No. In about 800 million years the Sun will be so intense it will boil away the Oceans. The sun will live on the next 3 or 4 billion years as a red giant. The Earth is too close to it to survive.
Despite great advances in technology, people are still fairly fragile biological entities. My main concern for deep space exploration consist of two forms of radiation. Galactic cosmic radiation (GCR) which is present at all times and solar particle events (SPEs), which are short bursts of solar radiation. GCR contains heavy, high-energy particles that penetrate spacecraft, you can't shield against it like you can for SPEs. Long term exposure to GCR is unexplored territory, we don't know how a person would fare being in deep space for extended periods of time. We're talking months and years now. It's quite possible a person could not survive a long journey, say outside of the Solar System even with future technology to get them there. People laughed at the concept of heavier-than-air contraptions until it was shown they are a viable means of transportation. We put a man on the Moon 66 years after the Wright Brothers flew at Kitty Hawk, so who knows what the future holds. It's possible technology could allow for deep space travel. I don't think there is anything in our Solar System that could be made habitable and terraformed. We would have to seek out exoplanets in another system and getting there could take a lifetime, maybe lifetimes...with present technology, even going to Mars would be extremely dangerous for a live person, a manned mission.
Where is Above Alpha when we need him? He talks about a kind of space travel where everything is in a single dimension, so that it takes literally no time to be in another place. We got smart guys looking into it right now. Even if it takes them another century or two to figure it out, we'll have use of it well before we're served with an eviction notice. A very good question is whether or not we'll just annihilate ourselves before any of this comes to fruition. Another of AA's favorite topics is a process whereby energy is converted into matter. It will take awhile to get that worked out too, so Bullwinkle doesn't pull a roaring beast out of his hat every time. If mankind can crack those 2 nuts, we should be able to do just about anything we want, without bothering anyone else.
Theoretically at least, the notion of wormholes is a possibility to circumvent "distance." It's been alluded that quantum entanglement, wherein two particles, say photons, once entangled create wormholes which allow for near instantaneous changes in one particle to effect another. This is theory right now, no one really knows what's on going with quantum entanglement. At least the math allows for wormholes to exist. Surviving a human sized journey into a wormhole would allow for interstellar travel given there is control over where the wormhole begins and ends. It exists only as science fiction now, but it has not been deemed an impossibility at least. Humans would need to be able to harness a wormhole to eliminate the need to travel massive distances on the scale of light years. I'm unfortunately a pessimist at heart, I believe humankind will decay before this potential science fiction becomes science fact. Natural disasters have shown that civilization evaporates quickly, sometimes in a single day...once order has lost control. It will be a every man for himself or herself scenario. I do not envision humankind going extinct, but I do envision events which will 1/2 our current population. The process will be one step forward and two steps back. Once great empires, the Mayans, the Egyptians, the Greeks, the Romans...flourished, built monuments, roads cities, infrastructure...now they are dust...studied as ruins. Now keep in mind, I'm a crabby old man who has lived through numerous human conflicts...wars if you will. I see humanity from a negative perspective, I see us as essentially brutish beings. A younger generation, not yet tainted by cynicism may save us all...I'm just unimpressed with humanity thus far and it's propensity towards self-destruction and decay of the spirit. It's probably best I have no offspring...when I die my cynicism dies with me, and maybe humanity can get it's act together and transcend it's Darwinistic tribalism. Good luck to our youth, in other words, and to future humans.
Why terraform another planet, when you can build your very own planet the way you want it. Thats what a true civilisation would do, constructing a megstructure. A halo ring for example. That would give is true freedom and the ability to settle evry system we demand.
You talk about ethics as if it was something that you people decide for lol. Your gov will justify extermination by making people believe all aliens are like this and problem solved.
Don't expect AboveAlpha to solve your future ethical problems for you. Hasn't he done enough already?! I mean come on guys the universe isn't that cruel on retirement (yet). Anyway you're thinking about AboveAlpha's line that gravity is a one dimensional expression. It's not the same thing as space travel. Gravity might be 1D in the math but it's not the case that all points in space inhabit one dimension (at least from our point of view.) Besides AboveAlpha shouldn't be talking about certain engines. He got a call. But, I do know, from school, that we can already use energy to convert matter from one form into another, fire a high energy ray into an atom to warp its interior shell and transform it into the size of another atom, but the catch is that altered matter comes out radioactive. Not so nice! If we want to use it we'll have to start stockpiling resources 1000s of years early and let the stuff cool down before we can use it.
