"The pressure from too many of us will lead to the kinds of innovations that will lead us off this planet."
This is a bullshit fantasy. If it were true, China and India, Bangladesh and other countries where humans are already tripping over each other would already be going there! China addressed the problem with the one-child policy, or there would be six billion Chinese today instead of two.
I thought we'd stay on the moon after we got there, set up a permanent base and expand into the universe....thirty years ago. I read too much Werner Von Braun and sci fi as a kid.
The cost/benefit just wasn't there. No national will. I think you really haven't thought through what's involved.
The cost of putting just a few humans TEMPORARILY on the moon, circling our own planet, is in the hundreds of billions of dollars. There isn't any magic exponential expansion of this science, decreasing costs as capability increases, as there is with microprocessors.
Scientists are exulting about the traces of frozen WATER we've found on the moon. Why? For one, we can make fuel out of water. For another, humans need water to live. Every gallon of water before this would have had to have been shipped up there, costing every penny as much as shipping and astronaut's weight up there.
Meanwhile, irreplaceable species and their habitats, holding secrets we don't yet understand developed by millions of years of selection and evolution, are dying FOREVER.
Take, for instance, the lizard you were dissing. Lizards have this amazing ability to re-grow a missing tail. Some can re-grow other body parts. How'd you like to be able to re-grow a missing limb? That lizard might hold the secret.
Understand, I'm all for colonizing space, we HAVE to do it. I believe it will take hundreds of years of advances, realistically. Way before then, actually NOW, is when we need to begin to control human population and activities here on Earth.
We ARE God, for any practical purpose. WE need to step up to the responsibilities. |
