Why We Need to Expand into Space 460
Zentropa writes "Why do humans need to explore and colonize space? To save the planet and our species, argues an opinion piece in Cosmos, an Aussie science magazine. It makes some good points from an angle you may not have previously considered; for example, it's in the universe's best interest to keep us around. We make things fun. 'So what if humans pass into history? It's not just a tragedy for us, but also one for nature. Without us, there is no one to witness its infinite beauty; no one to marvel at a sunset, revel in a view, or thrill to the breaking of a wave on a beach. As the late astronomer and author Carl Sagan once said, "we are a way for the universe to know itself". But we also deserve to continue because we have created things greater than ourselves. Not only scientific and engineering knowledge, valuable as this is -- we have also created new and beautiful ways to see the world through art, music, literature and performance.'"
Benefit or detriment? (Score:5, Funny)
For those who think that we are detrimental to the universe, I suggest that the only logical thing to do is to kill yourself. Now. For the good of the universe.
Quit reading; do it now. Thank you.
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So, let's start to put some massive amounts of $$$ into shipping people off planet. Hell, if they have need of a programmer, I'd volunteer to go myself.
Re:Benefit or detriment? (Score:5, Insightful)
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I agree that is an odd point-of-view. However, I do not think it is hatred per se. More of a, "we could be so much more," perhaps.
Fix the Planet First, Only Move Out Much Later (Score:3, Interesting)
The two activities overlap significantly - a critical skill we need to learn for surviving in space is how to run a viable ecosystem, whether
Re:Fix the Planet First, Only Move Out Much Later (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Fix the Planet First, Only Move Out Much Later (Score:5, Insightful)
Religion and other romanticisms are just a mental sleight of hand to make up for the fact that the universe will uncaringly grind us all to dust.
We are far more dependent on the ecosystem of this planet than anyone seems to want to admit. That harebrained experiment with the "biosphere" a few years ago proved that one pregnant roach - or some other bug - can and will screw up the best laid plan.
All these pie in the sky engineering types should be forced to study cellular structure and function until they all realize that the most complex devices and processes they can design are tinkertoys compared to nature.
All this talk of consiousness and meaning and the perception of beauty is irrelevant nonsense as we haven't the slightest idea of the true nature and function of the universe. Every time we crack one mystery we find its built upon another that's an order of magnitude more difficult to understand.
What really needs to happen is for people to start planning on the mundane. Go hold a door open for someone and the human universe will be better off.
Re:Fix the Planet First, Only Move Out Much Later (Score:5, Interesting)
And maybe we should care more about "true nature and function of the universe", but I don't blame people for being "pie in the sky engineering types" when they realize how much their keen have accomplished when compared to those other people that insist man is insignificant and who claim to be trying to understand the Universe, but who give us back nothing but lots of more or less useless rhetoric.
Do you even realize the computer you are using and the network that connects it to millions of other computers forming the most powerful form of communication invented in the last couple centuries is the brainchild of those "pie in the sky engineering types"?
If what we have achieved disgust you so much, you are free to get back to a cave and live like our ancestors did before they had enough brain to aspire for more.
Man is not insignificant. Intelligence is the most important thing that happened in this little corner of the universe because, further down the road, intelligence is the only hope the very universe has to survive its cold death.
And don't worry. It sounds like a huge undertaking, but we have a good many billion years to figure it out. And, in the meantime, we will doubtlessly find brothers out there who are willing to share this effort.
Because we all know that when you take intelligent life out, the universe is nothing but a cruel, meaningless void.
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This is all a load of egocentric horseshit. Even a comedy writer like Doug Adams understood how unbelievable large the universe really is, and how unbelievably unimportant humans are in the scheme of things.
what does size have to do with importance?
We are far more dependent on the ecosystem of this planet than anyone seems to want to admit. That harebrained experiment with the "biosphere" a few years ago proved that one pregnant roach - or some other bug - can and will screw up the best laid plan.
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Nah, the women would just gossip amongst themselves and nothing would get done. You'll need a man around to give them the odd smacking or two.
funny or flamebait? that is the question.
Re:Benefit or detriment? (Score:5, Insightful)
Neither. Humans are completely irrelevant, as far as the universe as a whole is concerned.
