
Sara Seager and the search for habitable exoplanets - jacobheric
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/12/07/magazine/the-world-sees-me-as-the-one-who-will-find-another-earth.html
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gkya
Is there any concrete possibility of colonising another planet? Here in the
comments for similar stories I see lots of scifi talk about the topic but
little concrete arguments other than some amateur maths and physics. I know me
some astronomy and even colonised Mars seems pipe dreams to me. Am I wrong?

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sdfin
Throwing money at searching habitable planets that are light years away is
what I'd call a terrible sense of what's a priority. We have immediate
problems on Earth right now, like getting enough energy, contamination,
millions of people living in poverty, and various illnesses that don't have a
satisfactory treatment. Directing money and efforts to analyze objects that
are light years away is complete madness, according to my subjective opinion.

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sdfin
I'd like to read the downvoters arguments agains what I wrote. I love sci-fi,
I think that eventually humanity could colonize other planets, do
terraforming, build an intergalactic civilizations, etcetera... I just said
that that's not a priority now. Right now we are polluting and depleting the
planet, and we have to fix that before thinking about expanding to other
planets. If we destroy the Earth we won't be able to do that.

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dogma1138
You need to feed the imagination and inspiration otherwise you don't have
anything to strive for.

Same can be said about the vast majority of space related exploration.

But that argument doesn't hold water space exploration isn't even a rounding
error in the budget of most nations including the US, not to mention their
GDP.

And the technology developed for it is then used to improve life here on earth
for a lot of people.

The ROI on NASA and other similar agencies world wide is pretty huge.

And even if it wasn't the 250m for a new space telescope won't improve the
life of that many people.

Before you talk about cutting space travel maybe it's worth talking about not
making another iPhone yet alone buying 2-3 fewer fighter jets.

One stealth bomber that will be (and is already) obsolete before the US would
have to fight a war in which it might actually provide some advantage costs as
much as sending an SUV sized rover to mars. And unlike a B2 bomber or its
replacement the technology for Curiosity isn't classified for the next 10000
years.

