Doing one isn't realistic. Good luck. None of this is ever going to happen.Quote:
Originally Posted by Wraith
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Doing one isn't realistic. Good luck. None of this is ever going to happen.Quote:
Originally Posted by Wraith
It's a radio source orbiting around the star; either it's a violent natural phenomenon, or something artificial. Either way, scientist says: Worth further investigation.Quote:
Originally Posted by EyeKhan
I'm not yet quite so cynical. The government seems to be taking space elevators pretty seriously, at least. We'll get there eventually, it'll just take way longer than it should.Quote:
Originally Posted by EyeKhan
When I hear statements like your last, the question always pops into my mind: how log should it take? Its nothing on you or anyone. Should is so subjective on one hand and it at the same time gets used in difinitively constructed statements. :) It's a great word - gotta head over to 'A Word...'Quote:
Originally Posted by Wraith
Anyway, afaik our materials scientists can't yet make a material with the necessary strength in the necessary quantities to make a Space Elevator. Isn't that right? I know they were looking at carbon nano-tubes but the last I read on the topic was that they were still very hard to make and industrial quantities were still beyond our ability. That's maybe 5 years out of date though....
When I was growing up, fresh on the heals of the Apollo Program, I was expecting to be at least able to apply for a job on the Moon by this time in my life. Space Stations, Mars colonies, terraforming, you name it. Nothing like that happened and I know you know why. But I'll say it anyway - the only reason we even did Apollo was for the rocket tech research and to show the Soviets we can reliably put a nuke anywhere in their Evil Empire that we want. After that point was proven, there was no interest in continued serious spending on building a anything like a space industry. Jesus, it took 30 years just to build a stripped down bucket of bolts version of the grand space station the Shuttle Program was originally engineered to build and service. It took so long that the shuttles are retiring just in time to finish building it, to say nothing of servicing it going forward, and we're likely a decade away from anything we'll be able to use to even get to it without paying the Russians for a ride. What the fuck? I mean really. What. The. Fuck.
So now we have this Starve the Beast budget crisis - here at last in the wake, finally, of a sufficiently large economic recession - and even though taxes are very low, unnecessarily low, all anyone can talk about is to cut cut cut spending. (And yes I do believe this is exactly what some if not many of the Small Government conservatives who came up with Starve the Beast had in mind.) But nobody's addressing the reasons for health care costs rising - its not driven by longevity or sheer numbers of retirees - the only plan is to cut it and I guess let the market handle it. Ok. Well, like SS, Medicare can't be cut politically, they shouldn't be cut morally, so what's going to happen? I dunno, but space research, development, and implementation is just going to be lower and lower in priority as this insanity plays out.
A project like a space elelvator, or an asteroid mine, is not going to happen without a great big giant funding source that isn't preoccupied with a 3 year payoff window. If the government is stripped of the ability to back giant infrastructure projects, who or what is going to do it? Simple, nobody and nothing. Its like the US highway system - you think that would have been built without government dollars??? Of course not; and the economic joy it allowed would not have ensued either. Its the same with space - there is unprecedented economic joy out there just itching to be scratched, but the investment is too big and too long term for the private sector. And the Powers that shove government policy around won't let it happen either - they have other priorities and no vision.
Also, I don't believe I'm cynical. I believe reality has gotten so bad that it seems like cynicism when you confront it objectively. But that could be the cynicism talking. Or ignorance. I know enough to know I don't know half of what I think I know and have only a marginal understanding of the scope of what I don't even know I don't know.
We should be starting on this sort of stuff as soon as possible. The rewards are so incredibly vast, that any justification for delays looks silly in comparison. How can you really compete with practically infinite energy and wealth?Quote:
Originally Posted by EyeKhan
No, you're right as far as I know. Nanotubes can't be grown long enough yet, though the amount and quantity we can make reliably is still constantly improving.Quote:
Anyway, afaik our materials scientists can't yet make a material with the necessary strength in the necessary quantities to make a Space Elevator. Isn't that right? I know they were looking at carbon nano-tubes but the last I read on the topic was that they were still very hard to make and industrial quantities were still beyond our ability. That's maybe 5 years out of date though....