Re:Benefit or detriment? (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:Benefit or detriment? (Score:5, Insightful)
"Conscious things like ourselves are the only way the universe can be concerned about anything."
Easily disproved. Conscious things NOT like ourselves also work. Mechanical intelligences, hive minds, and stuff that is so alien to us that we can't even begin to conceive it also work.
I doubt I'm the only one who thinks that this statement FTFA: "Without us, there is no one to witness its infinite beauty; no one to marvel at a sunset, revel in a view, or thrill to the breaking of a wave on a beach"
... is self-centered in the extreme.
Like they expect evolution to stop with us? Does ANYONE believe that humans will look the same a couple of million years from now, if we still exist? Look at what we were like 2 million years ago ... oops homo sapiens sapiens didn't exist then ... neanderthals were still walking about between 200,000 and 300,000 years ago.
And for those who don't believe in evolution, but want to invoke god - well, isn't your god capable of witnessing all this?
As for the "it's in the universe's best interest to keep us around. We make things fun" argument - this presumes that the universe *has* an interest and is capable of acting on it - in which case the universe is in some manner conscious, and can do without us when it comes to appreciating things. Tantamount to arguing some sort of universal gaiea.
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Easily disproved. Conscious things NOT like ourselves also work. Mechanical intelligences, hive minds, and stuff that is so alien to us that we can't even begin to conceive it also work.
Your examples are all 'conscious things like ourselves'. It is the consciousness that is being used to decide what is included in the set, not some arbitrary stuff like being a bag of hydrocarbons.
The article is pseudo-religious crap, not science. (Score:4, Insightful)
Well, for starters, the article anthropomorphized the universe. It belongs with religous writings, not science.
"Some ask: so what if humans pass into history? It's not just a tragedy for us, but also one for nature. Without us, there is no one to witness its infinite beauty; no one to marvel at a sunset, revel in a view, or thrill to the breaking of a wave on a beach. As the late astronomer and author Carl Sagan once said, "we are a way for the universe to know itself".
Factual errors in the above statement:
There is no evidence that "nature" can "experience" a tragedy. There is no evidence that nature has more consciousness than a sack of rocks.
This presupposes not just a human-centered concept of beauty, but that we, as humans, are the only beings capable of witnessing anything. Never mind that the author posits (point #1) that "nature" can "experience" tragedy; if nature can "experience tragedy", then why would nature need us to be able to experience beauty?
Just because Sagan said it, doesn't make it true. We are undoubtably here, and yet there is no proof that the universe "knows itself" today, except in quasi-religious and religious belief systems that posit a god or other supernatural being.
The best reasons for going into space are because its there, we want to, and we can make good use of it. Not some claptrap about if we pass away its a tragedy for nature, when there's more than ample evidence that, if anything, we ourselves are a tragedy on a daily basis. Go into space, by all means. I'm 100% for that, but go because we can, because we want to, because we're curious, because we can find uses for the stuff we find out there, for the knowledge we'll acquire, for the insights we'll develop, because we want the elbow room, or a room with a spectacular view, or to do something different.
These are real reasons to go. Go because WE WANT TO, not because of some metaphysical bullshit argument. The latter just make it easier to stereotype those who see space as a place to expand as just wild-eyed dreamers. The article does us a disservice. I say put the writer out the next airlock :-)
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>You're saying that we could evolve into another form of consciousness. But we can't evolve into another form of consciousness if we cease to exist before we do so. So your point of view is exactly as homo-centric as the articles.
My point of view is that there may or may not be other consciousness elsewhere in the universe, but that, in the end, its irrelevant. Just as, in the end, how long we survive as a species is irrelevant.
If the universe COULD care, then it already has the capacity to do the t
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From a purely information-theoretic perspective, the presence of people (and life) means that the net entropy of the universe is lower than it would be in our absence.
"benefit" and "detriment" don't really make sense, wrt the universe, but perhaps life can/will/has helped to postpone the universe's heat-death - if only for a short time.
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I would guess that the entropy raises moire quickly with life, though it's hard to say without knowing what would be in it's stead. Why do you think it is lower?
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Well, I haven't done an experiment
since life on earth hasn't really influenced anything outside of the earth,
then life on earth hasn't increased the entropy outside the earth.
