Colonize Space Or See Our End

[charles brough]

I've seen good technical posts in the forum here on how space colonizing and mining can be developed. It is interesting but it is all very expensive! The public shows too little enthusiasm for space travel to enable the government to adequately fund it. They see other things as more important. Is space now becoming something just for the rich to play in?

 

Lets consider what is really developing. My expertise is social evolution ("The Last Civilization") and I have a chapter on this subject. It goes like this:

 

We are evolved, small group primates which, like all such social animals, tend to expand in number. When the population of the group grows to where lack of food and the inherent sense of crowding characteristic of that species all results either in breaking out and expanding into new territory, usually at the expense of others, or it suffers a population crash.

 

With us, now, we are in such a crisis. We have developed language and with it ideology capable of more or less bonding us small group beings into ever larger groups during the last 40,000 years.These huge groups now function as nations and block of nations with the Western nations being one of four such large blocks.. But as our numbers put increasing pressure now on the Earth's ever-stretching resources, there is a tendency for each block to want to expand its territory at the expense of the others. We manage so far to mitigate that problem by spreading our secular ideological system which tends to unite the bocks and enables enough cooperation to build an expanding world economy. However, pressure is building anyway as our populations keep rising.

 

The only long term solution is expanding out into the universe and colonizing space. Should that finally happen, our species could grow and expand virtually forever. The problems are (1) that we lack the will to channel the resources needed to develop adquate space equipment to do it, (2) that we are unwilling to implement drastic birth control measures here that would be essential even if we do it, and (3) the possibility of the world unity we still have breaking down more and leading us into a nuclear war or plague-caused population crash

[Cyberia]

The human race went from six to seven billion in just 12 years. I would think double that (14 billion) is easily possible by the end of the century, with India, China and Africa leading the field. Certainly water wars are on their way from a shortage of drinking water, with food riots not far behind. We passed the half way mark with the world's oil supply a few years back and now more oil is being used every day so the other half won't take too long to vanish too. I saw an SF film a few years back where civilization had collapsed in the very near future and the story was that suddenly one day they had ran out of oil because there was not as much as people thought there was. Without transport, civilization collapsed within days.

 

America which has been printing money for decades (instead of belt tightening) to solve it's debt problems has now found much of space exploration too expensive. Rockets we rely on are little better than the V2's of nearly 70 years ago, and though there is again talk of nuclear powered space ships, there is no realistic alternative fuel to even allow us to launch manned exploration of the solar system let alone travel to other stars. We are talking trillions just to send a few people to Mars let alone a large colony to Mars or Ceres, which is probably a better alternative because of it's massive fresh water ice supply.

 

Short of some miracle fuel being discovered, the future of space is in envious glances through telescopes.

[Lancewen]

This is my pessimistic kind of post. First if we don't find more baskets to put our eggs in we will go out like the dinosaurs sooner or later. But in the short term if we don't start making progress on a major sustainable energy source like fusion or a combination of lessor sustainable sources like solar. wind, wave, geothermal and whatever else we can find to help out, we will be in big trouble. Next if you think population pressures are building up now what do you think is going to happen as the ocean levels start rising and everybody with an ocean view now starts scrambling for someplace else to live?

 

Even if we had the technology to get offworld to live, how many people are we talking about? A few hundred, maybe a few thousand? Anyway you cut it, most of us are going to be stuck on Earth until we die. So I suggest we start working together and get our act together so that the coming distractions are minimized for the greatest number of people. Trouble is humans are notorious for not doing what's needed until after the disaster happens.

[charles brough]

This is my pessimistic kind of post. First if we don't find more baskets to put our eggs in we will go out like the dinosaurs sooner or later. But in the short term if we don't start making progress on a major sustainable energy source like fusion or a combination of lessor sustainable sources like solar. wind, wave, geothermal and whatever else we can find to help out, we will be in big trouble. Next if you think population pressures are building up now what do you think is going to happen as the ocean levels start rising and everybody with an ocean view now starts scrambling for someplace else to live?

 

Even if we had the technology to get offworld to live, how many people are we talking about? A few hundred, maybe a few thousand? Anyway you cut it, most of us are going to be stuck on Earth until we die. So I suggest we start working together and get our act together so that the coming distractions are minimized for the greatest number of people. Trouble is humans are notorious for not doing what's needed until after the disaster happens.

