now think about it...after we begin space exploration and if/when we find more life we will no longer be: Americans, British, German. we'll be the human race, we'll have to band together, because then we would be Earth with whatever else. our world would no longer just consist of the countries it would be alien planets and earth. sure there would still be some conflict between races and religion, but could space exploration a right step to world peace?
Awesome topic!! Obviously......many, many years after all of us are dead, but eventually we will be a one planet people. A one planet Government. So I agree with what you are saying in theory. It wont be peaceful right away though. The discovery of new intelligent life I think will inevitably happen, but then what happens if they are an older species than us and they have a different religion? What if they tell us our religions are false? What about if just finding other intelligent life, makes some people discredit our religions? All of that will lead to fighting. Once the dust clears though I think that it will inevitably lead to peace. Its going to happen. The human race WILL end up moving on to different planets eventually. Our planet has an expiration date. It may not be for Billions of years, but there is still an expiration date. Within the next 2-3 hundred years I think there will be people living on other planets.
long and lasting peace is never achievable. this species exists only to benifit self serving interests, and that is to uphold the concept of Master and Slave relationship. polscie
You are day dreaming, living on other planets? How could that be? Even here on mother earth this species fails tremendously, and yet you expect us to go to other planet and live there. What a crap. You believe too much. polscie
I never said we treat the Earth well. I said that we will end up moving to other planets. We will probably treat those planets like crap as well, but we will eventually end up on other planets. Probably because we destroyed our own. I also said it was many, many years down the road. After you and I are nothing but ashes.
Actually I disagree. We would be like 18th century. The colonies would be British, French, American, etc. They will at first be loyal to the home world, however after a few generations when the majority of the population are born in the new world they will declare independence.
By the time we are able to have the technology to even transport people to another planet, the likelihood that we will be a one world govt is pretty high. So by the time we get to another planet, you will probably have people up there who have never lived in a world with different countries, just one big united people. Its bound to happen as our society progresses.
I disagree. I don't that believe that a one world government is the inevitable outcome of human progress. We humans are much too clannish for that. We have always had an "us versus them" mentality. Also, as we deplete our resources conflicts are going to intensify. Unless we find lots and lots of inhabitable worlds, we are going to end up fighting for the few that do exist.
I disagree that we will deplete our resources. The most crucial ones to short term survival, air, water, and food, are all part of a cycle based on sunlight as an energy source. Few resources escape earth. In the long-term, I think that deaths due to violent conflicts will keep decreasing as technology allows us to spend less and less time on satisfying our basic needs. Something as seemingly unspectacular as new varieties of wheat can save many lives by producing much more food on the same amount of land with the same amount of work. Here's a quote from Wikipedia on the work of a brilliant agronomist called Norman Borlaug. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norman_Borlaug Of course, that's all speculation. Maybe I'm too much of an optimist, but as I look back in history and notice how much saver life has become on average, I see no reason to be overly pessimistic for the future of humanity.
Yep, people are too bleak about our future. We are not a perfect species, and we have the technology to destroy ourselves...AND we are destroying our planet. But we evolve. We have come a long way from killing elephants with spears, and in the grand scheme of things we have evolved VERY quickly. Just thing in the last 100 years (or so) we have created the automobile, massive sky scrapers, heating and air conditioning systems, the internet, the airplane, and we have sent man into outer space!! Modern medicine is an absolute miracle of human genius. Science has become so incredible some of it is even hard to fathom. I mean we can clone things now. We can create our own resources if and when our resources start to deplete. I do believe the entire world will come together in a one world govt type of thing at some point. We are SO much closer together now than at any point in history that its only a matter of time.
I don't think that goal is as far as people think. The world is already tied together economically, and political union almost always follows soon after an economic union. I find it rather difficult to imagine, outside of perhaps some sort of hive mind, that an entire species would hold to a single religion, or a single religious interpretation. In other words, what would make anyone think that another species would not have the same sort of religious divisions we have ourselves? Some of those alien religions might be dangerous for us (which would really make it better for us to initiate contact with them, not the other way around--otherwise we might only meet the conquistadors, rather than the more moderate folks back home who hold their leash), but others might well be friendly or highly inclusive. If we ever did meet an alien species with similar or more advanced technology, it is insane to think that there would not be change on both sides as a result. It might be easier to move Earth than to move everything off Earth.
If you'd like that view shaken, take a look at the demographics of people born after the internet, who grew up with it as a central tool in their lives. The effects of the information revolution haven't ended yet. We've only seen the tip of the iceberg, so to speak. There is a frightening degree of commonality among the latest generations, even across national borders. It doesn't help that most of them will grow up in a world where borders become increasingly less relevant. We have an in-group/out-group mentality. Technology has completely turned that mentality on its head, by expanding the in-group to encompass people who can be pretty much anywhere in a developed country. There is a huge, huge difference between the viewpoints of the generations who grew up with the internet and those who didn't. It's not just a difference in political beliefs, it's a profoundly different and radically more inclusive worldview. You can see this very clearly expressed in public opinion research across borders. Or cooperation will win the day. History is rife with examples of cooperation being the preferable option. It's hard for some people to understand that, because they often get taught history as a collection of wars, but that's not always been the option of choice. By the time we're ready to colonize other worlds, our understanding of 'inhabitable' will likely be much wider than it is today. I would propose that when people speak of 'habitable' today, they mean a naturally green and blue planet with life and such. But what inhabitable might actually mean is the ability for a planet to be made habitable if certain relatively simple steps are taken (like directing some comets towards it, or building a greenhouse effect). I think there's probably quite a lot of planets in the second category, given that there are two of them (other than Earth) and a handful of moons in our own solar system that meet that definition. In other words, I think that people's idea of habitable will change with the development of terraforming techniques like our idea of "nearby" changed with the automobile or internet.
