How we petition for space exploration, and why it is important.

[saabstory88]

Hello all,

Obviously, many things I will say here will be preaching to the converted, however it is important to see how these arguments affect those around us. I want to start a general discussion on how to petition for space exploration, and ultimately colonization, but more importantly, how do we convince those people in our lives to do the same.

Let us address the elephant in the room, the first rebuttal. This is the notion that there are more important things in the world than sending people into space. We only need to employ some very simple logic, to show that nothing is farther than the truth. It is fairly easy to make a cursory survey of the items which will always be brought up, but we first need to talk about the most important core point. What is scarcity?

Scarcity is at the core of every argument, and discussion, about man kind and how we live. No matter what logical counterpoint you are given, it can always be brought back to this essential point. We will, in the beginning of this thesis, ignore emotional responses, and cover them later. If you think about it, the concept of finite resources is incredibly new to us as humans. Unfortunately, it really started setting in centuries before we ever could imagine that we actually could go anywhere else. It has now become ingrained, and must be eradicated from our social conciseness. This must be the central mission. The fact that we, as a community, are obsessed with the methods of exploration, must not overshadow the fact that exploration and colonization are essential for our survival, and freedom.

Let us take counter arguments from inequality. Must we not ensure that our fellow man is given an equal opportunity, before we expend resources on flinging people into the solar system? Again, we come back to the idea of scarcity. While we will likely never devise a system that eliminates poverty, we can see that whenever humans are given the opportunity to go over the horizon, settle new lands, and use new resources, that inequality is reduced significantly. We have two options, we can attempt to remove people's freedom to profit from their labor, or we can give people the chance for everyone to profit. Both options are not easy, but only one option has negative societal consequences. When we have two options to help enrich our people, and one of them requires taking someones freedom, why should we be more inclined to choose this when there is an alternative?

Let us now consider the following response, "we must keep the world we have clean, and devote all our resources to this venture". This ignores the fact that we will never control the world. Recycling every can will not stop the Chinese from demolishing our ozone, and continuing to upset the ecosystem. It will not prevent developing nations from using whatever dirty manufacturing methods are necessary to compete in the global market. If you are truly concerned about the future and wellbeing of our planet, and our species, then not having a backup plan on another world is unforgivable. You also ignore that the technology that we need to say, colonize Mars, is likely to help us develop better ways to clean up our own planet.

This brings us to one of the ultimate points, the phrase, "This is the only world we've got, so me might as well...". This state of being, a species with one world, is actually a fear that has been with us for a long time. However, historically, it pushed us to take action, unlike today. We have always sought future security for our offspring, and have ensured that there would be no way that we could all be wiped out, as far as we know. The fact that all of human life could be wiped out tomorrow, though nuclear war, or a super volcano, or an undetected asteroid, should scare you beyond belief. It sure scares me, more than anything I can imagine. I know it scares other people, why do we have disaster movies, which are so successful? This fear drives people like Elon Musk, and Robert Zubrin, possibly even people like Christopher Nolan. It must scare all of us, and we must make our leaders fear this fate as well.

This is where we must craft our arguments. Everyone I imagine I am speaking to must at least have some interest in the subject, but more importantly, an understanding of just how important it is to not just be a one planet species. I do ask, that we try and think of something that is more important, because this could be an incorrect thesis. I do not believe that it is, but if we discover that anything is more important, we should pursue that with all of our passion. If nothing else, we must generate a list of as many counter arguments as possible, and defeat them with logic, emotion, but preferably a combination of both.

We must take these arguments to our friends, our family, everyone we know. If you really understand this, then you will realize that this is worth losing friendships over. if your friends do not want to hear about it, then they are ready to let humanity be wiped out. It really is that simple. We must make anyone who will listen understand this, and the urgency with which we must correct this oversight of our species. As much as I like superlatives, I want to eliminate the possibility that I could personally be the last living human. You could be too, unless we do something.

So with the following things in mind, I would ask to the help of anyone who would hear me. We must:

-Discuss structured arguments

-Create convincing and factual rebuttals, which stir emotion in our peers

-Share these arguments, start conversations, and drive home the stakes of this proposition

-Use facebook, twitter, and all of our social outlets to make sure that everyone we know at least considers this

-Make it clear, that whether you are a democrat, republican, or any political creed, we must demand this from our leaders with swiftness

-Make it clear to these same leaders, that the likes of Lockheed, and our other entrenched military suppliers don't care if they are building missiles, or building spacecraft, and will continue to fund their campaigns.

To those who have made it through, thank you, and I welcome the discussion.

Edited August 18, 2014 by saabstory88

[Wanderfound]

There are very good reasons for sending technology into space. There are very few good reasons for sending humans into space, and the main one of those is "because it's cool".

