No, one has to keep remembering that the problems here are hard. Not hard like Kittyhawk. Hard like really hard. Astrophysicists and rocket scientists know these problems. Here's a quick 31 megabyte tour of NASA's 30 year plan. https://science.nasa.gov/science-co...strophysics-subcommittee/astrophysics-roadmap You don't have to do much guessing! Think about this. When are we going to get a commercially viable fusion reactor. We were promised this energy source DECADES ago. We have other reactors. There is HUGE money waiting to be made. That's what a hard problem does. (Edited to add the link - oops!)
climate is still an unknown in regards to food production, some regions could be devastated will other regions with improved climate makeup for it?... the oceans imo are the biggest concern all the fishing regions are either in trouble or under stress with over fishing, unlike land the oceans are out of sight of the general public and aren't drawing the concern of world leaders as they should, they're not election issues
it's like trying to make a car go faster on the Bonneville flats there are limits, to squeeze even 1 mph more requires exponentially more horsepower... when you're at the limits of existing technology progress slows to a crawl, there needs to be a technological breakthrough to a new source of propulsion...
Exactly. But it takes a long time for the atmosphere to escape Martian gravity and dissipate. Millions of years. The main problem with Mars is that there is not enough atmospheric pressure. Due to lack of pressure, liquid water cant hold its form and evaporates. So step 1 would be to heat the planet up by pumping it full of green house gases. Greenhouse gasses are also heavy. Once water could flow, we could start planting. The object is produce more gas than that could escape. We can do things like egulate the size of forest to account the escaping oxygen.
Amen. I will say I'm not much of a fan of more food in one area making up for less food in another. In general, the hunger problem has been one of distribution. Shifting the distribution problem to Canada or wherever isn't really going to solve that.
Yes, there are serious propulsion problems, especially when considering going to a significant gravity center like Mars and then hoping to return. I've heard an argument that says we need to build space communication architecture so we don't have to have every satellite carry the ability to talk all the way back to earth (power plus antenna). The antennae end up being weight plus bulk at launch time and power drain. If there were relay stations in space we could lighten the load of every satellite a little.
people with little to none geographic knowledge look at a map of canada and the areas that are farmed now and think incorrectly there's an enormous area of un-farmed frozen land that be available, but I've lived in those regions it's fantasy, the permafrost areas will take centuries before they're available if they don't turn into enormous swamplands...and the largest regions are un-farmable bedrock... there will be little expansion of farming in Canada, not nearly enough to make up for the loss of arable land in the USA...
Not that long. Because discoveries and technologies stack, technology increases exponentially. The graph only gets steeper with time. Technological advancement that used to take thousands of years will be made in mere hundreds. Mind you, it wasn't too lang ago since the light bulb was first invented.
Sixty years ago my forebears logged that norther land, as Canada promised to route a railway through there. They got the logging rights for the cost of building a village. So, I've heard the tales of waiting for winter as the only way out, building fires under trucks, etc. It was FAR FAR worse than the "ice road" movies back then. And, they did go bankrupt in a major, major way when Canada backed out of their deal AND the bottom fell out of the lumber price in the US at the same time. Right now, I think it is one stupendous source of methane that will probably warm the planet worse than the CO2 that is kicking off this disaster.
Those are merely improvements in kind. What you don't see is some other type of processor. There are too many problems between here and a Mars colony to just have improvements in kind.
and there is that elephant in the room... when the tundra permafrost melts in Canada and russia the amount of CO2 and methane released will be enormous...
Unless there's a discovered planet with a suitable and sustainable environment for homosapiens, plus an existing infrastructure of villages/towns/cities (where the original inhabits were perhaps wiped out by disease or something?), then I honestly don't see the point of obsessing about going into space.
Logically there is only one viable option at this point and the foreseeable future for human kind and it does not involve planetary colonization or Alien contact, as both of these are unlikely. The intelligent and doable option involves creating large scale space habitat(s) that allow us to "create" gravity and produce resources that allow for self sustaining survival. The technology is already here and exploration/innovation will continue unabated from this space based population. Trying to terraform does not change biological problems of gravitational degradation and is far too expensive and time consuming. Travelling to other stars is impossible at this point without a generational ship which this space colony actually IS.
By 2100 we'll still be talking about this...IMHO Space travel or colonization of other planets/moons are not the answer to over-population. Dreams are nice but reality is different...we can envision all sorts of things humans and space travel can do, even with some of it critical to the survival of mankind, but when it comes to funding, and technology, and producing, and implementing, we're talking about centuries into the future. Think about the FACT that as a nation the USA can't even bring it's infrastructure up to date, can't even colonize the Moon due to priorities and costs, yet we're going to suddenly as a culture allocate billion$/trillion$ to space technology research and space travel and colonizing? Being a realist...I just don't see it happening for a very long time...
What we accomplished landing humans on the Moon was basically a touch and go procedure and IMO we were extremely lucky to not have something go sideways. Even if we ignore how slow our space travel technology remains today, I think the more critical factor is the ability of humans to deal with non-Earth environments. Humans are designed for Earth conditions, and surely humans can adapt to other environments, but this process might take 1000's of years? If humans will be relegated to self-contained biospheres located on the Moon, or Mars, or whatever ET location, then just create a biosphere that travels through space...indefinitely...and forget about colonizing Mars and others...
This is part of Drake's Equation; How long can a civilization last? Single-celled stuff can last billions of years but modern man can bring it all down in 300-500 years! And there's always the threat of some external event, or a natural disaster, that can speed up the process. I always say humans are just along for the ride but I don't know how to quantify this? It's not rocket science for Earthlings today to understand the risks of population growth, a lack of potable water, a lack of arable land, effects of climate change, nuclear wars, etc. so perhaps the World and other civilizations only have a short time span to exist...
It's taken Voyager's like 40 years to get to the edge of the Solar system, and beyond that point it's a very, very, very, long time before the next pit stop!
I've written many times that I believe we should build a 100% sustainable vessel, which holds 200-300 humans, etc., and send them on a one-way voyage. Even with this option, 40 years before it can leave this Solar system, then how many more years to the nearest star...57,000 years! Point is without an exponential steroidal increase in vessel speed it seems like a wasted trip. 57,000 years is about 2300 generations and for the entire time it must remain 100% sustainable. This is the critical problem between our technology and the vast distances of space...
