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Do you think we will ever inhabit other planets?

General discussions of the systemic, societal and civilisational effects of depletion.

Do you think we will ever inhabit other planets?

Unread postby DesuMaiden » Sun 12 Oct 2014, 13:03:06

I doubt we will ever inhabit other planets, because of the rate of which we are destroying this planet. We will probably end up destroying ourselves and this planet before we inhabit another planet. I doubt there will ever be a manned mission on Mars because we would probably have a population crash before we even develop the technology to reach Mars. I seriously doubt in the science fiction predictions that we will reach another planet and develop colonies on other planets. I think mankind would destroy itself before we ever colonize other planets.

Earth is the only planet we can inhabit. And we are destroying it. There are no other planets we can live on. Even if there was another Earth-like planet somewhere in this galaxy, it would be much too far away for us to reach. The rate at which we are destroying the planet means it is highly unlikely we will colonize another planet before we destroy ourselves.
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Re: Do you think we will ever inhabit other planets?

Unread postby Quinny » Sun 12 Oct 2014, 14:30:05

No
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Re: Do you think we will ever inhabit other planets?

Unread postby Withnail » Sun 12 Oct 2014, 14:30:27

No.

There are no other inhabitable planets in our solar system, and it is physically impossible to travel to other stars.
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Re: Do you think we will ever inhabit other planets?

Unread postby efarmer » Sun 12 Oct 2014, 16:14:23

I hope there is a cockaroach stowed away on Voyager, and that he is near absolute zero and in stasis and dreaming until he thaws out one fine day. As interstellar space hurtles by he dreams of sitting up on top of the kitchen stove with a mouth full of bacon grease in the darkness, ready to run if the kitchen light would snap on suddenly...
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Re: Do you think we will ever inhabit other planets?

Unread postby Quinny » Sun 12 Oct 2014, 17:34:52

I did realise - you're not crazy. Well not stupid anyway :)

pstarr wrote:
Quinny wrote:No
Actually my 'Yup.' was to DesuMaiden's 'Nope.' :lol:

We will never leave the earth again. (and no, I don't consider low-orbit leaving the earth)
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Re: Do you think we will ever inhabit other planets?

Unread postby GregT » Sun 12 Oct 2014, 18:03:19

With current technology, it would take 165,000 years to travel to the NEAREST star, Alpha Centauri.

So no. Not going to happen.
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Re: Do you think we will ever inhabit other planets?

Unread postby Dybbuk » Sun 12 Oct 2014, 18:08:43

I don't think we can really know the answer, because the future is so open-ended and unpredictable. But if forced to make a prediction, I would say that we won't inhabit other planets in the sense of colonizing them and making permanent homes there. Short-term manned bases are within the realm of possibility, though probably just for some minor scientific curiosity work.
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Re: Do you think we will ever inhabit other planets?

Unread postby vtsnowedin » Sun 12 Oct 2014, 18:56:50

GregT wrote:With current technology, it would take 165,000 years to travel to the NEAREST star, Alpha Centauri.

So no. Not going to happen.

You are correct under current technology. But some whippersnapper with double jointed thumps from playing phone app games is apt to invent a "Star Trek" warp drive any day now. :::
Captain Kirk: Engineering give me warp nine.
Scotty: Capn' I'm givin er all shes got. the Millennium crystals are over heating.
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Re: Do you think we will ever inhabit other planets?

Unread postby vtsnowedin » Sun 12 Oct 2014, 19:44:07

pstarr wrote:
vtsnowedin wrote:Scotty: Capn' I'm givin er all shes got. the Millennium crystals are over heating.

That's pronounced 'oe'r heating' :lol:

I tweaked it a wee bit so that so that the sassenaches might understand.
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Re: Do you think we will ever inhabit other planets?

Unread postby TrickyDick » Sun 12 Oct 2014, 20:17:53

I thought it was 'dylithium' crystals...

At any rate, it's been almost 50 years since we landed on the moon. Never went back. Can't go back, they tell us. Makes no sense to discuss Mars when we can't go to the Moon with regularity. Unfortunately, space travel does not get better over time, as happens in most American industries. It actually devolves over time.
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Re: Do you think we will ever inhabit other planets?

Unread postby JuanP » Sun 12 Oct 2014, 20:45:15

Re: Do you think we will ever inhabit other planets?
Not in time to save any of us here today from what's coming on this planet, that's for sure. In theory, it might have been possible eventually, but based on how much more focused we are on destroying the only planet we have so far, I highly doubt it will ever happen. We are a lot more likely to destroy our planet past the point it can sustain us before we terraform another. :-D
I like your curiosity, Desu.
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Re: Do you think we will ever inhabit other planets?

Unread postby sparky » Sun 12 Oct 2014, 23:42:50

.
The main problem is propulsion potential and cost
so far manned space exploration has been bound to our planetary system , this at very great cost
this was done using chemical fuelled reaction rockets , the technology is based on military technology centuries old .......it got us barely at the front gate ,
the next house is Mars and with the present technology is practically out of reach.

for time , cost and range , space exploration is awaiting a major physical breakthrough in propulsion
and /or cosmologic understanding of non 3d travel .

when the physicists have some good idea , it will then be the turn of the engineers to build some vehicle
then some ( a lot ) government money and testing , then exploration of likely objectives , then settlement
so far the physicists have not a clue on interstellar travel for living humans ,

the chances are rather dim , much to my personal chagrin .

the main probability is that for the next fifty years we are Earth bound ,
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Re: Do you think we will ever inhabit other planets?

