Originally Posted by Skybird
We just heared the sound of the sea whgile still being far away from the shore, inside the land. We have not even dipped our toe into the waves at the beach - and you talk of crossing the ocean, settling on the other side, and building habitats at the deepest bottom?
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.
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. 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"..
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. We have nio technmology for realsitical terraforming in a forseeable timeframe. 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.
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".
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.
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07-19-12, 04:30 PM
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