Interplanetary colonisation is not going to happen in the lifetime of anyone reading this. Thanks to that whole speed-of-light thing, humans will never leave this solar system. Planetary-scale terraforming any of the non-Earth bodies in this solar system to human-survivable standard is not something that is remotely practical with anything resembling current technology. Can people survive off Earth? Yes. Can they do it in a self-sufficient and economically feasible manner on a large scale? No.

Without useful terraforming, space colonisation provides no solution to environmental destruction. Space is a very unfriendly environment: if your habitat can survive in space, it can also survive on Earth, no matter how badly we trash the place. There's just no sensible reason to go to the effort of flinging it into orbit. And even with useful terraforming, the obvious place to start using it is here.

By all means, campaign for more investment in space science and exploration. We desperately need it; apart from all the other reasons, there is an urgent demand for a lot more in the way of climate-monitoring satellites.

But do it with robots, not people. You can send the Curiosity rover to Mars a thousand times over more easily than you can send one person there and back. If we hadn't wasted so much of our resources on 50 years of inspiring-but-pointless boots and flags missions, we'd be a lot more advanced than we are today.

[No one]

The argument I always use is as follows:

Let's say we have a country, let's call it Awesomeland. The people of Awesomeland are more industrialized than the rest of the world, and want to show the rest of the world how awesomely advanced their technology is. The people of Awesomeland want the world to fear them. In addition to Awesomeland, we have Not-Awesome Land. Not-Awesomeland is basically the exact same as Awesomeland except Awesomeland and Not-Awesomeland hate each other. And also both go "Na na na na na the other country does blah blah blah and thus we are TOTALLY different to each other." But both are industrialized superpowers. The people of Awesomeland and Not-Awesomeland both want to prove that they're better than the other. They have four options:

Option A) Go to war

Option Go to space

Option C) Fight proxy wars in other countries

Option D) Don't prove they're better than the other

Option A can't happen because of nuclear weapons. Option C can and probably will happen but everyone agrees it's bad (When we're speaking hypothetically in terms of Awesomeland and Not-Awesomeland. Citizens of Awesomeland might say we need to contain the Not-Awesome scum or something). Option D won't happen because that's not the way the world works. Leaving option B.

Space races invoke the same nationalistic pride, the same advances in technology (Actually the advances in technology are more efficient because the whole point is to advance technology), the same competition as war, except without the whole "lots of people dying" part. Also, both Awesomeland and Not-Awesomeland demonstrate their technological prowess and how it would be stupid to go to war with them.

[saabstory88]

There are very good reasons for sending technology into space. There are very few good reasons for sending humans into space, and the main one of those is "because it's cool".

I am not currently arguing from a position of expanding our knowledge, which of course I personally support, I am arguing from a position of imperative of our continued survival.

Interplanetary colonisation is not going to happen in the lifetime of anyone reading this. Thanks to that whole speed-of-light thing, humans will never leave this solar system.

You mean to say interstellar. Do not confuse the two.

Planetary-scale terraforming any of the non-Earth bodies in this solar system to human-survivable standard is not something that is remotely practical with anything resembling current technology. Can people survive off Earth? Yes. Can they do it in a self-sufficient and economically feasible manner on a large scale? No.

How long can you, not an expert, but you, survive alone naked in the woods? Even our own planet is incredibly hostile to us. Additionally, arguing that have have never done something, does not mean that we can not do something.

Without useful terraforming, space colonisation provides no solution to environmental destruction. Space is a very unfriendly environment: if your habitat can survive in space, it can also survive on Earth, no matter how badly we trash the place. There's just no sensible reason to go to the effort of flinging it into orbit. And even with useful terraforming, the obvious place to start using it is here.

Does this mitigate the idea of not hedging our bets? Can a convincing argument be made for putting all of our eggs in one basket? Can you describe the cost benefit of choosing not to try?

If given the following options.

Action: We do nothing.

Result: With certainty, we will go extinct on this planet. We can not be certain when this will happen, granted, but describe a reason to wait.

Action: We try and fail.

Result: We experience extinction bound to this planet. Probable spin offs.

Action: We try, and colonize one or more other bodies.

Result: We have extended the span of our species until such time when we can no longer be considered human, and reintroduced the benefit of "infinite" resources for all of mankind.

We attempt to pursue options with maximal payoff in our daily life. Why is this subject different?

By all means, campaign for more investment in space science and exploration. We desperately need it; apart from all the other reasons, there is an urgent demand for a lot more in the way of climate-monitoring satellites.

But do it with robots, not people. You can send the Curiosity rover to Mars a thousand times over more easily than you can send one person there and back. If we hadn't wasted so much of our resources on 50 years of inspiring-but-pointless boots and flags missions, we'd be a lot more advanced than we are today.

