Peter Horton wrote:
>The main benefit for going OUT THERE is obvious. The continued >survival
>of our species. To put it simply, if you put all of your >eggs in one
>basket (the Earth) all it takes is one rock (a medium >sized asteroid) to
>destroy all your eggs (us).
Lets calculate the odds on that. I'm not at home now, so forgive my lack of
research, but the evidence that I see indicates that a worldwide mass
extinction even happens only once in multiple millions of years. The
dinsaours exticntion is an example of this...and it appears that the period
of this is in the hundreds of millions of years.
So, I'm not really worried about this happening in the next thousand years.
The odds are strongly against it.
Not only that, but sending a few folks to Mars in the near future has
virtually nothing to do with saving the population of the earth. A much
more plausable use of space technology would be the mapping of all of the
near earth objects of sufficient size to cause this type of difficulty, and
the development of the technology needed to nudge these objects in their
orbits as need be. You'll be surprised at how small the nudge can be if it
is given early enough.
Dan M....I'm away from home, so no full sig.
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