Not Going There

By Iain Aschendale · Feb 13, 2019 · ·
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  1. We'll never reach the stars.

    People have no concept of distance. Longest I ever walked in a day was around twenty miles, traveling at my own pace on paved sidewalks, with frequent opportunities to refresh myself. Teddy Roosevelt issued the first formal physical fitness test for US servicemen after seeing some fat officers. You had to do fifty miles on foot, or a hundred on horseback, with a three day time limit.

    A group of Marines set out and completed the test in a day, but they're like that.

    Fifty miles. It's five thousand times that distance to the Moon, and the US doesn't, at present, have the ability to send a person there. Mars is nine months, not gonna look up the distance, and yeah, we still send rovers there.

    Opportunity will be declared dead in a few minutes.

    But how much longer are we going to spend money on the space program, whatever that is these days? Some Canadian with a guitar? The Thwaites Glacier in Antarctica is going to break loose, one meter sea level rise, massive numbers of IDPs, crop failures, coral will be extinct in ten years, you think anyone is going to want to spend money sending people to Mars?

    Maybe the oligarchs will. Bolthole and all.

    And the Chinese are going to put someone on the Moon, by hook or by crook, just to prove they can.

    Maybe they'll die there. I hold no animosity towards them, but it would be nice if someone managed to put a corpse up there to prove to our successors in evolution that we could do it.

    But we'll soon be up to our ankles in a red-tide algal bloom that will never recede, fighting over who gets the last bit of dogmeat.

    The stars. Kepler 452B is a "second Earth" and it's only 1400 light years away.

    There are only eleven stars within ten light years of the solar system, and only one of those is relatively similar to the sun, but it's a binary, which is where "relatively" goes out the window.

    Even if we developed that warp drive, somebody would just mount a missile on it and use it to play smashy spike plate with someone else's capital city.

    It's almost 4 am, time for bed. Miles to go, but not light years.
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    Kinzvlle, Some Guy and Shenanigator like this.

Comments

  1. GrahamLewis
    Now that's what I call buzz-kill.
      matwoolf and Kinzvlle like this.
  2. Malisky
    Given that we will have more time (if we are not extinct in half a millenia or so) I believe, no, I estimate that we will reach another star at least. I think that it's the right thing to do. Earth is doomed as all planets are. All planets are born, have a lifespan and then die. Some due to accident, some due to murder and others of old age, just like any living organisms do. The thing is, will the other planet have a longer lifespan than our own? If not, we (humans) will vanish. No stress.
      Kinzvlle likes this.
  3. Iain Aschendale
    The planet will be fine. Hell, the biosphere will probably hold on in some form or another until the sun swallows up all the inner planets.

    The First Child will survive.

    [​IMG]
      GrahamLewis, Malisky and Kinzvlle like this.
  4. Some Guy
    Everyone forgets the Moon. It moves further away each day. Why do you think the Earth wobbles? It will eventually lose the Moon, and slow its spin. The poles will melt. The wobble will go out of control, with catastrophic effects on weather. The reflection of a water planet will cause it to freeze. The spin will slow, and the magnetic engine will shut down, leaving an already impossible surface uninhabitable. We don't need to find another planet. We need to evolve to a spacebourne race, and sooner than we think. The world will not end in fire. It will end in ice. Have a nice day. :)
      Malisky, Kinzvlle and Iain Aschendale like this.
  5. Malisky
    @Iain Aschendale, I agree. That's why I say we (humans) will vanish long before the Earth dies if we don't find a faster way to travel through space and find a younger, compatible planet. Maybe not any time soon, but eventually, even if we survive ourselves. Meteorites and other celestial bodies heading this way is my guess.
    However, I also speculate that if the human race was to get extinct one way or another, be it climate change or a deadly virus or WW3, most of the animals if not all, are doomed to follow suit, since we have already booby trapped the whole god damned nation. Some insects, bacteria and microorganisms will probably survive. I don't know about the plants. I know nothing about them. Way I see it, it's not self-centeredness for a specie to want to survive. We are part of nature after all. Any kind of nature. That's the whole point. We are here, aren't we?
  6. GrahamLewis
    I remember, long long ago, noticing how beautiful an oil slick can be, rainbow colors swirling and sparkling in the sunlight, or how stunning the harsh beauty of cold outer space, can feel, and realizing there is a major disconnect between abstract concepts like beauty and the hard reality of human survival. Mother nature doesn't care about our existence, whatever we do will make temporary surface changes to bits of the universe, but it will all be absorbed by the infinite curls and coils of change. It's only our awareness and self-interest that makes it at all interesting., and only to us
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