Space Travel - good or bad?

[Captainron]

It’s up there with climbing mountains for me. Waste of time and resources.

No way in hell humankind needs to live on another planet. Fix this one first please.

 

[Swinglowandslow]

It’s up there with climbing mountains for me. Waste of time and resources.

No way in hell humankind needs to live on another planet. Fix this one first please.

Not yet it doesn’t. But the decline is going to be exponential. I’m not talking about the next decade, but eventually.

And how to fix it…really? All the aggro we see is the different countries “fixing” it , as they see they can.

 

[RichA]

Not yet it doesn’t. But the decline is going to be exponential. I’m not talking about the next decade, but eventually.

And how to fix it…really? All the aggro we see is the different countries “fixing” it , as they see they can.

The closest potentially habitable world is estimated to be 25 trillion miles away.
That’s over 4 light years.
The fastest human built vehicle ever is the Parker Solar Probe. At its top speed of 430,000 mph it would take nearly 7,000 years to get there.

Good luck.

If the objective is finding a new home planet then space exploration truly is an utter waste of time and money. Not ours though, fortunately.

Realistically it’s probably just about finding planets, moons or asteroids whose resources they can mine.

 

[SwingsitlikeHogan]

Steady on….solar system? I take it you mean Universe or galaxy. It’s been pretty much observed that if there is life in the solar system on planets and/or moons , other than on our planet, then it is not going to be anywhere near as advanced as we are.
The rest of what you say is good advice except the last sentence. It’s not good advice, but is a damn good prediction, unfortunately.
I do believe however that elsewhere in the Universe there will be much life and many civilisations, a lot of them in advance of ours, and a lot well behind ours.
To believe differently is giving ourselves a gigantic sense of importance. In the scheme of things we are quite insignificant, merely the most intelligent ( not most deserving) mammal on a pale blue dot of a planet among millions of planets.
It’s not in our nature to not explore. Furthermore, if we do not find ,and some of us migrate to ,other planets the human race will die out….probably and hopefully long after the youngest of us presently alive.
Professor Brian Cox made the point that the likely cause of the demise of the human race is not disease or population ….but stupidity.!

Cox talks of the Great Silence i.e. if there was other life out there somewhere, then why have we no inkling of it…it would have had plenty of time from the genesis of the universe to develop and make itself known. One answer he suggests is that there may well have been multiple, even very many, instances of life, but they all self-destructed before they could reach the point of saving themselves from themselves and so did not technologically reach the point of sending out a sufficiently ‘loud’ and ‘enduring’…’hello - we are here’.

 

[Swinglowandslow]

The closest potentially habitable world is estimated to be 25 trillion miles away.
That’s over 4 light years.
The fastest human built vehicle ever is the Parker Solar Probe. At its top speed of 430,000 mph it would take nearly 7,000 years to get there.

Good luck.

If the objective is finding a new home planet then space exploration truly is an utter waste of time and money. Not ours though, fortunately.

Realistically it’s probably just about finding planets, moons or asteroids whose resources they can mine.

Yes , ‘‘‘tis a long way, I know. But IIRC, in 1900 the fastest humans could go was on a train.
Look at us now , in little over hundred years.
However, reference our migration, there is reasonable speculation of terraforming Mars. It is an increasingly held view that Mars once did have an atmosphere and oceans etc.
Maybe it can be returned to that.
That is not an unreasonable objective

 

[Tashyboy]

Apologies coz Ave not read all four pages. But to answer the question it’s a bit of both. One things for sure. There not exploring space for the good of Tash. Industry and Business will be the benefactors of this. Am sure as a taxpayer we will Fund it. But benefit from it, not a cat in hells chance. The question is asked what if we do find ET and he is a bad person. Am sure ET will look at Trump, Putin and quite a few others and think WTF Is going off there.
The romantic Tash in me hopes space exploration will be like Star Trek searching the final Frontier. The realistic Tash thinks it could be more
Like Star Wars

 

[Voyager EMH]

This mission, to a great extent, mirrors the Apollo 8 mission of 1968. First manned craft to orbit the moon and return to earth.
Came at the end of a very difficult year for this 8-year-old to comprehend.

