Missions like Kepler are what finally set me against human space flight. Consider the incredible amount of science coming out of projects like this ($600M), New Horizons (750M) or the Planck telescope ($750M), compared to the cost of the international space station (~$100B).
For less than the cost of a Shuttle launch, you can get scientific breakthrough after breakthrough, as long as you're not trying to keep primates alive on the thing.
We'll never be on two planets in any meaningful way. Antarctica is a paradise compared to everywhere else, and nobody wants to live in Antarctica. There is no other place for us in the Solar System.
Antarctica is not colonization. You are not allowed to own land or start a business on Antarctica. For human settlement on Mars to succeed, Mars must not become Antarctica. The first few missions will be government owned and the crew will be as independent as military personnel, but actual settlement will be done by people legally and economically free to colonize.
If technology progresses but international treaties don't change, then hundreds of years from now this will be exactly correct. Robert Zubrin is not completely insane.
I am all for space colonization but i realize it's a fundamentally egocentric thing to wish for. It's not really what nature intended. We have eleminated many other species and at some point in time the same fate will probably await us.
Nature intended for me to die of starvation within weeks of being born due to a congenital disorder preventing me from digesting anything. I'd wager that nature probably didn't intend for you to have 20/20 eyesight, or to have all of your teeth, or for you to type on a magic glowing box that allows you to communicate with people halfway around the planet.
Is self-preservation egotistic? Probably. An asteroid similar to the dinosaur extinction event could hit us at anytime, with a few hours notice. You'd think the human race would learn from the dinosaurs?
Imagine another asteroid hits Earth, humanity becomes extinct, and a new sentient species evolves after 200 million years. This species will dig up human and dinosaur bones. Reminds me of: "Fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me."
Nature didn't intend anything. There's no such thing as an integrated, thinking, conscious entity called nature that intends some distant outcome.
An example that makes the point: nature intends for us to spread to every habitable planet in the galaxy. Nature wants humanity to dominate.
There is also no such thing as fate. Humans aren't fated to a pre-set outcome. If I step on a spider, that doesn't mean bad karma is going to have a tornado rip my house apart. If some humans cause the extinction of some species, that doesn't mean the human race is going to be wiped out.
Depends how you look at it. Our bodies are built to live on parts of this planet in this specific era. We don't do so well in space and microgravity. We're not going to do so well on Mars, or Mercury or Triton. That's never going to change.
Judging by the history of this planet, if nature intends anything it's for life to spread into every niche imaginable. Colonizing the solar system is just more of the same, and if we do it right we'll bring lots of other species along with us.
We will, it just might not happen for thousands of years.
Once we have the ability to freeze our bodies in stasis to wake at intervals and check progress, time taken to travel huge distances may become meaningless. Set probe for x light years away, program the alarm for arrival. Of course, communication with anyone not travelling with you becomes a bit meaningless.
Obviously a huge deal of progress to be made in terms of energy and replication, maintenance, etc.
We're a bunch of stupid animals on average, but I wouldn't bet against the best of us making this sort of thing happen eventually. "Never" is a very definite thing to say!
10,000 years is long time in a freezer. I throw even hamburger away after a year or so.
The only way I see it happening is a multi-generational trip. Or sending some raw material with instructions and a platform to reconstruct DNA and grow out some embryos. Or we modify ourselves genetically to the point it isn't the current hominid species making the trip.
Unless of course we find some sort of shortcut through space time. But it's all far fetched science fiction of course.
Your freezer isn't that cold and doesn't freeze all that quickly.
Raw material sent for construction is more likely, but I do like the idea of an individual being frozen enabling them to live almost as long as they wish and travel almost any distance.
>Once we have the ability to freeze our bodies in stasis to wake at intervals and check progress
A better approach is to send self-building/self-replicating droids, with human DNA or hard-drive saved consciousness. Let AI deal with the hazards of navigating interstellar space and building up a colony before 'birthing' humans. No freezing necessary (just a waste of resources)
Antarctica is a terrible example. First of all, settlement of antarctica is illegal. It's all claimed and off limits by treaty. We don't know if anyone would settle it if it were open. Secondly, there is a qualitative difference between another planet and another place on this one.
Whoa there. First off, don't use the Shuttle or ISS as the yard stick for "manned spaceflight", they are some of the most expensive programs for the least results in history and are not representative of what can be done with manned spaceflight.
Additionally, spaceflight is not just about scientific research. Manned spaceflight is not just about exploration, it's also about colonization. At the end of the day space is just a place, a place where we live, though we have been restricted to a tiny corner of it for most of human history. We can do manned spaceflight cost effectively (orders of magnitude better than the Shuttle, ISS, or Apollo), and as our technology improves our capabilities will only increase while costs fall.