If we were to consider the Earth as being finite, then you argument is valid. However, a finite earth scenario not only drastically increases the near term possibility of the end of our species, but necessitates, that until such time as we are extinct, that we eventually must implement programs to curb our population, and find some method of fairly dealing with our finite set of resources. If we are looking at outcomes, what is the difference of living in a world were we are overpopulated, and miserable, and living in a world where we are overpopulated, miserable, and broke from flinging people into space and failing?

[saabstory88]

The argument I always use is as follows:

Let's say we have a country, let's call it Awesomeland. The people of Awesomeland are more industrialized than the rest of the world, and want to show the rest of the world how awesomely advanced their technology is. The people of Awesomeland want the world to fear them. In addition to Awesomeland, we have Not-Awesome Land. Not-Awesomeland is basically the exact same as Awesomeland except Awesomeland and Not-Awesomeland hate each other. And also both go "Na na na na na the other country does blah blah blah and thus we are TOTALLY different to each other." But both are industrialized superpowers. The people of Awesomeland and Not-Awesomeland both want to prove that they're better than the other. They have four options:

Option A) Go to war

Option Go to space

Option C) Fight proxy wars in other countries

Option D) Don't prove they're better than the other

Option A can't happen because of nuclear weapons. Option C can and probably will happen but everyone agrees it's bad (When we're speaking hypothetically in terms of Awesomeland and Not-Awesomeland. Citizens of Awesomeland might say we need to contain the Not-Awesome scum or something). Option D won't happen because that's not the way the world works. Leaving option B.

Space races invoke the same nationalistic pride, the same advances in technology (Actually the advances in technology are more efficient because the whole point is to advance technology), the same competition as war, except without the whole "lots of people dying" part. Also, both Awesomeland and Not-Awesomeland demonstrate their technological prowess and how it would be stupid to go to war with them.

This is a interesting point, which I believe can help to form the basis of another useful argument. Let us consider, why does Mutually Assured Destruction work? It works because both aggressors "Way of life" will be destroyed. This puts all nuclear armed nations on equal footing. Naturally, our military, and political leaders will seek a further advantage, by other means.

If we can propose that, upon establishing an outpost on another world, ours, or any other nation which should do this, would no longer be governed by the MAD principle, as their "way of life" would not be ended by a nuclear exchange. This would, in a sense, provide the ultimate form of defense, in that, the enemy, would know that even if we were to experience global thermonuclear war, that their adversary would not be defeated.

This would, as history shows us, force another desirable outcome to come to pass. Namely, the adversary country would have to establish their own extra-planetary base, to ensure that MAD would keep them safe. This not only retains the usefulness of MAD, but creates variety of methods by which to survive on other worlds, further increasing the chance for success of the overall goal of keeping us from going extinct in the near term.

[Wanderfound]

You mean to say interstellar. Do not confuse the two.

No, I mean to say interplanetary. Interstellar colonisation is not happening in the lifetime of any human ever. Einstein was right.

And go easy on the patronising tone.

How long can you, not an expert, but you, survive alone naked in the woods?

Quite a while, actually; it's something I regularly do for fun. I spent a week living in a cave a few day's walk from the nearest road a couple of years ago.

Well, not naked. Although I do know folks who do that, too...

Even our own planet is incredibly hostile to us. Additionally, arguing that have have never done something, does not mean that we can not do something.

Compared to space or the surface of any of the non-Earth bodies in the solar system, the middle of the Sahara is a paradise. We live on a paper-thin wisp of mud and gas wedged in between boiling magma and radioactive vacuum, but it's still the nicest place around.

Understand: I am not opposed to space exploration. I am not opposed to science; I used to be a professional scientist before I became too ill to continue. But if we waste all of our energies and resources on impractical pipe dreams, all we will achieve is to kill off the space exploration that isn't based on fantasy. If NASA had never built that daft white elephant shuttle, we'd all be a lot better off today.

[TheCanadianVendingMachine]

To be fair, Wanderfound, people back in 1945 said that a phone in your pocket wasn't able to be acheived in anyones lifetime. Yet it is. Technology expands quicker, and one day someone will find something amazing. May be in our lifetime, may not be

[Wanderfound]

To be fair, Wanderfound, people back in 1945 said that a phone in your pocket wasn't able to be acheived in anyones lifetime. Yet it is. Technology expands quicker, and one day someone will find something amazing. May be in our lifetime, may not be

It's theoretically possible; scientific knowledge is always provisional.

But you won't find many informed scientists willing to put their money on it. There's a difference between "we don't know how to do this yet" and "we're pretty certain that this isn't achievable given what we know of the nature of the universe".

