Venus now!Terraforming/colonizing: new places to call Home

[Mikobass]

Your source citation is sloppy and useless -- you're citing topic pages, not particular data points.

Did you know that in India, only 11% of the land remains wild? Extinction threatens not just a thousand species, but several hundred thousand. (...etc)

Well at least I try to back up my statements, not just voicing out loud unverified certainties. These links were indeed general so that you guys can actually make your own research and form you own opinion and follow the more direct and concise link if you wish to.

The funny thing is that actually seem to say the same thing I do, too many people at the same place, in this case India. We are not out of land to use or to live on, we just do not use it as efficiently that we could and that we should. And it still seems way more rational to me to reverse the harm we are currently doing right here then to actually go out in space to terraform other planets!!! We don't even know if it really is feasible!!

 

[Magrathean]

How would this negate the need for the dysgenics to stop?

Terraforming and colonization hardly have anything to do with dysgenics. What's the relevance of your question?

I don't feel Earth is overpopulated, it's population and ressources (natural but also social, material and wealth) are just not spread efficiently. This is a political and social issue. A new planet would not remotely start to help solve this problem.

there are huge cities like Mexico, Tokyo, New York, etc(...) where there are millions of people living there while there are other vast portions of land where no humans lives. And I'm not even talking about extreme places like Antartica, Sahara or Groenland, but places like Canada. Canada is so big, yet 95% of the population live in like less then 5% of it's surface. As for material ressources, the USA as a greater GDP then the entire continent of Africa. I'll rest my case here.

Ok, you might have a point there. It is true that we could easily populate countries like Russia, Canada, New Zealand and Australia and release a bit of population pressure in countries like Indonesia, India and China. However, i do believe a new planet could help, if not solve this on Earth, prevent it from happening again in the future in the new planet: as i said, a new planet is an opportunity for a new (and properly-run) society (and there are a few people in the world capable of running things the right way; it's just that most people/politicians aren't). Also, i do believe Earth's resources will be basically depleted very soon.

Also most of Earth ressources are renewable and grow back on it's own given time. So if we can control ourselves, nature will work it's magic on it's own!! We just need to be patient, learn from our mistakes and make more efficient political decisions.

First, there's a great deal of non-renewable resources on Earth (and yes, we're depleting them). Second, most or all of the renewable resources take more time to be renewed than we will ever give them. Third, you (and all the ecologists in the world) aren't taking into account that people need to keep eating and that people are still being born all the time (i.e. "giving the resources enough time to regenerate" means not using them until they regenerate, which means that people would have to stop using them for several years; we're talking massive wipeout of the human species here).

Well at the moment, it just seems more plausible (and logical) to me to stop the global warming here on earth then to start terraforming planets.

Logical, yes.

Plausible, not really, when you look at what it would require:

• You can't just shut down all factories, because a lot of the world's production depends on them (but you can build a new society where production is managed more efficiently).
• You can't switch to environment-friendly energy sources, because presently the best solar panels yield only 30% of the energy they capture (i.e. we don't have enough technology) (but while we develop it we can pollute a new planet a bit and it won't really matter).
• You can't make people give a shit about the environment quickly enough to stop global warming unless you start imposing extremely strict (i.e. on the border of fascism) environmental laws (like the ones in Singapore) all over the world (but you can send only people who already give a shit about the environment, wait until they have created a society where such rules aren't considered fascist, and then send more people).
• You can't repair the damage done. The ozone layer regenerates only very slowly (i.e. at the rate of many, many years).

Then Terraforming would be useless if we are not there in a few millenium, because it is my understanding that Terraforming would be quite long...

Not that long. We should be able to terraform Mars to a decent extent in a couple hundred years, i think, but that's just me.

Don't expect people to do this for money!! I don't know anyone who would invest any money knowing that he would not see any return in his lifetime.

How about investing money for something your children's children will see? And no, i don't expect them to do it for money; i just said that it's one reason some people might want to do it. I definitely wouldn't do it for money.

Again the risk is way too big for the possible return and the project would take way too long. So forget about any help from corporation.

Risk? I don't think there's much of a risk, except maybe for the spaceship failing to launch or losing communication with Earth at some point in its journey to another planet. We pretty much have the technology to terraform Mars and build tented cities on the moon today.

Too long? Again, i think it would only take a few hundred years. Think of it as the biggest / longest-term investment in history.

Do not forget that wealthy rich mans are ruling corporations (and the planet?) and their only goal is to get even wealthier and rich as fast as they can...

Sadly, you are right: they do rule the planet, basically. But think of it this way: Say one corporation/multimillionaire invests on Mars/Venus. All the other corporations/multimillionaires will start to get richer quicker than that one for a while, but say they/it can hold on long enough for Mars/Venus to be terraformed and inhabited. Then they/it will rule Mars/Venus alone, and that's like having another Earth completely under your control.

(And yes, the inhabitants can always make a revolution when the thing is done and overthrow said corporation/multimillionaire.)

You need idealist to run your project. People who care about mankind before themselves. Saddly, there are very few on this earth

Very few is larger than zero.

Another big issue that no one talked about yet is religion. Most of those religion fanatics believe God put us here to stay here until he comes back and take "care" of us. (Most of the western and wealthier civilisations are still christians...).

Well, the idea is that colonization/terraforming would be done by scientists (a big percentage of which are atheists) and experts in such fields as construction and ecology (of which there surely are atheists). That should take care of the religion problem.

Of course, with subsequent migration from Earth eventually one of two things will happen:

• Only atheists will go to Venus/Mars/wherever; no religious problems can possibly arise.
• People who believe in one or more god(s) but don't believe that "God put us on Earth to stay here until He comes back" will also go; a society with religious tolerance will have to be put into effect.

In conclusion, it's a nice dream you got there, but you won't see nothing in your lifetime except maybe in far fetch science fiction movies.

I know i probably won't see thefinal results in my lifetime, but i'd love to be part of such a project. I don't think i'm alone in saying that it would be a beautiful experience to set foot on an empty dead world and start a process that will turn it into another home.

I mean honestly, we're really fucking everything up here. That's why I disapprove of colonizing Mars or any other planet, we should try to fix this one. But that's also the problem, because I don't think that is possible.

So what do you suggest?

Also, we have to think about the fact that we humans are humans, so I wonder if we won't all just kill each other before we colonize Mars or wahtever?

That's why we need to act quickly and efficiently.

And if it gets colonized, shiiiiit, imagine the political mess...

Unless Mars becomes independent instead of being divided into regions belonging to several superpowers on Earth. Earth won't like that, obviously, but i doubt a well-planned revolution when the planet is inhabitable/inhabited would fail. Read Green Mars and Blue Mars by Kim Stanley Robinson (science-fiction, but then Jules Verne also wrote science-fiction).

We're out of land we can use responsibly -- in fact, we passed that point long ago -- now we're just eating up our future.

All the more reason to go to other parts of the solar system.

[on extinction and overpopulation] Is all this meant to convince us the sky is falling and that we should regress to a primitive lifestyle? All this stuff can be fixed by higher density (much higher) residential housing, which need not be built on habitable land, new food production technologies.

You solve extinction with cloning; you solve overpopulation with a more efficient distribution of the people (and yes, that means inhabiting the wildlife regions that are left on Earth, including, if possible when we have the technology to do it, Earth's oceans). There, problems solved. Can we move on to the rest of the solar system now?

[on terraforming other planets] We don't even know if it really is feasible!!

Please state your reasons to believe it isn't.

 

[Magrathean]

As i see it, this discussion is divided into two parts:

1. Is terraforming possible?
2. Why terraform other planets? Shouldn't we instead fix Earth?