While I wouldn't say that life decreases entropy (because it has to increase it somewhere, just to exist), it seems possible that the presence of life means that entropy is lower than it would otherwise be, because of the steady stream of negentropy that's arriving from the sun.
I'd certainly be very interested to hear any op
Re:Benefit or detriment? (Score:4, Interesting)
So yeah, agnosticism is a healthy position. In the absence of strong data I find it the only logical choice. Absolute statements like that of the GP are generally nonsense. Only a Sith deals in absolutes.
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Re:Benefit or detriment? (Score:5, Insightful)
Another thing which I find silly, is the tendency to view ourselves distinct and separate from the universe no matter what. Of course it's good to abstract the rest of the world as separate from us when going about your everyday business. However, when dealing with universal notions, such as humanity's relationship to the universe, we should acknowledge that humanity is just a property of the universe, a physical manifestation of the laws governing the cosmos.
The universe cannot care whether we colonize the space or not. On the other hand - space colonization is the obvious thing for us to do, due to our very nature. Expanding and filling all the available space and exploring the unknown is what we have always done, no reason to stop now.
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It may not make any sense, but that is the philosophical viewpoint at least 90% of the population subscribe to.
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Why must we be either a benefit or a detriment?
From my point of view, only living things can perceive a detriment and a benefit. With that assumption, what in the universe would care if we blow up a planet on the other side of our galaxy.
For all I know, the universe doesn't care if we blow up everything there is, since atoms do not bother. Our race would be a detriment/benefit to other civilizations, however, if such
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To the universe we are infinitecimal little microscopic bugs on a tiny little blue dot on the outside of a small insignificant little galaxy. We are absolutely nothing to the universe.
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Most of us are a benefit, but some of us are just pricks.
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I'd like to agree with you, but you're wrong. We're antithetical to the continuation of this universe. The good news is that I'm pretty sure any intelligent life would be.
The problem is the universe is too simple for the likes of us. Once you truly understand the nature of spacetime, it's simple to see how to switch between matter, time and energy states. In many ways it looks lik
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We'll never travel space. Any technology capable of producing enough energy to even make anything past mars a destination could also be used to create a weapon of unfathomable destruction...
Which do YOU think it will be used for first?
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Re:Benefit or detriment? (Score:5, Insightful)
So, you've had an epiphany about power generation that says that anyone with basic technical skills could build a device in a week that would produce free limitless power. Is there any particular reason that you haven't gone ahead an built this device? If it's that easy, and all of the physicists and engineers are pissing in the wind with fusion power then why not demonstrate to them the error of their ways?
When you "see signs" that others know about this, do you also experience paranoia that they are coming to get you? Or witness strange meaning in coincidences that are all around you? I really don't know what's scarier, that so many people replied without actually mentioning anything that you'd said, or that somebody with mod points thought that you were insightful about easy the power generation problem is...
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As Daniel Quinn has pointed out in his excellent novel "Ishmael", growing as a species is fine and dandy as long as you don't wage war on your surroundings.
Totalitarian agriculture (that's the term he uses for our way of life as a global culture, being totally dependent on the massive surplusses our food production yields) is the fire burning beneath our cultural cauldron, causing us to overrun the planet, its resources and most other s
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Re:Benefit or detriment? (Score:4, Insightful)
I think it puts the whole idea into perspective. We're just another variety of life on this planet that's managed to evolve to the point of self-awareness, tool-using, and altogether too much self-importance. The idea that the universe would suffer from the human species becoming missing is folly.
Hah, look around you. If you think all you see is a good thing when compared to what things would have been like without us, you're nuts.
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But we are part of the Universe and we care. Therefore the Universe does attribute value to us.
Entropy is increasing, the eons are closing! (Score:4, Insightful)
Humanity will also never occupy more than a tiny corner of the universe, as most of it is just too damn far away to be accessible. No matter what we do, our effects will be "local". Thus, we as a species should do what is best for ourselves (and for any other intelligences we may encounter, if we ever do) and our living conditions and not worry about "what the universe thinks", because if it thinks at all, it sure isn't thinking about US.
Mal-2
Babylon 5 (Score:5, Insightful)
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That line was uttered by Cmdr. Jeffery Sinclair, who was replaced by Capt. John Sheridan...
