Oldest known cave painting found in Indonesia
phys.org
phys.org
For scale, this reaches back in time roughly 10-15% of the way to when Homo Sapiens first emerged.
Then again, it took us 66 years to go from the first human flight to landing a person on the moon, and 60 years hence we’ll have settled Mars, solved worldwide energy generation and storage, and invented AGI.
It’s just too bad we are unable to intellectually or socially progress at anywhere near the same rate as we scientifically progress.
Even evolution cannot overcome the cold, hard limitations of physics. Unless by settled Mars you mean some transplanted bacteria survive there, and solved energy we consumed every reasonably reachable drop of fossil fuel.
At this point it’s “simply” a matter of scaling up the manufacturing base, which is one thing humans are astoundingly good at. Just look at silicon production scale over the last 40 years and extrapolate for lithium ion.
Likewise, there’s no boundary in physics, technology or human physiology to stop us from establishing a human colony on Mars.
There's no self sustaining settlement in Antarctica. Mars is much further away and less habitable.
I am extremely skeptical that we will even have a space station on Mars in the next 60 years. A self sustaining colony is laughably far off.
The amount of resources and people that you would need for a colony on Mars to survive indefinitely without imports from Earth is staggering. You would need all of the highest tech industries from Earth (certainly chip fabs and robotics), large mining operations, smelters. You would need enough population to man all of these (or automation on a scale we are very far from, that could entirely handle factories and self-maintenance), and enough agriculture for this population. And you would have to do all of this with no access to fossil fuels - which also means no plastics and no access to many common lubricants. And of course, all of these things would have to be built underground, with huge tunnel boring operations required for any expansion.
This may all seem possible from a physics perspective, but it is something that would have to be planned for generations in advance, well outside of our realistic civil engineering capabilities at least. And since doing all of this with the hundred million people that would be required with today's industrial practices would likely complicate things a lot more on Mars, you would need automation at a level that our robotics engineering is still very far from.
It all seems possible to some extent, but definitely not something that could happen during a catastrophe, and absolutely not something that could happen without all of the bases being laid out from Earth (that is, it is impossible for a colony that was not designed and prepared from Earth to be fully self-sustaining to become self-sustaining once on Mars out of necessity).
There is the prestige of having your nation expand, while others don’t. It is hard for democratic states to maintain long-term goals because power changes hands every election cycle, but it's not impossible that a stable and developed authoritarian country like China could launch such a venture just to cement its status as the leading superpower. That is not to claim, of course, that that colony would be self-sustaining anytime soon.
I disagree that there is “nothing to gain” and in fact I think there’s a lot humanity could gain from the development of regular space travel and settlement of other planets.
Overall, I believe that there is 0 reason to even attempt it for now. The Earth is in the middle of an existential crisis for human civilization as we know it, and all of our resources are required at home. We need to rebuild the global economy from the ground up in a way that will reduce global warming. Mars is no escape from this, certainly not in the next centuries.
Any cent that goes to a Mars colony would be better spent on Earth. If not for combating global warming, then at least for building self-sustaining colonies on Earth that could become a refuge for humanity if all else fails, or if we get struck by some asteroid. And this would not only buy us guaranteed survival, it would also act as a perfect model for a Mars colony is some far future - if we had actually built one on Earth, with all its requirements, building one on Mars would certainly become much easier.
Until and unless we know for sure that we could build truly permanent high-tech human settlements on Earth, there is no point in trying to in space. There is nothing to be gained from Mars if we can't build a permanent colony there not dependent on Earth resources, and we will not be able to build a permanent colony there unless we first build one on Earth.
Tell me how many underwater and arctic settlements we have today. They should be unclaimed territories just teeming with possibility, in our own backyard.
Yet they’re... not? You’d think that after space flight we’d have 8 metro lines in the Arctic by now, if it was all just a matter of waiting around.
And you want to fly how far for something that supposedly is full of some untapped potential?
Even an asteroid strike in the middle of a nuclear war wouldn't come anywhere close.
I think there are benefits to an independent settlement beyond physical destruction. In any case I’m saying Musk isn’t going there because it’s full of resources as was suggested up thread. He’s going there for the long term benefits to humanity he believes it will achieve. If you want to get rich in space mine asteroids. Which will probably become more viable if Mars colony ships ever routinely travel between Earth and Mars.
Elon Musk may end up going to Mars, I don't think after the last decade anybody will bet against that. He could very well be this generations Neil Armstrong in being the first person to set foot on another planet. Which would be a stupendous achievement in and of itself, even if he dies in the attempt to land there itself.
But after that he'll either die there anyway when his resources run out or he'll run right back to mamma earth assuming they can manage to resupply their fuel and make it back here somehow.
Now, if we were to think of a colony ship or a colony on a distant planet light years away, that would make some sense, but that is probably a project for the year 5000, not 2000.
This to me seems like an immense number of mental hoops, when you can’t even make people wear a piece of cloth over their face literally for the sake of humanity.