 

Yes, population growth needs to be tightly limited even as we reach a point where we are colonizing space. Our continued growth as a species can only be assured as our colonies spread and grow out in space. It is an iffy future but the only successful one. Moreover, it cannot come about until the world unites behind it. It has to be an objective that is stamped firmly into a way of thinking that is built around it. The goal has to be so dominant that it replaces the old religions and their supernatural goals---even consumerism. And such a new way of thinking and world view will not develop magically. I think I have discovered the way it will come about in present in the book, "The Last Civilization." Why not at least consider it at http://civilization-overview.com.?

 

brough

[Lancewen]

Yes, population growth needs to be tightly limited even as we reach a point where we are colonizing space. Our continued growth as a species can only be assured as our colonies spread and grow out in space. It is an iffy future but the only successful one. Moreover, it cannot come about until the world unites behind it. It has to be an objective that is stamped firmly into a way of thinking that is built around it. The goal has to be so dominant that it replaces the old religions and their supernatural goals---even consumerism. And such a new way of thinking and world view will not develop magically. I think I have discovered the way it will come about in present in the book, "The Last Civilization." Why not at least consider it at http://civilization-overview.com.?

 

brough

 

Good article and he’s probably right about needed replacement ideology. I just don’t see any easy way to convince Christians and Muslims that the most important thing in life is not what happens to you after death. After all if you really have an eternal soul after death, your only concern will be how to make that after death experience as good as it could possibly be, and what happens to you and everybody else in this life is unimportant if it doesn’t promote a better afterlife. You see where I’m going with this line of thought? To all the people in the world that it really sucks to be, that afterlife is all they got to believe in and religious leaders know it and have power over billions of people because of it. The only way to stop this is to increase the quality of all there lives to a point where life before death is worth living.

[Cyberia]

How do you increase the quality of lives when you are endlessly paying for more people at the bottom? Africa was and always will be a basket case. Oil aside, all muslim countries are little better. we've thrown trillions at these people, many of whom hate us and where has it got us? More mouths to feed and more aid needed.

 

Sure China and India will do well in the coming decades but that does not include helping any other country other than out of pure self interest because they know that "the poor will always be with us" and that in trying to lift them up, countries are dragged down.

 

Short of a miracle, population is increasing far beyond any possibilities of space travel allowing us "to put our eggs into other baskets too" (the estimated cost of putting just a few people on Mars is something like £3 trillion, and no doubt the actual figure would be much more). The reality is centuries away while population and resources doomsday is this century. We will run out of food, drinking water, oil, etc for all who need them, and those not getting them will fight for them. In the TV miniseries "World War III", where America and Russia are about to launch a nuclear Armageddon, the American President asks the Russian President why they are doing it and the Russian replies that his people are starving.

[Lancewen]

How do you increase the quality of lives when you are endlessly paying for more people at the bottom? Africa was and always will be a basket case. Oil aside, all muslim countries are little better. we've thrown trillions at these people, many of whom hate us and where has it got us? More mouths to feed and more aid needed.

 

Sure China and India will do well in the coming decades but that does not include helping any other country other than out of pure self interest because they know that "the poor will always be with us" and that in trying to lift them up, countries are dragged down.

 

Short of a miracle, population is increasing far beyond any possibilities of space travel allowing us "to put our eggs into other baskets too" (the estimated cost of putting just a few people on Mars is something like £3 trillion, and no doubt the actual figure would be much more). The reality is centuries away while population and resources doomsday is this century. We will run out of food, drinking water, oil, etc for all who need them, and those not getting them will fight for them. In the TV miniseries "World War III", where America and Russia are about to launch a nuclear Armageddon, the American President asks the Russian President why they are doing it and the Russian replies that his people are starving.

 

One thing colonizing space will do is that only quality breading stock will be able to go. So if we do get a new start some where else there will be smarter kids that will all be well educated. So maybe it doesn't matter what happens to the Earth once humans spread to other worlds, if all those other worlds get off to a good start. Kind of like parents giving their kids a good start in life while they're still alive. The question is are we smart enough to get that job done before we reach a point of no return. When we no longer have enough resources or the conditions on this world become to much of a distraction that we can no longer advance and move forward. First, we need to buy ourselves more time to get the job done. We either will or we won't and the human species will die out on this world the same as all the other less intelligent life forms.

