I hope you are right, but here are the things that make me pessimistic:
Seeing the solar system to the right scale. Makes me realize how the universe is a vast desert of almost-nothing, and how insane are the distances between the not-nothings.
Mars sounds like a big deal, but it is smaller than Earth. The total surface of Mars is like the land area of Earth, so successfully colonizing Mars would merely double the space inhabitable by humans. That is, unless we colonize the surface of oceans of Earth first, in which case it would only increase the total inhabitable space by 30%.
And colonizing Mars doesn’t mean that now we have the space-colonization technology mastered, because compared to other planets, Mars is easy mode. Venus and Mercury, that would double the inhabitable space again… and then we have gas planets and insanely cold ice planets… and then we need to get out of the solar system, where distances are measured in light-years, which probably means centuries or millenia for us… at which moment, if we have the technology to survive in space for a few generations, we might give up living on planets entirely, and just mine them for resources.
From that perspective, colonizing Mars seems like a dead end. We need to survive in space, for generations. Which will probably be much easier if we get rid of our biology.
Yeah, it could be possible, but probably much more complicated than most of science fiction assumes.
The main resource needed for life is light (which is abundant throughout the solar system), not land or gravity, so the sparseness of planets isn’t actually a big deal.
It’s also worth remembering the Moon; it’s slightly harder than Mars and even smaller; but the Moon will play an important role in the Earth-Moon system, similar to what the Americas have been to the Old World in the past 400 years.
Interstellar travel is a field where we currently don’t have good proof of capabilities yet, but if we can figure out how to safely travel at significant fractions of c, it shouldn’t take anything more than a few decades to reach the nearest stars, quite possibly even less time than that; and even if we end up failing to expand beyond the Solar System, I’d say that’s more than enough to justify calling the events coming in the next few decades a revolution on par with the cambrian explosion and the development of life.
I hope you are right, but here are the things that make me pessimistic:
Seeing the solar system to the right scale. Makes me realize how the universe is a vast desert of almost-nothing, and how insane are the distances between the not-nothings.
Mars sounds like a big deal, but it is smaller than Earth. The total surface of Mars is like the land area of Earth, so successfully colonizing Mars would merely double the space inhabitable by humans. That is, unless we colonize the surface of oceans of Earth first, in which case it would only increase the total inhabitable space by 30%.
And colonizing Mars doesn’t mean that now we have the space-colonization technology mastered, because compared to other planets, Mars is easy mode. Venus and Mercury, that would double the inhabitable space again… and then we have gas planets and insanely cold ice planets… and then we need to get out of the solar system, where distances are measured in light-years, which probably means centuries or millenia for us… at which moment, if we have the technology to survive in space for a few generations, we might give up living on planets entirely, and just mine them for resources.
From that perspective, colonizing Mars seems like a dead end. We need to survive in space, for generations. Which will probably be much easier if we get rid of our biology.
Yeah, it could be possible, but probably much more complicated than most of science fiction assumes.
Thanks for the thoughts.
The main resource needed for life is light (which is abundant throughout the solar system), not land or gravity, so the sparseness of planets isn’t actually a big deal.
It’s also worth remembering the Moon; it’s slightly harder than Mars and even smaller; but the Moon will play an important role in the Earth-Moon system, similar to what the Americas have been to the Old World in the past 400 years.
Interstellar travel is a field where we currently don’t have good proof of capabilities yet, but if we can figure out how to safely travel at significant fractions of c, it shouldn’t take anything more than a few decades to reach the nearest stars, quite possibly even less time than that; and even if we end up failing to expand beyond the Solar System, I’d say that’s more than enough to justify calling the events coming in the next few decades a revolution on par with the cambrian explosion and the development of life.