Unread postby jedrider » Mon 13 Oct 2014, 00:57:46

Considering what we did to Earth, what would be the point?

We would have to have a never ending series of planets to exploit and only a magical technology could deliver that. We're still waiting for fusion I understand.
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Re: Do you think we will ever inhabit other planets?

Unread postby Shaved Monkey » Mon 13 Oct 2014, 02:55:19

I hope not for the sake of other planets

Space exploration was really just a politically palatable way of spending taxes for developing military tech.
It will continue if there is some kind of strategic advantage and someone can print enough money to make it happen profitably.

So I doubt it.
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Re: Do you think we will ever inhabit other planets?

Unread postby Tanada » Mon 13 Oct 2014, 06:25:05

You all have way to short of a historical viewpoint. Unless we go extinct humans will spread off this planet sooner or later. Maybe Elon Musk will pull it off this century, or maybe civilization will crash into a new dark age for 500 years before the next Renaissance and humanity will spread a thousand years from now. Either way our species has existed for tens of thousands of years, and unless we make ourselves extinct we will last for tens of thousands more. Tens of thousands of years is ample time for use to recover from peak oil and move outward.
Alfred Tennyson wrote:We are not now that strength which in old days
Moved earth and heaven, that which we are, we are;
One equal temper of heroic hearts,
Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will
To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.
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Re: Do you think we will ever inhabit other planets?

Unread postby KaiserJeep » Mon 13 Oct 2014, 06:39:21

Thank you, Tanada. I was waiting for someone to inject some reality into the whining.

Q: Do you think we will ever inhabit other planets?
A: That's not even the right question. There are no other local planets that are compatible with human life. And as others have pointed out, the energy required for star travel is prohibitively high.

Planets are not where anybody should want to live, anyway. They are uncontrolled, and full of diseases and parasites and predators. They are subject to weather events that kill people and destroy property. Worst of all, the one planet suitable for mankind in this solar system is overpopulated with humans already, and rapidly swirling around the drain at present. Worst of all, planets have limited supplies of water, food, raw materials for industries, and energy. Lastly, they have space limitations that will constrain the human species to a population somewhere in the billions, or at very best the tens of billions.

I am confident that we will occupy space off this world. I will touch briefly on a topic, a single paragraph, and then give anyone interested a line of further research.

The first space habitats were constructed in Low Earth Orbits. They were temporary homes, the US SpaceLab and the Russian Mir space "stations". LEO is also the logical place for the first permanent space habitats - which may or may not include the present International Space Station. LEO is the logical place to exploit space when limited to vehicles and habitats constructed on the surface of the Earth. The logical culmination is dozens - perhaps hundreds of habitats in LEO, because it is close, easy and cheap to access, and yet still has access to microgravity and pretty hard vacuums, as well as solar energy - all three being of interest in the manufacturing of new crystals, composite materials, and nanostructures such as Buckyballs. (Read up on the ISS experiments past, present, and planned for the future, then search "Bigelow Aerospace".)

Almost as accessible as LEO are the Lagrange points in the Earth/moon system. There are five points where the Earth/Moon gravity is in equilibrium, and no fuel is required for station-keeping, as it is in LEO. These are numbered L1 through L5 as follows:
Image
....where M1 is the Earth and M2 the Earth's Moon (not to scale, of course).

L4 and L5 are the most useful of these and sometime in the next few decades I expect to see habitats constructed at both, using raw materials from the near-Earth asteroids (of which over 7000 have been identified so far). There are effectively unlimited water and materials off-Earth already, including the asteroid belt and Trojan asteroids (both nickel-iron and carbonaceous bodies), water ice from the rings of Saturn (more water than on Earth, and 99.9% pure), even more water (more than millions of planets the size of Earth) in the Oort Cloud, and the endless 24X7 solar energy in orbit. In fact there has been an active Engineering effort at designing these space habitats, an organization called the "L5 Society" since the 1970's. (Further reading would be "O'Neill Colony", "Asteroid Mining", "Saturn's Rings", "Oort Cloud", etc.).

I am virtually certain that once we have a foothold in space, that within the next two centuries, the exponential population growth that is stalling out from resource depletion on Earth will resume in the space of our own Solar System. I estimate the human carrying capacity of the Solar System - based just on the materials discovered already - to be in the hundreds of Trillions.

It is inevitable, it will happen, and we are on the verge already. The only question being, will the end of cheap oil cause some catastrophe such as a nuclear war that will interrupt the steady progress towards the goals I have described, that is occurring today, without any of you even noticing. In other words, I am questioning whether or not we will remain alive long enough to escape the dirty and dangerous place we inhabit today.

After we leave, nobody should care about this planet or any other, ever again. Only a fool would live on the surface of a world when the alternative is a 100% human designed and human constructed space habitat.
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Resistance is Futile, YOU will be Assimilated.

Warning: Messages timestamped before April 1, 2016, 06:00 PST were posted by the unmodified human KaiserJeep 1.0
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