To help keep things in perspective.

The news is: Humanity is whistling past the cosmic graveyard.
http://www.technologyreview.com/blog/arxiv/24917/

And if that doesn't get us the sun burns out, expands and roasts the planet, in another five billion years plus or minus a million or two.

And we are, in the really long term, we are going to collide with another galaxy, and might be heading for a giant black hole. You might want to pencil all this in on your calendar. Pays to plan ahead.

HT:
http://scienceblogs.com/gregladen/2010/03/we_are_totally_doomed.php

I would hope that our advancements in technology that will have been achieved by that time, the human race will survive. That is one of the reasons I am saddened to see NASA budget cuts and a lack of interest in future advancement.

I think even a billion years for the existence of the human race is a stretch. Zombies will own the world by that point!

Seriously though, we, as a race, likely will not exist long enough to be present for the end of the planet. Continuing on our current course, we may be lucky to get a couple of million years. By then, I would ASSUME we would have the capacity to travel off-planet, perhaps doing terraforming & the like. But, as a race, going the direction we currently are, I dont see us having to worry too much about a natural world-ending event-unless natural is defined as human-driven...

We're just in a brief pause in our evolution from apes.

If a rogue sun-flare or nuclear crazies don't get us first then those mutants in our evolutionary process are sent off-planet to colonize newly found places. While they thrive, the 'normal' people eventually deteriate and start to de-evolve. Or was that a Heinlein novel?....

Of course most cosmologists have assumed that Super Nova are exploding dead stars but there is a tighter statistical correlation of Super Nova just being those advanced civilizations with just bigger versions of Large Hadron Colliders.

Since this entire thread is 'equipped to survive' off topic I'll venture to ask a question that's been puzzling me.
I've heard the distances are so great that mankind will never leave the solar system. Is this true?
The Sock

We were told in the past that the distance was so great man would never reach space, or the distance was so great man would never fly aross the country or the distance was so great man would never sail across the oceans.

"The long run is a misleading guide to current affairs. In the long run we are all dead. Economists set themselves too easy, too useless a task if in tempestuous seasons they can only tell us that when the storm is past the ocean is flat again."
~ John Maynard Keynes, A Tract on Monetary Reform, 1923

Most science fiction is predicated upon faster-than-light travel. Physics says that faster-than-light is physically impossible. There is speculation about warped space and wormholes but, as far as anyone can tell, crossing space at speeds faster-than-light seems to be impossible. Even if technically possible it might require near infinite amounts of energy. As I understand it the entire output of our sun wouldn't drive even a small capsule faster-than-light.

Without faster-than-light travel the closest known solar system is over four light-years away. At 50% of light-speed, far faster than we have ever driven a spaceship, your talking eight years. Using just stored food, water, air your talking about a huge ship. And what happens if after they get there they find out there is something so very wrong they can't make a go of colonizing. Do they come back, plan for twice the material resources, or do we plan on leaving them hang.

The result of all this is that you have to make a much bigger commitment to cover the distances. In every step of a design process a larger ship multiplies the requirements on other systems. Heavier ship require bigger engines. Which use more fuel. Which means more structure. The longer the trip the more crew you need if they are to stay sane. Larger crews uses more food, water, air. Which means a larger structure and larger engines ...

Some science fiction writers describe 'planet' ships that are self-contained ecosystems. With a ship so large and a crew so numerous that they may not, over the decades, remember that they are on a ship. Ships where the crew have children and it takes decades, possibly hundreds of years, generations, to get to distant stars.

Yes, it is a grand vision. Far more complicated than Star Trek and Star Wars where you only have to pack a lunch to visit distant stars. It is anyone's guess that we might develop the technology, wealth and global will to build a ship large enough to get colonists to even the nearest stars. We have a very long way to go and our apparent inability to travel faster-than-light makes it even harder. Not impossible. Just more difficult.

I'm not a physicist, and I'm not stellar at math (nice pun, huh?). But, I do remember from Calc II, that there was an equation you could rotate around an axis, determine it's volume, but if you tried to determine surface area, you would reach infinity. I may have reversed it. The point is, up to that point, I didn't know enough (and actually didn't need to take any other math, and was not motivated enough to care...) to solve the problem of infinity, but the professor said it would be taught in a later class.

So, my point is: Many times in the past, we just didn't have the right perspective.

Orphans of the Sky by Robert A. Heinlein

If you can build a huge, indefinitely self-sustaining planetoid of a ship, why would you need to go anywhere with it? I guess there's that little matter of being sent to the converter... Best to stick around the asteroid belt and mine for raw materials.

Off topic, is it an unwritten rule that the cover art of all science fiction books must directly contradict at least one detail of story?

Absolutely true! One of Harry Turtledove's latest books, "Liberating Atlantis" has pictures of dueling ironclad ships (ca. US Civil War) on the cover. Nothing even close to an ironclad appears in the book.

Clive Cussler's latest "Oregon" Novel has a picture of a submerged Chinese junk under water with warm water fish swimming around it. Without giving away the plot, it's a huge contradiction.

