Is All of This Political Fighting Really a War over Man's Future?

[LuvNewcastle]

Sorry about the sexist tone, I was running out of room. But if you think ahead, I believe that we're going to start looking outward as a species. We have done so much damage to the Earth and the news doesn't even cover a lot of the more serious stories. We are either going to have to start looking for another place, or the population is going to have to take a big hit. If we start a serious space program and we begin to explore more frequently with manned missions, the world will have to change. Does everybody sense this, and is this the zeitgeist of our age?

We will need peace on earth so that we can use our military resources on building up NASA. This is what will save our economy, and end permanent war for profit in exchange for modification of our society into one that dares to lift it's head from its navel and starts looking up.

We have people who are on board with that progress, and we have the malcontents, who really want to deal with life as it comes and experience the heartbreak of life and then are cleansed by their own tears.


Which side are you on?

[tularetom]

1. Not a very cheerful prospect either way

In other words we've crapped in our own bed so often and for such a long time we have basically made the place uininhabitable and we now have to start looking for another planet to fuck up.

I'm good with that but then I'm 74 years old. We are years away from having the technology to achieve the end you envision and maybe centuries away from the global accord it would take to implement it, assuming that the human race isn't decimated by some climate disaster before then. Those of you who expect to be around for the next 50 or 60 years should get to work on it.

[LuvNewcastle]

2. I've been wondering if this isn't

something that all the hominids have gone through. Maybe the others were just plain not willing to adapt. Maybe they were satisfied and didn't understand the need to adapt and move in a different direction. A lot of us have Neanderthal genes, and maybe that's what's keeping us tied to the Earth. I have no idea which I would choose. Looking ahead, however, can ruin the now.

[struggle4progress]

3. There's no place else for us to go, and we couldn't afford to do it anyway

There's no known habitable destination. The nearest known candidate is 12 light years away. The recent Pluto probe New Horizons took nine years to get to Pluto, which is about half a light day from the sun. It carried no life-support systems. At these speeds, we talking about centuries or millennia to send robotic probes to check out any candidate habitable destination

We've sent fewer than 700 people into space, for rather short periods of time. The total cost to the US in inflation-adjusted dollars has been something like $900 billion so far. The world has about 7 billion people currently. The cost of shipping them all into space for rather short times would be more than 10 million times the cost of the US space program: $9 billion billion. Total world GDP in 2000 was only about one millionth of that

[Tierra_y_Libertad]

4. It makes one wonder about the conceit that we're the apex of evolution.

[NonMetro]

5. It Will Never Be Possible For Is To Move To Another Planet

Space is too vast, and we're too slow. But I think the political infighting does have something to do with population. Land is limited, people are not, and those who own and control the resources today fear losing their grip - as they more or less always have. Nobody wants to go there, but we're in the midst of class warfare. That's what the Republicans are doing every day: weakening unions, weakening the working people, restricting collective bargaining, and of course, the war on women. Republicans don't work for the 1%, they are the 1%!

[The Traveler]

6. I am an advocate of manned spaceflight

but I do not see it as a vehicle for insuring the survival of our species.

I acknowledge that recent really weird results in physics open the door to the possibility of interstellar transport technologies ... but we are a long way from actually inventing what wheel, or even establishing that it is actually possible.

I hang out with some pretty affluent people of the libertarian persuasion. In their belief system, a sudden die off of the human population will happen, but the most fit will survive by dint of technological prowess. They get really hand wavy about the details of how that will work ...

But I do think it is gradually penetrating the consciousness of the public that, yes, we are living in the middle of the biggest, fastest extinction event in 65 million years. And we could easily achieve Permian extinction levels of disaster before we're done ... which would make it the biggest, fastest extinction event in 250 million years or so. I think it is completely unreasonable to assume that the human species itself will survive this event.

The oceanographic community predicts the complete collapse of all ocean fish stocks by 2048. The ocean exerts enormous influence over the chemical composition and behavior of the atmosphere ... the stuff we breathe. It is difficult to predict how and at what speed ocean chemistry changes after all the fish are gone but it is certainly gonna change, and land based mammals are not likely to be happy with the new equilibrium.

And that is why I place environmental issues at the top of my priority list. Those issues are well served by an active space program ... there is a reason why NASA has been at the front lines of the climate change controversy for 30 years. But if we are going to survive as a species, much less sustain our culture, we are going to have adapt quickly and dramatically. If we want to survive, we're going to have to find and create ways to stop this cascading extinction event. And we're running out of time.

[LuvNewcastle]

7. Yes, so many people just don't believe it.

And the PTB have made sure that lots of them don't believe in climate change. These fools are supporting representatives who are leading them to their own extinction. Unreal. I'm 46 now. I wonder if I'll see the plague or the bomb that does the deed.

[Ron Green]

8. Forget survival elsewhere; our bodies are part of this planet.

Our only hope is to decouple human happiness from economic growth, and to quit having so many babies.

[LuvNewcastle]

10. plus 1000

[davidn3600]

9. Well the planet isn't going to be this way forever

What we are doing is causing change at an accelerated rate. But this isn't anything the planet hasn't seen before. This plant is 4.5 billion years old. We've only been on it for roughly 200,000. Before we were here there were several mass extinctions. There were massive supervolcanic eruptions. There were massive asteroid impacts. There were ice ages where glaciers made its way down to Florida. And there were even periods when tropical rain forests made it as far north as Alaska. The planet wasn't always like the way it is today. It is constantly in a state of change.

So you need to understand that no matter what we do, no matter what politics we vote for, no matter what policies we put in place...this world will change. We as a species are incredibly lucky to have evolved during a period of global calm and stability. But that isn't going to last. The fossil record proves these stable periods do not last forever. There will be another mass extinction. It's a certainty. It's either going to be caused by us or it's going to be caused by nature. One way or the other.

If the human race wants to survive in perpetuity, we will have to go to the stars at some point. That is certain.

[LuvNewcastle]

11. I think so too.

I also think that in the process, we will evolve into something else. The rest of the species would branch off and evolve differently. That could be how it happened before. How will the two new species get along in the future?