Futuof Humanity

*1. Does humanity have a future beyond Earth?*
I think its a dangerous delusion to envisage mass emigration from Earth.
Theres nowhere else in the solar system thats as comfortable as even the
top of Everest or the South Pole. We must address the worlds problems
here. Nevertheless, Id guess that by the next century, there will be
groups of privately funded adventurers living on Mars and thereafter
perhaps elsewhere in the solar system. We should surely wish these pioneer
settlers good luck in using all the cyborg techniques and biotech to adapt
to alien environments. Within a few centuries they will have become a new
species: the posthuman era will have begun. Travel beyond the solar system
is an enterprise for posthumansorganic or inorganic.
*Martin Rees, British cosmologist and astrophysicist*

*12. Will we ever colonize outer space?That depends on the definition of
colonize. If landing robots qualifies, then weve already done it. If it
means sending microbes from Earth and having them persist and maybe grow,
then, unfortunately, its not unlikely that weve done that as
wellpossibly on Mars with the Phoenix spacecraft and almost certainly
inside the Curiosity rover, which carries a heat source and was not fully
baked the way Viking had been.If it means having humans live elsewhere for
a longer period of time, but not reproduce, then thats something that
might happen within the next 50 years or so. (Even some limited degree of
reproduction might be feasible, recognizing that primates will be
primates.) But if the idea is to construct a self-sustaining environment
where humans can persist indefinitely with only modest help from Earththe
working definition of a colony, according to the various European
colonies outside of Europethen Id say this is very far in the future, if
its possible at all. We currently have a very inadequate understanding of
how to build closed ecosystems that are robust to perturbation by
introduced organisms or nonbiological events (Biosphere 2, for example),
and I suspect that the contained ecosystem problem will turn out to be much
more challenging than the vast majority of space colonization advocates
realize. There are a wide range of technical problems to solve, another
being air handling. We havent bothered to colonize areas underwater on
Earth yet. Its far more challenging to colonize a place where theres
hardly any atmosphere at all.Catharine A. Conley, NASA planetary
protection
officerhttps://www.scientificamerican.com/article/20-big-questions-about-the-future-of-humanity/
*

I think its a dangerous delusion to envisage mass emigration from Earth. Theres nowhere else in the solar system thats as comfortable as even the top of Everest or the South Pole. We must address the worlds problems here. Nevertheless, Id guess that by the next century, there will be groups of privately funded adventurers living on Mars and thereafter perhaps elsewhere in the solar system. We should surely wish these pioneer settlers good luck in using all the cyborg techniques and biotech to adapt to alien environments. Within a few centuries they will have become a new species: the posthuman era will have begun. Travel beyond the solar system is an enterprise for posthumansorganic or inorganic.
Martin Rees, British cosmologist and astrophysicist
12. Will we ever colonize outer space?
That depends on the definition of colonize.If landing robots qualifies, then weve already done it. If it means sending microbes from Earth and having them persist and maybe grow, then, unfortunately, its not unlikely that weve done that as wellpossibly on Mars with the Phoenix spacecraft and almost certainly inside the Curiosity rover, which carries a heat source and was not fully baked the way Viking had been.
If it means having humans live elsewhere for a longer period of time, but not reproduce, then thats something that might happen within the next 50 years or so. (Even some limited degree of reproduction might be feasible, recognizing that primates will be primates.) But if the idea is to construct a self-sustaining environment where humans can persist indefinitely with only modest help from Earththe working definition of a colony, according to the various European colonies outside of Europethen Id say this is very far in the future, if its possible at all. We currently have a very inadequate understanding of how to build closed ecosystems that are robust to perturbation by introduced organisms or nonbiological events (
Biosphere 2
, for example), and I suspect that the contained ecosystem problem will turn out to be much more challenging than the vast majority of space colonization advocates realize. There are a wide range of technical problems to solve, another being air handling. We havent bothered to colonize areas underwater on Earth yet. Its far more challenging to colonize a place where theres hardly any atmosphere at all.
Catharine A. Conley, NASA planetary protection officer
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/20-big-questions-about-the-future-of-humanity/