The topics you're talking about are more complex than you make them seem, and I suspect you know that. Skipping this now to stay closer to the subject.Quote:
So now we have this Starve the Beast budget crisis - here at last in the wake, finally, of a sufficiently large economic recession - and even though taxes are very low, unnecessarily low, all anyone can talk about is to cut cut cut spending. (And yes I do believe this is exactly what some if not many of the Small Government conservatives who came up with Starve the Beast had in mind.) But nobody's addressing the reasons for health care costs rising - its not driven by longevity or sheer numbers of retirees - the only plan is to cut it and I guess let the market handle it. Ok. Well, like SS, Medicare can't be cut politically, they shouldn't be cut morally, so what's going to happen? I dunno, but space research, development, and implementation is just going to be lower and lower in priority as this insanity plays out.
I think in many ways, the way our system works has given the government an even shorter time horizon than corporations do. There are many companies that invest with a 10-20 year time frame in mind, though I can't think of any instances where they went past that. The government seems completely bound up in the election cycle, and politicians never seem to care what happens when the next guy's around, only about things that'll happen when it's easy for them to take credit for them. Even when somebody does do something that with a longer time horizon than that, there's a good chance the next guy will get rid of it or mess with it for their own legacy & ego - they don't want the last guy getting credit for good things, they want credit for good things. The end result is that the government seems to have a really hard time doing anything that'll take longer than 4-6 years to work out.Quote:
A project like a space elelvator, or an asteroid mine, is not going to happen without a great big giant funding source that isn't preoccupied with a 3 year payoff window. If the government is stripped of the ability to back giant infrastructure projects, who or what is going to do it? Simple, nobody and nothing. Its like the US highway system - you think that would have been built without government dollars??? Of course not; and the economic joy it allowed would not have ensued either. Its the same with space - there is unprecedented economic joy out there just itching to be scratched, but the investment is too big and too long term for the private sector. And the Powers that shove government policy around won't let it happen either - they have other priorities and no vision.
And I completely agree with you that this is one of the things the government should be funding & doing. I think the market will take care of it eventually if we let it, but there's really no sense in waiting that long. We should go start grabbing that infinite wealth ASAP.
Just a note, you basically just explained what happened to the Space Station and what's been happening at NASA for years. Each president has his own idea, each budget its own priorities, changing at least from administration to administration. While GW's ideas to go to Mars were very appealing to many, there was never anywhere near enough funding for it and while NASA went ahead and started studying, designing, awarding contracts, planning mothballs, etc, the project was doomed to failure. And sure enough, Obama completely overhauled it - actually basically said we should dump going back to the Moon and out to Mars and outsource getting to the Space Station. Ugh. Really though, all of this is because NASA takes so damn long to do anything, and that's because NASA never gets enough funding to do anything substantial in a sensible amount of time.
Oh, I know I did. And the next guy's probably going to change NASA's mission & long term goal again. Also agreed on NASA needing more funding.Quote:
Originally Posted by EyeKhan
I do have a question though. What corporation would go through with ending their scarcity based business model by investing in a long term venture that would result in a post-scarcity world? Also what corporation would not try and hinder or stop any government or another corporation that attempted this?
It's the other mining corporations that get screwed by something like asteroid mining. The corporation that does it will be filthy rich. It doesn't kill scarcity completely, it just cripples it, and the company that does it gets to hold the bat.Quote:
Originally Posted by Illusions
But his point still stands - the wealthy, powerful, established corporations of today, with billions invested in infrastructure and operations down here on Earth, which generate profits that just keep going up as resources become more scarce, have no incentive at all to upend their deeply vested interests. And because they have enormous political influence they can step on any attempts to upend those interests. Why do you think the US has never done anything serious about alternatives to fossil fuels or limiting greenhouse gasses despite a need that is obvious to anyone with half a brain? Just look at recent oil company profits.
