Is Space Exploration Worth the Cost

[Tagaziel]

To ensure our survival. KT-events do happen.

We can ensure our survival by colonizing dead places. Like the Moon, which is, for all intents and purposes, dead. I'm not so sure about Mars.

I know! Mercury!

And if you're concerned about letting other forms of life evolve peacefully we should all leave Earth

That too.

 

[Eejit]

We can ensure our survival by colonizing dead places. Like the Moon, which is, for all intents and purposes, dead. I'm not so sure about Mars.

I know! Mercury!

There would be extensive scientific surveys of Mars before any large-scale colonisation could be allowed to begin. That would show if there's any life.
Though even if there are some microbes living in the martian soil it's unlikely they're going to evolve any higher. Mars is an older planet than Earth. If they've had far more time than us to evolve and are at a far more basic level, **** it, survival of the fittest can apply over giving them another few billion of years in peace.

 

[theotherguy]

You missed the point. By terraforming a planet, making it Earth-like, we prevent any natural life formation and eradicate an entire ecosystem, and if intelligent life would be born from this, an entire possible civilization.

Quite selfish. Guess the religious concept of anthropocentrism is still well and alive, even in secular circles.

Let me get your logic straight.

1. There might be life on other planets.

2. There might potentially be life on other planets in the future, even if the planets themselves are dead.

3. This life might, under a wildly improbable set of circumstances, become intelligent.

4. Therefore humanity should not colonize these planets.


Does that make any sense?

We are intelligent life. Today. We live on a tiny geological timescale comparable to the vast amounts of time and improbability required to go from a planet as dead as Mars or as hellish as Venus to an entirely new civilization. We, ourselves, are the product of a highly improbable course of events. We might even be the only intelligent species ever to appear in the universe. We might not be.

But the point is, if civilization is some great monument which we must preserve on other worlds, wouldn't it be better to simply put our civilization in its place? Aren't we the products of a vast evolutionary process on our own world? Should it matter which planet life and civilization evolves on?

I think not. The vast spaces of time and improbability do not necessitate the formulation of decisions based on what might be in the distant and improbable future, but what is, and what we want it to be.

Should there be life on other worlds, and should it be microbial life, it should be preserved in laboratories and studied, but for goodness sake we shouldn't just leave a planet alone and let the biological pools fester until someday billions of years from now something intelligent lives there. By the same token an asteroid could strike the planet with these tiny microbes, and kill them off anyway. By the same token, we could be dead as a civilization ourselves while we wait for all of this to happen. The distances of time and chance are far too great to make any accurate predictions about any world at all, let alone to make any decisions based on them.

This isn't anthropocentric, this is realistic; this is biological. We are a species made of organisms whose goal is survival and whose ideal aspirations include knowledge and happiness. If colonization increases our chances of survival, improves our knowledge, and potentially creates happiness, what should stop us from it? Certainly not alien microbes which might, in the distant future, have the potential of making a new civilization. Certainly not a dead world with the possibility of someday, in billions of billions of years, might harbor life.

This is the case with both Mars and Venus. Mars may have already had life, and Venus' chance is long gone. The sun will likely explode before any life appears on either planet. The Earth was simply lucky to be in the goldilocks zone and have an abundant supply of water. Mars was far too small, and Venus had a rotational period far too long. Do you think it is logical to sit and wait, play the cosmic lottery, if you will, on the off chance that in the next five billion years, one of these places becomes habitable? That is a wager I do not think we should take.

 

[Atomic_Piggy]

Post of the year.

 

[Cheomesh]

I'm all for colonization.

To be honest, the first "big" group should be all volunteers.

 

[Atomic_Piggy]

You missed the point. By terraforming a planet, making it Earth-like, we prevent any natural life formation and eradicate an entire ecosystem, and if intelligent life would be born from this, an entire possible civilization.

Quite selfish. Guess the religious concept of anthropocentrism is still well and alive, even in secular circles.

Its called survival of the fittest. Mars will likely never develop life. So we go there and terraform it.

 

[Narvi]

I hear we shouldn't make houses just anywhere because there's a chance that a bacterium in the soil could become intelligent life a few billion years down the line?

 

[Druckles]

Personally I'd give my life to the advancement of science, but it's worth squat on its own.

 

[Cheomesh]

To be honest, I think our issue with getting into space is LESS a "scientific advancement" issue, and more an issue with engineering experience.

I've always valued engineering over pure science tbh. Often, engineers can innovate and recursively advance pure knowledge.

 

[99.vikram]

I've always valued engineering over pure science tbh. Often, engineers can innovate and recursively advance pure knowledge.

And I've always valued pure science over engineering. Don't get me wrong, I'm studying engineering too. But I think we should acknowledge that while engineers, doctors, lawyers and humanitarians sustain our society, our true calling is in the stars - and only pure science can take us there.

I also admire other branches of science that have no real world uses and are for the sake of knowledge alone.

 

[Druckles]

You can't pick on over the other. Pure Science can't get us there without the engineering skills which it takes to accomplish it. You want to float up there on a puff of logic?

And engineering wouldn't work without the basic science behind it.

 

[Narvi]

Eh.

Engineering is applied science. Science isn't some kind of division between pure and unpure. Research science is about finding things out; engineering is about applying it. These things often overlap.

 

[Cheomesh]

Agreed, Narvi. 99, I disagree. Pure science gets you no where. Knowing that something CAN be done and actually DOING it are totally different.

 

[Druckles]

Agreed, you disagree??

Yawa??

 

[Jerry_111]

Agreed, Narvi. 99, I disagree. Pure science gets you no where. Knowing that something CAN be done and actually DOING it are totally different.

Strongly disagree. Without pure science, applied science wouldn't exist. Pure research provides the foundation of knowledge that we can then use to apply it for practical applications.

If you limit yourself to applied science, you would be too narrowly focusing scientific research. You would be blind to all other possibilities.

Both need to coexist and work together.

 

[99.vikram]

Knowing that something CAN be done and actually DOING it are totally different.

Applied science is usually driven by corporate/military motivations. Radical innovations, the ones that make us view the universe in a different way (relativity, quantum theory) all come from pure science.

 

[Druckles]

I'd say that either could live without the other. But hand-in-hand, they work like butter and toast. Mm... food.

 

[Narvi]

Almost everything has an application, you know. Scientists aren't just doing this for shits and giggles. Even those which don't have an application now might have one just down the road.

Relativity, for example, is applied to keeping satellites synchronized.

 

[Druckles]

Scientists aren't just doing this for shits and giggles.

Um... actually, most of them do.

Sure, everything has an application, but then everything has a theory behind it. But you don't need to apply everything, and you don't need to know how everything works. But it's harder if they don't either way.