Okay, other people have made the jokes so I’ll play it straight.
If this theory disproves anything, it disproves religion. Pretty much all religions say that humans are the center of creation and the universe was created for our use.
So if science shows that pretty much the entire universe is uninhabitable by humans, it’s a direct line of evidence that we’re nothing special in the universe. The universe as a whole exists for reasons that have nothing to do with human beings. There’s no God that created humans and then built a universe around us.
First of all, I’m not sure I like your tone, with “escapist space fantasies.” Without escapist fantasy, we’d have no science, no culture, no nothing. Without imagining the impossible, we’d just be a bunch of apes slamming rocks together.
Second of all, maybe we’re the first. Someone has to be, right? We have no idea how common the conditions for the creation of intelligent life are. Just like all life on Earth has descended from a single cell, all *intelligent *life in the galaxy will be descended from a single planet.
But I don’t care about my direct descendants; honestly, at the scale we’re talking about, I don’t care about anyone alive - after all, we’ll all be dead within a century or so anyway. What I care about is the continued long-term existence of the human race and human civilization. A million years from now, I want there to be people, even people very different from us, and I want them dispersed so far and wide that no single event can wipe them all out. Is that too much to ask? Because if we all stay here, sooner or later we’ll be wiped out, no matter what we do.
He also says that we might be able to go to Mars in 50 years, but it would take centuries to reach Jupiter. So you can see how good he is at understanding space travel.
He reminds me of the scientists quoted in books by Clarke and others I read 55 years ago who thought space travel and going to the moon was hogwash. Perhaps Mayor has never read of ways to get to other stars without ftl travel?
BTW Mayor does not discuss god at all, so “atheist mythology” seems to have been inserted by the OP for no reason I can see. Maybe Mayor is an atheist - that would be amusing, if irrelevant.
I mean, you shouldn’t waste resources on dead-end avenues of research, but if at some point in the future, evidence appears that suggests it might be possible, shouldn’t you follow it, just in case?
What does this have to do with religion or atheism? ISTM the issue of whether humans will live on another planet or not is entirely about technology and the practicality/feasibility of the matter.
Or maybe because we’re the first intelligent species to arise. Hey, somebody has to be. (I’ve heard a theory that explains how this might have happened involving the unlikely occurence of us having a moon so large compared to Earth. That it “stirred the soup” making the initial stages of evolution occur much more rapidly than would otherwise be the case.) I’ve also heard the theory that intelligence is great for short-term survival, but not long-term survival of a species. You get smart enough and “Boom”. (There’s always a “Boom”.) There could even be a formula saying in essence that a species gets so many years after the discovery of nuclear fission to get space bound or it goes extinct.
As mentioned in the OP, ramblings about humans spreading across the galaxy or creating conscious AI are instances of atheist mythology, often seen here on SDMB. Another random example is the idea that now that science has reached this high level of development, religion is living on borrowed time and is likely to die soon. There is so much faith invested in these projections that, from an objective point of view (i.e. outside the clash between believers and non-believers), it is hard not to regard these narratives as mythology. But life’s too beautiful and short to get caught in the Internet’s current tribalism. I’ve just stated an opinion and I apologize if people find it offensive.
Please. If we never live on an alien planet, it will be because we realize that gravity wells are for losers and hang out in orbital stations around alien planets instead, sending probes down to gather resources for us.
Not offensive, just [Not Even Wrong](https://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/do not underestimate the power of the force). It is like you are saying that belief in space colonization is puppy hat avocado pencil.
I’m still not getting the connection with atheism. I’m no theologian so forgive me if there is an obvious answer, but why would humans spreading across the galaxy be incompatible with the teachings of the Bible?
Sounds like a lot of people have trouble distinguishing between “science” and “belief”. “Humans will (or will never) live on another planet” is a belief, much as one would believe in God or Santa Clause.
“Humans will never live on another planet within the time frame of any technology reasonably expected to be developed in the near future” is an expression of the current state of science.
I don’t know if it violates the laws of physics. But it would require mankind to make the largest, most complicated machine ever, and then have it work in one of the most extreme environments imaginable far longer than machines have existed on Earth.
It also presumes it’s better to build this thing and send it into space, vs just build and live in it on the Earth.
It’s not that your post was offensive, so much as it has no connection to any sort of observable reality. Most significantly, you’ve decided that two particular concepts (colonizing other worlds and inventing strong AI) are exclusively atheist concepts. I’m not sure where you got this idea from, but it’s patently untrue - there’s no end of theists who also think we should be colonizing other worlds, or think that creating strong AI is at least theoretically possible.