There are many reasons an independent settlement makes sense. Earth could get stalled in political deadlock, have a nuclear war, or fall under the control of autocratic regimes.
But there are direct benefits to humanity even without these worst case scenarios. Independent thought and political control at a time when the countries on earth become ever more intertwined (China’s Belt and Road) will probably serve some benefit in our future.
And then regular rockets between Earth and Mars would pave the way for asteroid mining, which would allow construction of massive solar energy harvesters.
That’s 200-500 years out but if we’re capable of starting now I’m not opposed to folks trying!
Musk is purportedly dreaming of a colony on Mars that would survive if the Earth were destroyed. That means that not only do they need to grow food, get water and generate electricity from Mars, but they will also have to have the manufacturing capacity to make everything from tunnel boring machines to microprocessors. An actually self-sustaining colony on Mars would likely have to be closer in size to a large city on Earth than to a permanent base in Antarctica.
So I would look at it the other way: even a large city on Earth isn't entirely self sustainable. How could we hope to build a self-sustaining colony on Mars in 60 years?
Or, that sort of area.
SpaceX has done wonders for getting the cost of moving a kilo of matter into orbit. From a tech point of view it is a very large but still incremental step from where we were before.
A self sustaining Mars colony is science fiction.
Mars colonies are way down the list of things I think worth trying to do, but it's absurd to call them physically impossible, even on a 60-year deadline.
Radiation: interpose some matter.
Temperature: heater.
Oxygen: Mars has plenty in situ.
Gravity: current humans might actually find this a problem for long-term health, I'm not sure, but it's a bounded one, not likely to compare to long-term zero-g life. There's no barrier in physics to spinning up big centrifuges, even though it's ridiculous. Biomedical approaches are more likely for a biomedical problem.
Yes, I'll be surprised if they manage a crewed mission at all by 2029.
When the moonlandings first happened the papers and popular science writers (and SF writers) were all over what would happen next. What happened next is nothing. Sure, we have the ISS, it's been a neat little testbed and good PR for space development.
But colonizing another planet is a lot harder than it may seem. I'll challenge anybody that believes that this can be done to 10 30 ton semis full of gear, food and oxygen, then to set up shop right off the coast somewhere and prove that within a decade they can be self sustaining. That's many orders of magnitude easier than doing the same thing on Mars and it is still very much this side of impossible.
The 'self sustaining' bit is the nasty part here, as long as you can ship in food, oxygen, water, toilet paper and whatever else you think you might need on your faraway planet you'll be fine within your little environmental cocoon. But another planet without a breathable atmosphere is so incredibly hostile to life that your first mistake will be your last.
60 years is the interval between Zuse's first Turing-complete relay computer and the popping of the dotcom bubble. Or between the Wright flyer and Project Gemini. Outer space has ridiculously more resources available than Earth surface, making it economically irresistible. Powerful economics plus 60 years of development can equal... a lot, as I said to start this subthread. Mars itself is not very attractive, but if space happens bigtime then even a sideshow can also happen.
100% self-sustaining would be unlikely (there's no real point in the last increment towards that), but colonies on Earth always had trade too.
Unless we self destruct by then, possibly wiping out most life on this planet with us.
20,000 years ago, the sea level was 400 ft lower. People had already lived there for tens of thousands of years. Even 13,000 years ago there were still millions of square miles now inundated. If there were not legends reflecting such an event we would need to know why. As it is we do have such legends, everywhere. The flood did not recede; we call it the sea now. It happened gradually, but large flat areas would have been covered in a generation.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meltwater_pulse_1A#/media/File...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sundaland#/media/File:Map_of_S...
What was Sundaland is girded by what are now Indonesian islands. The Yellow Sea west of Korea and the northern South China Sea off Viet Nam to Taiwan were dry land. Territory stretching out hundreds of miles around India, particularly to the west, south of Pakistan, shows evidence of construction (visible right before the big tsunami). Britain was not an island; we call the land where the North Sea is now Doggerland. The whole Persian Gulf was dry land, south of Mesopotamia. The oldest cities there border the gulf.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Doggerland3er_en.png
See orange areas: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bathymetry#/media/File:Mid-oce...
For AGI, we are so far from even having a clear idea how to even approach this problem (no, deep learning and backpropagation are not promising avenues).
For Mars, there are no real incentives, and the problem of a self sustaining colony underground in an irradiated environment with little oxygen and grabity is absurdly difficult. We might at best have essentially a space station on Mars in 60 years, but a self sustaining colony that wouldn't die off 2 years after something catastrophic happening to the Earth is far beyond our current engineering, much farther than any advance in the last 60 years.
Not to mention, for any plausible catastrophe happening to the Earth apart from a gamma ray burst, the Earth will still be much, much more habitable than Mars. So even if you are motivated by survival of the species, trying to build a colony on Mars before having a huge array of self-sustaining underground habitats on Earth is putting the cart way ahead of the horse. You'd even get the first-hand experience needed to actually have any hope of building something like this on Mars.
Bullshit.
I find AGI in 60 years to be more controversial than Mars. Not enough evidence yet. One can def hope though.
