This is why it’s silly hearing billionaires, who do the most damage to our planet, telling us how urgently we need to “get off this rock” which has supported life for millions of years in favor of some dead planet. It’s really just an extension of capitalism that demands infinite space to exploit, instead of being content with sustainability.
Elon’s argument for why we need to spread to other planets holds true even if everything on Earth were going perfectly.
It’s not about getting everyone off Earth - it’s about creating a backup for humanity on other planets. This ensures that the only known flame of consciousness in the universe isn’t extinguished by a nuclear war, pandemic, supervolcano, or asteroid impact. It’s about not having all your eggs in one basket.
By extension it would give more of an excuse for the top 1% to give even less of a fck about earth and the climate. Next thing you’d see is all the rich bailing to another planet while those who can’t afford it are left with what’s left of earth and the hellscape they left behind (and probably still have more agency over earth than those still living on there).
That’s quite cynical view. There’s about 0% chance of that happening during their lifetime. Or you think they’ll just want to go to mars and sit inside some capsule for the rest of their lives? C’moon now…
Our bodies are simply not made to leave earth for a long period. It’s a lofty goal but completely unrealistic when considering our biology has evolved specifically to live here.
Has no one learned anything from War of the Worlds?
Also, remember how humanity really messed things up when we started colonising other parts of our globe? We brought disease, we murdered and we polluted.
This is not risk free. When you give people access to space and still have terrorism and wars, things can end badly quickly.
There’s also a valid argument around where to best focus those resources now. We are nowhere near ready for space colonization on any scale, let alone sustainable ones.
A City on Mars by the Wienersmiths dives into some of these challenges if you are interested.
We will most likely always have terrorism and wars. That’s not an argument against letting wealthy individuals fund a private space race.
I think it would be a good idea to start colonizing space before “we have our shit figured out on earth”, since you know, that will never actually happen. We will have wars on earth for all eternity, we should colonize and explore space anyway.
Honestly, I strongly believe that striving to make space habitats work is one of the things that will finally teach us what we need to know to live sustainably on earth. The thing is, an affordable space colony is one that recycles almost everything, one that works mostly as a closed loop, a sustainable bubble. So in other words, if you know how to survive in a space colony, you know how to live without destroying the earth. And extreme sustainability is really the natural goal with any large space colony. Unfortunately nobody is really trying to do that here on earth, the funding, the engineering, it just isn’t happening. But if we start seriously attempting habitats in space, then people will be attempting that somewhere… And once we figure out how to do it, it can be reapplied to life on earth.
It should also be a strong strong signal to stop listening to the apes that are hoarding all the bananas, and instead, eat that banana-hoarding abhorrence.
Bananas make for a terrible time value storage in the real world
In donkey Kong country tho? He who controls bananas controls the universe
I heard if you ingest huge quantities of bananine, you will see the golden path humanity must walk, but will be condemned to life as a half banana, half human monstrosity.
The good news is that it will never get to that point. Venus is a different planet with a different makeup and history.
The bad news, it doesn’t have to get nearly that bad to be bad for us and the rest of existing life. Not even close. Just a few degrees more, and we’re doing really well in getting there.
I’ve heard of the runaway greenhouse gas effect. Is there a limit to that?
The limit is our distance from the Sun. After a certain point the greenhouse gasses can’t make up for the fact that we just get less radiation than Venus does. The maximum potential I’ve seen is 10°C - almost all life would go extinct and we’d have to live on the tropical Antarctic archipelago, but not Venus.
Everything find equilibrium eventually. I’m sure any limits for a runaway situation depend on a lot of factors, but their ceilings are all far above anything we could tolerate. Runaway doesn’t mean there’s no point to level out, only that at the time it’s not controllable and escalating fast.
The last “runaway” situation the Earth had was called the Paleocene–Eocene Thermal Maximum (PETM) 56 million years ago and globally had a 5-8 degree Celsius rise over thousands of years. That might be a good example of a natural situation and its limits. Keep in mind the differences in rate, we’re increasing the global temperature faster than the PETM (or anything we’ve found in geological history) so we don’t know how that faster rate will act in determining a peak. There’s theories of pushing the Earth into a hothouse world that would have its own equilibrium that is far hotter than we can survive.
Bruh, just realized terraforming starts with terra and that’s why it’s what it’s called
The term translates horribly into Finnish: “maankaltaistaminen”. “To make like Earth/ground/dirt” and “make like” as in “type”, not “form”.
So it could be like “earthlikening” instead of “terraforming”.
Which makes me think of this Wikipedia that’s written in the way they imagine English could’ve evolved if it wasn’t influenced by Latin.
https://anglish.fandom.com/wiki/Main_leaf
for instance their article on maths starts with:
Telcraft (scorelore, rimecraft or reckonlore) (English: Mathematics) is the smeying of scorings, or the recking of begrips such as score, room, shift, and forebuilding. Benjamin Peirce called it “the cunning which draws needful outcomes”.
Through foredeeming and wordlock mulling, scorelore arose from notching, reckoning, deeming, and the learning of sheathes and shapes.
Knowledge and note of fern scorelore have always been a spanning and a needful lifetool, as can be witnessed from orshafts of Egypt, Bearithland, Indland, China and Frodland. Furthermore, the Ishango bone is more than 20 thousand years old.
Titillating, isn’t it?
But think of the shareholders!!
I, for one, would like to give a shout-out to my dog, magnetosphere!
Holla!
The magnetosphere has been weakening in strength due to the ongoing pole shift over the past 30 years, which will peak in the 2040s when the poles will fully shift. I pray there will be no solar flares in the direction of earth during this event, otherwise most of unshielded electric equipment will get fried, including energy infrastructure.
No way. Is that really happening? The magnetic poles are flipping the 2040s? How often does that happen? Old compasses won’t be correct? Will it affect anything else (Aurora Borealis?, etc?)
I’m plumb flummoxed.
Aurora Borealis will be more visible because of the weakened magnetosphere. I don’t know what implications this will have on the world in practice.
You can watch this video for some more information: https://youtu.be/1sDZiCLUW8I
