"I like living on this blue marble. I like exploring different places, seeing different things. Most of us are like that. It is in our DNA to be explorers. And now we are ready to explore beyond our home planet. Exciting times await for our decedents."
Blue marble? Yes, Earthlings - I am talking about Mother Earth. Gaia as some New Agers call her. And this is NOT about losing our precocious planet to man-made global warming, whatever that is. No, this is a story about where we have come from, and where we might be going in the next few (thousand) years. So hang on tight.
In 1903, mankind discovered it could "slip the surly bonds of Earth". In other words, the Wright Brothers took flight at Kitty Hawk. In that short period of time from 1903 to present, we have broken the sound barrier, landed on the Moon, and are now planning a mission to Mars. Not bad for a bit over a century.
When Edgar Mitchell was alive, he was on the lecture circuit quite a bit. Sometimes talking about the reality of ET's on other worlds, sometimes talking about the future of our world. I saw one interview when he was talking about the future of Earth, and we might not have a very long future at that. Meaning our sun is at its halfway point. In another two billion years or so, the sun, as well as all its planets will not be here. So we need to get going on finding another "Earth" we can move to.
That was almost amusing. I just pointed out how far we have come in a bit over a hundred years. How about the next hundred? I bet we will have bases on the Moon and Mars as well as exploring interstellar space. How about a thousand years after that? I can't even imagine. My thinking is by the time our sun gives out, and if we have not killed ourselves, mankind will be spread all over the galaxy - maybe further.
I like living on this blue marble. I like exploring different places, seeing different things. Most of us are like that. It is in our DNA to be explorers. And now we are ready to explore beyond our home planet. Exciting times await for our decedents.
Other than the fact that one or two billion years is a LONG, LONG time (time to live to be a thousand years old, for a million generations), finding "another Earth" may be difficult because the whole universe is dying. It make take TEN billion years, but the lights will eventually go out. And you assume we find a way around that nasty universal speed limit, just to be able to visit a tiny fraction of it.
ReplyDeleteBy the way, here's a question for you to ponder. Every where we look in the universe, we see that it is something like 14 billion years old. Is it really possible that we are in the exact center, or is it more likely that the universe goes on and on beyond what we can see, in some direction(s)?
Sorry, I mean the "known universe" is 14 billion light years "across."
ReplyDelete"Exciting times await for our decedents."
ReplyDeleteI think you mean "our descendants." (Few people want to be decedents. :-) )
"In another two billion years or so, the sun, as well as all its planets will not be here."
Ah, one of my favorite rant subjects! One or two billion years is actually how long astronomers expect Earth to remain habitable where it is because main-sequence stars tend to progressively brighten. A little planetary-engineering savvy should take care of moving our orbit--in fact we're almost capable of doing it now, using the crude, dangerous expedient of stealing momentum from Jupiter via a rerouted asteroid!
Our sun is expected to enter its red-giant phase in about five billion years. Don't know who'll be running this place, but they may want to move one or more planets outward then, & maybe inward after the sun shrinks to a white dwarf.
It's been estimated, meanwhile, that a "mere" million years would be enough time for us humans to colonize the galaxy--assuming, of course, that no one out there objects! And that, IIRC, is without superluminal travel.
Jerrye92002 seems strangely pessimistic about the lifespan of our cosmos. According to this information (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_the_far_future)it's more a (projected) matter of trillions of years.
As for the center of this universe, astronomer Jeff Hester gave a talk years ago where he said that it is, in effect, everywhere. Reminds me of a geometric teaching about the Deity: A circle whose center is everywhere & circumference nowhere.
These are some interesting numbers. Apparently we only have 1 billion years to solve the "global warming problem" created by a Hotter and expanding Sun. But since we'll all be dead in twelve years from Al Gore's imaginary global warming, maybe it does not matter. :-/
ReplyDeleteYes, my estimate of the life of the universe was a rough approximation :-). But at this point I'm wondering if we don't have more immediate concerns? Remember the old song "In the year 2525, If mankind is still alive…" 100 years is quite a length of time for technology to usher in a new golden age, or for us to use it to destroy ourselves.
Maybe getting some other colonies out there is a good idea to keep not just the species alive, but our humanity with it. The galaxy is only 100,000 light years across, so with near- light propulsion And multi- generation Ships, we could seed ourselves pretty widely. Not sure I would be up for that trip but…
Good talk guys - really good talk! Thanks for you input!
ReplyDeleteYou really think our species has the ability to accomplish any of this. We can't even provide potable water to half of the earths population. Or cheap Internet or cell service to the worlds greatest? country. Dream on.
ReplyDeleteI think it is possible, but we are going to need to be smarter and perhaps more civilized than where it appears we are heading. Smarter because, while the cost of "preventing catastrophic man-made global warming" is estimated at $70 trillion worldwide, the cost of adapting to global warming IF and WHEN it occurs is a mere $7 trillion, the SAME cost as bringing the Third World out of poverty. We could be NOT stupid and more civilized and still save 90% of the money we were going to waste trying to prevent something that we did not cause in the first place. Some people are worried about Artificial Intelligence. So am I, but far less about it in robots than in politicians.
ReplyDeleteDave:
ReplyDelete"We can't even provide potable water to half of the earths population."
Such nations tend to lack good government, which generally makes everything more difficult for most people. (I'm not inclined to brag about our own, though that's another story.)
"Or cheap Internet or cell service to the worlds greatest? country."
Whatever "cheap" means in this context...
jerrye92002:
"Not sure I would be up for that trip but…"
Me neither. I now realize I like Earth too much. Wish we could live longer; we might enjoy our solar system's trip through space more! Word is it only takes 1190 Earth years to travel a light year.
You are only traveling 911,000 mph. Speed it up! If you travel at 99.6% of light speed, the nearest star is only 4 months away, as far as your lifetime is concerned, even though the journey actually takes 4 years Earth time. Speed up to 99.999% and we could cross the galaxy in about 450 years. And that's feasible.
ReplyDeleteNot yet! Relativity, of course, interferes with its vicious circle of velocity increasing mass, requiring more energy & so forth. Star Trek invoked an imaginary "Heisenberg compensator" to solve a transporter problem. What we need is for someone to invent a Higgs nullifier to strip out mass by neutralizing the particle/field that impart it!
DeleteI worked briefly on a nuclear rocket engine. The idea was that by running the rocket continually, speed would continually increase so that, on a long journey, relativistic speeds could be attained. "Higgs nullifier" I like that.
DeleteYeah, nuclear rockets: In theory we could make those & run around the solar system, I guess! Could've made 'em decades ago & gone where no man has still been. But at least we've tried ion propulsion, & robot probes are improving all the time...
ReplyDeleteMore than theory, but to run for a few hundred years you would probably need some sort of Bussard ramjet-- still theoretically workable but not yet tested. And it would be interesting to know if relativistic time dilation affected nuclear decay.
ReplyDeleteIt does--as observed in accelerators with short-lived particles, IIRC.
ReplyDeleteThis gets complicated conceptually, doesn't it? Imagine I have a rocket that heats interstellar hydrogen collected through Bussard collectors, and expels that heated gas to continually accelerate towards c. Does the nuclear decay creating the heat decrease as we approach c and thus not push the rocket faster?
ReplyDelete