Send It Somewhere Special

[snoopy369]

Originally posted by Elok
Are you referring to unstoppable doomsday asteroids slamming into Earth? They could just as easily slam into another planet AFAIK. In fact, I can't see how the human race is safer on a planet completely hostile to life as we know it.

Because the odds are it won't slam into TWO planets ... survival through diversification

[Elok]

So our surviving descendants will be on Mars, relying entirely on whatever life-support mechanisms will have been built by that time? That'll just delay extinction until such time as the systems fail and spare parts from Earth aren't available.

[BeBMan]

Originally posted by DRoseDARs


Because we are not unlike the Minoans living on ancient Thera. Earth isn't eternally safe. There are plenty of ways for nature to frak things up and even things we can do ourselves. Colonizing space is the only way to better ensure our survival as a species. There are also resources that can be harvested from the abiotic environments of other bodies. Mining them won't harm Earth's biosphere. Anyway, this is all hypothetical until it isn't, but you have your honest answer: Not because it's there for the colonizing, but that we must colonize to survive.

That's not what I asked. Why do you hate the "r"?

[Zkribbler]

Originally posted by Lancer
I don't know, it wouldn't be our problem. Some other species might rise and we could leave them titanium monoliths with writings explaining to them how totally screwed they are.

Bah! Everyone knows that brain-sucking alien locusts can't read.

Example: Pick out the brain-sucking alien locust:

[Lancer]

Huh, I didn't know there was going to be a test, ahh hmm. My dog ate my well erm. Second from the left?

[David Floyd]

I agree with the OP, except to say the US should do it, and should militarize space as heavily as possible to secure our lead. We should do everything in our power to deploy a workable Star Wars system, put a base on the Moon, build a US-only space station, and put a man on Mars. These are first steps, of course, as we need to pursue faster propulsion, to open up the rest of the Solar System - who knows, for example, what we could find in the asteroid belt?

[Lancer]

Asteroids?

[David Floyd]

Mass driver ammo

[DRoseDARs]

Originally posted by BeBro


That's not what I asked. Why do you hate the "r"?

Stupid Euros and your deliberate spelling mistakes.

[DRoseDARs]

Originally posted by Elok
Are you referring to unstoppable doomsday asteroids slamming into Earth? They could just as easily slam into another planet AFAIK. In fact, I can't see how the human race is safer on a planet completely hostile to life as we know it.

That's only one of a great many things that can go wrong. As far as being safer, it's about spreading ourselves out instead of being solely concentrated in one place. You know, eggs in one basket? I don't see under any reasonable scenario a complete collapse of Earth's biosphere. Any significant asteroid passing through while we have either colonies or manned outposts will be dealt with since we'd have the capacity to have colonies and manned outposts in the first place. I'm thinking more along the lines of war, plague, or extreme weather shifts that greatly threaten societal and governmental stability on a global scale. Habitats outside of Earth's biosphere would be somewhat insulated from all that. They'd have built-up supplies anyway because it takes months just to go one-way to Mars, so they could stretch their reserves until either the situation calms down or they can mount their own return mission. It isn't like we'd set up missions where those crews can't return on their own if they need to. The time between now and our first self-sustaining colony (can grow its own food and produce clean drinking water) is the most critical. Anything cataclysmic happens in that time period and we share the fate of all the other dim-witted species on this planet: Extinction, that or we're set back a few centuries leaving us open for more sh*t to happen. We're the first species capable of preventing our own extinction so let's make good on that potential now while we still can.