The Astronomy Thread

Pops said:

News | NASA's Opportunity Rover Mission on Mars Comes to End

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R.I.P.

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Yes, son, Wall-E is dead.

BrutulTM said:

I think if we had kept up the space program at the level it was in the apollo years there could have easily been a moon colony by 2000. The problem is that the moon is kind of lame and it's hard to keep people excited about spending billions to colonize a cold, dead rock.

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I think youre right, and have correctly identified the cause.

What frustrates the shit out of me is that no one is excited about spending billions on Medicare, Social Security, or Defense either, but we manage to do that. Sure, people may feel like it's our duty to do so, or in our national interest to do so, but no one likes that we have to spend all that money on these things. But we keep doing so.

Meanwhile, we put aside the most important priority for our species' survival because not enough people are "excited" about paying for it.

Aldarion said:

I think youre right, and have correctly identified the cause.

What frustrates the shit out of me is that no one is excited about spending billions on Medicare, Social Security, or Defense either, but we manage to do that. Sure, people may feel like it's our duty to do so, or in our national interest to do so, but no one likes that we have to spend all that money on these things. But we keep doing so.

Meanwhile, we put aside the most important priority for our species' survival because not enough people are "excited" about paying for it.

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Yeah, not gonna let you state that as a fact unchallenged. I have not seen anything saying that space is the most important thing to ensure our species survival. We can kill each other in space just fine, it won't save us if we go that route.

I'm just gonna leave your quote here for posterity.

Mudcrush Durtfeet said:

Yeah, not gonna let you state that as a fact unchallenged. I have not seen anything saying that space is the most important thing to ensure our species survival. We can kill each other in space just fine, it won't save us if we go that route.

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getting humanity onto two or more planets *isnt* a self-evident and absolute requirement for our long term survival as a species? OK. If thats really the hill you wanna die on, be my guest.

Tuco said:

The only thing that will protect us from an endless number of earth-ending calamities is spreading out to the stars.

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Until we run into the Necrons, and our God Emperor actually dies.

There are solar system ending calamities too. A gamma ray burst fries everything within the area of a sphere.

The focus of a civilization should be the quality of life for its members, not the quantity.

Exploration and production expansion can serve that goal. Meteor impact s are not generally persuasive as a reason for expansion for root psychological reasons. That's a rationalization of something else. Which, I'm not calling anyone stupid, but I've seen frustration about the argument. What you think is absolutely self evident is not. It also does not address primal drives or needs.

None of that means I'm against the idea, personally I am for it. But I'll vote for Medicare first, and so will everyone else.

The way to approach it is not fear of death, the way to approach it is love of life.

Think about it this way. All of our explorers either already had a buck or they were looking to make one. Existential fear drove exactly 0% of them.

MusicForFish said:

Then what do you feel should be the focus of our civilization if not space?

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Killing every Muslim on the planet would do a helluva lot more to ensure the future of our species rather than letting Islam spread to another planet.

MusicForFish said:

Then what do you feel should be the focus of our civilization if not space?

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I think we have enough people and resources on Earth to concentrate on many things, space included. We should focus on building a better society and world than we currently have. How to go about this is the question, imo.

I feel we should spend more on space development than we do.

Tuco said:

The only thing that will protect us from an endless number of earth-ending calamities is spreading out to the stars.

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I have yet to see any convincing evidence that this is even possible. It might not be, like physics might not allow the construction of a craft to carry people to another star.

Also, 'endless'? So far we've had zero earth ending catastrophes.

The idea of a star empire is, and I don't mean this in a rude way, supremely stupid.

It makes for good Sci-fi. But when you consider even just a few of the practical realities you have to realize it's an adolescent mythology. It's a story they told us when we were 13 to get us excited. It's a powerful story. It's a good story. The problem is that it's just a story. Even simple things like language drift, not to mention genetic drift, if you can bring yourself to honestly consider them, will show you that.

At what point in fixing solutions to these problems do we stop being human? And now the argument has nullified itself. There's a plot hole, bro's.

Hey, if we -can- colonize mars then why not? If it's profitable all the better. If it's not, it might happen more slowly but happen anyway. Life finds a way. But "a meteor might hit us" is not a very good reason to do so. If a meteor hits earth and we have a colony on mars and i'm on earth... I don't care. I just don't care. "A meteor might hit us" is a very good reason to do other things.

It is an irrational attachment to physical form masquerading as an intellectual argument. Anthrophillia. The argument should not be "the human race, our progeny". It should be intelligent life. Because as far as we know or are able to prove this planet IS unique and there IS a good argument for propagation of intelligence.

The things that colonize centauri you won't recognize as human. Continuation of the species misses the point. Continuation of the society makes the same mistake.

It's the love of life and the propagation of intelligence. Not the fear of death.

You're gonna die, dude. There is no immortality in that dream.

I don't like Transhumanism. But that's because i'm human.

BrutulTM said:

Why do we need to? Would you want to be alive on a space station or in a tin can on Mars if Earth was gone? Aside from being the last human to die, I don't see much future in it unless a reachable planet was found that could actually support a real population of humans.

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With reasonable progress in technology there are several moons and Mars that could support a decent amount of humans. If we can figure out how to make adequate shielding and cryogenics it's entirely possible to start colonizing other star systems as well. That would be a project for centuries, though, given the spaces between stars. And the colonies would just be seeding, and not offshoots of current societies, since there would be no real communication between them and us.

It's small comfort for the billions that die but if you have to choose between going extinct or going extinct except for some small colony on Mars, the second option is clearly better. Ideally the colony has to be big enough to keep civilization going and growing, you'd want to have enough people to mine, manufacture and research, not just sit there growing and eating food. Musk's idea of a million people on Mars is based on this.