So the job of scientist is to be a more educated and less sexy cheerleader?
I would simply note that “never” is a very long, long time and, as Thomas Edison said (attributed to him at least): “We don’t know a millionth of one percent about anything.” (OK, with our advancements since then, maybe were up to two-millionth, three-millionth at the outside).
Just saying.
End of line.
It’s definitely centuries in the future - but it doesn’t violate any laws of physics, does it? The slow seeding of humanity across the galaxy over a period of eons is, potentially, well within our capabilities.
Their job is to solve problems, not to say they can’t be solved.
Guess I missed out on my atheist mythology, where do I find this? Can I just make shit up like religious people do?
Yeah, they exist, but are they “real”?
I have been in a meeting about whether we were spending too much time in meetings*, at one point the discussion was about the effectiveness of the current meeting (and was a further layer of meta meeting required? (a meeting about meetings about meetings…)) I think space-time may have folded on itself at this point.
- F@cking “agile” development.
PS [To be read in Miranda Hart’s voice]I’ve said “meeting” too much now, is that a real word? Mee…ting…
This clip from Babylon 5 is quite on topic.
There was also a great quote that I can't locate saying that there will be two kinds of species. The ones that do travel beyond the planet of their origin and the one that make the practical decision and stay home. The former will explore the graveyards of the later.We’re so close to solving that pesky perpetual motion problem.
Yes, that was it. I did locate it and came back to post it, but you’d beaten me to it.
And Telemark, if someone wants to try to build a perpetual motion machine, I say let 'em try. They might come up with something useful.
My dad used to say: “Aim at the sky and you might hit the fencepost, aim at the fencepost and you’ll hit the ground.”
what the fuck?
So scientists should be figuring out how to go faster than 300,000kps, rather than saying we can’t do it.
Gotcha.
Seconded.
If there’s any word whose corporate-speak use I’ve come to absolutely hate, it’s “agile.” Where I am, it’s accompanied by a lack of interest in making our basic processes work well, but we’re gonna do new and exciting things despite that, because we’re ‘agile.’
Even talking about it makes me want to vomit into my trashcan.
Also: who the fuck is Michel Mayor and why should I care what he says?
Is the problem that you aren’t empowered enough? Perhaps you could leverage some synergy.
Only if you leverage it in alignment with our core values going forward
.
He was the scary dude in all the Halloween movies.
Tell us some more about these “tenets of atheist mythology”
Is there a book? Some kind of list at least?
It really doesn’t matter if some humans do escape this solar system and find a habitable planet elsewhere. Only an extremely tiny fraction of the descendants of those living now will be among those who leave.
But 99.999% of our collective descendants after the era of such travel begins, will still live here. The notion of space travel as a solution for the mess we’re making of this world is completely wrongheaded. And no matter what sort of mess we make of this planet - via global warming, nuclear war, whatever - it will still be more habitable for humans than any planet our spacefaring descendants are likely to run into out there.
The real question for the long term is, how many people will our planet be able to support after we get through messing it up, and at what level of technology and comfort? But humans are tough critters. The remains of prehistoric humans are found in some of the least habitable corners of the earth. Our race will survive here, it just may not be nearly as easy for them as it is for us.
Which leads to the fundamental question–if it is so possible, where is everybody? If it is so inevitable, why hasn’t the galaxy already been settled by lots of other species? Maybe–you think–because it is harder than escapist space fantasy stories make it look?
Unless we can learn how to terraform a planet so that we can live on it the way we live on earth, it would simply be too difficult and costly to maintain more than a large research station on even a planet as close as Mars, much less on any of the large satellites circling the outer planets. Populate the galaxy? Right now, it would take us ten thousand years to reach even the nearest star.