> Compared to colonizing Antarctica, for example, or the bottom of the sea?
Why not both? The bottom of the sea is as unexplored as space, creating self-sufficient habitats in both places poses similar technological challenges. I for one would love to see more deep submersion research.
As for "what is the purpose", are you asking for "a purpose" or "a commercial purpose"? Because most of the time I see this question the person asking usually means the latter, and that is IMO a very, very limited view of the world. Not everything worthwhile makes commercial sense, and not everything that makes commercial sense is worthwhile.
"It will be difficult enough to avoid disaster on planet earth in the next 100 years, let alone the next 1000 or million. The human race shouldn't have all its eggs in one basket or on one planet. Getting a portion of the human race permanently off the planet is imperative for our future as a species."
- Stephen Hawking
Yet we have no idea how to build a self-sustaining colony of human beings anywhere other than planet earth. And even here it does not seem to be the case that we are self-sustaining, hence the need to leave the planet in the first place.
A much better statement should be we need to create a self-sustaining civilization here on Earth at any cost. Don't take it easy, it's no longer business as usual.
I don't think Hawking's primary concern was in the self-sustaining sense, rather with the more immediate threats as in the 'asteroid/epidemic/natural disaster' sense.
Hawking believes humanity needs to figure out space colonization ASAP.
I don't think non-human-created disasters are that much of a threat to civilization in the 100/1000 year time scales, so I don't think that's what is meant.
Well then what would be the point? Any thing that can cut off the life support mechanism of the Earth to the Astronauts or the colony, would mean their survival was no longer guaranteed.
I assume in his quote when he means "Getting a portion of the human race permanently...", he means resource independence from Earth, which would be the point.
I don't think so, simply because of the way he phrases it and the timeline. There's no way Hawking would predict such a huge natural disaster in the next 1000 years, let alone in the next 100 years with such certainty. I think it's clear he's talking about man-made disasters which have already been set in play (like global warming, overpopulation, war, etc.).
We're much less likely to develop that technology if we don't try. Automobiles in 1900 weren't terribly capable to what we have today, but because they were made use of then we've had over a century of improvements on them.
I'm not convinced at all that we can turn things around. Most likely scenario is that we will just keep growing, there will be a massive die-off at some point, and then the remaining humans will ensure survival of the species.
We can grow ten times the food inside that we currently do outside. We can grow it faster, with far greater quality, and with a fraction of the water we use now. And that's before we get into really advanced crop engineering, which is inevitable in the next few decades.
Nuclear power can easily solve our energy problems as desired. If it comes down to it, and there are no other options, they'll turn back to nuclear power. Most likely the radical acceleration of solar will solve half of our energy problem all by itself.
I see no reason why a die-off would occur due to population growth.
I don't believe the population will stop growing, ever. I also don't believe that we will forever be able to break through resource walls with our technology. Maybe it takes 10000 years and a population of 500 billion, I just think that's the most likely scenario.
The Deutsche Bank is already predicting peak population [0] by 2055 so maybe a mass grow isn't as likely as it seems as industrializing nations lower birth rates.
Although the UN is predicting continued growth until 2100. It would be pretty amazing if we stopped expanding in 2025.
Living on the ocean floor is infinitely cheaper and more feasible than living in space, is definitely safer, and protects you from all the potential dangers of being a one-planet species.
Huge asteroid? Just dive into a deep trench. Gamma ray burst? You'll barely detect any radiation under a few meters of water. War? The ocean's a big place and you can hide somewhere and weather a war that might last centuries.
The argument that we need space exploration so humanity doesn't go extinct is a ridiculous last-ditch effort to save people's sci-fi fantasies.
I think you are grossly under estimating the challenge of living under the ocean. There have been a number of underwater habitats built (both for science and nominally living quarters) so there are reports you can read on the experience.
In particular a 'huge asteroid' could not be mitigated by "diving into a trench", water is incompressible by nature and the impact of an asteroid in the ocean would cause a huge over-pressure event in your habitats, where ever they are, resulting in their destruction. Today, such an impact would destroy every submarine in the same ocean where it hit.
Gamma rays would be fine, water does make an excellent radiation blocker. That could be achieved on land by building a structure that was inside the middle of a water reservoir. (imagine a large water storage tank with underwater living space in the middle of it.)
>I think you are grossly under estimating the challenge of living under the ocean. There have been a number of underwater habitats built (both for science and nominally living quarters) so there are reports you can read on the experience.
I didn't mean to talk about it as if it were a commonplace thing, but compared to settlements on other worlds, it is. I'm not sure what the state of the art is, though as I recall the navy had some habitats in the 70's that they stopped reporting on, so either they closed them down or there's some secret underwater laboratory Deus Ex-style somewhere.
