Will we ever become an interplanetary species? (1 Viewer)

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With budget constraints and an economy still recovering from the 2008 crash, the picture for US space exploration in coming years looks to still be in limbo. We do not know what to expect with a Trump presidency and how this will effect future efforts. It's comforting to know that many private companies like SpaceX, Blue Origin, Virgin Galactic etc. are starting to launch bigger projects and some even are talking about make it a priority that we start to think about colonizing another planet.

I hate to say it, but I think the real "space race" will probably occur long after i'm gone--maybe at some point in the 22nd century. I do think that man made climate change is a reason to not only be wary of our fragile species effect on our planet's ecosystem, but to take into consideration what humans could do to another planet as well. If we have gone past the point of no return in damage to our planet, we might only have a matter of time before conditions start to worsen--sea level rise, crop failure, etc. This is why as goofy as "Interstellar" may have been in an acting sense, the "blight" scenario may not have been far off.

I understand this is kind of an open ended title, but what are your thoughts on this? Will we ever successfully colonize Mars or even Titan? My thoughts are that by the 2030's or 2040's we will have an outpost on both the mooon and on Mars.
 
With budget constraints and an economy still recovering from the 2008 crash, the picture for US space exploration in coming years looks to still be in limbo. We do not know what to expect with a Trump presidency and how this will effect future efforts. It's comforting to know that many private companies like SpaceX, Blue Origin, Virgin Galactic etc. are starting to launch bigger projects and some even are talking about make it a priority that we start to think about colonizing another planet.

I hate to say it, but I think the real "space race" will probably occur long after i'm gone--maybe at some point in the 22nd century. I do think that man made climate change is a reason to not only be wary of our fragile species effect on our planet's ecosystem, but to take into consideration what humans could do to another planet as well. If we have gone past the point of no return in damage to our planet, we might only have a matter of time before conditions start to worsen--sea level rise, crop failure, etc. This is why as goofy as "Interstellar" may have been in an acting sense, the "blight" scenario may not have been far off.

I understand this is kind of an open ended title, but what are your thoughts on this? Will we ever successfully colonize Mars or even Titan? My thoughts are that by the 2030's or 2040's we will have an outpost on both the mooon and on Mars.

I would think Mars would happen within our lifetime, I think it'd be a lot like the movies in terms of companies owning colonies for mining resources and not countries.

The colonization process wouldn't be impossible, the traveling beyond mars is what would be a little dicey.

It takes 6-8 months just to get to Mars.
 
With budget constraints and an economy still recovering from the 2008 crash, the picture for US space exploration in coming years looks to still be in limbo. We do not know what to expect with a Drumpf presidency and how this will effect future efforts. It's comforting to know that many private companies like SpaceX, Blue Origin, Virgin Galactic etc. are starting to launch bigger projects and some even are talking about make it a priority that we start to think about colonizing another planet.

I hate to say it, but I think the real "space race" will probably occur long after i'm gone--maybe at some point in the 22nd century. I do think that man made climate change is a reason to not only be wary of our fragile species effect on our planet's ecosystem, but to take into consideration what humans could do to another planet as well. If we have gone past the point of no return in damage to our planet, we might only have a matter of time before conditions start to worsen--sea level rise, crop failure, etc. This is why as goofy as "Interstellar" may have been in an acting sense, the "blight" scenario may not have been far off.

I understand this is kind of an open ended title, but what are your thoughts on this? Will we ever successfully colonize Mars or even Titan? My thoughts are that by the 2030's or 2040's we will have an outpost on both the mooon and on Mars.

You start watching Mars yet? They're giving great explanations on the challenges needed to get there and colonize it along w/ showing what they're trying to develop to overcome them. I do believe we'll colonize Mars and other moons in our solar system. The real challenge is developing the technology needed to reach other systems in our galaxy. If wormholes do exist and we can figure out how to use them, to me that is our best bet.
 
I think Space exploration is a great way for the military industrial complex to be satisfied without humans having to kill one another.


You get the spending and innovation of war without all the death and destruction.

The public should love spending money on space exploration.
 
I'm very pro space. We need to keep putting money into it, we should get people to and from mars. I wouldn't mind a return trip to the moon.

We need to develop new propulsion technology. As of now, we still only have one basic way to escape Earth's gravity. But there may be more options for propulsion while in space.
 
You start watching Mars yet? They're giving great explanations on the challenges needed to get there and colonize it along w/ showing what they're trying to develop to overcome them.
Since you bought up this show, if they were trying to inspire people to want to go to Mars, they are doing it wrong! They are being as honest as they can be about space travel and not sugar coating anything, they are highlighting how dangerous space travel is to us. All I am seeing is that it takes an infinite amount of thing to go right for a successful mission and only one thing to go wrong for mission failure.
 