No it doesn't. You're implicitly assuming here that there's a conspiracy amongst all the corporations of the world to never change any buisness models? How do you explain the buisness models that keep changing and the companies that keep being driven under by tech progress? On your last point, what about the electric cars that are starting to come out, hybrids, and the auto industry's heavy investments into alternatives to fossil fuels? And since any such conspiracy depends entirely on nobody ever cheating, despite the advantage cheating brings, do you think that'll hold at all the moment someone is in a position to cheat?Quote:
Originally Posted by EyeKhan
Anyways, with something like we were just talking about, it's most likely to come from the aerospace industry, not the mining industry. There aren't even the contacts to arrange a conspiracy, and there's no incentive for the status quo there. Anything that happens off planet is also currently outside politcal control. What's going to stop any company from doing this is the staggering investment required and the long time until payback, not any conspiracy.
Certainly not all, but enough with enough power to keep already really difficult and/or expensive and clearly obviously threatening (for them) change from happening.Quote:
Originally Posted by Wraith
Unforseeable change that can't be easily stepped on that is relatively cheap to research and implement (by comparison to, say, retooling the planetary civilization's energy infrastructure or building an asteroid mine).Quote:
How do you explain the buisness models that keep changing and the companies that keep being driven under by tech progress?
There's a lot in that question. The easy one first, the auto industries afaik, and I've VERY close to them, are not investing in alternative fuels. Hybrids and electrics are coming out because there's profit in them - the price of gas is high enough now that people will buy them. As it is now, there is no clear threat to the fossil fuel industry certainly by hybrids or by electrics - power has to come from somewhere, even if a meaningful portion of cars went electric, which by current and forseeable technology, they won't any time soon. Last, my conspiracy suspicions do make me wonder about the rising price of oil. It smacks of an arrangement among the Powers, a recognition that CO2 loading in the atmosphere must come to an end, and a win-win deal where artificially high oil prices pays off these companies for the loss of their established infrastructure coming in a pair of decades and the corresponding high fuel prices soften the public to the trials and costs of retooling some of our energy infrastructure. It fits really nice, explains a lot that I don't understand, but I admit its far-fetched describes an organized global Power structure that just doesn't seem possible without being exposed for what it is.Quote:
On your last point, what about the electric cars that are starting to come out, hybrids, and the auto industry's heavy investments into alternatives to fossil fuels?
The extreme costs and long lead times can keep cheaters under foot in projects of this scale.Quote:
And since any such conspiracy depends entirely on nobody ever cheating, despite the advantage cheating brings, do you think that'll hold at all the moment someone is in a position to cheat?
Too funny. I read and replied as I went along and here I see you already wrote what I was replying above. :up: :) The fact that its aerospace, which isn't thinking about mining on their most adventerous days, might be the problem. All they think about is what people might pay them for tomorrow, like a sub-orbital vacation for billionairs, like a better weapon system, like a satellite lifter, like a taxi to the space station....Quote:
Anyways, with something like we were just talking about, it's most likely to come from the aerospace industry, not the mining industry. There aren't even the contacts to arrange a conspiracy, and there's no incentive for the status quo there. Anything that happens off planet is also currently outside politcal control. What's going to stop any company from doing this is the staggering investment required and the long time until payback, not any conspiracy.
They dumped a bunch of money into hydrogen fuel cells in the past. That turns out to have been a waste, and now they're all starting to dump money into development of better batteries for electrics. The CEO of GM doesn't give a shit about the profit of Exxon, and the current mantra of any company that uses some sort of technology in their buisness model is "be agile or die". They know if they fall behind in the technology race, they'll be screwed, which was the initial motivation for trying to buy into dead-end technologies like hydrogen fuel cells. They switch because they expect profits, yes. If they don't switch, it's because they don't expect profits, not because they're conspiring with the oil companies to keep the status-quo going.Quote:
Originally Posted by EyeKhan
If you want a conspiracy around the price of oil, OPEC's the best you're going to get. They are openly a cartel, and control enough of the oil production that they do have significant control over the price, and they do like it high. The government isn't doing as much as I wish they would to raise gas prices further.