1968.
Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy assassinated.
Social unrest and growing opposition to Vietnam war in the USA.
Entrenched Apartheid in South Africa.
The beginning of an era of The Troubles in Northern Ireland.
A Student protest in France escalating to a General Strike of 10 million workers giving the government a big wobble.
Tanks rolling into Prague to regain Soviet control.
Black Power salutes on the podium at the Olympic Games.
The middle of the years that Mohammed Ali was banned from boxing due to his political and religious beliefs.

But there was a developing movement/culture among a younger generation that we should move towards a world of Peace, Love and Understanding.

The Apollo 8 mission focussed many minds towards the great possibilities that the human race could achieve at the end of a year of great unrest around the world.
I hope something similar might occur this year.

 

[The Squirrel]

The closest potentially habitable world is estimated to be 25 trillion miles away.
That’s over 4 light years.
The fastest human built vehicle ever is the Parker Solar Probe. At its top speed of 430,000 mph it would take nearly 7,000 years to get there.

Good luck.

If the objective is finding a new home planet then space exploration truly is an utter waste of time and money. Not ours though, fortunately.

Realistically it’s probably just about finding planets, moons or asteroids whose resources they can mine.

The technology of today is unfathomable to even the victorians, and go back 500 years and we today look like supernatural Gods. This is the rate of change in the scientific age (approximately the last 500 years). For contrast, pick any human up from any point in history before William the Conqueror from their settlement and put them in that settlement 500 years in the future. There would have been a few strange aspects to their new world for sure - but they would have not have seen anything too much out of their comprehension or need to taught anything much about how to function within it. This is the age where resources and intellect were spent only on the present, not with a view to the future. Human progress was glacially slow for millenia as a result.

Scientific progress has done far more to improve the condition OF EVERYONE than immediate needs charity and benevolence to the deprived. Progress also benefits all future humans (countless billions, hopefully) rather than the few standing in front of you right now. Even our understanding of poverty and deprivation has changed - what we hold up as the most abject poverty today would be seen as a comfortable existence in 1850. If our Victorian predecessors had focussed all out on poverty alleviation rather than scientific progress then we might all be comfortable …. in an 1850s standard of living. No thanks. Let’s be thankful that enough of them had some future vision and were prepared to pursue (and spend on) scientific endeavours even when the benefit might not accrue in their own lifetimes. Our descendants will feel similar about those pushing the frontiers today.

Now imagine what could be done in the future.

Mars could be given a warming blanket of an atmosphere.

Did you know Venus is actually significantly closer than Mars to us? Somehow strip it of its hellish global-warming-dialled-up-to-a-million-with-corrosive-acid-added atmosphere and replace it with one similar but less effective at retaining heat than our own and who knows what the possibilities are.

All these things are unimaginable to us today how they might be done. Flight and space travel were unimaginable 500 years ago. My money is on human ingenuity and technological progress to solve those problems in the end, even if it takes lifetimes to do it, and that’s just one of the reasons that what we are attempting right now is worthwhile.

 

[nickjdavis]

Apologies coz Ave not read all four pages. But to answer the question it’s a bit of both. One things for sure. There not exploring space for the good of Tash. Industry and Business will be the benefactors of this. Am sure as a taxpayer we will Fund it. But benefit from it, not a cat in hells chance. The question is asked what if we do find ET and he is a bad person. Am sure ET will look at Trump, Putin and quite a few others and think WTF Is going off there.
The romantic Tash in me hopes space exploration will be like Star Trek searching the final Frontier. The realistic Tash thinks it could be more
Like Star Wars

Maybe ET and his mates ARE looking in and have decided to not make contact and hide instead...I wouldn't blame them one bit.