--- In [EMAIL PROTECTED], "Peter Horton" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
>Much more efficient for what? Mechanical surrogates can't LIVE for me. If
>we don't get our genepool off this dirtclod then eventually, we will become
>extinct.
Well, I do believe in long term planning, but the timeframe in which we
absolutely must get off planet to survive is probably measured in billions
of years.
>Space is the only hope for continued survival of a species.
Why? I can think of a number of ways we can survive without sending many
people into space well beyond any reasonable long term planning horizon.
After that time, its not irresponsible to belive that the future generations
will be in a much better position to make plans. One hopes technology will
advance in the next million years to allow people to make long term plans.
Looking ahead, the real crunch will come when the sun expands. It is quite
possible that humanity needs to move by then. But, I see no imperative
before that.
>
>Forget short term economic benefits. I am talking about the long term
>survival of our species. How do you put a cost on that?
>
If my job were to figure out how to reduce the risk of humanity being wiped
out by an asteroid, sending a mission to Mars would be about on the bottom
of my list. The first level would be to identify potential candidates for
hitting earth and setting up a system to stop that from happening. The
second would be to have habitats set up on earth for miniture ecosystems to
be set up below ground for the duration. Actually, after the initial dust
settles, people could set up habitats on the surface again...that would be a
span of months, I would guess. Maybe just one month....
That's just the initial dust, of course. The temp of the planet would fall
a great deal (guess is about 30 C or so) the first few years and most plants
would be killed. But, under domes, people could live. And, seeds, etc.
could be stored.
This would be far far easier to do on the earth than on Mars.
>I will have to disagree with you on the odds.
What do you base your estimation of the odds on? I obtained mine at
http://www.ruf.rice.edu/~leeman/geol108_impacts.html
>There are LOTS of large rocks out there, and most of them cross the Earth's
>orbit.
Most of them do not cross Earth's orbit. LOTS is a rather loose number.
Have you put pencil to paper on your estimations?
>It is only a matter of time.
Right, probably 10^8 years or so.
>The thing is, it seems that a lot of them are so nonreflective that
>seeing them will be horribly difficult.
Could you please give me a source for this? Everything that I read
indicates that our ability to identifiy such objects is improving
significantly. One site for this is: http://dmtelescope.org/neo.html
>And the only way to go out there is to start going out there.
Ah, not really. The real way to go out there is to develop the technologies
that would make it cost effective.
>There are things that a human can do that no machine can do. At least yet.
> And
>possibly for the next hundred years or so.
There are. But, the information we have obtained from robot probes vs.
human flight shows that, at the present time, manned flight is for
entertainment only. We learn very little needed in the long run from manned
flights.
>
>You like gambling with the survival of our species? You feel comfortable?
>I don't.
I tend to not worry about things that happen once every hundred million
years. It does not seem imprudent to say we can worry about this in a
hundred years or so.
>The sooner we have a completely permanent and self-sufficient
>presence in space, the better, as far as I am concerned.
>But I will agree that maybe our resources could be better spent in the
>short
>run. Instead of a manned mission to Mars sooner, maybe we should spend
>more
>resources in making several space habitats and making them ecologically
>closed and healthy biospheres. We haven't figured out how to do that yet.
>
The problem is really a lot harder than even that. I�d guess that it would
take hundreds of years to develop systems that would make something like
this feasible. I could be surprised by a discovery tomorrow, but one
shouldn�t plan on that. Indeed, the best course for obtaining such a
discovery is not spending money on today�s technology, but just funding
basic research in general.
Dan'm Traeki Ring of Crystallized Knowledge.
Known for calculating, but not known for shutting up
>
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