[TLAM Strike]

Originally Posted by Skybird

In several centuries - maybe. I doubt that we have that much time. And sending two men to Mars and back - what meaning could that have? It may offend our boasting egos, but the meaning rates close around zero. Even a station on Mars, crewed with half a dozen person, means nothing for mankinds future.

Well it all starts somewhere doesn't it? Rovers first, then a few people for a day, then a outpost manned for a year, then it gets bigger. Its all part of a process.

And moon - I can not imagine to build habitats for huge autark colonies on moon. At best we will have a kind of robot mining up there, and automatted ore-transportation to Earth'S orbit. MAYBE. Moon has no atmospühere, and we have no idea how to get one up there.

The Atmosphere is a big pain in the butt. It blocks all that nice solar energy we could use as power. Plus it makes everything rust. Don't get me started on the weather!

But the robot mining is a good idea, we will need the mine shafts...

Remember Star Trek II?

CAROL: There is food in the Genesis cave, enough to last a lifetime, ...if necessary.
McCOY: We thought this was Genesis.
CAROL: This? It took the Starfleet Corps of Engineers ten months in space suits to tunnel out all this. What we did in there ...we did in a day.

We've done it before. Once we create a basic habitat, O2, soil, light we bring in the strongest plant and animal life we have to build a self sustaining ecosystem. Then we move in.

So, living there, colonies and all that - no. I think it also is not desirable. It would be like spendign all your life aboard a dived submarine. Whioch maybe only is bearable because a submarine can surface, if it wants, and open the hatches, and there you climb out and tank some sun and light and wind and fresh air. A moon colony can not "surface"..

After a generation being inside a habitat will be normal. There is a great passage in the novel 2001 where a young child on Luna expresses disgust at the thought of going down to Earth, its all a question of physics to get it where we want it to go.

And I do not think our technology is so solid and surviving that it would maintain human life for decades on Mars, in autarky, and independen t from Earth.

The Voyager probes are still going strong. Some of the gear Buzz and Neil left at Mare Tranquillitatis still work. Sprint and Opportunity failed to lack of a snowbrush.

We have technology that can last, we know how to build everything we need. All we need is the will to go and do it.

We have nio technmology for realsitical terraforming in a forseeable timeframe.

See the link I posted above. Plus all the other ingredients we need are just floating around. There is more water and oxygen floating around the outer planets than there is on Earth.

Even the flight to Mars can fail and kill the expedition just because one single chip for 8 cents breaks down. Our technology is not of that kind that we can trust it to run for generations.

The developers of Project Orion had the right idea, don't build a spacecraft like a spacecraft; build the thing like a damn Battleship. If you increase the launchable weight you increase just how tough the whole system is. You quickly get to a point where the spacecraft is not dependent on some computer chip made in Taiwan, you get a ship that has its own machine shops and manufacturing.

We have visions, fantasies, yes, and I love them. But I am also aware that they are science fiction, and will remain to be that for another couple of centuries at last. If they ever get realsied at all. And that is a very big "if".

We went to LEO (half way to anywhere as RAH once said), we went to the Moon, we seriously were going to Mars before the Soviet Union collapsed (just what do you think those year long missions aboard Mir were about? Setting a record? Ego? You don't keep spending that money for pride).

Either we get along on this planet, or evolution is done with this failed design of ours. I really wonder if inventing instrumental intelligence and these two hands of ours - marvellous tools - was such a great design of evolution. It has not resulted in a design that fosters life, increases its own survivability in the evolutionary race and does not exterminate itself. So what is it good for, from an evolutionary POV? It seems to bear no advantages. Other, less complex and sensible life forms seem to outlast us easily, and at a smaller cost to the planetary biosphere.

Chances are high that homo sapiens is a dead end of evolution. Sad, but I have started to take this possibility into account. And I think it is the one with the greatest probability.

In other words: No, like Attenborough I'm also not optimistic.

"We are too many." I keep writing this since years.

Take a tortoise, which lives longer than a human and walks around its its own armored shell, and flip its on its back or lift it up and put it in a tree; what happens? it dies. A human can think of a way out and build it.

There is no natural harmonious state the hippies keep talking about. The universe's natural state is decay.

We are the only species yet discovered with the intelligence and tools to do something about it.