Yeah, they're not going to go straight for it. But once they're selling orbital vacations for average joes (or somewhat-above-average joes, anyways), they'll have paid a bunch of the costs already, lowering the additional investment required, and reducing the time until payback. Someone will eventually decide to go just a bit further and grab some asteroid moneys because they don't want to be the second person to start on that. But because they're not going straight for it, this could be a pretty long wait. Again why government work here would be good.Quote:
Originally Posted by EyeKhan
I don't think of hydrogen fuel cells or battery tech as alternative fuels research. Those are just different ways the same old energy sources get into and power vehicles. Neither would cut CO2 usage and might even increase it, depending on how electricity is produced and how water is split. Real alternative energy has to come from the source where it is generated.Quote:
Originally Posted by Wraith
I don't believe for a second the auto-companies are in cahoots with the oil companies to jack up/ maintain prices of gas. That spike in gas prices in 2008 drove GM and Chrysler into bankruptcy and if the government hadn't helped those companies would be gone today. The Powers I was talking about are a mix of governmental officials, top CEOs of finance and energy executives, a nameless super rich shadow organization that combines elements of the Templars and the Masons, and the Galactic Republic Ambassador. There could be some entity represented that I don't have direct evidence for too.
That's a theory.... and maybe it will happen. But my expectation is that warming is going to be extraordinarily disastrous in the next 50 years or so and that's going to threaten the foundations of global civilization. When that happens there really won't be resources available for space exploration and settling. I hope I'm wrong, but it doesn't look like it.Quote:
But once they're selling orbital vacations for average joes (or somewhat-above-average joes, anyways), they'll have paid a bunch of the costs already, lowering the additional investment required, and reducing the time until payback. Someone will eventually decide to go just a bit further and grab some asteroid moneys because they don't want to be the second person to start on that. But because they're not going straight for it, this could be a pretty long wait. Again why government work here would be good.
Since the main discussion thread has pretty much fallen off, I wanted to come back to this. What do you think about subjects like lunar conservationism? Do you feel that's a strong enough reason to limit/stop lunar development? Any differences for something like Mars, where it's possible primitive life existed/exists?Quote:
Originally Posted by EyeKhan
Open question, naturally. Responses from not-EyeKhans also welcome.
I think the Amazon is a prime example that the people motivated to strip an area/planet of its resources are not going to give a shit whats living there, as the Amazon provably has complex life, sentient beings living there, and a ton of data and knowledge we could gain from it, but that hasn't really stopped us. Think about it this way. Our forum exists a millenia from now, and we're debating whether or not its right to strip mine a planet with multicellular organisms but that hasn't evolved complex life yet. Is future Lewkowski more likely to:Quote:
Originally Posted by Wraith
A) Bash future liberals for caring more about some non-earth flat worm, than his son's ability to buy a holodeck for 500 credits instead of 10,000
or
B) Argue that we should endeavor to ensure that possible complex alien life is not inhibited in its evolution or destroyed by mans' continuing gluttony for resources
:bored:
I don't care what future lewkowski thinks, I want to know what you think. Should we eternally avoid something like terraforming mars, just take it off the table completely, in case we destroy some non-earth flatworm fossils? I think the answer's fairly easy when there's complex life currently around someplace, but what about extremely primitive life, or just fossils?
