Are you afraid of the future?

[Coffee Pancake]

3 hours ago, Arielle Popstar said:

There are 2 trillion galaxies in observable universe. For all 2 trillion galaxies, each one has 100 billion stars. Next, one in five stars has an Earth-like planet. That means there are as many as 40 billion Earth-sized planets.

Even if none of them actually have life already, it is quite likely that at least some could be seeded and engineered to support it within a generation or two. Our first expeditions would likely be for mining of things that are scarce here.

I see you have no concept of distance, scale or time.

How do we get to these places? How long would that take? 

Wizards perhaps ?

2 minutes ago, Arielle Popstar said:

True that though at this point it would seem to be little more than a formality.

Oh sweet summer child ... 

 

[Arielle Popstar]

3 minutes ago, Silent Mistwalker said:

Who is offended? I'm merely pointing out the flaws in your arguments.

It wasn't a part of the argument to begin with so little more than tilting at windmills. It was interesting to me as I was not aware of that aspect but to bring it forth as an argument of the future colonization of new worlds, not so much.

[Rolig Loon]

Historical accounts tend to emphasize things that people at the time thought were most important or noteworthy, not necessarily what people reading them later might be curious about. It's not an intentional bias, necessarily, but it's worth remembering when we imagine that we are getting a clear picture of what life was like in the past.

I remember many years ago hearing Jane Smiley discuss the process of writing one of her best novels, The Greenlanders, which is set in the era of early Viking exploration. She spent time there, getting a feel for the land and the people today, and then did deep research into the Eddas that record the history of the region, hoping to write a story that felt as much like a historical account as she could. As a result, her narrative is slow-moving and gray, filled with struggles against cold, famine, and disease.  And yet, it deals with some "momentous" events almost casually ("And then Einar slew Bjorn.") with few details. Smiley's point was that interpersonal strife was the least of the challenges that the settlers faced -- worth mentioning but mainly as a brief scene in the greater story. 

[Innula Zenovka]

12 minutes ago, Arielle Popstar said:

Right but part of the supposed fear for his voyage was the potential threat of falling off the edge of the world, so not much different from the Mariana trench. The colonization of other planets is highly likely to involve substantially more research finding one most suitable to be inhabited. We already have experience with the Moon and Mars on actually setting foot on other worlds were the potential dangers were known and prepared for so in some ways, less of a risk then Columbus's trip.

Columbus thought he was going to find an alternative route to the far east, thus opening up a new and highly lucrative trade route for his patrons, not fall off the edge of the world.

https://www.history.com/news/christopher-columbus-never-set-out-to-prove-the-earth-was-round

[Silent Mistwalker]

1 minute ago, Arielle Popstar said:

It wasn't a part of the argument to begin with so little more than tilting at windmills. It was interesting to me as I was not aware of that aspect but to bring it forth as an argument of the future colonization of new worlds, not so much.

I wasn't the one to bring up Columbus nor was I the one to conveniently leave out pertinent facts. All of which do very much so have a large bearing on whether or not humans can survive on an alien hostile planet since all environments are hostile to all life. Science has proven that beyond any shadow of doubt.

[Arielle Popstar]

1 minute ago, Coffee Pancake said:

I see you have no concept of distance, scale or time.

How do we get to these places? How long would that take? 

Wizards perhaps ?

Oh sweet summer child ... 

 

We are discussing this as a future time when the distance, scale and time factors are more or less irrelevant to our current understanding. Perhaps if warp drives ever make it to a practical reality (which I believe it will)then that will allow colonization.

[Arielle Popstar]

5 minutes ago, Innula Zenovka said:

Columbus thought he was going to find an alternative route to the far east, thus opening up a new and highly lucrative trade route for his patrons, not fall off the edge of the world.

https://www.history.com/news/christopher-columbus-never-set-out-to-prove-the-earth-was-round

Yes interesting how "history" changes as it gets rewritten. 50 years ago when I was in history classes though, I do remember it being taught that people of Columbus's day feared falling off the edge of the world.

[Innula Zenovka]

6 minutes ago, Arielle Popstar said:

Yes interesting how "history" changes as it gets rewritten. 50 years ago when I was in history classes though, I do remember it being taught that people of Columbus's day feared falling off the edge of the world.

From the article to which I linked

Quote

The myth of Columbus’ supposed flat earth theory is tempting: It casts the explorer’s intrepid journey in an even more daring light. Problem is, it’s completely untrue. The legend doesn’t even date from Columbus’ own lifetime. Rather, it was invented in 1828, when Washington Irving published The Life and Voyages of Christopher Columbus.

