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given what has been achieved in over 50 years of space exploration, will 200 years be enough time to find another potential habitat?... Hawking suggested that unless the human race begins to inhabit outer space, it will disappear.
His tinge of optimism is painted in quite muted colors. "If we can avoid disaster for the next two centuries, our species should be safe as we spread into space," he told BigThink. ...
Our only chance of long-term survival is not to remain inward-looking on Planet Earth, but to spread out into space," he said.
...
"The human race shouldn't have all its eggs in one basket, or on one planet. Let's hope we can avoid dropping the basket until we have spread the load," he said.
I disagree with Hawkings on this one.Barring a fundamental change in our understanding of physics, space has little to offer as a habitat. Space stations aren't self sustaining and terraforming takes a lot longer than 200 years. Solar systems with potentially habitable planets can't be reached unless we can develop faster than light travel.
Hawking: It's outer space or die for humans | Technically Incorrect - CNET News
given what has been achieved in over 50 years of space exploration, will 200 years be enough time to find another potential habitat?
will this be a wake-up call to those who seek to further de-fund the space program?
Depends on the kind of station.Space stations aren't self sustaining
The problem with going elsewhere is that we would be completely reliant on artificial means to survive. That isn't an insurmountable problem, but there is little point in not building the same structures here on earth to compensate for any natural disaster. The same Bio-Dome you need to survive on mars can be built here on earth to compensate for nuclear winter without the insane costs of shipping material millions of miles. If we can create a sustainable lifestyle in space, we can do it easier on earth, no matter how badly we screw up the planet.
Solar systems with potentially habitable planets can't be reached unless we can develop faster than light travel.
At our current rate of technological change, doing that in 200 years isn't unthinkable. It seems impossible, but then, in the 17th century, human flight seemed impossible.
I do disagree with Hawkings that we're going to die otherwise. We've lived a few hundred thousand years, we can live another few thousand without going elsewhere. Doesn't mean we shouldn't be looking, though.
given what has been achieved in over 50 years of space exploration, will 200 years be enough time to find another potential habitat?
will this be a wake-up call to those who seek to further de-fund the space program?
Technology isn't the problem, as the human imagination, given time and resources, is limitless in what it can achieve.
Space won't be a viable option until humans can work together, and there are a lot of challenges here on earth that would be healthy for us to overcome to prepare us for greater voyages.
The biggest barrier to space exploration for us is that, as human beings, we simply do not live long enough for long-term space travel to be truly feasible.
Were faster-than-light flight possible it would still take a human almost 4 years to travel to our nearest star Proxima Centauri ... and 30,000 years to just the very centre of our own galaxy !!!
The speed of light (670,616,629.51 mph / 1,079,252,849 kph) is a very long way beyond anything we can achieve today ... so until we are even near that ... space travel shall remain just a dream !!!
APOD: 2005 December 4 - Proxima Centauri: The Closest Star
The biggest barrier to space exploration for us is that, as human beings, we simply do not live long enough for long-term space travel to be truly feasible.
Were faster-than-light flight possible it would still take a human almost 4 years to travel to our nearest star Proxima Centauri ... and 30,000 years to just the very centre of our own galaxy !!!
The speed of light (670,616,629.51 mph / 1,079,252,849 kph) is a very long way beyond anything we can achieve today ... so until we are even near that ... space travel shall remain just a dream !!!
APOD: 2005 December 4 - Proxima Centauri: The Closest Star
Hawking: It's outer space or die for humans | Technically Incorrect - CNET News
given what has been achieved in over 50 years of space exploration, will 200 years be enough time to find another potential habitat?
will this be a wake-up call to those who seek to further de-fund the space program?
I am not so sure Hawking is correct in the near term, but overall we know that this planet is only destined to live so long before it goes the way of Mars. So, in all frankness everyone with half a brain realizes that if this race is to survive for the far off future we must move to space.
Interstellar travel will certainly take much faster engines than we have now, but given that the only possibly viable faster than light travel (aka wormholes) is clearly a hugely long way off from being developed (unless of course the technological singularity occurs) any travel will take a long time, so humans actually surviving the journey to another system (especially one with a potentially habitable planet) and back is unrealistic. Thus we're dealing with generation ships for the foreseeable future.
Of course that isn't really the biggest limitation to space travel...getting off the Earth is.
Sure we launch things into orbit on a regular basis, but only at enormous cost. For every kilogram of payload we launch into space it costs $300. If we wanted to launch an average size car into space that would cost about $300,000. The international space station cost $100 billion dollars to build and took over a decade. Unless we can get a handle on these costs, building the necessary space infrastructure to even think about regular interplanetary travel much less interstellar travel. We know how to do this, build a space elevator or space launch loop (I favor the latter), but we're not investing enough in it. Instead we keep spending money on stuff we've already done. We keep using our resources to send space probes into areas they've been sent (the Voyager craft are decades old and we're still not surpassing...we're only getting more specific in what our probes are studying), or building stations to replace stations we had in the past, or doing low Earth orbits that are half a century old, or talking about visiting the moon that we've already been to. We're stuck replicating things we've been doing at a glacially slow pace, and its all because we simply can't afford to do more at current launch prices. If we had a space launch loop we could have launch 20 Galileo missions to Jupiter, established a moon base by now, and begun serious work on resource extraction from asteroids.
We're never going to make real progress in "getting our eggs out of one basket" until we move beyond chemical rocket launches. The day we get beyond that is the day that the real space age begins.
based on the relative proximity to the sun how does that compute to "going the way of Mars"? The only thing that destroyes this planet might be a planet killing asteroid.
Even if we blow ourselves up we will rebuild, probably in a much healthier and more efficient manner.
Which given enough time, will almost certainly happen.
I'm not sure that this is a safe assumption to make. I can think of several ways that we could damage our planet to the point that it could no longer support human life (and possibly could not support any life at all)
Also keep in mind that given enough time, it is absolutely certain that our planet will become uninhabitable as the sun expands and engulfs the planet, turning it into a charred cinder.
1-maybe we should be working harder on those astroid games...
2-I think the planet is a pretty AMAZING system. As far as closed ecologies go it has everything it needs to be sustainable. But if we are going to have this advanced level of thinking that enables space travel to a heretofore unidentified inknown planet capable of sustaining human life, then it stands to reason that we will have a better grasp of how to avoid the kind of cataclysm you see.
3-as I understand it based on our knowledge of the sun we are about 3 billion years into a projected 10-15 billion year run for the sun. Is there some sort of valid theory that says Mars was destroyed as a viable life sustaining planet because it drew too close to the sun or the sun expanded? Id be interested in reading that theory.
If it holds true...its going to make the theories on Global Warming look pretty silly...
based on the relative proximity to the sun how does that compute to "going the way of Mars"? The only thing that destroyes this planet might be a planet killing asteroid. Even if we blow ourselves up we will rebuild, probably in a much healthier and more efficient manner.
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