In addition to what Art said: any spaceship that could travel faster than light is also a time machine, and that's a no-no.

Alastair Reynolds is a good example of a science fiction author who pushes against the limits of known physics mercilessly but does not cross them. His book House of Suns has a character explaining at length why there can be no faster than light travel: I suspect that Mr. Reynolds got tired of fan mail asking why he didn't just use spaceships with warp drives...

With current technology, pretty much.

The Apollo missions traveled at roughly 3300mph to get to the moon in three days. At that speed, it would take roughly 800,000 years to reach the Centauri system, 4 lightyears away. (A lightyear is approximately 5,800,000,000,000 miles.)

Our fastest space probes ever are the Helios probes, but they are orbiting the sun. The only ones heading out into interstellar space are the Voyager, Pioneer, and eventually the New Horizons probes. The fastest of those is Voyager 1, at about 38,600mph. But even it would still take about 4,500 years to reach Centauri, if it were pointed that way.

There are some promising alternative drives on the drawing boards, but even they don't get an interstellar journey down to a single lifetime.


That's why Science Fiction usually uses one of the various workarounds Art described: FTL ("Faster Than Light") travel, some kind of jump/wormhole shortcut, or "Generation Ships".

or the speed problem could be solved in one of those head slapping "we should have thought of this before!!"moments and we will be fishing for Gerblatzo in the yellow seas of terra 44 in a couple years.Physorg.com is a good place to restore you faith in science,posts like--nano tubes line up in pulses of light--give you the idea that old moon shot science is,well,old science.now if someone could come up with a SPOT that would beam me to an ER------

Rather than travel outside the solar system, maybe it would make more sense to grab another planet in our solar system and insert it into Earth's orbit. Add atmosphere and start planting! ;-)

Sue

Good call on Physorg.com. Lots of good stuff there. Certainly if we ever do colonize another solar system it will be a result of some combination of physics and engineering we don't, or only vaguely, understand presently.

If staying alive when faced with the normal stuff, like hurricanes and earthquakes, is Survival 101 and surviving a nuclear war is Survival 301 living on the moon would be Survival 601. Which makes extra-solar colonization Survival 1201. We have, as a species, barely begun to master our environment enough to prosper. It has only since the 1800s that we haven't been in a constant existential battle with famine and disease. We haven't conquered them. But our booming population shows we are no longer on the edge of extinction.

It seems to me that most of the biggest problems we face in the near future, outside a cosmic boot stomping us, have to do with human behaviors. Can we learn to get along? Can be live together? Can we control our consumption, greed and desire to reproduce enough to avoid being caught in a downward spiral of conflict, violence and destruction over ever scarcer resources?

IMHO the most important results of the space program were the photographs of the earth taken from the moon and Jupiter. The first shows the globe we know suspended in blackness. The second a tiny blue-green speck in a field of stars. We live on a planet-ship, a multi-generational star ship. Until we can build or find a replacement it is all we have to work with. We are living on a space capsule. A lifeboat on a vast empty sea. We either make it work ... or we don't.

One could think of our solar system as the real spaceship as we need most elements in it to survive (ie Jupiter sweeping up cosmic bullets). The system is going places -and pretty fast. Our Galaxy will be meeting up with others in a pretty short time on the cosmic scale.

Unfortunately that's unlikely. One strong argument that current science is correct in saying the problem is fundamentally hard is the question "Where are the tourists?"

If travel between stars were practical we'd expect to be inundated by bug-eyed monsters wearing Hawaiian shirts toting cameras touring the galaxy. Even if some follow an alien Prime Directive it only takes one who doesn't. Yet nothing of the sort is seen outside of Hollywood.

This is all wrapped up in the Fermi Paradox and nobody knows the answer(s). But one implication of the lack of tourists is that such travel really is as hard as it appears and there is no easy solution.

I've always asked myself "Why would beings capable of crossing interstellar space stupidly crash when they get here?"

Then I thought of a possible explanation: The ones that crash are irresponsible alien teenagers out joyriding in Dad's UFO.

[/quote]
Unfortunately that's unlikely. One strong argument that current science is correct in saying the problem is fundamentally hard is the question "Where are the tourists?"[/quote]

Are we a tourist attraction? We think we are the Yosemite/Yellowstone of the universe, but we may be just another midwestern cornfield waiting for the harvest....

I posted a quote about the long term not being a good guide to current behaviour.
We get an astoundingly high return on the space race.
There is not one part of our technology that has not benefited from it.
We have better metals for our knives and other trinkets, and we bounce signals off satellites to call for help when we get lost.

I don't think we will ever discover signs of ET, and even if we did it would take so long for the signals to get here from there that they would already be extinct, or we would if it was going the other way.
But still the return in technologies is so high that we should continue trying to get off the planet.
"Mars today, Tomorrow THE UNIVERSE!!!"

Besides, if the universe really is undeveloped we might be the first to be able to capitalize on it...

