Humans will not 'migrate' to exoplanets, Nobel winner says
afp.com
afp.com
Reading the article, while he supports the claim with the impracticality of the science in the foreseeable future, he seems more motivated by his frustration with the idea that if things deteriorate too much here we can just go somewhere else.
He wants us to treasure our home.
Sounds pretty sensible tbh.
I like SF quite a bit but I'm well aware of what the 'F' stands for.
It's super hard compared to fixing Planet Earth.
I don't think that's true. Most of Earth's problems are political, with humans in charge exercising their power on purpose to make pollution on Earth worse. On Earth you are fighting against rich and powerful people who want the pollution to get worse (because it temporarily 'enriches' them, ugh). This is happening at an accelerating rate.
There is no such challenge on Mars to overcome. Nobody is arguing (with any power) that we should not terraform Mars, but even the US President thinks that Earthly climate change is a 'hoax' invented by the Chinese to specifically harm America. THAT is what prevents progress here, not technological development.
We have technology to 'fix' Earth today and to 'terraform' Mars soon. The main issue on Earth is that the people with the power to do something good are choosing to bad instead.
What the US president believes is not representative for what politicians in general believe. He's somewhat of an exception (fortunately). Unfortunately, he's doing a lot of damage but even if he weren't the problem would largely remain the same.
Ahhhhhh.....
> ... compared to flying to a more habitable planet.
Ah, OK, right, agreed completely. Very good point.
And both are wildly misrepresented as to their difficulty.
Terraforming Mars is how many times more difficult than not destroying Terra? Billion? Trillion? Exillion?
"It's OK for us to destroy Terra, we can "simply" find another planet to live on and if not we'll simply Terraform a planet that is uninhabitable."
That's the philosophy this Laureate is speaking against, and it's clearly a delusional philosophy held by millions including the shyster sociopath Elon Musk and every last one of the fanatical devotees of his deranged and unscientific cult.
How can anyone believe they are going to travel vast distances to some hostile alien planet carrying a minimalist cargo to not just reboot civilization but terraform the planet to begin with, and succeed, when they have no ability to survive on a planet that in every way is completely dedicated and attuned to the optimal survival of their kind? What hubris and madness in such a belief. Comparably one might find they are incapable of living on a tropical island with fertile fruit trees and abundant fish and announce that they intend to move to Antarctica and transform it into a tropical paradise using vines and coconuts lashed together on a raft. It's utterly delusional. Believers in the madness should be committed to asylums for the insane, if they can take a moment away from their busy schedule of gulping down drugs and accusing cave rescuers in Thailand of being pedophiles.
Yeah, we just need to funnel excess CO2 from Venus to Mars and make both planets habitable in the process. Easy peasy. 2 million years tops.
I'd consider finding a fast method of travel and suitable planet detection to be much much simpler than terraforming Mars, Venus or any other planet in this system. It's just a sequence of directed findings, maybe would take 1000 years. That's incomparable to starting geological-level processes on another planet and getting it right.
If we have the technology to terraform Mars then we will have the technology to geoengineer earth back to a more hospitable state.
This isn’t an argument to continue to fuck up the planet but terraforming Mars is about as feasible as interstellar travel at this point in time and likely will be so for the next 5 generations if not longer.
Ironically the most realistic part of the Expanse is that Mars despite being settled by millions of people is still a lifeless rock outside of the domes people live in.
It’s insanely impractical, we’d be millions of times more likely to develop a way of living under the sea than on another planet, and that is only a few hours drive away and nobody wants to live under the sea given current capabilities.
Imagine how much worse life on Earth would have to get (and how much better undersea living would have to get) to make it a viable place to raise a family and get old.
Take your average totalitarian state. Say China. Multiply times 10.
That would be what living on another planet will be like.
It wont be some pristine unexplored planet, where you'd be let to go settle anywhere you like, explorer style.
At least not on the solar system.
It would be something like a small, tightly controlled, and highly co-dependent colony, where everyone must stick together. There will be less room, no places to just roam (except with your suit and air). Away from the food, air, generators etc, would be mostly death. Oh, and at least for the first decades the government and/or some big corporation will select who goes and who can't go.
And everybody will be monitored 24/7, first because it would be made with high tech, which can just as easily include tracking chips, smart doors, cameras, and so on, and because if anybody goes crazy/suicidal and does something stupid, they can get everybody killed easily (e.g. sabotage something)...
If you want that kind of freedom of being deviant you'd be much more likely to get it in Alaska, Antarctica, Siberia, and so on, than in another planet we're going to go anytime soon...
(Herzog's documentary "Encounters at the end of the world" alludes to that, and shows some such types https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-0KzBHJLQ80 ).
Whereas the space colony will need trillions of dollars to be set up, coughed up by some big government.
And they're unlike to send people there to fulfill their fetish/deviant lifestyle/whatever lifestyle...
Heck, the puritans were persecuted from their old country. No government is going to pay billions to send persecuted people to a space colony...
Except if it's a doomed mission, and e.g. they send death row volunteers or something, like The Dirty Dozen movie...
If the price of space travel comes down enough for colonies to be viable, I would not be surprised to see a mix of governmental, corporate and religious settlements setup.
Dirt cheap. They were persecuted people, they gathered, paid together for a ship to take them, and landed there. Money weren't that good where they settled, as there was hardly an economy at the time. Most of the stuff they built themselves, started growing, etc.