If the world is dead, then do what you want with it. In the case of the Moon, it might be nice to preserve some of the bigger craters because they look nice, but overall I think paving it flat is fine. As for Mars, we need to look it over thoroughly for native life and if there is none, then extract whatever you want. We should be careful to not mess it up too much because we will want to terraform at some point. And there are some neat places to preserve there as well, like Olympus and maybe some of the big canyon and some craters.Quote:
Originally Posted by Wraith
If just fossils, we study it all thoroughly and then proceed as above. If there is actual life, I'm not sure.Quote:
Originally Posted by Wraith
For Mars, I think we should start terraforming it now. One suggested method for kicking off the process is actually relatively cheap - it involves bombing it with certain terran extremophiles, it'll just take an insanely long time. Estimates I saw go about three centuries. More expensive options, like dropping Ceres onto Mars, or adding orbital mirrors, will help speed things up and increase the habitability in the end. But if this will naturally be hugely destructive to any native life, if there's any there. It'll also mean that if there are any new biological discoveries we make it'll be tough to tell whether it's native, or we put it there.Quote:
Originally Posted by EyeKhan
Since I'm more about maximizing human knowledge, capabilities, and technology rather than number of humans, I would like to take a wait and see approach. For instance, in your last reply, we don't start terraforming Mars until we've combed over the place and made sure that its essentially always been a lifeless rock, and we're learned as much as possible about its history as a planet. If it has bacteria, assess the likelyhood that they'll evolve into more complex things before proceeding, and if there are already more complex things, we skip over it entirely, other than research purposes.Quote:
Originally Posted by Wraith
That's essentially saying that we shouldn't start for another few centuries. We haven't even finished figuring out the history of Earth as a planet, it'll be several hundreds of years before we could possibly meet a standard, and there'll always be one more thing to look at.Quote:
Originally Posted by Illusions
And in my scenario we're terraforming Mars because we as a species want to demonstrate that we are capable of such a feat and not because we need space for more humans because Earth is overflowing with them; so whether we do it now or centuries from now doesn't matter as time isn't a pressing issue.Quote:
Originally Posted by Wraith
My reason for doing it is it makes a good lifeboat, and there's always a chance that we might need the habitable space several centuries from now. Because it takes so long to actually do something like this, I'm not comfortable with saying we shouldn't just because we probably won't need it within the next 50 years, or to possibly preserve potential bacterial fossils which may or may not exist.Quote:
Originally Posted by Illusions
Have you read Kim Stanley Robinson's Red, Green, Blue Mars series? There was an argument about when to start terraforming and some enthusiastic souls went ahead and seeded the place with living things. Then later, in a deep aquifer, they found living things but nobody knew if the life they found was native or not, thus blowing what could have been an extremely important discovery. I believe taking the time to dig deep and be sure there is or is not life there first is priority. That's a pretty important question for a number of reasons. There's no hurry right now to start terraforming Mars - hell, there's not much of a will to go there at all, even with robots these days.Quote:
Originally Posted by Wraith
You want to do it just to show we can? That just shy of not having a purpose at all.Quote:
Originally Posted by Illusions
1. By the time we could seriously consider terraforming Mars, we will have hopefully solved our overpopulation problem here on Earth. We already have near 7 Billion people right now, and we can only educate, feed, cloth, shelter, etc. a very small percentage at what could be considered a decent level. If we need to terraform a planet to fix this we have failed horrendously as a species.Quote:
Originally Posted by EyeKhan
2. Nothing we do has purpose except that which we give it. Turning an uninhabitable world into a habitable one to demonstrate our abilities as a species seems like a grand enough purpose in and of itself, and would be a progression of our already existing abilities to alter environments here on Earth.
