The Mars Colony

[TLAM Strike]

Originally Posted by Skybird

I think we will have deleted ourselves long before the term "space colony" and "stellar empire" could start to make sense for us. "Stellar sailors" we want to see ourselves as? Right now we are not more than a kid on the beach, throwing little stones at the waves, and running away when they roll up the beach, frightened.

People traveled the Pacific in canoes and colonized Australia and many islands. The primitive slow boat approach has the advantage of being less noticeable to other civilizations and that by the time it arives at its destination any civilization there has died out.

Actually, it might even be a good thing for life on Earth if we do not start to pump ressources from other stellar objects into the system of earth'S planetosphere. it would change balances between substances and chemical agtns to a degree beyond that level that would be possible if we only deal with what is available to us on this planet. And if we even cannot reach a consenus on how our current modern messing-ups of the biosphere and ecosphere is creating what effect for Earth, and if we even cannot reliably calculate the longterm consequences of our modern playing around with the elem,nts of the pplanetosphere we already hav ein reach right here on Earth - how much more unable must we be to reliably forsee how it could change Earth's fate if we start to bring even more for example carbon from extraterrestrial sources into the internal Earth-based cycle of chemical interaction. - Not that we are close to being able to industrially exploit ressources on the moon in large scale.

Millions of tons of extraterrestrial material fall on the Earth every day. Its believed that the early amino acids the joined together to form the first string of protein and then on to be the first life on Earth were brought here on comets.

Optimism is one thing. Fantasizing is a different one. and this talking of space colonization and stellar empires and industrial exploitation of foreign stellar objects, to me is currently just - nothing. We even cannot reliably opertae a simple space sation without running into problems time and again, a space station that is not even a space staion becasue it is still embedde din the upper layers of earth's atmopshere.

What we got running and what we are capable of are two different things. If politics had not killed Project Orion the solar system would be ours.

And it is very liekly, that even in a most optimal future setting, we wpuld not reach out into space purselves, but send robots and probe droids, or discover other forms of travelling, via mind and spirit and mental projection or whatever.

I agree with using robot probes (especially Von Neumann Probes) to explore and colonize space. When we arrive at that level of technological advance (its really not that far away) there is nothing preventing the designers of such probes from using them to seed human life on the worlds they visit.

Many cosmologists, btw, expect that if there are any civilisations out there running space travel programs successfully, will be civilisation that have left any animalistic, biology-dependant staes of life behind, and will be - as we would see it - robot civilisations, by that defeating the monumental problems of time and ageing when travelling huge distances like between stars, and alos deleting the high vuolnerability of biologic life to chnages in the enviuronmentl variables. maybe higher biologic life forms simply are not robut eniough to enable them for long-lasting space travels that would be needed to run space travels and empires indeed.

I also want to remind you that plkanet Eaerth is located in those 10% of our galaxy that is the youngest 10% of this galaxy alltpgether - 90% of the space and in this galaxy is millions of years older than the 10% we are embedded in. That means that we must expect most intelligent life out there to be eons older than we are, and thus being of higher developement levels and knowldge and ability, than we are. the difference probably is such that not only "their" abilities wopuld appear like magic to us - mor elieklöy is that we would not even be capable to recignise these higher intellegnes as what they are: higher intelligent life forms (like the ant does not realise the intellkictual superiority of man).

And its also possible that those civilization have long since died out. The lack of signals and visible signs of (highly advanced) life in the MW tend to support this.

If somebody thinks we men from planet Terra could storm into space and make our way into this galaxy's history with flying banners and sounding fanfares, then this is most probably not matching reality. we more likely compare to this galaxy's junior class in kindergarten, and maybe we have been put under quarantine because we promise to annoy the adults with our noise and trouble-making.

Then again we could be like a virus, once we escape confinement we slowly consume the host and spread until all is consumed, then we go dormant- like Spanish Flu.