Humans will never live on another planet, says Michel Mayor

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
141

I don’t know where you’re getting your figures, but atheism isn’t always anti-Christian. Maybe most Western atheists were brought up as Christians, but they came to their viewpoints because they realized religion in general could not answer scientific-base questions. The ones who want separation of church and state tend to get lumped in with atheists, and therefore for political reasons, are assumed by Christian-based advocates to have anti-Christian motives.

The bible burners are doing it more as an act of rebellion, and odds are their rejection of Christianity has less to do with objectivity, and more to do with hitting back at “The Man.” “Atheist mythology” is *not *the basis for skeptics’ opinions that mankind won’t be settling on other planets. It’s not that they lack faith in mankind’s strengths and abilities. It’s their realization that our current level of technology isn’t good enough, and there’s that annoying theory that says THE SPEED OF LIGHT CANNOT BE EXCEEDED. Animism has fuck-all to do with it.

142

So Denali is not just a river in Egtyp?

143

Sigh… I’ve never heard of this “New Atheism.” It may be presented as a religious-type movement by Wikipedia, but the only one of the “Four Horsemen of Atheism” I’ve ever heard of was Richard Dawkins, and that’s only tangentially. He’s not the reason I’m an atheist. I came upon that on my own, and believe me, it was a tough decision. It’s not something I make known to the public, and I don’t consider it my business to tell people what their belief system should be.

All this is besides the point. You’ve been assuming the reason there’s skepticism about colonizing space is because of this asinine concept that atheists have a mythology. What, do you think the reason scientists and skeptics voice unpopular opinions is because they didn’t get enough God in school? Haven’t you for once considered our reasoning is based on scientific principles, such as THE SPEED OF LIGHT CANNOT BE EXCEEDED? Atheism has jack shit to do with the reason.

It took us 40 years to send a table-sized object out of the solar system. Voyager can’t increase speed. It maintains a constant velocity. The distance to the nearest star system, Alpha Centauri, is 4.3 light years. Here’s an article about the logistics of space travel. Here’s an excerpt:

There, see anything about “atheist mythology”? It’s simply math. Repeat after me, “Atheism has nothing to do with it!”

144

A few nutballs do not a colony make. A few rebels fleeing a comfortable self-contained habitat that they’ve existed within in coddled comfort for their entire lives to a planet that has no support facilities is not a colony, it’s a suicide mission, literally. Even if the planet by some miracle happens to have a biome that already supports life and has plants and animals on it that can provide sustenance for humans.

Seriously, these will be not be rural preppers champing at the bit to farm and hunt on their own plot of land - these will be people whose families have lived in spaceship corridors for a hundred times longer than America has existed. These suckers won’t even have read about subsistence farming, or even inclement weather. So if they flee to the planet without even the support of the colony ship? Those suckers is all gonna die.

And this applies even if “a few” means “multiple thousand”. Not even numbers could save them.

Gravity wells are nothing to laugh off - they consume incredible amounts of energy when you try to exit one. (And dropping into one and surviving is no walk in the park either.) There is no way any massive interstellar vessel would make a regular habit of parking on planets, futzing around for a while, and then taking off again.

You might see colony ships parking near planets and launching dropships or colony-sized domed habitats or something, I suppose, though I can’t fathom why anybody would bother. People went around exploring and colonizing earth for three reasons:

  1. Seeking resources/precious resources/wealth. For this there are small and medium-sized asteroids - much easier to scoop up and consume than whole planets which will put massive stresses on any large space vessel that approaches.

  2. Needing more room. But you’re not going to be able to just land on some planet and survive - you need the basic necessities of life like shelter, food replicators, air generators, power generators, ship-standard gravity generators, medical facilities, birthing(cloning) chambers, TV, internet, and porn sites. So you’re going to have build a colony. So why not just build a colony ship? There’s ample space for ships up there, and that saves the multigenerational trip too!

  3. Getting away from people you don’t like. Again, who needs a planet? Just fly a few orbits over and don’t answer their emails.

The only reason I can think of to bother landing on a planet is because that planet is the only source of some resource that can’t be fabricated elsewhere. We’re talking about something on the level of the spice Melange, here. That level of fictional importance. And even then they’d just drop robots - what sane human would want to deal with that dirtwalker crap?