Mars-Bound Astronauts Could Face Higher Risk of Cancer Source: http://www.space.com/21359-mars-radiation-manned-mission.html
(My bold) Yah, BBC reported @ Feb. 2000 - see http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/sci/tech/specials/washington_2000/649913.stm - "Professor James Kasting, at Pennsylvania State University, calculates that the Earth's oceans will disappear in about one billion years' time, due to increased temperatures from a brightening Sun. However, well before the planet is left as an arid desert, the level of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere will be too low to support plant life, destroying the foundation of the food chains." Is the 800 million years the estimate for when the CO2 level gets too low?
First off, Herk, I'm in your camp as another cynical old man. With the recent spate of earthquakes in volcanic regions, we're all reminded about the fragility of life on earth as it is. The way things are going with Russia, China, the radical Muslim agenda, etc... it's easy enough to believe that we certainly will find a way to get ourselves into the biggest conflict yet before long. The references here to the radiation problem are more than enough to call Markus S down on his wish for man made structures wandering around in space. On the other hand, let us all keep in mind that the era of technical awareness is only about 400 years old, if we cite the invention of gun powder as the dawn of the period. I guess the Egyptians preceeded that with some of their stuff, but the age is still very young, compared to the 800M years that we use as the figure for how much longer we have to figure things out. What we really need to make is some kind of skin for space structures that absorbs radiation and converts it to the energy that is used on board. That's basically what the earth does, so how do we emulate it?
way off topic, more consistent with maintaining our current planet of residence... I think it's possible to separate hydrogen from H2O using a similar method to how plants photosynthesize CO2 into O2 from water. Essentially sunlight could create a clean energy in hydrogen using ordinary sea water... 3/4ths of the planet is covered in water...basically an inexhaustible source of fuel for a hydrogen cell. The problem now with the technology is the energy used to extract hydrogen from water is greater than the yield of energy it produces. Sunlight is free, last time I checked. That's a ways off, but there are a lot of promising technologies out there to maintain the one planet we know is habitable and friendly to life. More on topic, I would hope within my lifetime, someone, even China, sends a manned mission to Mars. Just to see if it's possible and what this will tell us about deep space exploration in the future for humans. Drones and robots are nice and all, but if we decide to move from Earth, well, it might be nice to know what to expect in deep space and what hazards need to be circumvented.
I assume by Halo ring you mean a ringworld. If you can build that than it would probably be easier to terraform a planet. Or just move the earth to keep it habitable.
(My bold) Yah, lots of tough materials & engineering problems to solve before we can build a ringworld. Moving a planet might be even more delicate. But you can read Niven - Ringworld, Ringworld Engineers, especially one of the later compilations of Ringworld stories - he talks engineering/materials with some of his readers, some of whom are v. bright people, & do the math, etc. Just getting together the raw materials could take us a long, long time. Enjoy!
Of course gravity is not 1D in math, it's 4D and takes 10 (hard) equations to solve (Einstein Field Equations). The equations have produced some interesting solutions that indicate large distance space travel may be possible, like the Alcubeirre Drive https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alcubierre_drive or Dr. Felber's ideas http://phys.org/news10789.html.
It is not about what is easier but about what is better. A terraformed planet will always be just a compromise. It always will have variables we can't change like mass, its density and gravity and so on. An artificial construction like a ringworld in halo or a mini dyson sphere is a far more superior technology and gives the option to settle virtually evry star system.
IMO except for small numbers of humans, under our current set of physics, the masses will never inhabit another planet/moon in our solar system and cannot travel the distances to other solar systems. I'd say Earth is our only prospect when we are talking about the masses...billions of humans. Even if we magically had a new set of physics which allowed SOL travel, it will not be practical to have more than a few humans make the trip. Earth is all we have and the way we treat Earth today it is accurate to say 'this is as good as it gets'. If we don't change our course it's all downhill from here until we've screwed the pooch. This same scenario might apply to all extraterrestrial life forms across the multi-verses...