[charles brough]

Good article and he’s probably right about needed replacement ideology. I just don’t see any easy way to convince Christians and Muslims that the most important thing in life is not what happens to you after death. After all if you really have an eternal soul after death, your only concern will be how to make that after death experience as good as it could possibly be, and what happens to you and everybody else in this life is unimportant if it doesn’t promote a better afterlife. You see where I’m going with this line of thought? To all the people in the world that it really sucks to be, that afterlife is all they got to believe in and religious leaders know it and have power over billions of people because of it. The only way to stop this is to increase the quality of all there lives to a point where life before death is worth living.

 

It seems to me that whether or not people believe their "soul" lives on is not such a big deal. To me, what is most important is the goal set by the religion. The myth that your "soul" is happier if you life rightously is a little constructive even if it is a myth. Why people behave is determined by the group they belong to. We are small group primates who fit most socially in small groups or, when groups are larger, ones bonded tightly together by an ideology, they behave because it gives them a sense of community and security. People who genuinely believe in their country and society do not need to believe in another life. They feel unity. The men feel like protectors and the women feel protected. They would not respond to fears generated by the media.

 

The ideological systems that provide some unity to parts of the world such as Islam, Christendom, Marxist East Asia, and the Hindu block tend to be badly divided and to as seriously divide the world.

 

Only an ideology that can bridge that sea of disunity can bring us out of the decline. In "The Last Civilization" I describe what such an ideology would need to be like. It has to provide answers to the "mysteries of life" that are scientifically accurate.

 

Brough

[Lancewen]

It seems to me that whether or not people believe their "soul" lives on is not such a big deal. To me, what is most important is the goal set by the religion. The myth that your "soul" is happier if you life rightously is a little constructive even if it is a myth. Why people behave is determined by the group they belong to. We are small group primates who fit most socially in small groups or, when groups are larger, ones bonded tightly together by an ideology, they behave because it gives them a sense of community and security. People who genuinely believe in their country and society do not need to believe in another life. They feel unity. The men feel like protectors and the women feel protected. They would not respond to fears generated by the media.

 

The ideological systems that provide some unity to parts of the world such as Islam, Christendom, Marxist East Asia, and the Hindu block tend to be badly divided and to as seriously divide the world.

 

Only an ideology that can bridge that sea of disunity can bring us out of the decline. In "The Last Civilization" I describe what such an ideology would need to be like. It has to provide answers to the "mysteries of life" that are scientifically accurate.

 

Brough

 

Even if your right, it seems like it would be about as easy to do that as it would be to end hunger, poverty, bad water, uneducated children and governments that don't care about anything but their own agendas. No matter where you start the best you can do is add another group with a new ideology to the mix. How's that going to help anything?

[charles brough]

How do you increase the quality of lives when you are endlessly paying for more people at the bottom? Africa was and always will be a basket case. Oil aside, all muslim countries are little better. we've thrown trillions at these people, many of whom hate us and where has it got us? More mouths to feed and more aid needed.

 

Sure China and India will do well in the coming decades but that does not include helping any other country other than out of pure self interest because they know that "the poor will always be with us" and that in trying to lift them up, countries are dragged down.

 

Short of a miracle, population is increasing far beyond any possibilities of space travel allowing us "to put our eggs into other baskets too" (the estimated cost of putting just a few people on Mars is something like £3 trillion, and no doubt the actual figure would be much more). The reality is centuries away while population and resources doomsday is this century. We will run out of food, drinking water, oil, etc for all who need them, and those not getting them will fight for them. In the TV miniseries "World War III", where America and Russia are about to launch a nuclear Armageddon, the American President asks the Russian President why they are doing it and the Russian replies that his people are starving.

 

For sure, it won't be solved by our Secular Humanist world-view and way of thinking, the one that we have spread across the Earth. It will take an advanced ideology, one that focuses the world away from its present obsession with exploiting Earth's resources, the one intently espousing the spreading of "the American Dream." We have built up a world-view that is willing to sacrifice the future of the whole human race for such short-term illusiory gains. With "the pursuit of happiness," we set out to let business mold the world's people into "consumers," and people bebcame addicted to the collecting of "stuff."