[saabstory88]

No, I mean to say interplanetary. Interstellar colonisation is not happening in the lifetime of any human ever. Einstein was right.

And go easy on the patronising tone.

Quite a while, actually; it's something I regularly do for fun. I spent a week living in a cave a few day's walk from the nearest road a couple of years ago.

Well, not naked. Although I do know folks who do that, too...

Compared to space or the surface of any of the non-Earth bodies in the solar system, the middle of the Sahara is a paradise. We live on a paper-thin wisp of mud and gas wedged in between boiling magma and radioactive vacuum, but it's still the nicest place around.

Understand: I am not opposed to space exploration. I am not opposed to science; I used to be a professional scientist before I became too ill to continue. But if we waste all of our energies and resources on impractical pipe dreams, all we will achieve is to kill off the space exploration that isn't based on fantasy. If NASA had never built that daft white elephant shuttle, we'd all be a lot better off today.

I apologize for the tone. That was wrong of me to introduce spiteful emotion into this debate.

I would really just like to elicit your feedback, not on any particular technical challenge, but on the implications set forth by a view of our world being all that there is for us. If our world is all we have, then what do we do about our long term survival, and how well off will be be during this time? Is there a method of cooperating which both preserves some semblance of freedom and equity, while still allowing us to survive comfortably for the tens of millennia before we cease to be human, at least biologically? Is having to expend vast resources to make the oceans, and remaining land, fit for food production, to feed our ever expanding population, a desirable outcome? How many more centuries, or possibly millennia, will it be before we are, out of necessity, consuming nothing but algae and insects? Will we have the resources to continue technological civilization at this time? If we are left with the prospect of no escape from extinction level events, how should we be petitioning the government, to create long term survivable shelters for at least some of our population?

As to the original argument, let us take this from a different tack, as of course, even if we were to pursue the idea originally put forth, in practice, we should not disregard our gathering of knowledge. You are, of course, correct about unmanned robotic vehicles being a far more efficient means of gathering science. Let us leave NASA out of this business, and focus, instead, on another funding source.

As we could feasibly task NASA with the business of science, we could also feasibly task the military with the business of colonization. What percentage of the military budget could theoretically be diverted under the auspices of "Preserving the American Way of Life"? It seemed to be a valid argument for building atomic weapons, launch vehicles, and a massive support infrastructure. Lets put it this way, from what I could find about the cost of the Cheyenne mountain complex, it cost us 18 billion in adjusted dollars. It costs us 150 million dollars a year to operate it. This, all in an effort to "P.t.A.W.o.L". How far could you get towards the beginnings of a viable colony? If we are able to use commercial boosters, specifically of the sort which are planned by SpaceX, how much life support and mining hardware could transfer to Mars every transfer window?

Edited August 18, 2014 by saabstory88

[Wanderfound]

I'll make a proper reply to Saabstory's post [1] when I have the time, but for now here are some links that should provide interesting reading:

http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2007/06/the_high_frontier_redux.html

http://coyot.es/crossing/2006/06/13/who-the-hell-does-stephen-hawking-think-he-is-anyway/

http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/2006/06/14/start-a-new-life-in-the-offwor/

http://scienceblogs.com/retrospectacle/2006/06/15/nasas-funding-looking-up-thank/

http://james-davis-nicoll.dreamwidth.org/tag/space+colonies

(note: there's a fair bit of snark and sarcasm in those posts. Most of them were written in response to Stephen Hawking's advocacy of space colonisation a few years ago, which a substantial proportion of the scientific community thought was destructively misguided. And sarcastic snarkery was in fashion in the blogosphere at the time)

[1] Thanks for winding back the aggro, BTW; much appreciated.

Edited August 18, 2014 by Wanderfound

[No one]

This is a interesting point, which I believe can help to form the basis of another useful argument. Let us consider, why does Mutually Assured Destruction work? It works because both aggressors "Way of life" will be destroyed. This puts all nuclear armed nations on equal footing. Naturally, our military, and political leaders will seek a further advantage, by other means.

If we can propose that, upon establishing an outpost on another world, ours, or any other nation which should do this, would no longer be governed by the MAD principle, as their "way of life" would not be ended by a nuclear exchange. This would, in a sense, provide the ultimate form of defense, in that, the enemy, would know that even if we were to experience global thermonuclear war, that their adversary would not be defeated.

This would, as history shows us, force another desirable outcome to come to pass. Namely, the adversary country would have to establish their own extra-planetary base, to ensure that MAD would keep them safe. This not only retains the usefulness of MAD, but creates variety of methods by which to survive on other worlds, further increasing the chance for success of the overall goal of keeping us from going extinct in the near term.

