It's worse than you think. We may only have a few hundred million years.

Continental drift is well established in science. Going forward, the continents are expected to again unite into one super continent. Without getting into details, the causes of this and the effects of this will result in either a massive warming causing a desert age or a massive coloing causing an ice age.

Extinction events of the past are associated with this.

Any evidence of that? See, this is like arguing against a devout christian, there's no winning. I'll say it's not very feasible to do so given our current technology so stop sinking more and more money into it, and all I get is a wave of "wtf dude don't you have DREAMS MAN?!?!?"
or "Well what happens if an asteroid is gonna hit the Earth?"
or "Well what are we gonna do if the Earth becomes uninhabitable?"
or something like what was just said "what about this fuel, material or whatever found ____? Don't you think it'd be worth it to mine said material and bring it back to Earth?!?"


It would be awesome if we could find an alternate fuel source on Mars, but pray tell how we would get significant amounts of it back to Earth? Is that even possible now?



And we also have an alternate fuel source accessible from the Earth that is clean...it's called the Sun, as I've mentioned before. Why does everybody feel it's so necessary to get the hell off this planet?

<3 Bowie

I was just looking at some images from space, and decided I would post them here. I love this stuff, I really do. However, I do feel that, presently, efforts to explore space in a significant capacity are pretty much in vain for reasons I've stated before. Maybe I'm just arguing to argue, but for some reason I got ticked off in this thread and decided to keep at it. Anyways, in 2006 the US Government only used $7 billion dollars for the space program, and $16 billion in 2007 (as a comparison the Iraq War costs $10 billion a month). In all honesty, I was looking for concrete reasons why we should maintain the space program, and I was getting frustrated that the only feedback I was getting was "dreams", "destiny",etc. I've always had a HUGE interest in it, but somewhere along the way began to question whether it was actually worth it.


I found a solid link from a Freakonomics blog here . This passage stuck out in particular If this is indeed true, and my argument against being an apparently economic one there is no other conclusion than I am objectively wrong. I am not afraid to admit this, I just get carried away sometimes



Anyways here are some cool pictures:

10,000 galaxies




"Pale Blue Dot" (Earth seen from several billion miles away)





Aftermath of a supernova






Radio galaxy





Solar Flare

I think aiming 2 robots at 2 bullseyes 280,000,000 miles away and hitting both is $820,000,000.00 worth of COOL.


oh, and sasquatch can fly.

Story? Link?

Serious? 1st link in OP...

The resources available on this planet are finite, and barring significant evolution of the species, our appetite for those resources is, if not infinite, certainly greater than the planet will ultimately sustain. So, we can engineer ourselves such as to do away with the evolutionary need to expand, we can continue to limit that expansion by killing ourselves (in any number of ways) or we can find somewhere to expand.

There were 4 links in the OP, I read the last two, looked at the pictures in the first 2. I thought you were referring to this at first.

It's pretty clear what happened here and it proves that life on mars is just as violent and ruthless as on earth. The martian on top has just killed the martian at the bottom of the rock after a deal gone wrong. My interpretation of the events that transpired......

Nice straw man. That's a brutal comment and I'm not even going to dignify it by addressing it.

The answer to this is given by suzzer right below this. This is about diversifying our portfolio. Right now we are a planet that could torch itself at a moment's notice. This is not likely to change in the future. The sooner we are out there populating other worlds, the sooner we have more than one seed in the universe, the chances of the human race surviving and proliferating increase dramatically; in fact the chance quickly approaches unity. This is really the reason for space travel and exploration. The human race must go on. It is our singular evolutionary imperative. Space exploration and eventual colonization is the only means to this end.

Why does the human race need to go on?

Playing devil's advocate a bit here, but why should we care what happens in 2000 years time, let alone 2 million years time. I mean, I worry about my grandkids and all, but I struggle to get worked up to what happens much further in the future than that.

Yes, but your grandchildren will have grandchildren they care about. What about them? And their grandchildren? Do you see where I'm going with this?

Didn't the space program first make velcro? There are technologies that they are coming up w/ that will be commonplace in 20 years.

As far as space exploration, it's in our nature to explore other worlds. How long did it take to go from NY to San Fran in 1850? 2 or 3 months? Do you think people back then thought it would ever be possible to fly from 1 city to the other in 6 hours? Personally, I think we will have colonies on Mars 150 years from now. Call me crazy, I don't care.


BTW-Whoever was asking about that 75 miles from Earth argument: It has something to do w/ reaching top velocity in space. My brother told me about it a few years ago. Basically, once we get a shuttle to go 20,000 miles per second or whatever it is, we don't need to use energy until we reach Mars gravitational field.

OK this would make sense except that in 500 years there is a low chance of us having a permanent self supporting colony off world, but there is a very good chance our planet will be trashed (even discounting nuclear war) at its current rate.

Well everyone who is on the planet now is related to you on some level like that. I'd say we have more of an obligation to them than people born in 2000 years time.

Muresan I haven't read any of the intervening comments between our back and forth and now, but this morning I heard on the radio something that I had completely forgotten about: space as an arena of private enterprise.

I don't know why I was so dead-set on NASA yesterday, when just a few months ago I was thinking that Elon Musk and those like him were the way to go.

I think we can all agree that this would be beneficial in a variety of ways.
1) It takes it off the government tab
2) It spurs competition, which spurs innovation.
3) Hopefully, it could possibly make space accessible to common people.