Given the many random chances that seem to be necessary for sentient life to develop -- a star that's not too hot or too cold, small enough to be stable for long periods, far enough from galactic center that its planets aren't regularly sterilized by radiation from supernovae and gamma ray bursts, that has enough heavy elements to form metal-rich planets, has other, larger planets to sweep up "debris" left over from the system formation, has a planet that's not too close to or too far from the star, too large or too small, with a relatively large moon to stabilize its rotation and catch even more of the cosmic "debris" -- I think intelligent life is going to be very, very rare.

So there may be others out there. But they are simply so far away, we'll never even know they're there.

Edit: Heh. Got caught up in the writing and forgot to say that I also agree that our only hope for long-term survival is to get out of this system completely. And the benefits of just trying would far outweigh the costs.

I'm still looking for it here.

I am a pretty big space buff. The tech, wonder, and inspiration we get back for the investment is IMO repaid many times over. Just on the survival side, that is what the forum is about, mostly, what price the many saved by EPIRBs.

How many trillion dollars have been saved over the years because we could track hurricanes. People are told days in advance so they can flee or prepare. The world knows who gets hit and can have help standing by ready to go in as soon as the winds die down.
Into WW2 many people got little or no warning. And assuming you survived the event the odds are people might not hear about it for days.

How many plane crashes and maritime disasters have been avoided because people could look to a GPS receiver that tells them where they are. If you know where you are you can fly around the mountain instead of into it. Ships can steer around reefs and shoals. Rescue after disaster is good. Avoiding the hazard is even better.

Space exploration is expensive but it gives back and the technology continues to pay dividends ever after.

I also need to point out that when I say 'we have to learn to get along' it isn't a sweet, sing Kumbaya, sort of admonition to avoid all conflict. There are bad situations and there are bad people. The proper response to a rabid dog is to shoot it. You take care to do make sure the end is swift, sure and as painless as possible. But the dog has to be put down to protect the community. No amount of loving and positive attitude will make the dog less rabid. When it is the only practical option remaining violence, without hate and malice, is justified to protect the community and prevent harm.

How true! The deadliest disaster in US history is considered to be the Galveston hurricane of 1900, which killed somewhere between six and eight thousand people. It came ashore as roughly a cat 4 with virtually no warning.

The more recent Galveston event was far less deadly, and those that remained on the island and perished at least had a choice.

In the 1970s, my brother lived briefly in Galveston. The walls of his living room still retained the high water mark from the 1900 storm.

The Drake Equation may be of interest - it turns out that "very, very rare" is still a significant number in a galaxy of a few hundred billion stars. And the Fermi Paradox is about the problem that since they _should_ be out there but aren't, why not?

Some possible answers to the Fermi Paradox are scary considering that our present technology is very close to being able to leave considerable evidence of us (robotic probes to distant stars) in a way that B.E.M.s have not.

(Just to be clear, I am a fanatic space buff. Just discouraged by current events and things I've learned over the years.)

The primary sign that SETI has been looking for is radio/tv/other Electromagnetic (EM) radiation from other civilizations at the same approximate development as ours.

But a year or so ago there was an article published that found that our own EM radiation fades into the cosmic background within about two lightyears. Beyond that it's completely undetectable against the emissions of everything "behind" us.

So there could be a thriving civilization at the same level as us in the Centauri system, 4 lightyears away, and they'd have no idea we were here.


Also, the scale of space is mind boggling. If the Sun were a ball 3 feet across, then the Centauri system would be 25,000,000 miles away. (On that scale, Earth is about a third of an inch.) Our own galaxy is approximately 100,000ly across, or, on this scale, about 7,000,000,000,000 miles.

While stars in the core are close together, often less than a lightyear apart, the radiation levels there would prevent advanced life from developing. Probably even any life at all.

Out on the rim, where we are, 5-10ly apart is normal for stars that aren't in a cluster. Stars in clusters like the Pleides or the Orion Nebula can be fractions of a lightyear apart.

Our galaxy is big. Very, very big. Even our nearest intelligent neighbor (if there are any) is most likely hundreds of lightyears away.

I've often wondered why it is that we discover a particular technology when we're just barely sensible enough to use it, but before we've got the sense not to use it at all.

For instance, imagine how the 19th century would have gone if somebody had the A-bomb. The civil war would've left North America a smoking ruin. But if electricy or the internal combustion engine were new science today, we would be to scared of them to use either. (This isn't an original idea. Bob Newhart did a skit on what would happen if the airplane or smoking were invented in the 1960's.)

So my theory is that we'll figure out how to move to another planet right around time we've just about destroyed this one, but also figured out how not to destroy the next one. If we moved right now, we'd just destroy the new one, so what good would that do us?

When new technology comes out, what is one of the first uses? Some kind of way to kill as many people as possible with it.

You can bet there are many hundreds of people relishing the thought of detonating nuclear bombs in dozens of major cities. Just human nature.

Think that other great advances in technology will be any different?

My point is that for the next many thousands of years our greatest threat is from ourselves.