We have bunkers which would mean that not everyone would die, MAD still exists. Unless either country can move a significant percentage of their population off-world, MAD would still exist. Furthermore, it would be perfectly possible to just nuke the space-base.

[Wanderfound]

I would really just like to elicit your feedback, not on any particular technical challenge, but on the implications set forth by a view of our world being all that there is for us. If our world is all we have, then what do we do about our long term survival, and how well off will be be during this time? Is there a method of cooperating which both preserves some semblance of freedom and equity, while still allowing us to survive comfortably for the tens of millennia before we cease to be human, at least biologically? Is having to expend vast resources to make the oceans, and remaining land, fit for food production, to feed our ever expanding population, a desirable outcome? How many more centuries, or possibly millennia, will it be before we are, out of necessity, consuming nothing but algae and insects? Will we have the resources to continue technological civilization at this time? If we are left with the prospect of no escape from extinction level events, how should we be petitioning the government, to create long term survivable shelters for at least some of our population?

As to the original argument, let us take this from a different tack, as of course, even if we were to pursue the idea originally put forth, in practice, we should not disregard our gathering of knowledge. You are, of course, correct about unmanned robotic vehicles being a far more efficient means of gathering science. Let us leave NASA out of this business, and focus, instead, on another funding source.

As we could feasibly task NASA with the business of science, we could also feasibly task the military with the business of colonization. What percentage of the military budget could theoretically be diverted under the auspices of "Preserving the American Way of Life"? It seemed to be a valid argument for building atomic weapons, launch vehicles, and a massive support infrastructure. Lets put it this way, from what I could find about the cost of the Cheyenne mountain complex, it cost us 18 billion in adjusted dollars. It costs us 150 million dollars a year to operate it. This, all in an effort to "P.t.A.W.o.L". How far could you get towards the beginnings of a viable colony? If we are able to use commercial boosters, specifically of the sort which are planned by SpaceX, how much life support and mining hardware could transfer to Mars every transfer window?

Yes, it would be nice if we had some other planet available that could support human life. If we had the option of establishing a viable self-sufficient colony on some other planet or in orbit, it would probably be a sensible thing to do, if only as insurance against an unexpected comet.

But there isn't. It sucks, but that's just the way it is, and wishful thinking won't change that. The universe is unforgiving like that; it doesn't care what humans want or believe. This world is the only human-friendly planet that we have for the foreseeable future.

It's not the sort of problem that you can solve by throwing money at it, either. Yeah, if we committed an insane amount of resources, we could probably keep a handful of humans alive on Mars. But they wouldn't be self-sufficient, and that makes them useless as an insurance policy: shortly after Earth dies, so do they.

Plus you'd probably lose the entire settlement several times over while we worked out the bugs. Resupply missions won't prevent that; the nature of survival in space is such that you usually can't wait around six months for the supply ship to show up with the parts you need. When stuff goes wrong in space, you've often only got minutes or seconds to deal with it before you're all dead. The problems of the Plymouth colony (almost wiped out) or the Viking settlements in Greenland (were wiped out) are trivial compared to the hazards of Mars.

The problems we face on Earth are solvable; the difficulty isn't the technical ability, it's organising the political will to do so. Overpopulation is not a problem; gratuitous wastage of resources is the problem. It is entirely within our ability to feed, house and educate every human on the planet today. We just choose not to do so.

It turns out that Malthus [1] was wrong; Norman Borlaug's Green Revolution [2] saw to that. The idea that population growth inevitably outstrips the food supply failed to account for the impact of technological advancement on agricultural productivity. This process didn't stop with Borlaug's development of dwarf wheat; it's continuing with the development of GM crops [3], hydroponics, cell-culture meat and other technologies.

The idea that population growth is inevitable and endless just isn't supported by the facts. See https://www.ted.com/talks/hans_rosling_religions_and_babies for some entertainingly presented data. Basically, as soon as you extend education and civil rights to women, reduce infant mortality and make birth control available, birth rates drop to around about replacement level. Unsurprisingly, it turns out that most women prefer not to have fifteen children if they're given the choice. Current projections see the human population levelling off around about the close of the 21st century.

Comets, if we survive long enough to see the next big one coming, will have to be dealt with by interception and diversion. This actually isn't that hard; the tricky bit is seeing them in time, particularly the long-period comets from the Oort cloud, because they can come in from all sorts of weird angles and are unexpected by definition. This is yet another reason not to waste our resources on manned space flight. We desperately need 360° coverage by dedicated comet-hunting orbital telescopes.

But comets, mega-volcanoes and such are black swan events that are a relatively low risk in the near future. The biggest threat facing humanity today is climate change, by a very large margin. If you aren't terrified by the climate situation, then you don't understand it. As with famine, poverty and ignorance, we have the technological ability to solve this problem [4]; what we lack is the political will to do so.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Robert_Malthus

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Green_Revolution

[3] There are genuine problems linked to GM, but they're all to do with intellectual property and profiteering bastardry by some large biotech corporations. The bulk of anti-GM scaremongering is anti-scientific nonsense.

