescopes can confirm that these planets have a reasonable thick and stable atmosphere, maybe we know where can aspire to get to. Even if these planets don't necessarily have breathable atmospheres because they either don't have life, or very primitive or weird complex life. In fact, it would be less of an ethical and safety issue if we ended up on a dead world that averaged 0-100 F, a 90%+ CO2 atmosphere the same as either being at 25000 feet above sea level or 1000 feet underwater, than it would be to visit a planet that was not only perfectly habitable, but inhabited. So yeah. Finding a place to actually go is important.

> Even if we never figure out how to send humans past 1-100 AUs from Earth and we never find a planet interesting enough to travel a 1E14 miles to, there is still the opportunity to colonize space by building giant space stations, asteroid mining facilities, and orbital solar power stations. That would be a way our current civilization could solve its raw material and energy needs without causing a Malthusian resource depletion/environmental degradation issue.

> So TLDR-
1) People and one civilization or another will be around for thousands of years, if not more. Time is on our side.
2) There is technology that can make deep space colonization possible and some technology that is essential to deep space colonization that might be an easier reach than "warp drives".
3) We need to figure out what we want to do and where we can go.
4) There's other things we can do in our solar system if there is no reason to actually leave it.

[Person Man]

A lot of you are spending too much time thinking about about "getting to Mars" and not enough about "getting a job."

On the contrary, thinking about other planets is the only thing that keeps me sane at work.

I'm guessing if you were more competitive with continuous mathematics, you would have gone into Aerospace Engineering or Applied Physics? It's never too late to go back if you don't get the job you want. You appear to go to a good enough school that you will get a job, but if you don't like your job, and you don't have a family in 5 years, consider this.

"Just do it" isn't just a catchy phrase.

[Person Man]

Why go to space?  it seems there's nothing out there

Except for all of the energy and “metals”(Included is stuff like Graphene)  we will ever need.

[Person Man]

     Disagree. Mars might be feasible one day, but there are considerable logistical obstacles to spreading much beyond that, let alone outside of the solar system altogether.

Like I said, a lot of the Scientific hurdles have nothing to do with space travel per se.

[Person Man]

Nonetheless, these poll results do help me to contextualize some of the political opinions I often see being expressed on this forum (and elsewhere). If you seriously think the Earth itself is humanity's final frontier, you are probably predisposed to wring your hands about billionaire spaceflights and minor ecological problems. Just know that to the rest of us, you sound like the people who said desktop computers would be "little more than a novelty."

It just strikes me as frivolous and frankly perverse to prioritize wild, distant fantasies over the things we need right here and right now to lead good lives. Even if we take everything you say as certain (which, frankly, you should be clear that this level of certainty is simply not supported, and you'd really be better off admitting that you're professing it as an article of faith like the rest of us do with other things), it's not exactly clear why the "sacrifices" needed to get there are worth it right now. Churchill's point that the good of distant future generations doesn't justify putting the current generation through untold misery was of course intended as a conservative argument against Stalinism, but it works just as well as a social-democratic argument against your technolibertarianism. If we have to let Earth rot away for a century for the vague promise of one day reaching for the stars, then frankly I'd just rather stay put.

There is a limit of what good government can give us if it has no means to do more.