The sum total of how God “sprawls” into the various and sundry parts of existence is when we look around us we don’t see any Gods there. Identically, we also don’t see chupacabras there.

The position you are arguing is that if a person doesn’t spend active and conscious effort in disbelieving in chupacabras, it’s impossible to understand anything about reality. Note that by your argument this would be the case even if you’ve never heard of chupacabras.

145

Yeah, right, that’s why no one today ever goes wilderness camping or hunting or learns to knap flint or make fire by rubbing sticks together even as a hobby.

Why do you suppose they’re just going to plunk down bare-ass naked? You think they wouldn’t have some sort of material support? Winter clothes? AC? Whatever else they might need or want?

We just don’t know what those future people will be like.

Why? Because when the colony ship was set up all such references to farming or weather or other planet-based phenomena will be wiped? Like maybe how no one had any interest in the story of Gilgamesh, so no one bothered to translate it into modern languages… oh, wait…

Why do you assume they’ll be “fleeing” anything? For all you know they’ll be given support and encouragement to make more room for those who want to stay on the colony ship. Why do you assume they will have no support?

Seems to me you’re making an awful lot of assumptions about people we know nothing about.

If they’re landing on a planet why do they need “gravity generators”…?

I really do think you’re making a lot of unwarranted assumptions here.

Why build another ship when you’ve got a planet nearby you can use?

146

Hey, you’re the one who said they were oddballs and rebels. That sort of implies that they colony ship is not going to devote massive amounts of manpower and resources to supporting their insane hobbies/rebellions.

And when they use Gilgamesh (or any comparable modern TV show) as a model for their colony, that’ll go super well.

Why “fleeing” and no support? Again, rebels. You said it, not me.

But there is no chance whatsoever that the colony ship would be shipping them off to make more room for those who want to stay, because we’re talking about non-FTL colony ships which spend tens of thousands of years between planets. If these ships were going to have had a problem with overpopulation then they would have run into it long ago and come up with some kind of cannibalism-based* solution to deal with it, so when they finally pulled up next to the planet they’d have no concerns on that front. If anything they might be reluctant to let a significant number of their citizens up and disappear forever, especially if they were the sort of people with the knowledge and skills not to die on their first evening in the wilds.

  • Assumptions? What assumptions?

These folks are accustomed to on-ship levels of gravity - which may be based on earth gravity, or may be a lot less. If the planet’s gravity doesn’t match what they’re used to they’re going to have quite a lot of problems.

And speaking of assumptions, we’re kind of blasting past the terraforming issue here. It’s all well and good to assume that the exoplanet will be Eden, but it’s more likely to be Venus, or at least New Jersey. The odds that people will be able to step out of their crashed escape pod, pick an apple off a tree, then strip the branch it was on and make it in a bow and arrow to shoot the nearby Succulent Space Cow are, to put it generously, zero. And no ship would bother to terraform a whole planet just so the idiot tourists can move from one artificial environment to another. More realistically the planet living will be harsh and raw, and these yahoos will be out there fresh out of the ship - or even more realistically they’d set up an enclosed and comfortably climate-controled colony of sane people for the preppers to set off from and then return to when the acid and sandworms make all their crops die. Because they ain’t coming back to the ship - it’s leaving and never coming back.

Nearby? Nearby?? Have you seen the commute to Proxima Centauri B? There’s not even a decent bus line there!

A better question is, why build a permanently landed space colony on some distant rock where there’s some perfectly empty bit of open space right here to use?

147

Being an “oddball” does not make you insane. You really don’t like people who are the least bit individual as opposed to being just like everyone else, do you?

Gilgamesh is not a TV show. Is it really necessary to explain that to you?

I dunno - parking the “rebels” in exile on a space rock might be seen as less effort and less distasteful than, oh, executing all of them.

Or maybe those staying on the ship will be thrilled that, with a bit of a drop in population, many can have slightly more children than they would have otherwise been allowed.

Depends on just how different it is, doesn’t it?

You are simply incapable of imagining anything other than disaster, aren’t you?

Gee, I don’t know - why did our distant ancestors leave the perfectly serviceable continent of Africa to go off to places like Siberia to make a living?