[4] Well, we did if we'd got onto it back in the 1980's when we should have. The best thing we can hope for now is to try and minimise the damage and hope that the worst-case scenarios don't come true. This is not a good bet; so far, the trend has been that the nasty side of the error bars is the situation that comes to pass. For the last thirty years, if you want to find out what the future held, what you should've done was listened to the climate researchers who were being dismissed as hyperbolic scaremongers at the time. They've been right almost every time. There's been a lake at the north pole during summer for ten years, and the Siberian methane clathrates are bubbling to the surface as we speak. In a sane world, we would have shut down the coal industry twenty years ago.

Edited August 18, 2014 by Wanderfound

[saabstory88]

You have some interesting points Wanderfound, I wish continue this discussion after work.

Edited August 18, 2014 by saabstory88
cell phone grammer

[saabstory88]

I felt it necessary to reorder my response, as to provide a better flow to the subsequent arguments. Others, please note this is not the original order of the author.

The problems we face on Earth are solvable; the difficulty isn't the technical ability, it's organising the political will to do so. Overpopulation is not a problem; gratuitous wastage of resources is the problem. It is entirely within our ability to feed, house and educate every human on the planet today. We just choose not to do so.

It turns out that Malthus [1] was wrong; Norman Borlaug's Green Revolution [2] saw to that. The idea that population growth inevitably outstrips the food supply failed to account for the impact of technological advancement on agricultural productivity. This process didn't stop with Borlaug's development of dwarf wheat; it's continuing with the development of GM crops [3], hydroponics, cell-culture meat and other technologies.

The idea that population growth is inevitable and endless just isn't supported by the facts. See https://www.ted.com/talks/hans_rosling_religions_and_babies for some entertainingly presented data. Basically, as soon as you extend education and civil rights to women, reduce infant mortality and make birth control available, birth rates drop to around about replacement level. Unsurprisingly, it turns out that most women prefer not to have fifteen children if they're given the choice. Current projections see the human population levelling off around about the close of the 21st century.

I happened to watch this particular talk a couple months ago. The data is absolutely flawless. He lays out fantastically the events and trends which must occur for his model to continue to be correct. These being:

1. Children survive

2. Many children are not needed for work

3. Women get education and join the labor force

4. Family planning is accessible

Point one may or may not remain true. We will leave this as is, and assume trends will continue.

Point two is more of a point of divergence, with outcomes being completely dependent on the demographic area which you are surveying, and your optimism about future trends. The positive outcome assumes positively trending economic outcomes for the majority of people in a given nation. It is possible that the following will be an oversimplification, but I will make the point anyway. If we are witnessing developing nations tracking to the same trends which developed nations experienced in the past, then how do we reconcile the data which shows that many of these developed nations have reached Peak Economic Equality. As more people are given to producing things locally, and independently of industry (Industry making the use of children for labor unnecessary), is there not a reasonable possibility of seeing an increase in children being integrated into the family to produce their own goods and food? As Hans Rosling has suggested, this would be something which would contribute to an increase in births.

Point three, may be a cause for concern in much the same fashion as point number two. Again, I stress that we undergoing a period of change, and that these trends may not be able to be predicted with accuracy, the new trends have not been given time to be known, however it is still an important factor to consider. If we are seeing college enrollment fall, regardless of gender, due to the same economic factors which are driving the local production of goods, then how will this affect the trend of continued education of women? Hans's assessment of this factor is, of course, accurate. However, we are only seeing data from when these populations have been recently afforded these opportunities. We do not yet have data which shows how education is affected in nations which have long had this access, and it is no longer a novel thing they have had to fight for. Complacency, and negative education trends, have had impacts on other historic cultures, in a variety of ways. Again, we do not yet have data to see where these trends will go, but that does not mean that we should blindly assume that, at the very least developed nations, will forever choose to become more educated.

Point four. This assumption only holds true assuming that we will never see an increase in the number of governments being influenced by fundamentalist religious principles. This again, is difficult to predict with accuracy. Religion has such a great emotional component, that we can not say with certainty that any particular industrialized, or developing nation, will never see a return to religious governance, in one form or another. Emotion of course, having the power to defy logic, and even the basic principle of self preservation.

All of this correlates with with United Nations reporting on the topic, seen: http://www.un.org/esa/population/publications/longrange2/WorldPop2300final.pdf . This data they are using is simply expository, not explanatory. It is not sufficient to state, "these are the underlaying trends which drive the future of our growth", without also being able to say, "and these are the underlying factors of these trends, which we can also say, with confidence, will remain constant". I am not disagreeing with their predictions, based on current data. I am simply trying to assess which other factors, which are more malleable, and subject to sometimes very rapid change, may cause the current model to become invalid.