Why don't you see the human desire to move to new places? It's a simple matter of wanting to go. No other reason should be required to explain why humans will go live on Mars.
It's going to happen simply because people want it to happen.
This sounds a lot like the religious arguments for supernatural healing, just have to believe and try.
Human willpower is limited by the laws of physics. Barring some fundamental breakthroughs in resource utilization, like cold fusion, I don't see it happening--no matter the desire to do so. And if the cost is making Earth uninhabitable then it'd a be foolish to pursue blindly.
It'd be like living on top of Everest, but a solid 100x worse in just about every way. It's wicked inhospitable. It's a romantic notion for some because we've got over a century of science fiction about Mars behind us, but it'd be a pretty miserable (and extremely expensive) existence.
People'll probably go there at some point. A long-term colony? I really doubt it. It'd be a colossal waste of money more or less doomed to failure.
Any NATURAL catastrophe. As soon as someone knows you're there (and they will, because building things like that is both literally and metaphorically noisy), and that you have food and shelter while they don't... Well, your invulnerability is going to be put to the test.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Low_(comics)
> The series is set billions of years in the future of the Earth after the start of the sun's expansion into a red giant has made the surface uninhabitable. It follows the lives of the two million survivors in the underwater city of Salus; its helmsmen, the Caine family; and its pirate enemies. The protagonists of the first issues are Stel Caine, who searches for life-supporting planets with robotic probes, her husband Johl, and their children. Remender summarized the story as being about "one woman's optimism in the face of inevitable and true doom".
Living in Antarctica or in the middle of the Gobi desert or at the bottom of the ocean (independently and sustainably) are way easier than living on Mars, and that’s orders of magnitude easier than finding and reaching a viable exoplanet.
The break even point for living on an exoplanet or Mars is when Earth is the worse environment, and I don’t think even a serious Dinosaur-killer asteroid impact makes Earth less habitable to mammals than anywhere else we know about. Maybe a gamma-ray burst would but at some point if the universe wants you, it’ll get you.
Climate change is real, environmental pollution is serious, the powers that be most likely aren’t going to do enough in time, so we’re going to get a screwed-up Earth.
But it’ll still be the best place we have access to for living in.
Some towns in Russia, or Canada where its deadly cold outside in the winter. Why don't they move out of there?
People are more adaptive then you'd give them credit for it.
In some sense, it means that humans, as we are now, could never leave earth and colonize space.
Evolution on such things works on the span of tens of thousands of years, not merely "some generations".
That's actually a good point and one I hadn't really thought about.
The only way I can think of for humanity to get to these other planets would be to build a network of self sustaining space station colonies. And if we can do that we don't really need planets any more.
In a similar way I could see something we make traveling out of the solar system, maybe we could even seed life. But it would be something different than us.
The furthest humanity has ever travelled, by way of analogy, is a couple of millimeters - to the moon. The nearest star system relatively speaking is another 200 kilometers further.
And sure you can appeal to the "well you never know what humans are capable of in the future" line of thinking, but that's really just star trek fantasy - there's not the remotest chance, nada, never.
Here's a fun video that explains and will totally dismiss any idea that we'll ever get there - apart from Star Trek fantasy:
I think anyone dreaming of interstellar travel and not also dreaming about human life extension is being silly. Until and unless we can live for at least 10Ky there's almost no point in going beyond the heliopause, unless you just want to live like an anchorite.
Just going to space within our own Solar System will be like living (not just working) in a very unsafe mine.
Without some sort of "magic" FTL and/or "stasis field" we are as trapped as a beetle on Hawaii.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/O%27Neill_cylinder ?
Multiplied by so many times across OUR solar system, until the building materials from asteroids, moons, moonlet, whatever runs out?
Why would one try to bend another unfriendly or hostile ecosystem into something which supports human life, instead of building one from scratch, with the added benefit of the right (rotational) gravity? Endless solar power. No storms. No quakes. No radiation, if done right?
Thomas Watson, president of IBM, 1943
Mayor’s claim doesn’t seem any more credible than Watson’s. Mayor might wind up being right, but not due to any deeper insight. It will happen, or it won’t. My opinion is we will do it as long as we don’t destroy ourselves first.
He’s also conflating the migration with protecting the earth. I don’t think there are very many credible people saying we should protect the planet as we can migrate to an exoplanet.
Protecting the planet is worthwhile, regardless of whether we can flee it.
The breakthrough project is working on very lightweight probes that travel at super high speeds.
Models that claim life is so rare as to be impossible are obviously speculative, and more reasonably deemed wrong.
“When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong.”
Clarke was a distinguished but elderly scientist.
Therefore it's unlikely that Clarke accurately predicted what's unlikely?
Plenty of distinguished but elderly scientists have said that the existence of ghosts is impossible. Therefore, in the view of people who quote Clarke's First Law, ghosts probably exist.
tl;dr As Voltaire said "A witty saying proves nothing."
(Aside from that, didn't we already discuss this not long ago in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21207011 ?)
It's part of the "californian ideology" thing (developing from "technological utopianism").
Not suggesting we destroy Earth, but, "well, destroying it isn't that bad, surely technology will (handwaving) get us to another planets, it's (handwaving) inevitable that man will colonize the universe".