*sigh*
I disagree (Score:4, Interesting)
I'm not any more.
We do a lot of cool stuff in space -- the Hubble is a great example. But I think it's mostly a military program. The program is thick with screcy, and so much of it seems to be part of this strangelovian plan to militarize everything.
If we were actually going to do that cool stuff in a transparent way, I'd be all for it. But we're not. We're going to lob satellites into orbit to support networked weapons systems, and to spy on people, and all the rest.
The cool stuff is mostly bait and switch to get us to accept the ugly stuff without examination or complaint.
Re:I disagree (Score:4, Insightful)
We are sending probes to explore the planets, the asteroids and further. Unfortunately science always goes in its own pace, and the amount of investments is small compared to the money that goes to wars. But we are making progress.
Take look at New Horizons [jhuapl.edu], who will explore Pluto and beyond. It will take a few years, but I'm sure it will give images to us from a planet, that no one has ever seen before. And there are several other interesting projects running, not only US-based, but also Japanese (Hayabusa [wikipedia.org] took the first sample of an asteroid) and now even China is making progress in its space program [wikipedia.org].
Keep up the good hope!
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That stuff is already there and will be funded no matter who is in charge. So that argument is a red herring.
I'm naive enough to think that if we push for space exploration hard enough, it might just happen. At the very least, it's in our nature to explore and to colonize.
Tragedy for nature? (Score:2, Insightful)
Nature doesn't care the least bit if someone witnesses its infinite beauty (which is a purely human term anyway; not the nature is beauty, but nature, or rather some part of it, fits our perception of beautiness). It doesn't care if we thrill to the breaking of a wave on a beach. Nature has no wish
Methods... (Score:4, Interesting)
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T
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Of course we need to expand into space... (Score:3, Funny)
You also can't expand into say, love, or the scent of almond, or square root of negative 1.
When it comes to extension, expansion is only possible in space.
Duh.
the ole geek pipe dream (Score:3, Insightful)
Now mod me down for goring the sacred calf.
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I'm all for space exploration -- but we are doing a great job with robotic probes! Let's continue research and make them fully autonomous. We can send up hundreds more for the pr
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The same WILL happen with mars as with many places on earth - there is water on mars, not on the surface, but on some places it will be found frozen below the surface.
I wish you'd make up your mind. Is water already found or "will be" be found.
There is all necessary elements to grow crops, manufacture things and live a good life - given the sufficient technology.
Umm... Breathable air? Atmospheric pressure? Low radiation? Sorry. You're wrong.
On mars we will also probably find valuable metals, minerals and other resources.
Not necessarily, and not necessarily in accessable locations or in large amounts. This is pure speculation. You might as well be saying we can mine the asteroid for "valuable materials," because asteroid mining is a standard in scifi. Of course asteroid mining makes no economic sense since they're made of base metals, like iron, have always be
Enough. (Score:5, Insightful)
Do they raise geeks on shitty, whiny junior high poetry instead of Heinlein and Asimov now?! Damn! Moving forward into space doesn't have fuck to do with GOD or the "meaning of life". It's the next goddamn step. You all of you whiney bitches saying "oh, what's the point... humans are sooo terrible" are just refusing to help because you're to damned selfish. Selfish because you don't think your children, or your neighbors children, or anybody's grandchildren should get the same thrill you did when you first saw the Shuttle take off in grade school. Or the first moon landing. Or the first manned orbit. Or the first mother fucking flint scraper.
What assholes. No wonder you don't want the human race to expand into outer space -- you assume we are all just like you! Fine. Stay in Middle Ages Europe, afraid to fall of edge of the fucking planet. Yeah, it's hard. Life is hard. Get used to it. But ruin it for everyone else -- even in the future -- by not even trying? Pathetic.
I wonder why Carmack or even Branson are so interested? Oh wait, they must be "god freaks" or idiotic enough to believe that we are eternal as a species and there will be no Big Rip, Big Crunch whatever according to 90% of these posts. It sure as hell isn't gonna make them money while they are alive.
THIS is slashdot? If the human race goes out like a punk, I'm blaming all of you.
--
It's about time I earned some negative points. Fuck.
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1. Fun.