Not to diverge too greatly from the original topic, I just wanted to point out our potential for destructive societal change. Human progress has not been without setbacks. It is depressing to think about, but it is not untrue that we have, at times, done so.

Comets, if we survive long enough to see the next big one coming, will have to be dealt with by interception and diversion. This actually isn't that hard; the tricky bit is seeing them in time, particularly the long-period comets from the Oort cloud, because they can come in from all sorts of weird angles and are unexpected by definition. This is yet another reason not to waste our resources on manned space flight. We desperately need 360° coverage by dedicated comet-hunting orbital telescopes.

But comets, mega-volcanoes and such are black swan events that are a relatively low risk in the near future. The biggest threat facing humanity today is climate change, by a very large margin. If you aren't terrified by the climate situation, then you don't understand it. As with famine, poverty and ignorance, we have the technological ability to solve this problem [4]; what we lack is the political will to do so.

Absolutely agree with the development of a full NEO, and far field, detection system. This is, of course, incredibly important.

To the point of climate change, this is of course a grave concern. What is most concerning is what you are most correct about, that it is not an engineering problem, but a problem of human cooperation. It is not enough for every member of this nation to cry out to prevent catastrophe. The easy portion of solving this, would be to inform the global citizenry to the point where they will act upon this. The difficulty, is then convincing these same citizens to dismantle the structures of political power and industry, which will fight with every fiber of their being to prevent such action. If we could, tomorrow, pass sweeping regulations which curb carbon output, responsibly dispose of our edible live stock population, and drastically reduce our energy usage, such that it could be sustained with nuclear and renewable power alone, it would do nothing to stop, say, China.

Whether or not arguing, that since we have never had a unified global will to do something, we will never do so, is a fallacy of tradition, or a set of data, is debatable. Even if we consider the previous remarks as invalid, we can still extrapolate three primary outcomes.

1. We will, as a species, do the right thing, and deploy the regulations and technology to save our planet.

2. We will continue at our current level of cooperation, and rate of progress towards curbing climate change, and likely still have our planet affected in a negative way.

3. An unexpected social event, or series of events will occur, we will cooperate less towards this goal, and our environment will be damaged severely.

To simplify:

1. Action: Positive change. Outcome: Positive

2. Action: No change. Outcome: Negative

3. Action. Negative change. Outcome: Negative.

To eliminate the bias of pessimism versus optimism, let us consider an equally likely chance of these actions coming to pass. We see that this matrix leads to a greater likelihood of a negative outcome. I do not ask you to take this to heart, as any given reader will have an opinion as to whether we can overcome the human cooperation factor, I simply ask you to read this argument, at least once, from a point of optimistic neutrality.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Robert_Malthus

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Green_Revolution

[3] There are genuine problems linked to GM, but they're all to do with intellectual property and profiteering bastardry by some large biotech corporations. The bulk of anti-GM scaremongering is anti-scientific nonsense.

[4] Well, we did if we'd got onto it back in the 1980's when we should have. The best thing we can hope for now is to try and minimise the damage and hope that the worst-case scenarios don't come true. This is not a good bet; so far, the trend has been that the nasty side of the error bars is the situation that comes to pass. For the last thirty years, if you want to find out what the future held, what you should've done was listened to the climate researchers who were being dismissed as hyperbolic scaremongers at the time. They've been right almost every time. There's been a lake at the north pole during summer for ten years, and the Siberian methane clathrates are bubbling to the surface as we speak. In a sane world, we would have shut down the coal industry twenty years ago.

Your third annotation is fantastic. The problem is with corporations, not with our science. It is the same line of thinking which causes individuals to fear our agricultural technology, which causes them to not vaccinate their children. This is also a wonderful example of a negative educational outcome.

To your fourth annotation, this fact is why I had proposed the original argument I did, in the way I did. We are seeing data which shows that we will choose not to cooperate towards the positive outcome. Our short term self interest will ultimately outweigh our long term self interest. This is why I have chosen the path of supporting a mission to simply go elsewhere. If we are going to save ourselves, from ourselves, any solution proposed must, by its nature, not disrupt our personal comfort in the near term if it is to succeed. The right thing to do is to take care of the planet we have. If we can not have successful outcomes with this approach, we must find an alternative one, to at least have as a backup, while we continue to try to have a positive influence on our planet.

Yes, it would be nice if we had some other planet available that could support human life. If we had the option of establishing a viable self-sufficient colony on some other planet or in orbit, it would probably be a sensible thing to do, if only as insurance against an unexpected comet.

