There are many reasons to get active and start building colonies off Earth, even if they aren’t self sustaining and cost a fortune. One main reason is that we can do it, and we can afford it, if we stop blowing money on women.
It will also help humans see that we are all one and that we should have a common goal and unite. The common goal should be to secure ourselves from possibility of extinction NOW.
This means we WILL need to colonize another habitable world, even if it takes building a massive generational ship and spending 10,000 years in space just to travel two stars away. It must be done.
We WILL go extinct if we do not do this because Earth has a track record of killing life off. 99.99% of all species who lived on Earth are extinct. All other hominids are extinct. And we almost got waxed too, about 80,000 years ago. The time to unite and grow up is now.
For me, possible Mars Missions are just publicity stunts like Voyager’s Golden Record. Voyager was simply a fact finding mission to photograph the never before seen gas giants. But they made it way more fun by increasing public awareness with the golden record stuff.
Mars and the Moon are uninhabitable dead worlds that are utterly useless for our species. We shouldn’t even be concerned with finding proof of life elsewhere. We should be concerned with making sure our kind of life doesn’t get vaporized by a freaking comet. This means we need to venture out past SOL.
A generational ship is one solution. Obviously its a gargantuan task and it will be a slow road. There is no way to achieve fast propulsion, sorry this isn’t Star Trek, we need to GET REAL, like yesterday. A generational ship is going to need it all, rivers, mountains, air, trees etc etc…It will be home for hundreds of generations of humans. They need to start building it now because it will probably take a hundred years to get it ready. Once completed, it will set off for the nearest Earthlike habitable world about 12 light years out. The trip will take thousands of years. Bring a book to read.
The other solution is a Population Bomb. This one is highly difficult, way more than a generational ship. Mainly because LIFE takes millions of years to evolve, even billions. It’s possible to probably just build the life we want though which may only take hundreds of years.
A population bomb is not really a bomb. It’s an unmanned spacecraft with all this onboard:
1. Brawny AI robots with opposable thumbs that can do everything humans can do like fight off predators, teach children and fix machines.
2. Hundreds of artificial wombs in tanks ready to literally grow humans.
3. Humans embryos, eggs, sperm….whatever….ready to be go into the wombs.
4. It’s possible that even frozen embryos cant survive the long trip. So we may have to send DIGITAL DNA and many other DNA of animals and bacteria (like stomach animals that evolved with us). And the robots will have to literally build life from scratch and build the artificial wombs.
The main difficulty is getting the biology right and also creating really smart AI and really physically capable robots.
Anonymous 1 year, 7 months ago.