2. A challenge.
3. A way to stick it to the man.
By "the man" I basically mean NASA. Billions of dollars. Thousands of engineers. Metric butt loads of paperwork. That's what you need to get people into space right? Bollocks! If 8 guys, one girl and an armadillo [armadilloaerospace.com] can put people into space using garage grown engineering, and on a part time basis, no less, then anyone can!
As for making a profit, watch 'em.
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Sorry, it just sprang to mind.
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Caring about other humans who are not your closest relatives also seems quite strange.
Uh....no....that's basic human nature. If you are walking down the street and see a child get hit by a car: do you stop and call 911 or do you think: "Doesn't have anything to do with me. He's not my relative." The word "strange" means "out of the ordinary" but caring about distant strangers is not "out of the ordinary" at all. Most people give to charities that help strangers. If you would not help the child and have
Lee Smolin's take on it (Score:3, Interesting)
It's not totally implausible that having parameters conducive to life and complexity in general would be a good reproduction strategy down the road.
Now, where did i put my bong?
Lack of understanding of population biology? (Score:4, Insightful)
So if I'm understanding correctly, his proposal is that after the Earth is 'full' at some optimal value x, any excess population is then shipped off into space?
Since the world population http://www.ibiblio.org/lunarbin/worldpop [ibiblio.org] has a net increase of about 2 or 3 people per second, or about 200000 people a day, he just needs to figure out how to build enough starships to ship 200000 people offworld every day.
SpaceX believes that $500 per pound to orbit is achieveable http://www.spacex.com/press.php?page=10 [spacex.com]. Assuming each of those 200000 people weighs an average of 150 lbs (and ignoring things like, oh, I dunno, air, water, food, and habitable space), his proposal would be expending $15,000,000,000 per day, forever, to keep the population of Earth at some optimal number.
Now, I'm all for keeping an open mind about spreading humanity's risk of complete annhilation by spreading to other planets if possible, but to use the argument that this will solve Earth's putative population problem seems...flawed.
Re:Lack of understanding of population biology? (Score:4, Interesting)
You're absolutely right that it costs a lot of money to get stuff off Earth. Thing about space is, there's so much resources up there for the taking that just about anyone who manages to "mine" just one asteroid, or crater on the Moon, or the atmosphere of a gas giant, is going to be rich beyond the ability of Earth's markets to measure.
The off-worlders will be so rich they can buy the services of anyone they need. And if they see a need to bring them into space, then they will. Seems a lot more likely that the whole Earth will be seen as a cheap source of labor, much as third world countries are seen by first world countries today. I think the term "first worlder" might become derogatory this century.
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You're absolutely right that it costs a lot of money to get stuff off Earth. Thing about space is, there's so much resources up there for the taking that just about anyone who manages to "mine" just one asteroid, or crater on the Moon, or the atmosphere of a gas giant, is going to be rich beyond the ability of Earth's markets to measure.
You bet your ass they'll need help. All kinds of hig
Meh (Score:2)
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
Unbelievable... (Score:5, Insightful)
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I knew this would show up sooner or later - "Earth, Love it or Leave it!".
People engage in a conversation, you don't like what they say, so ya tell them to kill themselves, and it gets modded to +5: Insightful. Jesus, there's a good reason to despair for humanity right there.
Destructive abstractions. (Score:2)
We are no less nature than a rock, orchid, river-in-valley scene. Strawberry cheesecake, RFID card readers, Teletubbies, pulp-fiction and compiler flags are as much a part of 'nature' as anything else. It's the 21st cent
not an argument (Score:3, Insightful)
Although I wish it were true, there's actually no absolute value in that. Without humans, these intellectual achievements have no meaning. Meaning only exist in the mind of other humans.
contradictory (Score:2)
Given the naturalistic worldview that is most likely held by the editors of Cosmos and majority of its readers, in which the universe is impassive, unthinking and unfeeling, it is in fact no tragedy at all "for nature" if mankind ceases to exist. That kind of thing only "matters" if there is someone for it to matter "to".
What a load of old cock (Score:2)
The only thing the author has shown is that he needs to pull his head out of his arse and be sent for a good long spell in a total perspective vortex [wikipedia.org].
Holy shit, /. taggers, learn to spell (Score:4, Informative)
Why did people explore before? (Score:4, Insightful)
To decide whether it makes sense to spend resources on manned space travel, you should look at why mankind has explored and colonized new lands in the past.