So with that said, I recant most of my previous statements.

Christ, 20,000 miles per second? Just a little comparative example: The speed of light (c) is 299 792 458 m / s. 20,000 miles per second is 32 186 880 m / s, which is about .11 of c. This is also the velocity at which iron clumps get hurled around inside of a Black Hole. Currently, our fastest spacecraft travel at 40,000 miles per hour, or 17 881.6 m / s (.00006 c). We would have to multiply the performance of current spacecraft by 1800 times to reach the performance you speak about. If a spacecraft was traveling that fast it would reach the moon in 10 seconds. Remember when I was talking about 10 light years and how long it would take? Even at that speed, it would take around 100 years to travel 10 light years (which is actually very reasonable astronomically speaking,there could be ways around that).

Can you now at least see why I'm sort of skeptical about it? In the 50's people were saying that by the 2000's we'd have colonies on the moon. Now, you're saying we're going to colonize Mars in 150 years, can you at the very least see where I'm coming from? I understand all the principles like "100 years ago noone knew what the **** a genome was and we mapped that sum bitch!", but space seems like a different ballgame. Final frontier is the damn truth... The one reason I wish I could live forever is so I could see all the awesome advances that will be in made in science. I've only got so much time, they need to hurry the hell up. But here's to hoping we solve the riddles and actually do create the means to explore our galaxy,and maybe the Universe.

Well I'll get you up to speed: I found a stat (maybe it's biased or skewed or w/e) that said for every $1 put into the space program the US economy gets $8 in return. So I decided that if my argument was an economic one (which I think it was), and this stat had truth to it then I had no choice but to shut the hell up and admit I was wrong, which I did. Last year the space program used about $16 billion while the Iraq War costs $10 bil a month. Interesting stuff

Probes, landers, satellites etc.
No people. no space ships. No landing on the moon unless its like a Landrover etc to drive around electronically.

Send some **** to Jupiter...that like shoots balloons or something into its atmosphere. Send **** a Rover to Neptune/Pluto/Uranus etc.

Send stuff into deeper space maybe etc etc

Flying to Mars is gay---its never a good to do something that GWB thinks is a great idea.

Or the intelligent life that's out there could stop by for a visit and give us a hand, advancing our technology by a few dozen generations.

That or the simulation we're living in gets reset.

Seriously though, now that I've brought it up what are you guys thoughts on whether we're alone. I know this is a pretty volatile topic given that some people are religious, but just speaking in the context of the size of the universe and how astronomers have identified dozens(more?) of planets that are similar in size and characteristics to Earth.

Is a program like SETI currently pointless given the technology that's used, even though the intention is good?

I have to admit I'm pretty fascinated about this stuff, just as a casual observer.

Yea,manned space flight doesn't accomplish nearly the same as unmanned, and it costs tons more cash dollars. Bush cut a lot of spending on unmanned expeditions in favor of the manned ones. Pretty stupid decision imo



To me, given the sheer size of the Universe is enough to convince me that life of course exists/has existed. Most likely intelligent life too. It's just too incomprehensibly large to even have the audacity to think we're the only thing around. The only thing is, civilizations if they do exist, have only a tiny astronomical window to even exist at the same time as others,let alone be able to communicate, and travel to them. The window gets increasingly smaller when factoring in distance, motivations,etc. What if an alien species has no desire to travel off his home rock? Or maybe we're just assuming other species have the same lust as us for space travel and expansion.



One argument that is used is the following: consider the technological advances of the past century, we've been improving at a geometric rate, in just a short period of time. Thousands of years is nothing to our galaxy or universe, it's like a millisecond to us. And in that short time we've gone from stone tools to actually contemplating the merits of exploring our damn galaxy. Now consider that in the Milky Way galaxy, the inner parts of the galaxy (in the habitable zone that isn't too hot) have existed for several billions of years more than us. Which means that if civilizations existed in those regions they'd have a billions of years head start on us. Looking back at how far technology has come in such a short period of time, you're trying to tell me a species with that much time hasn't developed the capabilities to expand through the galaxy, and check out new worlds? Take that for what it's worth

the thought of sending humans to places that are light years is beyond my comprension. what about logistics? fuel, food, supplies, and the ability to fix stuff along the way. i would think that politics aboard the vessel will come come into play.

i heard the other day that the speed of light can be accelorated. dont know if it was from a relieble source. since light and gravity can be manipulated, as evidenced by black holes, it is surely a possiblely. with all the numerous reports throught history about stuff in the sky behaving in a way what we think is physically impossibe does not prove that it is possibe. on the other hand, it could be herd mentalliy as evidedenced by lemmings going to the sea.

bottom line: humans going into deep space without speed of light and gravity control is far above our understanding. im still rooting for the existance of bigfoot and wormholes. its fun mental exersice when wasted.

The first 75 miles thing is to get us out of the Earth's gravity well, it may only be 50, I couldn't remember so went farther. Once we figure out how to cheat the rocket equation and get into space cheaply it opens up all the rest of space for exploitation. We are taking baby steps now, learning how to do things, we need to keep doing it so we can get out there. It won't happen over night, but it won't happen at all if we stop the program and stop encouraging private enterprise to do it.

$820 million is less than 1 day of the Iraq war.