>In particular a 'huge asteroid' could not be mitigated by "diving into a trench", water is incompressible by nature and the impact of an asteroid in the ocean would cause a huge over-pressure event in your habitats, where ever they are, resulting in their destruction. Today, such an impact would destroy every submarine in the same ocean where it hit.
Well, yes, that is true for submarines. But an undersea settlement would most likely be anchored to the ocean floor and have access to it, mostly for mining, geomethermal power and storage, but you could use it as a shelter in case the main habitat is destroyed.
>Gamma rays would be fine, water does make an excellent radiation blocker. That could be achieved on land by building a structure that was inside the middle of a water reservoir. (imagine a large water storage tank with underwater living space in the middle of it.)
The ocean has the advantage that it's a single massive body of water, so it's harder to boil all of it off.
I think it will be easier to convince 10,000 people to live on the moon/mars then to convince 10,000 people to live their lives surrounding pure darkness on the ocean floor.
You evacuate people in a big submarine, if you have to. It might not even be necessary, if the impact site is sufficiently far away or the settlement is deep enough.
But this is all a moot point, any realistic asteroid that threatens this planet can be blown to smithereens and will probably be spotted unless it's coming perpendicular to the ecliptic.
*citation needed for both being able to blow up an asteroid adequately, and to have a high probability to spot them. At least from my childhood on discovery channel, both are nearly impossible (With respect to seeing the asteroid, it would be too late to make a difference)
Usually, at this point someone links to some NDT interview with Jon Stewart or something where he says "but if you blow up an asteroid, the chunks will still hit you".
Yes, well, if you blow up an asteroid the ratio of surface area to volume will change, and a greater percentage of the asteroid's mass will be
Honestly, I'm not sure our species deserves a future if we lay waste to an entire planet and make it uninhabitable for ourselves (something which we seem to have already set in motion). What's to stop us from doing so to any other planet we colonize? Or, more pertinently, what's the point of preserving the human race if the only outcome is planetary destruction?
I'm not trying to be dreary, but I do think Hawking is completely wrong on this point, not to mention its feasibility in the next 100 years.
I mean, I'm also appalled by what we're doing on this one, but say we all decide to curl up and die, saving countless planets from our interference. Who's going to care? Universe will go on, and so far there's no evidence that there are other beings like us, who could reflect on themselves and the state of the world they live in.
We may not be the centre of the universe, but it is still ours for the taking, we're the only Player Characters around. There's no point in making honourable self-sacrifice when there won't be anyone to appreciate it.
I am also sure we do not really deserve it, but we also can't stop our own urge for self preservation which is fundamental to every species. So we can't really stop it anyway, but we as a species might eliminate ourselves before any meanigful progress on space colonization can be made, for better or worse. The universe certainly wouldn't care.
True. I just think there's more we can do here on Earth for this purpose. Yes, some problems are inevitable, but as a whole species we haven't yet done anything to destroy all life.
I used to find hope in this idea of going to another planet, so if we nuke one planet we're still okay as a species. But heck, if our species is inclined to wage destructive war on ourselves, we're probably going to do it a second time. We'd have to colonize a lot of planets to find the rare group of humans who would not resort to destructive power struggles.
I'm not yet convinced that we're going to destroy ourselves, but it wouldn't surprise me to find that self-destruction is in our nature.
To put some numbers on it, if humanity has a 25% chance of destroying itself within 1000 years of discovering nuclear power, how many planets do we need to colonize to have a reasonable chance of surviving another 10,000 years? (survival = no catastrophic nuclear event, survival != a subset of humans barely making it in a post-apocalyptic world)
Just like a house is good enough until it burns down. Not every house burns down but a lot of them do. It would be nice to have another one, just in case.
Indeed, Kepler covers only 0.25% of the sky, and is only capable of detecting systems that are edge-on (around 0.47% probability for Earth-like planets)[1].
The mind boggles at what we might discover with a more complete picture...
Well, it shouldn't boggle the mind too much, because 0.25% of the sky translates to factor of about 400 of what the Kepler mission has achieved. Multiply all the numbers of the mission by about 400.
I was thinking more along the lines of: instead of daydreaming about planets > 1000 ly away, we might find a system nearby that we can study in detail...
$100 billion is still a drop in the bucket when compared to iur own federal budget, let alone the budgets of all the participating countries in the ISS. It is also a showcase as to how we can survive the depths of space if we ever need to migrate off this planet.
$100bn is not a "drop in the bucket"; it's more than the Department of Education, something like 3x what we spend on housing, and actually a pretty sizeable chunk of the discretionary military budget.
For less than the cost of a Shuttle launch, you can get scientific breakthrough after breakthrough, as long as you're not trying to keep primates alive on the thing.