Natural resources - Early man followed the food. There were edible plants and animals outside of Africa, so if you were hungry where you were born it made sense to go elsewhere for food. Civilized man sought spices, minerals, and lumber. It was lucrative to send out a ship and bring those back. Do the same economics apply to manned space travel?
Religious freedom - America was settled in part by people seeking freedom from religious or economic oppression in the Old World. Do you expect space colonies to escape from the burdens of Earthbound society?
Reduction of overpopulation - Colonization of America didn't do much to decrease the population of Europe. The number of emigrants was small compared to the existing population. For space travel, the number would be miniscule. You'd need to launch a thousand spaceships a day with a thousand passengers each to actually decrease the population of Earth. If overpopulation exists and a fertile underpopulated land is available then it's a good deal for those who make the journey. But it won't help those who stay behind, and we have found no hospitable planets outside our own.
Exploration - Curiosity and pursuit of knowledge are worthwhile reasons for exploration. Men went to the North Pole and the Moon because that was the only way to learn about them. With modern technology we could send a thousand robotic probes across the solar system for the cost of one manned trip to Mars.
Adventure - People still climb mountains just for the sense of adventure. You can build a rocket or buy a ticket on Spaceship One if that's worthwhile to you. But you shouldn't expect the government to fund your trip to the Moon any more than it would pay for your trip to Kilimanjaro.
Preservation of the species - If you're worried about a natural disaster, you could send a few dozen people to live in a deep mine or on the bottom of the ocean. They'll be just as safe as on the Moon or Mars. Plus they'll have protection from extreme temperatures and solar radiation. The journey would be a lot cheaper and less hazardous.
To maintain the spark of life - Life is interesting. It's a pity when some branch of Earth's diversity of life perishes. The universe would be a boring place without life (although there'd be nobody left to miss it). If we're the only life then that's good justification to spread it. But are we alone? Does other life exist? Is it common? Is it like us? Those are questions worth answering. Those are missions I'd be happy working for. Are those missions that would be helped or hindered by focusing on manned space travel?
AlpineR
The key would be to adapt (Score:3, Insightful)
Think of it this way: Wouldn't it be silly for a race of intelligent fish to try to colonize the land? Actually, that's exactly what they did, but only after they themselves adapted to the environment over millions of years of evolution. Similarly, I think that if we are ever going to colonize space on a large scale, we're going to have to adapt our bodies first. For example, resistance to vacuum, radiation, zero-g, and increased tolerance for heat and cold would be steps in the right direction. Will the results of such an engineering project still be human? I guess that will depend on what you define as human, but I figure that it's something we're going to have to do if we ever really want to leave this planet.
So, the good news is that there's reason to be optimistic: yes, we will eventually be able to colonize space! The bad news is that it'll likely take a couple of hundred years before we have that kind of capability, and once we have it we may not want to use it. Either way, we're going to have to figure out how to survive here on Earth for the time being.
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Ugh. This is masturbation. As in, it's uncomfortable to watch. Also, you spelled mystical wrong.
I've had the same feeling, briefly, drunk, and it was like being high. nobody wanted to be around me. [asofterworld.com]
Re:Get some perspective (Score:5, Insightful)
Or, to be more concise, I disagree.
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Re:Get some perspective (Score:5, Interesting)
I agree on the science and math. I strongly disagree on the music - sure the ratio of tones might be a universal but there's a lot more to it that - music is tailored to our attention span for a start, things are repeated just enough for us to remember then, just before we get bored, a new theme is introduced. It seems unlikely that anything else would coincidentally have the same thresholds. And who's to say they wouldn't prefer their music at humming bird speeds? Or as a week long contest like a cricket match?!
As for the visual arts - they're even worse because our colour perception is so arbitrary. Whole paintings would likely look brown to an alien!
In short, I disagree back
Re:Get some perspective (Score:5, Interesting)
But there's two trite assumptions you've made that always annoy the hell out of me, because there's absolutely nothing to support them but a kind of quasi-prejudice. While at first glance, these two assumptions might seem seperate, they have the same root.
