Interesting, I’m of the opposite mind: I think it’s inevitable that we will inhabit places outside earth. Time is long, technology keeps getting better, space on earth keeps getting smaller, and there’s only one way we escape the consumption of earth by the eventual expansion of the sun. We just have to make sure not to destroy ourselves here first (a tall order, it seems as of lately).
No way we colonize space or smaller rocks until we invent artificial gravity, which I don’t think is possible. Even spin “gravity” comes with a nauseous Coriolis force unless the station is huge and you’re on the outer edges.
Luna is a death trap, no magnetosphere, radiation soaked, and the fine dust would make asbestos look like lung candy.
Much the same for Mars. No radiation protection, fine dust clogging everything.
Fair points but you and the other commenter are, in my opinion, thinking too near-term. On the scale of hundreds of thousands to millions of years, evolution starts to become a factor. The beings that leave earth to live elsewhere, on that time scale, may have been human once but would have evolved into something different, hopefully more suited to environments on other worlds. And we’re not even close to the destruction of earth by the sun, which is on the order of a billion years from now.
That’s more what I meant by inevitable. Our curiosity brought us to the stars early, but we have the time here on earth to invent, adapt, grow, and change before the hard stop of needing to leave earth…assuming we survive what earth throws at us (and what we do to it) in the nearer term.
I was on same side but then I started reading and watching interviews with astronauts, when you get back from space station you can’t even walk by yourself. It’s not only muscle disappearing problem. There are eye sight problems, brain changes. Brain is made 80% from water. There is no way people can overcome it with current fuel based space flight. And it’s just humans so don’t get me started about food. We’re stuck here for good.
Interesting, I’m of the opposite mind: I think it’s inevitable that we will inhabit places outside earth. Time is long, technology keeps getting better, space on earth keeps getting smaller, and there’s only one way we escape the consumption of earth by the eventual expansion of the sun. We just have to make sure not to destroy ourselves here first (a tall order, it seems as of lately).
No way we colonize space or smaller rocks until we invent artificial gravity, which I don’t think is possible. Even spin “gravity” comes with a nauseous Coriolis force unless the station is huge and you’re on the outer edges.
Luna is a death trap, no magnetosphere, radiation soaked, and the fine dust would make asbestos look like lung candy.
Much the same for Mars. No radiation protection, fine dust clogging everything.
Fair points but you and the other commenter are, in my opinion, thinking too near-term. On the scale of hundreds of thousands to millions of years, evolution starts to become a factor. The beings that leave earth to live elsewhere, on that time scale, may have been human once but would have evolved into something different, hopefully more suited to environments on other worlds. And we’re not even close to the destruction of earth by the sun, which is on the order of a billion years from now.
That’s more what I meant by inevitable. Our curiosity brought us to the stars early, but we have the time here on earth to invent, adapt, grow, and change before the hard stop of needing to leave earth…assuming we survive what earth throws at us (and what we do to it) in the nearer term.
I was on same side but then I started reading and watching interviews with astronauts, when you get back from space station you can’t even walk by yourself. It’s not only muscle disappearing problem. There are eye sight problems, brain changes. Brain is made 80% from water. There is no way people can overcome it with current fuel based space flight. And it’s just humans so don’t get me started about food. We’re stuck here for good.