148

As a rationality junkie, I think anyone fighting ignorance should acknowledge the existence of symbolic narratives in modern mass media. That these narratives and symbols dwell deep within the brains of the people who populate the cultural environment has been shown by sociologists like Durkheim, anthropologists like Levi-Strauss, and psychoanalysts like Jung.

Mythologist Gregory Schrempp has given specific examples of how contemporary authors mingle science and myth, demonstrating that their popular science writings use various themes and motifs to create narratives meant to build knowledge. James A. Herrick points out that that new mythologies have emerged at the core of Western culture, where scientists, filmmakers, writers, and philosophers fill the post-Christian spiritual void with symbols and stories that seem new but show the same structure and functionality of traditional mythology.

Of course one is free to believe that by no means shall atheists participate in the cultural milieu they belong to or that never have they resorted to the thinking patterns the entire human race makes use of. But then what do we do about fighting ignorance?

149

Well, unless anyone can come up with a more convincing opening, I think that settles it.

150

You really reach some bizarre absolutions when atheists tell you they don’t have a mythology. Just because we don’t believe in gods doesn’t mean we don’t appreciate fiction. Sheesh.

151

Whoa, ratchet it back, this is MPSIMS, it’s all in fun.

Welcome to the Arcadia! We’re a giant spaceship that is flying through space for, er, some reason? Let me check my notes. (rustling) Oh yes, Earth was getting overpopulated and started desperately offloading large blocks of its population as quickly as it could in an ultimately doomed effort to counteract the birth rate. Fortunately they eventually discovered that by giving everyone the internet they could eliminate intercourse, but in the meantime this ship was buiit and launched.

Anyway, we’ve been flying through space isolated and unaided for fifteen generations now, and we’ve almost completely eliminated the mental disease “rock madness”, where a person is for some unclear reason unhappy when their clean, enclosed colony bubble is mobile rather than parked on a large rock. We worked so hard to treat this because the poor souls afflicted with it could never be satisfied, since we go for hundreds of years at a time with no large rocks nearby. And we have been almost completely successful, which we are thankful for, for their sakes.

The Arcadia is dedicated to providing the best entertainment options possible. Among the many entertainments here, we include a full suite of simulated outdoor environments for people to LARP in. There is an entire level where people can live in purely rustic environments, harvesting genuine crops and trees and building genuine shelters to protect against realistically simulated weather and large predatory animals; similarly there are realistic simulations of medieval, victorian, antebellum, preinternet, internet, postinternet, and postscarcity eras. With our enlightened awareness that we don’t actually have a shortage of people and don’t really need you to stay alive, we even allow you to live your entire lives and even kill yourself due to a preference for terrible living conditions and twentieth-century witch doctor medicine. Live (and die) your own way!

Oh, and here’s a news flash: for the first time in decades we’re approaching a star with a theoretically habitable planet! Dubbed “Eden” because it’s so insanely human-friendly that it has been determined to be statistically impossible, for the first time ever we are going to allow citizens to shuttle down and walk on a planetary surface without atmosphere suits. All interested parties are welcome to schedule a landing trip for dropoff, with an entertainment package of seeds, animal stock, inflatable shelters, and other survival goods provided free of charge. Sign up today! Note: As with our internal habitats, there is no assurance of comfort or survival, and the Arcadia will be departing this system forever in one month and after that time no further support will be provided. Also note that due to uncertainty about environmental contaminants, no one and nothing that lands on the planet will be allowed to return to the Arcadia. So enjoy your trip! Live (and die) your own way!

Of course it isn’t, but it is a bit of historical information that could be considered data about the past. People watching modern “realistic” TV shows aren’t going to get very good information about how to survive. Honestly they’d be better off playing in the habitat simultions.

I don’t see how it’s less effort - in both cases they leave via the shuttle bay; just with execution you save the cost of a shuttle.

It might indeed be perceived as less distasteful by people who choose to believe that rather than thinking it through, of course. Sure the planet we’re dropping them on has an atmosphere made of hydrochloric acid, but hey, at least we’re not executing them!

Once again, they would have already figured this out. And it would be a very brief thrill in any case, and then it’s back to whatever they had before. No point getting excited about it.