First you implied that somehow classical music is somehow superior to all other forms of music. Bullshit. Classical music was simply the popular music of the day. There's nothing magical about it. You described classical music as "very pleasing in its forms and the interplays of wavelengths." (Typically one describes audio as frequencies, but whatever.) Well geez, since every musical form has forms and interplay of frequencies. That's what distinguishes music from a steady tone. But your choice of aliens enjoying classical music is very telling. Over the years it has become perceived to be superior to all other forms of music because of the perception that "smart" and "successful" people listen to it. As the antithesis to classical music, rap is typically given. I suspect that the thought of many alien species finding rap music pleasing never entered your mind, because classical music is for winners and rap music is for losers. This is a very persistent view, even though there's no evidence, let alone anectodal evidence, to support it.
This leads me to the second assumption, which I already touched on. The assumption that aliens are somehow super intelligent/powerful. Basically, Klaatu from Day The Earth Stood Still. Why? What's the basis for this very common assumption? Simple. Some want to believe that someone will come down from the sky and solve our problems. That's absurd. Given that we have absolutely no evidence for any intelligent and technologically lifeform existing anywhere in the universe besides us, I would argue, that this leads to an obvious conclusion: that humanity is the most intelligent and technologically advanced lifeform in the universe. It has to be someone, so why not us? Oh. Right. That would be too depressing.
Evolution rewards fitness for the environment. Not intelligence. Not culture. Nothing but who can fuck the most. It's good to remember that in discussions like this.
Re:Get some perspective (Score:4, Insightful)
Well, there is the fact that we can't get to them, so if they can get to us, they are far superior to us, at least scientifically/technologically.
Almost agree (Score:5, Insightful)
I do think that there is an objective reason to believe that a species which was truly alien would like some (not all) classical music more than modern music: it has fewer musical assumptions.
Specifically, Bach's counterpoints make very few assumptions of the listener - you won't have to understand any other art forms to appreciate Bach. Most modern music (Rap, Rock, etc) uses a shared language which has been built up over centuries, and has a whole lot of cultural assumptions built into it. To pick an example, Eminim's song "Stan," which used the Dido song as a backdrop, makes a bunch of assumptions of the listener: we have to understand obsessive fandom, we have to have an appreciation of the irony of using a sweet pop melody to tell a murderous story, and we get all kinds of references to Eminim's earlier work.
Most artists draw on the shared body of culture to express their art - it's a very rare piece which will seem beautiful to radically different cultures. I would put forth that some early Bach would be more likely to succeed in that than, say, Elvis Presley. Also the lack of lyrics helps: if you listen to Rap, or most Rock without lyrics, it's clearly missing something major - many of the older classical pieces are designed as instrumentals, and thus avoid the language barrier.
Just my $.0196 (adjusted for inflation)
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There was zero evidence in 1845 that we'd have an atomic bomb in 1945.
Given the rate of technological advancement, it isn't far fetched to admit that it could be possible to create something that would replace us over a period of time.
Of course it won't be monkeys or dolphins that replace us, but rather something more unnatural that makes the homo sapien obsolete.
This might include genetically altered humans that are no longer of our
Re:Let's figure out how to stop fighting each othe (Score:2)
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Oh yeah, the subjugation and murder of millions of Native Americans (north, central, and south) is a great example of humans being at their best...
Re:Let's figure out how to stop fighting each othe (Score:2)
It helps on two levels:
1) We're assured surviving an asteroid hit, or other planet-busting catastrophe (whether natural or man-made).
2) An expansion into space may not SOLVE humanity's tendency to fight, but it might buy us enough time that we might solve them before some wacko destroys the planet taking us ALL out in one fell sweep. IE by expanding in
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Absolute proof - God/no god (Score:3, Funny)
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And those who don't search for meaning in things like nature, going to the extent of "worshiping" the Earth and the environment, placing them about humanity.
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Because otherwise it's just nature's laws playing itself out, with all of our existence being nothing more than a random series of events.
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I, for one, would like us to expand into space to get away from those who are total PITAs (pains in the ass).
Only ordinary people cavorting in space wastes so many resources that could be better used. An argument may be made to shrink the distance between habitable worlds perhaps by somehow bringing them closer together. Another answer is for people to rise above their ordinariness and achieve worthy goals in space. If the scientists can convin
Not obscure (Score:2)