I’d like to think that the human race will someday sort itself out and resolve the self-created problems like Global Warming and War that threaten to wipe us off the face of the Earth. I’d also like to think that we will some day figure how to get off this rock and start terraforming and inhabiting other planets and then spread across the Galaxy. However every time I switch on the news, my hopes fall ever lower. It seems that we’re hell-bent on self-destruction as a species and that all our dreams of Dyson spheres, green planets and artificial ringworlds will remain figments of our imagination - never to be realised.
So do you think we’ll ever make it off Earth, or will we end up blowing ourselves up or wiping ourselves out before that ever happens?
Any planet conceivably within our reach will probably be every bit as inhospitable as the earth itself is almost certain to become. I think it’s far more likely that the human race ends up living under the sci-fi circumstances you mention, only right here on our “home” planet.
If that’s true, then we will probably survive long enough to fix things.
And if that’s the case, do you think, then, that the technology we will need to develop in order to combat Earth’s own failing ecology will later help us to terraform other planets?
I think we’ll see humans on Mars in the next 100 years. Maybe some sort of rotating crew type base station in a few hundred years. There’s no way we’ll make it out of our solar system though. Too far.
I think we’re probably already “out there”, in some fashion. It’s my theory that life is life but adapts to it’s environment. In other words, I find it completely possible that life exists on Jupitor, but in a form so foreign to us that it escapes our notice or detection - a gas-based life form, for example, instead of carbon-based. So, as our current planet becomes more and more inhospitable, our bodies will evolve to allow continued survival, while at the same time we endeavor to colonize other planets. Regarding an actual “exodus” from the planet, I’d suspect it would be more like scattering mold spores in the wind than everyone jumping on transports to Mars. I think we will have staging bases on Mars, though I think it would make more sense to send frontier families adrift in the general direction of “ready” planets, than it would to try to transform a mostly dead planet like Mars. Who’s to say we didn’t start there, though, and end up here?
Humanity 2.0 maybe. I predict humankind to get itself in a real pickle in the not too distant future. Our quality of life will stagnate or dip for a long, long time. After that, humanity will realize the benefits of central planning and start cooperating instead of competing. We will eventually claw our way back to where we can think of space colonization.
Perhaps you might ask the Russians about the benefits of central planning. Open, free, competition results in a better end result than forced cooperation.
But I believe that we’ll escape the Earth eventually. I believe that we must escape the Earth. Right now, we can only barely do it, but we’re taking the first steps. It doesn’t matter if it takes us a thousand years, or ten thousand. We must get out there. Just as people left the Old World in their thousands for America, and died in their thosands at the hands of Indians and disease, so too will people leap at the chance of opportunity out there.
The galaxies is a big place.
But the moon - I can see permanent stations on the moon, complete with people finding themselves born and dying up there. Stuck in a rut like their uncles and grannies back in the hill country