But there isn't. It sucks, but that's just the way it is, and wishful thinking won't change that. The universe is unforgiving like that; it doesn't care what humans want or believe. This world is the only human-friendly planet that we have for the foreseeable future.

It's not the sort of problem that you can solve by throwing money at it, either. Yeah, if we committed an insane amount of resources, we could probably keep a handful of humans alive on Mars. But they wouldn't be self-sufficient, and that makes them useless as an insurance policy: shortly after Earth dies, so do they.

Plus you'd probably lose the entire settlement several times over while we worked out the bugs. Resupply missions won't prevent that; the nature of survival in space is such that you usually can't wait around six months for the supply ship to show up with the parts you need. When stuff goes wrong in space, you've often only got minutes or seconds to deal with it before you're all dead. The problems of the Plymouth colony (almost wiped out) or the Viking settlements in Greenland (were wiped out) are trivial compared to the hazards of Mars.

You are correct, that this is not simply something we can throw money at, that is the wrong approach. We must throw engineers at it. We are just as good at solving technical problems, as we are poor at solving social ones. That is all the colonization of Mars is, a technical problem. If the base elements needed to support life exist in a place, however unlikely, then it is simply a matter of using our ingenuity to create the most efficient and sustainable methods of utilizing them. You are correct, we have the methods of correcting our global environmental crisis, the remaining issues are socio-political ones. So if it is not engineers which we need to help solve this crisis, then why not get them working on finding better ways to survive, in ever more hostile places. Think about the benefit, if we are going to have to learn to live in a world which have made less habitable for ourselves, then why not gain some experience in one of the least habitable (but not uninhabitable), places we know of?

Edited August 19, 2014 by saabstory88

[Airlock]

I share many of my views on human spaceflight with acclaimed visionaries like Clarke, Dyson, and O'Neill. Not only do we need to spread humans out into our solar system, but other Earth-life as well. Life should be allowed to express itself in its full domain, in as many ways possible, free of the singular biosphere of Earth.

Here's some stuff to watch:

[Nibb31]

Nothing lives forever. Humanity as we know it will one day go extinct, whether we like it or not. It might be supplanted by something better suited to the environment, or it might evolve and branch out into something totally unrecognizable to us. Nature doesn't care if it's good or bad. Life will go on for better or worse after we are gone. We are just a species among billions of others on a tiny planet among billions of others. We have only existed for a few thousand years. We are nothing more than a sudden rash on Earth's skin. We aren't special snowflakes with any special rights or special destiny. Our insignificance is unfathomable, and there's nothing wrong with that.

Overpopulation is a real problem. You simply can't have infinite growth with finite resources. Technology can improve the efficiency with which we extract those resources, but the fact remains that the reserves are finite. The easiest way to fight overpopulation is simply make less babies. The balance between human population and resources will reestablish itself naturally sooner or later. Either we do it voluntarily over a few generations or we let nature take care of it and it won't be pretty.

For the moment, it's pointless to envision fighting overpopulation by sending people off-world. You would need to send billions of people if your goal is to reduce the strain on our resources, but the expenditure of energy required to do so, and to keep them alive out there, would ruin the world for the billions who would stay here. It would put more strain, not less, on our resources.

And really, there is no other place for us to go. The laws of physics say that we are stuck here for the foreseeable future. Life and human reproduction might not ever be possible beyond our atmosphere and gravity well. And even if we make Earth a giant wasteland, the planet we evolved to live on will always be more habitable for us than Mars or the Moon. In fact, if we can survive in self-sustaining colonies on Mars, then we could also survive in self-sustaining colonies on a scorched Earth.

[Wanderfound]

(big snip of thoughtful post)

On the population issue, my point isn't that it's impossible for us to stuff it up. It's that it is an issue that appears to be solving itself, and that even if it does go bad, space colonisation is not a useful solution.

Throwing resources (which doesn't just mean money; it includes brainpower, i.e. scientists and engineers) at a futile attempt to colonise makes the solvable problems here more likely to go wrong. We need those resources here.

And I still don't think that you properly appreciate the impracticality of settling Mars. I'd strongly recommend that you have a read of the links I posted upthread, particularly the first one.

[SemiaCloud]

I have devised a system for saabstory88's method (which I support.)

First, a fleet of terraforming probes are sent to the planet of choice. By the time the next wave of probes arrives, the planet will be halfway terrformed,

and the second wave of probes starts building infrastructure and buildings. The last wave, a number of large ships carrying humans will arrive. A computer assigns people to homes and the people choose jobs and settle in. Construction of more colony ships and probes is started a few weeks after the humans arrive, people are loaded onto the ships and the probes are launched in waves as well as the humans and the process repeats.