Eventually we will have to leave this planet to survive as a species. Can you imagine making a 300 day trip in a vehicle the size of a SUV to Mars even with people you like? How about your mother in law? lol. OK, how about four or five people in a small space for nearly a year with current NASA technology? How long before someone will want to KILL someone else? It's not possible for someone to go for a walk or "leave" in that space prison.
Obviously, the answer is that faster transport may be required to prevent murder in space! lol. Calling Scotty for Warp Drive!
The "How the Universe Works" episode on the "Space Ark" is fascinating -it raises the question how would we migrate to another world to survive as an intelligence, space-technology species?
Even if we built a huge space vessel filled with all kinds of humans (WHO gets to go? Who would decide?) and our cats, dogs, bbq pits, etc., it would be a 42 year trip to reach the closest sun to our sun star - Alpha Centuri A. Once there, no guarantees it would work. Being adaptable will be vital to success. Scientists think with a "Warp Drive" we could be there in 5 months! Right now, its 42 years! Let's start with Mars and start planning ahead. It's stupid not to.
As the sun ages it will GROW into a red giant, evaporating the Earth. Sooner or later, humans will face a day when we will HAVE to become planetary migrants and fall back to the outer planets like Mars to avoid becoming extinct as our solar system heats up from the sun.
So today's immigration debates will look silly. We are all about to be migrants on a grander scales since the GOP does not want to minimize the damage to our planet by human emissions.
Unlike dinosaurs, we are lucky enough to have a space program, so if we don't survive it will be because we were too dumb to take advantage of it. Frankly, we have been pretty damn dumb lately - our politicians would sell their souls for a lobbyist plane ticket and not give a second thought to any of this.
At some distant future billions of years from now (no one living today will have to worry about it) our Milky Way galaxy will collide with the Andromeda galaxy, requiring even more ingenuity of our species to survive.
Of course the GOP Congress will be against doing anything about any of this, or paying for it! They don't even want to fix 70 year old bridges before they collapse, so vision is not their long suit. But all these things will happen anyway.
Either build the ark or drown in the flood!
Either we build an asteroid early detection and defense system or risk losing a city like New York, Houston or Paris to a city killer meteor like the one that hit Russia in 2013.
Just today another huge asteroid just buzzed within 25,000 miles from us - closer than the moon! We are getting dozens of hits from space rocks that we don't see coming. Earth is "flying blind" because we don't have a global asteroid detection system, so it is a matter of time before we pay for our negligence. We are not defending our planet's trillion dollar economies from a real threat that we have the technology to avoid. All it takes is the vision to make the investment. It should involve every country since all of us face the same risk and each of us, from Moscow to Bombay and Chicago, would be devastated by a hit.
The effort would create jobs and advance technology while providing our first-ever planetary defense system.
We WILL have to make changes to survive as a species.
Right now that means "do no harm" to our only home in this vast empty part of space. I for one am not anxious to live on our dead moon, or even move to Mars, but Earth is being suffocated into a hothouse Venus-type planet with our man-made carbon emissions.
If we kill our own planet with climate change it will end up forcing us to begin that transfer sooner rather than later....
They say if you put CO2 machines in Mars it would eventually create an atmosphere, just the opposite of the impact on Earth....photo above. Let's put off the need for a Space Ark and save our planet as Priority No. 1. All else is relative versus a dead planet.
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