Oh, absolutely! Heck, with a sufficently eden-like planet they’d be able to step out of their crashed escape pod, pick an apple off a tree, then strip the branch it was on and make it in a bow and arrow to shoot the nearby Succulent Space Cow! Comfortable year round! Houses literally grow on trees! Indigenous aliens that are Rawling’s house elves, desperate to be enslaved! It could be wonderful!

But then again it might not be, and maybe humans will want that entertainment package to be shipped down with them after all.

You know, this response would have gone better after the cannibalism comment, not the comment that segued directly from the crashed pod to eden.

Oh, that’s easy: For resources, for space, and to get away from people they don’t like. Those are the reasons why people explored and spread out.

The thing is, though, with the possible exception of the odd miraculous eden (which will be promptly overrun and destroyed be people taking selfies), the average space rock is hardly more enticing than empty space itself. Empty space provides places to expand to and places to run away to; all it lacks is resources. So then it comes down to what resources do you need; if you have replicators the only resource you need is energy, for example. And failing that, what will the average planetoid have that you can’t get more easily from an asteroid belt?

152

This very idea that atheists don’t make a social group whose members share a culture consisting of shared values and beliefs expressed by means of symbols and narratives in patterns of thought pertaining to the entire human race sounds exactly like a tenet of such mythology.

153

Back up a second - since when do atheists have a social group? Like, at all?

Religions hold meetings. They get together and share ideas - in person! Whereas I haven’t met a whole lot of atheists in person, and when I did we didn’t share ideas. (“Hey, guess what - gods aren’t real!” “Yep.” “Yep.” “Um, now what?” “Want to get some lunch?” “Naah. We have nothing in common.”)

Religion has to be taught, because when two people make up religions separately they invent different things. Atheism is just the act of not doing that, and not listening when others do that. This results in people with the same non-beliefs naturally. It doesn’t have to be taught, and once you figure it out, there’s really not that much to say about it. As mythoses go, it’s a single sentence.

You have this grand vision of some kind of atheist church or something, with the sharing of ideas and the creation of myths, but that sounds absurd to me. It’s true that a lot of atheists agree about things relating to objective reality, but that’s not because atheism taught us those things, it’s because those are the things that happen to be real.

154

That reminds me–I forgot to pay my Atheist dues! Gotta take care of that, or I won’t be able to enter the Atheist Cathedral or do the Secret Atheist Handshake! Not even sing the Atheist Anthem!

155

Huh???

You seem to have a lot of really bizarre assumptions about atheists. Do you think we make sacrilegious gestures to each other? Signs of the Not Cross? “Psssst… there is no God. Pass it on.”

What religion are you? If you tell me, I’ll be sure to saturate you with every type of inane stereotype of that religion I can think of, and even make up new ones.

Besides, you started this thread to correlate skepticism of exoplanet colonization with an atheist agenda, because you think we’re some sort of religion in disguise, intent on holding back the potential of humanity. We’re saying it can’t done because of simple math! How do you expect human colonization to occur after 70,000+ years of space travel? Humans have only been around for 6,000 or 100,000 years, depending on who you believe.

156

Just the opposite–he claims that belief in space colonization is one of the prime tenants of the Church of Atheism, and that saying that it won’t happen is going to get atheists specifically into a tizzy.

157

I wonder, what is the atheist stance on apostasy and heresy? Do those who fail to live up to the tenets of atheism have to get baptized (perhaps even again) as part of their excommunication ritual?

158

No, that would only be the case if atheists only disbelieved in the single god of the single religion Christianity. Since atheists disbelieve in all gods, proposed or not, to be properly excommunicated from atheism one would have to undergo all the entrance rituals for all possible religions and religious variants, for all possible religions including theoretical and not-yet-imagined ones.

We don’t do this all that often, because it takes a very long time and is generally fatal to the subject.

159

But I’ve been told that a central tenet of my atheism, along with my belief that we will inevitably colonize other worlds and develop sentient AI, is that I am specifically anti-Christian, thereby setting Christianity apart from all those religions as the “anti-atheism.”

As you seem to reject this, the mainline view of all atheists, I can only say… apostate!

160

Aw dang, now I have to join a religion, don’t I? And it can’t even be one of the ‘fun’ religions, that don’t worship a creature that accepts human sacrifices - it has to be that one doesn’t it. :frowning: