David Attenborough takes a novel and courageous stand. Let’s “sort out life on earth, first.” [Paywall]
I don’t think I’ve ever heard anyone make that argument before, except a lot of people, for decades.
“America? Let’s sort out life in Europe first.”
“Europe and Asia? Let’s sort out life in Africa, first.”
It’s obviously a mindless prescription for never settling new territory.
What? You would have us mess up the rest of the universe just the way we’ve despoiled the Earth!
😉
Maybe we need to build Asimov’s Caves of Steel before we populate the Spacer Worlds?
If you are going to live on the Moon, and perhaps the same holds for Mars, the simplest thing is to dig tunnels and holes to live protected from the radiation environment. If you do that, why not dig tunnels here on Earth as the Next Frontier? Are there advantages to living below the surface in those other places to living below the surface of the Earth?
Obviously I have no dog in this race! 😉
Your logic is impeccable Paul. I just have one question. How does going to mars prevent us from making caves of steel on earth?
Now Rand, You know we can’t go to mars until after we file the proper paperwork with the Vogon Galactic Hyperspace Planning Council office in Centauri. This may require you to stand in lines Alpha, Beta and Gamma of course.
Pardon me for not answering your question…
Are there advantages to living below the surface in those other places?
Yes.
–Are there advantages to living below the surface in those other places to living below the surface of the Earth?–
wiki:
Benefits:
“The benefits of earth sheltering are numerous. They include: taking advantage of the earth as a thermal mass, offering extra protection from the natural elements, energy savings, providing substantial privacy, efficient use of land in urban settings, shelters have low maintenance requirements, and earth sheltering commonly takes advantage of passive solar building design.”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earth_sheltering
Potential problems:
“Problems of water seepage, internal condensation, bad acoustics, and poor indoor air quality can occur if an earth shelter has not been properly designed.”
Moon and Mars- no water seepage. Or it would regarded as good news:)
And on Mars and Moon one doesn’t get floods.
Now without going underground, one get similar thermal advantage as one gets underground on Earth, and underground on Mars or the Moon, one get better thermal advantages. And this again is due to lack of water. The underground on Mars or Moon will start colder, but after about 1 foot of ground warms up, it will remain warm. You are going to need to be air tight- unlike on Earth, so one can’t merely exhaust air and get fresh air like on Earth. So you need to remove CO2 and make Oxygen to breathe. But being sealed means one probably going to need to cool the living space rather than warm it. And one has lots of cool ground to use for this purpose [kind of opposite using geothermal energy of your backyard- if enough piping and/or close enough to surface, it should provide cheap cool air conditioning]. Though if have greenhouse near surface, one might warm it and cool living quarters with it’s cooler air [plus oxygen].
Another difference, is one could find underground caves one could use. Which not really option on Earth. In words, one has as much land area on Earth as Mars. If Mars has as many caves as Earth- and it could more [or less] then one’s task is finding it, and then it’s yours.
And it’s unlikely it’s filled with water- though if it is, it’s basically a gold mine- though there might be political problem as one could get every microbiologist wanting your cave declared a park or something.
In terms of lack of water, on Mars and Moon, one can dig deep with no water seepage problem- unless one looking for liquid water at shallowest depths. We don’t know, but there might liquid water as shallow as 100 meters on Mars [though not at all likely, anywhere on the Moon- even at 10 km depth or more].
But I tend to think living under water would better on Mars. So for that one need lots of available water. But anyhow, Mars would need to be first explored. And finding caves and finding liquid water near the surface [100 meters deep] would kind of stuff that needs to be explored.
I have no respect for persons that hate human achievement. It is particularly ironic coming from Attenborough, as he has enjoyed richly the economic wealth created in our society.
Oh, so he already reached that level of idiocy. Sorry for wasting your time with my earlier message.
Science progresses one death at a time.
At 88, Attenborough will be contributing to progress soon enough.
Assumes “we” can only do one thing. We can’t fight Ebola *and* grow more food, we can’t launch spacecraft *and* explore the ocean floor, we can’t make nuclear power safe *and* harden the electrical distribution grid.
Assumes our leaders, great and wise and good, will determine what “we” will and must do, and all other efforts, (known to some as “business as usual”) must be stopped until “we” accomplish “our” goals.
I say the assumption is spinach and I say the devil may take it.
I call that the fallacy of binary reasoning.
In other words, we need to screw up properly the by far most important, if not only, ecosystem in the Solar System before screwing up the rest. After all, why else would you rather have your heavy industries on Earth rather than say, the Moon? It’s interesting how counterproductive these ideas get.
I always use a two part test with these types:
1) Are human beings a good and valuable thing to have? Answer yes or no.
2a) If “yes” — then isn’t it valuable to have more of them elsewhere in the universe?
2b) If “no” — then why are you still here using up valuable oxygen?
PennyPincher, Vernor Vinge has a retort for you.
He answered that yes, human beings are good and valuable but they will want to stay clustered together on Earth or in Earth-orbit to avoid communication lags as their computer-assisted brains link to billions of other such computer-assisted brains. People who travel will be hopelessly out of touch and bandwidth limited as the Singularity approaches….
That scenario is described in Marooned In Real Time. Have a look at the bottom of page 176 and top of page 177 here:
http://books.google.com/books?id=H1NOwjENGOkC&lpg=PP1&vq=bandwidth&pg=PA176#v=onepage&q=charon%20corp&f=false
Start at the paragraph that starts: “My company was small; there were only eight of us. We were rural, backward; the rest of humanity was hundreds of light seconds away.”
It’s very easy to fall into this line of thinking, it seems so very rational on its surface. One must have one’s priorities straight first and foremost, right?
But when you look deeper you see it as horrifically naive and indeed objectionable. Firstly, it requires perfection, an impossibility. Using such a line of reasoning mankind would never advance, because it would never have perfected itself in the pre-advancement state. Secondly, it ignores the great benefits of exploration and adventure. Benefits to technology, benefits to civilization, benefits to the human soul. Without the drive to explore humans would be relegated to a life of using primitive stone tools to eek out a fundamental animal existence in a small region of Africa. It was folks who thought of new things, new places to go, new things to do, new ways to exist as human beings who made us who we are.
On another level, the idea that any person on Earth would dare to bar all of humanity from leaving the planet is more than a little presumptuous. Earth is not East Germany. No one has the right, not Attenborough, not anyone, to demand that humans not leave. If people want to leave Earth, they should be free to do so.
Pennypincher’s post above is quite spot on, support for off-Earth exploration and colonization often comes down to a matter of whether one believes there is value in human civilization. It’s rather odd that some do not believe this to be the case, but such is the nature of the “intelligentsia” these days.
One of the advantages of space colonisation, or colonisation of other planetary and dwarf planetary bodies, is that civilisation can expand without having to trash anything, or cause any species to become extinct, or exterminate/subjugate any sapient natives. There aren’t any native Ceres dwellers. Nor are there any endangered Ceresian plants or animals to worry about.
Actually, I agree that going to Mars should be given a low priority; but I have a different reason. Near-Earth asteroids have more volatiles (if the right ones are chosen), more minerals (ditto) and are easier to get to; less delta-v requirement and much easier to land, precisely because of the lack of atmosphere.
IMHO settling Mars, if we are being rational (which humanity rarely is), should be something to do only after there are substantial amounts of hardware in space.
Near-Earth asteroids have more volatiles (if the right ones are chosen), more minerals (ditto) and are easier to get to
Not easier to get to. Delta-V is not the whole story. Martian elements will be used in place making Delta-V a one time cost for an ongoing activity. Mars has not been mined out for thousands of years. Those asteroids are already there sitting on its surface or near.
Mars has more volatiles than all the asteroids (somebody check me on that?) and no Delta- V required by martians (they’ll drive or pipe) to recover them.
No Ceres dwellers? Have you considered pan dimensional beings that look like mice?
It’s really very simple. No justification is required if we don’t extort money from those that don’t want to go. Government involvement is greatly not desired. The strings attached to government pork carry too great a price. People so nannified are not qualified to settle space. The 200k+ found by Mars One are exactly the kind working class people a mars colony needs. They will build the self sufficient industrial town that makes it possible for scientist (and anyone else) to follow.
Some will die. They are willing to risk it. The payback is an entire new world and shaking us up from all our false preconceptions.
“. The payback is an entire new world and shaking us up from all our false preconceptions.”
Why? Lets imagine an alternative history scenario: Nevermind how, but in this scenario Mars is an earthlike world – you can breath the air, eat the vegetation and wildlife: big swaths of it are rather like Wisconsin. Further, imagine that only the US develops spaceflight. So, Americans visit earth-like Mars and start settling there. What happens next? Does it shake us up from all our false conceptions? I don’t think so. I think Wisconsin-like Mars, settled by Americans, petitions to join the Union, and life goes on rather like before.
Or, if “life doesn’t go on rather like before”, if, say, the Singularity eats our brains as mentioned above, then at least “life goes on the same, whether we live on one planet or two”.