 

The only thing able to reverse course is a world ideology that reshapes all that. After all, you and I may look down on all the craziness and wonder why people keep producing so many extra children when that is not the solution. But we are all biologically much the same. It is our secular over-humanist ideological world-view and way of thinking that allows that to go on unrestrained. It is that patchwork of ideology that makes us blind to what is happening and the doom awaiting the human race. As a species, we have brought civilization too far to be blamed for stupidity. But we need to believe better in common. We need better unity. We need an advanced way of thinking or ideology, one that sets new and better goals, one that makes space colonizing the supreme goal. Yes, we are along way from colonizing space, but if we take control of the over-population problem with a less humanistic and more "do whatever it takes" urgency. Only with that change we can control population levels and direct the needed intellectual and environmental resources into achieving the space colonizing goal.

 

Like all other biological beings, we are also territorial as there is no other way to enable a species to grow. We all need to expand our territory or suffer a horrible population crash. We have the whole universe before us and for the first time ever, we have the possibility of actually spreading out and taking possession of it. Biologically, all social groups function this way. It is a social evolutionary matter of advance . . . or else.

[charles brough]

One thing colonizing space will do is that only quality breading stock will be able to go. So if we do get a new start some where else there will be smarter kids that will all be well educated. So maybe it doesn't matter what happens to the Earth once humans spread to other worlds, if all those other worlds get off to a good start. Kind of like parents giving their kids a good start in life while they're still alive. The question is are we smart enough to get that job done before we reach a point of no return. When we no longer have enough resources or the conditions on this world become to much of a distraction that we can no longer advance and move forward. First, we need to buy ourselves more time to get the job done. We either will or we won't and the human species will die out on this world the same as all the other less intelligent life forms.

 

That is good logic, but biological natural selection has brough about no known advance of any significance in at least the last 40,000 years. Civilization and the general accumulation of the immense human cultural heritage was achieved by natural selection between societies, not the individual. It is only cultural. We have biologcally evolved only a slightly small brain case, narrower legs, immunity to certain diseases and lactose tolerance. It was not our era that built civilization. Give credit to the Sumerians and Egyptians 5,000 years ago.

 

What is advanced and must continue to advance is our ideological systems, in other words, our world-view and way of thinking.

[Cyberia]

arKane and Charles Brough. The change required in people if left with free will, will never happen. Most are greedy, selfish, lazy, useless, self interested, and so on.

 

The third world are not going to wake up one morning and decide not to have endless kids, especially if the first world is helping pay for them. It is not in the interest of some countries.

 

The guy in the dress in the vatican; nowhere in the bible does it say that people should produce endless kids. When god says they should multiply, there were two people in the world (garden of Eden) and eight people in the world (after the Flood). The reality is that the Poop is trying to have his followers out breed all other religions. So it is with countries like China, India, etc. Give it time and half of all the people in the world will be of Chinese or Indian descent.

 

We cannot feed the world so our one chance is to educate it, show people in the third world that there is more to life than producing the next generation. If we cannot do that by the end of the century, then civilization may well collapse. If it does, billions will die and it will be a long time before some kind of civilization rises again; a civilization with no coal, oil or nuclear power available, and some rare metals gone too.

 

If you look at the SF stories of the 1950's and 1960's, they believed we would have colonies on the Moon by now and maybe even Mars, that we would have explored all the planets and started mining the asteroids. And some believed we would have travelled to nearby stars. Instead we have a space programme that is imploding because of costs, and because the fuels we are using are little better than those used in V2 rockets seventy years ago.

[Lancewen]

That is good logic, but biological natural selection has brough about no known advance of any significance in at least the last 40,000 years. Civilization and the general accumulation of the immense human cultural heritage was achieved by natural selection between societies, not the individual. It is only cultural. We have biologcally evolved only a slightly small brain case, narrower legs, immunity to certain diseases and lactose tolerance. It was not our era that built civilization. Give credit to the Sumerians and Egyptians 5,000 years ago.

 

What is advanced and must continue to advance is our ideological systems, in other words, our world-view and way of thinking.

