Therumancer said:
Actually that's not true to be honest. Such arguements are born out of ignorance and a desire to try and defend a liberal-centric view of where resources should be expended. If this is what they are teaching in school, it's no wonder people have lost interest. Between you and Shinji all I can say is "wow".
Okay for starters, we found trace elements of minerals on Mars like Iron with our probes. Enough in the soil and atmosphere to show that the planet is loaded. This is where all of the "martial mining" stuff comes from. Minerals being a very important thing here on earth. Mines are being depleted, and even enviromentally destructive strip mining in places like Africa is going to deplete the supply of mineals in short order, especially given our rapidly expanding population and need.
What's more we've been able to terraform Mars for a while now, indeed I believe that this is where the whole "terraforming" idea came from to begin with (but I'm not sure). I'm no expert on the details, but the bottom line is that ecosystems are fragile, as enviromentalists point out there are literally dozens of ways we could radically change our own enviroment. The foilage in Africa produces a lot of the world's oxygen. If we literally defoliated the area, and a few other places on earth we could pretty much smother all life on earth. We could probably do it inside a week if we wanted to committ racial suicide somehow.
While it's a slow process, scientists more or less understand why the atmospheres of planets like Mars are the way they are (or so I've been lead to believe) due to the probes and such we have there. We could effectively "destroy" the enviroment of mars like any other ecosystem but do it in a way that benefitted us as we slowly intergrated the things we wanted to support life. It could take centuries, but we've apparently had the tools for decades.
As far as comments by guys like Shinji talking about how we might get as far as Jupiter some day, I think in the course of conveying the size of space people exagerrations have leaked into the actual education, which is understandably demoralizing.
Truthfully we already have a degree of cryonic technology and have been in possession of it since those old rumors about Walt Disney. We're pretty close to the point where we can freeze and unfreeze people at will, and that makes sleeper ships a viable possibility. What that means is that not only is reaching every corner of our solar system within the realm possibility (and yes people would volunteer to do such things) already, we could put people into other solar systems if we really wanted to (over a ridiculous period of time).
People are always saying "it's impossible" as an excuse not to try. They are continuously proven wrong. Right now I think it's more or less an attitude born of politics and people obsessed with the short term being unable to see the solutions to their own problems.
It's odd being casually mentioned in giant posts. But to further explain my cynicism regarding space colonisation...
Do I think it's 100% impossible? No, but I certainly don't share the romantic vision that people like Bob seem to have. In order for mankind to even
attempt to try and colonize a planet, we would have to change our way of life drastically. And in today's society of gratification at the touch of a button, I don't see that happening for a looong time.
I know everyone loves to dream about colonizing Mars, but Mars no longer has a magnetic field so terra forming would be futile. Even if we found a planet that had a magetic field, an atmosphere and water, it would still take atleast 100 years to research whether or not the planet is actually save enough to sustain us, or that it might hold a few cataclysmic secrets that might bindside us during the 20th generation of our colonisation.
Then there are the health risks posed by space radiation. Eventhough space might seem empty, there's a shit ton of galactic cosmic rays and solar energetic particles storming throughout. The best shielding we have is only partially effective and some shield material actually increases the radiation. Even a healthy man in the prime of his life would stand a 20% chance of dying from cancer simply by traveling through space.
I'm not saying, 'stop exploring space', I'm saying, 'stop manned missions'.
I could give more examples, but for a more indepth look at a "What if..." scenario, check out the anime
Planets. It's probably the most honest dipiction of space colonisation I've ever seen.
