I thought when I got older I would be able to look up at the moon and see expanses of colonies. I don't want to die not knowing whether life exists outside of our tiny little sphere.
The future was supposed to have surface lighting.
The future was supposed to have surface lighting.
Even if the odds of life are astronomically low (one in a billion), there are billions of galaxies, with billions of stars.
The odds are good, but the results are irrelevant. Only 5% of the stars that we see can emit light presently that will ever reach us - they will all recede beyond our cosmological horizon.
There is very likely life elsewhere, and it makes no difference.
We can't know how probable life is given similar conditions to Earth because our sample size is too small. But there are definitely a lot of Earth-like planets out there.
How do we know that there isn't life teeming in our galaxy if we can't even detect neutrino/quantum/ansible/tech-undiscovered signals?
We do not know and cannot show any viable means of creating the full sequence of pre-biotic chemicals needed for the first organism to exist. When one of the top organic chemists in the world puts out that challenge and nobody responds, one can then say that all of these experts know full well that they do not have a clue and are just deluding everyone else as to how life even came to be.
Just using probability to say that life came about without at least a semblance of an idea of possible sequences that could work is useless. You need at least some possible viable sequence for the full biotic complement of chemicals to be available. Since the sequence requires processes and solvents that are inimical to previous and follow-on chemicals, this sequence development is a major, major problem that is regularly ignored by those who use probability to say life can arise.
When these things are taken into account, the simple fact that there is life here on this planet can be seen as a unique event throughout all of the universe.
On some estimates of random action giving rise to life anywhere in the universe, the probabilities are so low that the universe would need to exist for many magnitudes of time longer than its apparent age at this time. Your "one in a billion" is oh so many magnitudes of order higher than the probabilities estimated.
Of course, your view can be very different and if you can come up with a viable sequence then simply accept the challenge that has been put out. There will be an awful lot of relief if this could be done.
One thing we do know to be extremely unlikely: That we - exactly we, us, here at this specific point in time - should somehow have arrived at a point where we can confidently secondguess the universe in all its glorious details. We can't, and we don't really even have the foggiest idea what kind of life is possible, or how it comes about in the first place.
All the Drake equations in the world can't hide the fact that we know nothing. Every single galaxy may be bursting with life, or we may the only specimens anywhere in the dark, cold void.
My personal guess - which is no better or no worse than anyone else's - is that life or its functional equivalents is more or less everywhere, but that intelligent critters like ourselves are exceedingly rare.
There are many more stars than chemsists, and the universe has had much more time to get lucky than our chemists have had. The universe has gone through more chemical permutations than our scientists can dream of.
Maybe you could explain it as "if rockets had advanced as fast as computers, we'd have flying cities that could travel to the moon and back in minutes."
And would people living on the moon have really changed her life either? Unless she was one of them she'd just end up hearing about it in the news and then going about her day.
TBH if I really had to pick the thing that has most changed her life I'd bet it's the shipping and logistics technology that has dramatically lowered the cost of all the consumer goods she buys.
As to people living on the moon: she grew up with America being this frontier that was very inspiring. I think she sees space travel the same way (also, probably bias from reading a lot of sci-fi of the time).
If progress in space travel seems slow, remember that almost all of the money going into it is spent by a single organisation whose budget is less than 10% of Apple's revenue.
However they're still wearing fur-lined space suits and calculating trajectories using slide rulers.
Predicting future technology (especially new out of the box ideas) is really hard.
Colonies on the moon might sound cool, but there's no real economic benefit, and the cost is astronomical.
Humans are attuned to survival not coordinating millions of people to a common goal.
Give us a break!
Von Braun was the first to make a guided rocket (developments like the de Laval nozzle and rocket equation had just been discovered). The US poached him and sent him to West Texas, then Alabama, without a whole lot to do. Probably to keep him out of enemy hands. The US government had their money and "intelligence communities" lined up behind the Vanguard rocket. It was only because the Vanguard rocket failed so embarassingly while the Soviets won the space race that Eisenhower started NASA and gave Von Braun some funding. So Von Braun wrote a letter to Kennedy, and he got his childhood wish to go to the moon. And he did it. The greatest engineering and technological achievement in history. All the politics (like cost-plus suppliers) still hurt the program, but they really made a lot of progress. So then the new NASA bureaucracy pushed him out and went on to do bureaucratic things like build the ridiculously badly conceived STS (they proposed ideas and Nixon picked it), and crash it even when NASA engineers told them before hand that a foam strike was going to happen as was the case with the Challenger Groupthink disaster.
The Soviets also had plenty of childish and embarassing dramas and politics of their own going on as well.
It's all a shame, really. People can do amazing things, but I'm not willing to pretend our shortcomings aren't because of moral failings.
There is no legitimately good reason for the Challenger disaster, or having to rely on Russians for their superior rocket tech to get into orbit.
The upside of this is that if we can maintain this cocktail of traits while curbing the more obviously dangerous ones, we may be able to surpass greatly what we've accomplished so far. I hope anyway.
Ultimately what seems to drive us forward (IMHO), is finding new ways to kill each other.
Tom Lehrer's take strikes me about right: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=5V7me25aNtI
However, during the end of WWII he intentionally surrendered himself, his team and capital into our hands -- the Americans. He came to America, assimilated and oversaw the greatest engineering feat in history when we were losing the space race to Russia, and would have continued to lose without him.
I would also consider, what should he or could he have done in his time? OK, how about what have I or you done to stop the genocide in Darfur? Nobody in the Western world did much, and we didn't do anything at all about the Cambodian genocide. The American Government has also never officially acknowledged the Native American genocide, or paid reparations for it--these would be crimes in Germany today.
In my mind it is important to address these moral questions, which are indeed difficult, but if we are not honest about them then we find can at times be the pot calling the kettle black.
(Has this ever been explored in fiction, a very determined and patient civilization digging themselves out of an unrocketably deep gravity well?)
Yes, spacecraft are more fragile than pellets, and canned primates even more so, but a ludicrously long acceleration track is still going to cost peanuts compared to the kind of planetary liposuction you're talking about.
Maybe you could launch materials and construction robots for an elevator using a mass driver then use the elevator for passengers, I dunno. Still need some non-rocket way to get things up there.
So are we getting fatter or slimmer? By a quick Google survey it depends which estimates one trusts, but probably losing a bit.
Everything is economically viable when you can employ fantasy magic technology to make it happen.
Are you familiar with the companies that are being set up to do this, and that are backed by Eric Schmidt et al?