A Ringworld or Dyson Sphere won't be possible for tens of thousands of years, if ever. The wait for them is about as long as for a terraformed planet, but we could probably build O'Neill type habitats in the next century or so.
Dr. Chaim Tejman has written that somehow hypnosis….turns the human subconscious into a device capable of viewing other time periods……. It is intriguing that the people who saw what looks like the future…….. but it would actually be the fairly distant past……… because time is not limited to being linear……… saw that space travel was going to become like an "outward wave!" http://dwij.org/forum/future_link/future7.htm
Its natural law if we are victorious we are meant to advance and if not we are not, we will expand until something or some species stops us.
Evolution only occurs when a species is presented with a change in its environment. Otherwise nothing would evolve. There is no "natural law". That is something you just made up.
Evolutionary Law is Natural Law like I said we will expand and spread out in the galaxy until something stops us, and we have a duty to do so for the survival of our species since the Sun can die as can our planet for any number of things from nuclear war to a black hole moving by. If we meet other species it will be us or them if we are not compatible. Humans area ruthless species I would not want to oppose us if our technology is better and the other species primitive.
We would never have to occupy another planet. We could live in large space habitats, many cubic miles in volume. Remember that hull area increases more slowly than volume, so large habitats could have parks, houses with yards, and so forth. The sun isn't supposed to actually go nova, from recent reading. It is only supposed to send out weak puffs of material as it shrinks down to being a dwarf star. Puffs would remove atmospheres of planets around Jupiter, but there are ways space habits could survive. Then the space habitats could settle in around the dwarf sun. There are millions of cubit miles of metals in the asteroids, so we have enough raw materials. If we did move to another star with an equivalent asteroid belt, we could continue there without settling on a planet. Planets aren't very safe anyway in the long term. Things happen to planets like asteroid hits. Other than wars, which we could prevent, and things like asteroid hits if we stay on earth, the biggest danger to humanity is long term genetic deterioration because natural selection is no longer weeding out middle level bad mutations, which are therefore accumulating. That problem could be solved by putting full healthy cell nucleuses into egg cells, so that healthy individuals would continually be born into the population.
That is certainly a problem with small spacecraft. However, a large space habitat a number of cubic miles in volume could easily have a thick hull, which would protect everyone. We do have the metal and other resources in the asteroids to build such large space habitats. The problem is lifting enough mass from earth to orbit to get a space economy going in the first place. If we can't get the cost of lifting payload to orbit below a thousand dollars or so per kilogram, the expense of starting a space economy would be high. However, once the space economy were in place, production costs would be similar to earth. It is mainly a political problem, and the chances are that humanity will fail for that very reason. However, even with a thousand dollars per kilogram, here is how we could do it. First, we expand the world economy. To be safe for the environment, all the energy would have to come from alternative energy, but that could be done. It is only a political problem. Until we have metals coming from the asteroids, we would have to continue to substitute non-metals for metals in as many of our products as possible. Again, that could be done. The only problem is political. The current Gross World Product is about 60 trillion US dollars per year. If we really became efficient with economic growth, I see no reason we couldn't match the Chinese growth rate of the past few decades of almost 10% a year. If we created a world economic growth rate of 10% per year, safe for the environment, the world economy would double about every 7.5 years, which I will round up.. Thus, we would have a Gross World Product of about 120 trillion US dollars per year in 2022, 240 trillion US dollars in 2030, 240 trillion US dollars in 2038, and 560 trillion dollars per year in 2046. At that time, if we were willing to spend 10% of the Gross World Product creating a space economy, that would give us a budget of about 56 trillion dollars per year. At a cost of $1000 to lift a kilogram to orbit, we could with that budget lift about 56 billion kilograms per year from earth to orbit. At that rate, if would only be a few years before we would have a space economy adequate for building large space habitats. I'm just looking at the worst case scenario. If we do manage to develop an ability to lift mass to orbit more cheaply, such as 100 dollars per kilogram, the cost of creating a space economy will be less.