 

We may not be evolving as individual humans, but the human society is evolving faster than ever, we are becoming more technological and the Internet is definitely changing everything. I for one would like to watch that development a few more years. Humans seem to work much better when under a great deal stress such as world war or threat of world war. But, and I hate to say it, if we don't have a major threat hanging over us that we can see or feel, we tend to get bogged down in day to day human drama and anything but emanate death is not of much concern. We humans are very short sighted, and that's one of the reasons scientists are being a bit alarmist about global warming. Even that hasn't worked very well. The doctor is still out as to whether were going to make it or not.

[Moontanman]

The human race went from six to seven billion in just 12 years. I would think double that (14 billion) is easily possible by the end of the century, with India, China and Africa leading the field. Certainly water wars are on their way from a shortage of drinking water, with food riots not far behind. We passed the half way mark with the world's oil supply a few years back and now more oil is being used every day so the other half won't take too long to vanish too. I saw an SF film a few years back where civilization had collapsed in the very near future and the story was that suddenly one day they had ran out of oil because there was not as much as people thought there was. Without transport, civilization collapsed within days.

 

America which has been printing money for decades (instead of belt tightening) to solve it's debt problems has now found much of space exploration too expensive. Rockets we rely on are little better than the V2's of nearly 70 years ago, and though there is again talk of nuclear powered space ships, there is no realistic alternative fuel to even allow us to launch manned exploration of the solar system let alone travel to other stars. We are talking trillions just to send a few people to Mars let alone a large colony to Mars or Ceres, which is probably a better alternative because of it's massive fresh water ice supply.

 

Short of some miracle fuel being discovered, the future of space is in envious glances through telescopes.

 

 

Space travel is too expensive? NASA doesn't get even a small amount of what people think it does.

 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NASA

 

Budget

 

Public perception of the NASA budget is very different from reality and has been the subject of controversy since the agency's creation. A 1997 poll reported that Americans had an average estimate of 20% for NASA's share of the federal budget. In reality, NASA's budget has been between 0.5% and 1% from the late 1960s on. NASA budget briefly peaked at over 4% of the federal budget in the mid-1960s during the build up to the Apollo program.[69]

 

Military budget and total US federal spending

 

 

 

Fiscal Year 2009 U.S. Federal Spending – Cash or Budget Basis

The U.S. Department of Defense budget accounted in fiscal year 2010 for about 19% of the United States federal budgeted expenditures and 28% of estimated tax revenues. Including non-DOD expenditures, defense spending was approximately 28–38% of budgeted expenditures and 42–57% of estimated tax revenues.[citation needed] According to the Congressional Budget Office, defense spending grew 9% annually on average from fiscal year 2000–2009.[24]

Because of constitutional limitations, military funding is appropriated in a discretionary spending account. (Such accounts permit government planners to have more flexibility to change spending each year, as opposed to mandatory spending accounts that mandate spending on programs in accordance with the law, outside of the budgetary process.) In recent years, discretionary spending as a whole has amounted to about one-third of total federal outlays.[25] Military spending's share of discretionary spending was 50.5% in 2003, and has risen steadily ever since.[26]

For FY 2010, Department of Defense spending amounts to 4.7% of GDP.[27] Because the U.S. GDP has risen over time, the military budget can rise in absolute terms while shrinking as a percentage of the GDP. For example, the Department of Defense budget is slated to be $664 billion in 2010 (including the cost of operations in Iraq and Afghanistan previously funded through supplementary budget legislation[28][29]), higher than at any other point in American history, but still 1.1–1.4% lower as a percentage of GDP than the amount spent on defense during the peak of Cold-War military spending in the late 1980s.[27] Admiral Mike Mullen, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, has called four percent an "absolute floor".[30] This calculation does not take into account some other defense-related non-DOD spending, such as Veterans Affairs, Homeland Security, and interest paid on debt incurred in past wars, which has increased even as a percentage of the national GDP.

 

 

NASA has averaged about .5 to 1% of the federal budget.

 

I think we could spend a bit more on space travel...

[Lancewen]

Speaking of places to colonize, the following link should be of interest.

 

 

Subject: Salt Water May Flow on Mars

 

NASA Science News for August 4, 2011

 

A new study of images from NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter suggests that salt water may be actively flowing across the surface of the Red Planet.

 

FULL STORY at http://science.nasa....4aug_marsflows/

[sigurdV]

How we (without governmental help) got into space? Perhaps we launched a serious project on the internet!

 

Collecting and reinvesting all those single coins we might want to contribute monthly to the cause...