Maybe, just maybe, we will have made a manned round trip to Mars. And that would be quite an accomplishment. A much more likely chance is a one way trip with all hands lost, assuming they make it to the destination at all.
To be fair, “hence” means counting from now, not counting from the moon landing.
Ah! But only if we're talking about anatomically modern homo sapiens. Behaviorally modern humans emerged much later, and in fact one of the most definitive signs of behaviorally modern humans is the existence of cave paintings!
Defining behavioral modernity is an endless debate, but a key part of it is symbolic thought - the ability to think with abstractions and manipulate concepts. Representing a group of pigs on a wall in pigment (or even considering doing so a meaningful activity) demands powers of abstraction that humans acquired only recently, in the last 50,000 years, most likely via the development of language. This is ultimately why finding the earliest cave painting is such a big deal. It shows that in this place there were people who had crossed that behavioral chasm and in some sense were more like us.
For more on this subject, Masters of the Planet: The Search for Our Human Origins by Ian Tattersall (2012) is a wonderful read.
Not as long as there is the popular notion that only researchers should go to Mars and anyone going there for profit is bad. See National Geographic's "Mars" miniseries.
The only way people will settle the solar system is when:
1. there's money to be made
2. people get past the notion that terran life will "contaminate" the other worlds
A huge amount of research and development went into aeroplane design as people quickly realised they could be used very effectively for reconnaissance, strafing infantry, bombing and resupply. This led to the development of air to air combat which led to faster planes and eventually jet engines.
The German development of the V2 rockets for bombing London from a great distance led to a lot of work on rocketry which was then able to built on for the space race.
The space race was two super powers pouring enormous resources into research and development to ensure there would be no military gap from lack of capability in near earth orbit.
From a military perspective, colonising Mars is unlikely to have any major military benefit on Earth. I'd guess there are many other hot topics for the military to focus on (autonomous/semi-autonomous warfare, cyber warfare, biological warfare etc).
Colonisation of Mars is (currently) more likely to be pursued by commercial or non-military scientific purposes. Perhaps some of the commercial entities now rival small countries in terms of economic might. I doubt though that a commercial entity (Space-X) will be able to get very large groups of people to unite (and sacrifice other interests) in pursuit of a common goal in the same way that they do during times of conflict.
What would you have adorned your cave with 45,000 years ago?
Do you think the result would be as distinctive as the stencil?
I haven't tried it. I'm making speculative inferences from the existing data vs the non-existent data.
Similarly, "seven sisters" interpretations of the Pleiades are found from Africa to Australia and everywhere in between. The last time the Pleiades were recognizably seven stars was 40,000 years ago. "Seven sisters" legends everywhere include an accounting of the missing sister.
I think it's also accepted that some cultures spent thousands of years with very little change compared to the climactic and geographic variations they endured.
Art periods are of couse referred to as "schools" and the most prominent way tradition is carried on by modern artists who intend to produce a work that will stand the test of time, is to use medias that are much closer to Rembrandt or Michaelangelo than what we see in the caves.
But not that different either.
Whatever was proven to last more than a few generations at the time.
IOW techniques proven over unknown generations of artists who came before, so much so that maintaining any knowledge on the subject required a degree of faith or superstition not less intense than efforts which preserved religious or cultural traditions, even of prehistoric humans.
Maybe for thousands of years.
It's not the Flintstones but it is just modern man in prehistoric times.
Artists who are contemporaries will need to develop a trend together in order for a school to form, and from what we see in recent centuries, a certain style often takes a while to catch on but also can last more than a generation even when there is only one progenitor as a seed.
Even though almost all art & science have always been lost without a trace.
The little bit that does stand the test of time and get preserved probably lasts much longer if it had been in development for more years before initial recognition.
And you've got to figure that schools of art come & go in much less rapid cycles the further back in time. But the materials that will last have evolved much less quickly.
The latest trends are still often depicted using inorganic pigments on canvas or carved in marble, and signed using the artist's name, styles can be wildly different but that part is exactly like it was done over the most recent centuries.
A recognized predecessor might have simply been inorganic pigment on a cave wall, signed with a hand stencil, when you're trying to paint a masterpiece that will stand the test of time. If nothing else had ever been proven this is what most would do.
And that tradition would likely have lasted orders of magnitude more generations when pop culture or art appreciation cycles were slower. Much slower in all probability, and probability can have some tall odds.
Like when there's not that many people in the world yet, most of them are going to be more similar than they are later.
Seems like the initial trend from earliest centuries could have actually lasted for earliest unfathomable millenia before any other school of art might have arose naturally as it was going to do anyway.
Could be all art everywhere started out always being signed with a hand stencil and it was so widespread and universal a trend it did not dissipate for tens of thousands of years. And it was everywhere, at home, at work, on billboards etc., you just couldn't get away from it, for like eons. It's been a while and it wouldn't be too surprising if the only thing preserved from way back then is in caves, and it could have been painted there intentionally for generations to enjoy into the unforseeable future, based on proven techniques from the unknowable past.