[....]

Over the years—and with the help of Antoine-Jean Letronne, a French author—the legend took hold. Even today, it’s a commonly held belief…even though it couldn’t be further from the truth.

 

[Arielle Popstar]

5 minutes ago, Innula Zenovka said:

From the article to which I linked

 

Yes, I read that and saw it also on another video i watched where they mentioned that Columbus and others of the time did believe the Earth was round but of a smaller diameter then what it actually is. It apparently is why he thought he had reached the Orient, Japan in particular, and wound up calling the natives Indians, as that was how people of Europe referred to people of Asia. Apparently he never did realize he had not reached the orient according to some scholars.

[Innula Zenovka]

4 hours ago, Arielle Popstar said:

Yes, I read that and saw it also on another video i watched where they mentioned that Columbus and others of the time did believe the Earth was round but of a smaller diameter then what it actually is. It apparently is why he thought he had reached the Orient, Japan in particular, and wound up calling the natives Indians, as that was how people of Europe referred to people of Asia. Apparently he never did realize he had not reached the orient according to some scholars.

He thought he'd reached India, which is where he was hoping to get to.  There was a already flourishing trade between western Europe and both India and China, both overland ("the Silk Road") and by sea across the Arabian Ocean into either the Persian Gulf or the Red Sea and then overland to the eastern Med

However, the various Italian maritime city-states, notably Venice and Genoa, dominated trade by these routes, and both Spain and Portugal hoped to find alternative sea routes, thus cutting out all the middle-men, overland freight costs and all the taxes collected by the territories through which goods had to pass from India and China all the way to the west of Europe.

Edited January 20, 2022 by Innula Zenovka

[Drake1 Nightfire]

2 hours ago, Arielle Popstar said:

We are discussing this as a future time when the distance, scale and time factors are more or less irrelevant to our current understanding. Perhaps if warp drives ever make it to a practical reality (which I believe it will)then that will allow colonization.

The US government is paying farmers not to grow crops in a world where hunger runs rampant. The society you are talking about is so far off the current world radar that its more likely we start WW3 first. 

To create the society that Roddenberry envisioned we must first come together as a whole and take care of the population of the world as a whole, not little squabbling nations. 

[Coffee Pancake]

2 minutes ago, Drake1 Nightfire said:

To create the society that Roddenberry envisioned we must first come together as a whole and take care of the population of the world as a whole, not little squabbling nations. 

Also .. SOCALISM

[Tama Suki]

15 hours ago, Coffee Pancake said:

Also .. SOCALISM

More like a dictatorship.

[Waialae]

On 1/15/2022 at 10:52 AM, Tama Suki said:

Do you think we will be able to build a better world or do you think we will destroy it?
Will we be able to colonize the solar system and then the galaxy?

I am enormously hopeful for humanity's long-term future, but worried about how we will react to unavoidable changes in the short-term. My belief is that we will inevitably build a better world right here on Earth as it becomes both more difficult and more expensive to continue our bad habits that are actively destroying it. Our inevitable transition to a world in which we use less energy will be painful for many, but will ultimately result in a more peaceful, sustainable, and just place. 

By "we" I'm guessing that you mean humanity collectively. But because all beings all have different desires, aspirations and appetites I suspect that as individuals we will always be driving humanity further and further apart from one another. We seem to be far more interested in our differences than our similarities, so the world we share is likely to continue to allow some to flourish at the expense of others, and this balance will continue to shift back and forth. What gives me hope is to see examples of people more concerned with our collective well-being than in personal wealth. 

As for colonizing the solar system and galaxy, it's important to recognize that each of us have already done this. Here we are sitting still in front of our computers, not realizing that in fact we are rotating at 1670 KPH (speed of Earth's rotation), or that the room we casually occupy in this moment is in fact traveling at a speed of 110,000 KPH as Earth rotates around the Sun. And then of course we are also constantly moving as a component of the Milky Way galaxy, that speed varying relative to other Milky Way components. Being in space is something like being in nature, in that we are never separate from these things. Space and nature aren't places "out there," that we need to travel to... they're right here, right now.

I suspect that space travel as we commonly think of it will soon no longer be possible. Rockets are fueled by fossil fuels, which are quickly sunsetting. There is (currently) no other way to break free of our atmosphere... though we may be able to break free of our atmosphere by destroying it, which our actions make clear is a real possibility. Our task moving forward isn't to find new places to treat as exploitable and mine for resources - that's what viruses do - but instead to reverse such behaviors, and by doing so to become better partners to the planet we already call home.