Since you bought up this show, if they were trying to inspire people to want to go to Mars, they are doing it wrong! They are being as honest as they can be about space travel and not sugar coating anything, they are highlighting how dangerous space travel is to us. All I am seeing is that it takes an infinite amount of thing to go right for a successful mission and only one thing to go wrong for mission failure.

Every astronaut from the get go in the 60's knew full well the risks involved and ppl have been signing up to be astronauts since then. Disasters like the Challenger haven't stopped the dream of space exploration, and when people were signing up for Mars One, they knew that it would be a 1 way trip and that everything is still being figured out.
 
Whether we find life there or not, I think we should declare Jupiter an enemy planet.

Sent from my Nexus 5X using Tapatalk
 
Well, now, don't you tell me to smile
You stick around I'll make it worth your while
My number's beyond what you can dial
Maybe it's because we're so versatile
 
I’m all in favor of exploring and researching space, as I think there’s a lot that can be learned, but as far as the idea of colonizing a permanent settlement, the odds are heavily stacked against this ever happening. And just to be clear, this is coming from someone who grew up on and loves Star Wars and sci-fi and the idea of interstellar travel, but the reality is that it definitely won’t happen in my lifetime and barring extreme, fantastic scientific advances it won’t ever happen. From a logistical standpoint, we’d first have to find a suitable planet to colonize, and then we’d have to come up with a way to travel to extreme reaches of the universe -- light-speed or warp speed or worm holes. Mars would “only” take about six months to travel to, but it’s a cold, desolate rock currently completely void of life, and the other planets in our solar system are even more hostile to life, so we’d have to look elsewhere. The problem is that the next closest solar system, Alpha Centauri, would take about 165,000 years to travel to by current technology – imagine what it would take to create a vessel that could provide 165,000 years worth of supplies, oxygen, fuel, etc.

But the space travel would actually be the easy part – and for the sake of argument we can assume massive technological advances in interstellar travel. The issue is that even if we could travel anywhere in the universe we wanted to, the likelihood of finding another planet that could sustain us is just infinitesimally small. The basic problem is that the universe is simply incredibly hostile to life. It’s mostly a cold, radioactive vacuum, with our planet being a (or possibly the) rare exception in its vastness where the conditions allowed the rise of life. The hard reality in all this is that we are the result of 3.7 billion years of evolutionary perfection of life on this planet, which makes us perfectly suited for this planet, but only this planet. We’d have to find another planet with not just similar but almost identical gravitational pull, atmospheric composition, chemical composition, distance from its sun so as to be in the hospitable zone, etc., basically an exact copy of Earth or something very similar whereby any and all variations from Earth would have to be benign. The odds of that happening are so ridiculous it’s pretty pointless to even consider it.
 
Jupiter is our Friend.... We better learn to become interplanetary.... we only have 5 billion years left here... But we won't last until then.

I hope that we find life in outer space in my lifetime...
 
I'm very pro space. We need to keep putting money into it, we should get people to and from mars. I wouldn't mind a return trip to the moon.

We need to develop new propulsion technology. As of now, we still only have one basic way to escape Earth's gravity. But there may be more options for propulsion while in space.

I'm sure you've heard of it before, but..The EM drive is very intriguing

Either we're on the verge of a breakthrough in quantum mechanics or it is an anomaly we'll never be able to explain. Either way, exciting stuff:

NASA Made an EmDrive, and It Works, But We Still Don


ETA: I think space tourism will really take off, no pun intended, within the next 20-30 years. At the very least, of the low earth orbit type. There are many companies that see it as a profitable venture. Check out Moon Express, the company whose founder wants to start working with Elon Musk on getting humans to Mars.
 
Every astronaut from the get go in the 60's knew full well the risks involved and ppl have been signing up to be astronauts since then. Disasters like the Challenger haven't stopped the dream of space exploration, and when people were signing up for Mars One, they knew that it would be a 1 way trip and that everything is still being figured out.

I get that, and it wasn't my intention to discount their bravery or sense for adventure. I was trying to contrast the fantasy of space exploration to the harsh reality of space exploration. I think, as a species, we still have much to learn and we are further from being an interplanetary species than we care to believe. We still haven't figured out how to live on this planet yet, much less get to another one.
 
I get that, and it wasn't my intention to discount their bravery or sense for adventure. I was trying to contrast the fantasy of space exploration to the harsh reality of space exploration. I think, as a species, we still have much to learn and we are further from being an interplanetary species than we care to believe. We still haven't figured out how to live on this planet yet, much less get to another one.

how different would you say we are to our Bronze Age forebears as they contemplated sea travel?
 

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