We can seriously consider it now. Really. The cost for kicking off a biologically-driven process isn't that high (not doing things like asteroid or comet drops, which would help end habitability but aren't strictly needed). It's about the same as sending rovers to Mars. We've already got and use all the technology required too - it isn't very different from sending rovers to mars. There's also already been a substantial amount of research done on which biologicals to send and in what order and time frame to produce optimal terraforming results. There are other things we can do later (solar mirrors, comet drops), but we've got a few hundred years while waiting for the process to go anyways to get around to doing those things.Quote:
Originally Posted by Illusions
I disagree. We shouldn't be doing things unless we derive some gain from it. The gain doesn't need to be tangible or direct, but I don't think prestige or ego-boosting is a good enough reason, unless we find ourselves with nigh-infinite resources and energy. Otherwise our efforts would be better directed towards things that do gain us benefits.Quote:
2. Nothing we do has purpose except that which we give it. Turning an uninhabitable world into a habitable one to demonstrate our abilities as a species seems like a grand enough purpose in and of itself, and would be a progression of our already existing abilities to alter environments here on Earth.
We haven't seriously explored Mars, thus we cannot seriously consider terraforming it. :noob:Quote:
Originally Posted by Wraith
We've researched and developed a bunch of stuff in the past that has no immediate or direct benefit to humanity, other than to show that we are capable of doing it. Particle colliders have no immediate or direct benefit to humanity other than creating knowledge, or that we can in fact perform some experiment. Its not like they create parents for orphans, or feed the hungry, or create world peace, yet we funnel money into them. Should we stop the particle colliders too?Quote:
I disagree. We shouldn't be doing things unless we derive some gain from it. The gain doesn't need to be tangible or direct, but I don't think prestige or ego-boosting is a good enough reason, unless we find ourselves with nigh-infinite resources and energy. Otherwise our efforts would be better directed towards things that do gain us benefits.
It is pretty clear we will not be solving our population problem in any organized, planned way. But problems like that have a way of solving themselves and I totally agree that will happen regardless of what action humanity takes with regard to Mars. No foreseeable technology would allow Mars to be a safety valve for population anyway, even if it were fully terraformed today.Quote:
Originally Posted by Illusions
Demonstrate our abilities to who? Or what? Why not terraform Mars for the purpose of putting the eggs of life in two baskets instead of one? The closest thing life has to a purpose is to continue to survive over time. Infecting a second world with any sort of living thing would arguably the biggest step in that direction since sexual reproduction. Spreading to another star system would be even better.Quote:
2. Nothing we do has purpose except that which we give it. Turning an uninhabitable world into a habitable one to demonstrate our abilities as a species seems like a grand enough purpose in and of itself, and would be a progression of our already existing abilities to alter environments here on Earth.
Just curious, what sorts of things do you consider a benefit, especially in the context of words like "us" and "we?"Quote:
Originally Posted by Wraith
I find the latter part doubtful. The hurdle would be monetary and building enough ships, and if we're at a point where we have to move X amount of people or we all die/suffer horrendously, money will not be a problem.Quote:
Originally Posted by EyeKhan
Ourselves? Isn't that how all initial stages of technological development go? Ask if we can do it on a certain scale, then demonstrate we can?Quote:
Demonstrate our abilities to who? Or what?
That would be your purpose you ascribe to human beings. Subjectivity and all.Quote:
Why not terraform Mars for the purpose of putting the eggs of life in two baskets instead of one? The closest thing life has to a purpose is to continue to survive over time. Infecting a second world with any sort of living thing would arguably the biggest step in that direction since sexual reproduction. Spreading to another star system would be even better.
Resources, energy, useful redundancies, a lifeboat, or just things anything that improves quality of life of people. Mars is an interest to me because being able to drop a self-sustaining and growth-enable colony there substantially decreases the risk of extinction.Quote:
Originally Posted by EyeKhan
If we're at the point where Mars is needed to support excess human population, there will be no resources to build ships to transport them. It would be vastly cheaper, easier, and inevitable to just let people starve; or fight over the remaining resources on Earth until the population drops to a reasonable size; or more realistically, both.Quote:
Originally Posted by Illusions
No. Technological development comes from a motive to make money, learn how to do something, make something easier to do, by accident, or all of these. Individuals, teams or even nations may take on a technological challenge to prove to the rest of the world they are capable, valuable, or superior, I guess. If you consider the Apollo program, the US was interested in demonstrating our general superiority over the Soviets and Communism and more specifically that we can use rockets to deliver nuclear bombs wherever we want. But I'm not aware of any endeavor on a large scale undertaken by humanity just to show humanity what humanity is capable of doing. I can't imagine the humanity I know and love doing something on the scale of terraforming a planet for such a sentiment.Quote:
Ourselves? Isn't that how all initial stages of technological development go? Ask if we can do it on a certain scale, then demonstrate we can?
