I’m a little more optimistic about it. It’s definitely insanely difficult to do, and I don’t think a lot of people even get how hard it is and the crazy out of this world (literally) hazards there are with just flying to the moon and Mars.
But more than one country has sent things to the moon, and we seem to have low earth orbit cracked, so I can definitely see people normalizing moon transit and beyond in the inner solar system.
It gets even more hazardous past that though. But like the oceans before I really do believe humanities strive for exploration will endure and someday we’ll go further and further.
Extra-solar system is a giant flashing question mark though. That might be the next new ocean, and might take us just as long if longer, if even ever, to conquer.
We could put people on Alpha Centauri in 88 years with 50s technology like Project Orion. The really hard part is figuring out a way to make us use the technology we do have for things like that, instead of for bombing each other back to the stone age.
I get what you’re going for, but no we couldn’t. The radiation and other interstellar particles and dangers would kill a crew using moon landing technology.
With that kind of propulsion politically available, I doubt finding workable combinations of mitigation strategies to interstellar medium hazards would be the showstopper. Especially not one to hold us back for time scales that oceans did. Getting humans interested in prioritizing projects like that, to me, is the real headscratcher.
Regarding the problem of running out of oil, I look at it a bit like, “we are a plant (biological plant)”.
The plant starts in a seed, which provides it with nutrients (energy) as some kind of starting bonus. It can use these nutrients to develop itself and live, but it will recognize that at some point it will run out of calories and die. So it has to do something about it. What it does, is to develop leaves. These leaves collect the sunlight and this way, the plant has a constant and continuous source of energy/calories. So it can keep on living.
Society has a very similar problem. We have oil, but it is limited. We can use it to develop, but eventually we’re gonna run out of it. So we have to do something about it. Just like a plant, we develop solar panels to collect the sunlight, so we have a continuous income of energy. This way we can live waaay beyond the time of our starting bonus.
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I’m a little more optimistic about it. It’s definitely insanely difficult to do, and I don’t think a lot of people even get how hard it is and the crazy out of this world (literally) hazards there are with just flying to the moon and Mars.
But more than one country has sent things to the moon, and we seem to have low earth orbit cracked, so I can definitely see people normalizing moon transit and beyond in the inner solar system.
It gets even more hazardous past that though. But like the oceans before I really do believe humanities strive for exploration will endure and someday we’ll go further and further.
Extra-solar system is a giant flashing question mark though. That might be the next new ocean, and might take us just as long if longer, if even ever, to conquer.
We could put people on Alpha Centauri in 88 years with 50s technology like Project Orion. The really hard part is figuring out a way to make us use the technology we do have for things like that, instead of for bombing each other back to the stone age.
I get what you’re going for, but no we couldn’t. The radiation and other interstellar particles and dangers would kill a crew using moon landing technology.
With that kind of propulsion politically available, I doubt finding workable combinations of mitigation strategies to interstellar medium hazards would be the showstopper. Especially not one to hold us back for time scales that oceans did. Getting humans interested in prioritizing projects like that, to me, is the real headscratcher.
Regarding the problem of running out of oil, I look at it a bit like, “we are a plant (biological plant)”.
The plant starts in a seed, which provides it with nutrients (energy) as some kind of starting bonus. It can use these nutrients to develop itself and live, but it will recognize that at some point it will run out of calories and die. So it has to do something about it. What it does, is to develop leaves. These leaves collect the sunlight and this way, the plant has a constant and continuous source of energy/calories. So it can keep on living.
Society has a very similar problem. We have oil, but it is limited. We can use it to develop, but eventually we’re gonna run out of it. So we have to do something about it. Just like a plant, we develop solar panels to collect the sunlight, so we have a continuous income of energy. This way we can live waaay beyond the time of our starting bonus.
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A large part of oil can be replaced with electricity. Please point to examples where neither solar power or renewable biomass are sufficient.