Humans Will Never Live on Another Planet, Nobel Laureate Says.

sailorbarsoom@... [spacesettlers] wrote:

> Here's the reality: We're messing up the Earth and any far-out ideas of
> colonizing another orb when we're done with our own are wishful thinking.
>
> I haven't read his argument yet, but in this sentence he's already
> misstated the proposal. I know of nobody, repeat nobody, who advocates
> using up and ruining Earth and then bailing for another planet. This
> sort of "disposable Earth" argument is often thrown up by opponents, but
> never by pro-spaceflight folks themselves.

Right. Yet I think many people *not* in the space community think that
this is what space colonization is about.

Jeff Bezos has done a decent job, in his speeches, of talking about
moving heavy industry into space so as to *protect* Earth. But clearly
many people haven't gotten the message.

I think this is something we all need to try to combat. Most space
enthusiasts I know are environmentalists, and (like Bezos) eager to use
development of space to improve the Earth. We need to keep pushing this
message as strongly as we can, because this idea of "use up the Earth
and throw it away, it's fine because we'll move to Mars" will cause a
serious backlash, even if it isn't true.

> And then there's the little fact that "never live on another planet"
> hardly matters if we're planning to live in O'Neill habitats.

And yeah, that too.

And then there's the claim that "the required physics to reach the
stars, if it exists, is not known to us and it would require a
fundamental change in our understanding of the relationship between
mass, acceleration and energy" -- which is just flat-out nonsense.
Several serious studies (e.g. Project Daedalus) have worked out the
technology to reach nearby stars in a reasonable time with only known
physics.

And even that ignores the fact that expansion to other stars will be
more a gradual diffusion than some sort of big colony mission. Our Oort
cloud extends nearly 2 LY's out. So does the next one over, most
likely. They practically overlap. Once we're out there, living by the
billions or trillions, somebody's going to recalculate their orbit one
day and realize that the mountain of ice & rock they just claimed is
actually in interstellar space, or in orbit around Alpha Centauri. No
new physics required at all.