Oh yes, very subjective. But a purpose, definable and capable of motivating, nonetheless.Quote:
That would be your purpose you ascribe to human beings. Subjectivity and all.
I think the only benefit here that colonizing Mars could reasonably be expected to provide is redundancy/ lifeboat. Resources would be easier to get from asteroids. Energy easier from the sun. Quality of life? On Mars? Best case scenario is a generally cold and gloomy place after its terraformed. I can't imaging living there in the many generations it would take to complete that project. Miserable at best.Quote:
Originally Posted by Wraith
I thought you were asking more generally than just Mars. Mars gets us living space and useful redundancy. Agreed on resources and energy being found more easily elsewhere. Perhaps it's not the most useful thing we could be doing, but because of the incredibly long time until payoff, fairly low costs for kicking it off, and risk mitigation potential, still worth doing IMO.Quote:
Originally Posted by EyeKhan
Also, you're not supposed to live there until it's done. Terraforming Mars doesn't need local human presence. We just need to drop biological payloads there every fifty years or so.
Uhm, I don't know why you're trying to contradict me, we usually demonstrate new tech first before moving on. Are you honestly going to argue that we don't?Quote:
Originally Posted by EyeKhan
Also "Hello World". :bored:
Nothing is that easy. Mars won't be terraformed just by seeding it with life - unless you go to very great lengths to fine tune the organisms you use, the order you seed them, where you seed them, how often, etc etc. Yeah, I guess that's a given. Monitoring that process could be done robotically, but it would be more efficient and effective to at least have a permanent lab on the surface staffed by good old fashioned biologists. And furhter, if you want it to be comfy for humans there, you'll have to do more. Mars needs heat, it needs nitrogen, and it needs a surrogate for a magnetic field (unless you have a means of melting its core...). On the other hand, given the time involved, it might be easier to just engineer humans to live in the shitty environment there. But then, of course, you have two human species. And they'll fight over the rest of the solar system. And beyond.Quote:
Originally Posted by Wraith
Trying? :) I agree people do things like discover new technology just to for the sake of accomplishment - it feeds the ego. (And others do the engineering to find a use for it...) But the human species going to the expense and time of terraforming an entire world for no other reason than to feed the collective human ego?Quote:
Originally Posted by Illusions
I don't see how the following:Quote:
Originally Posted by EyeKhan
Are we able to terraform a planet?
Humans Terraform Mars.
Yes we are able to terraform a planet.
...is ego.
But I really think you don't understand that we do stuff for demonstration purposes, to see if it will work. Feel free to argue that we don't.
I don't see how merely answering that question could ever be the motivation for humanity to terraform Mars. :bulb:Quote:
Originally Posted by Illusions
Agreed. I do not understand what you mean. Are you saying that terraforming Mars would be a basic science experiment, something without a necessary real-world application in mind, like what is done commonly in universities? But you also seem to be describing a proof-of-concept sort of project, though. Like:Quote:
But I really think you don't understand that we do stuff for demonstration purposes, to see if it will work. Feel free to argue that we don't.
"Can we do this? Yes, it can be done, and this is how."
But those projects tend to have a larger purpose, like
"OK, it works, lets do this to every world we encounter than meets whatever minimum critera so that we can achieve goal X." Merely proving the concept is workable isn't the ultimate goal of proving the concept.