How long until we as humans have to skidaddle earth? Will we even survive before we can even fathom the technology to leave earth?
Reminder that the lead-melting, acid-soaked hellhole named Venus is also an Earth-sized planet in a star's "habitable zone".
>>8109496
this is true
>>8109403
>even fathom the technology to leave earth?
If you count solar-orbiting space habitats, we're probably pretty close to that right now.
The "how" isn't the hard part.
Political motivation to allocate funding, even in the private sector is the hurdle.
>How long until we as humans have to skidaddle earth?
>Will we even survive
Despite appearances, the future isn't that gloomy.
Human population growth is down to half what it was in the early 1960's, and is looking to continue declining.
Per-capita energy use (in Europe and the U.S. at least) is declining.
Improvements in technologies like desalination, bio-materials, reduced pollution from cars, power plants, etc, maybe even fusion power soon, are promising.
GMOs _can_ be useful in a very green-friendly way.
Nuclear proliferation is down.
Civilian casualties in war are greatly reduced compared the the last century.
We already have some means and ideas for star travel, we just don't like plan/think in terms of generations and the costs would require multinational efforts and possibly doing things unthinkable in today's global climate, like killing most defense spending and throwing those hundreds of billions into R&D.
We also don't yet have telescopes that can let us image exoplanets much less analyze their atmospheric compositions. Once we have that we can get a much better idea of what's out there and worth checking out. I think once the first evidence comes in that there are Earth-like worlds within 100LY and there are grainy images of them, that funding will pour in to build better and better telescopes to try to see what the fuck is out there as that's probably the best we can hope for in our lifetimes. Then, people will start asking "ok we know where to go, let's fucking decide how to go there". We'll probably be old by the time that happens, if we live to see it at all.
The splitting of the atom was not something that just spontaneously happened, but was built towards for decades with massive funding coming in for the Manhattan Project. We have basically no funding coming in for FTL travel research.
Where would we begin to go? Would people eventually have to be forced towards other planets?
>>8109403
So, OP, I tried reading up on Kepler-186F, and wow, if that's our best hope for a new home, maybe we should be concentrating harder on alternatives.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kepler-186f
Huge problems in the first sentence.
>Kepler-186f is an exoplanet orbiting the red dwarf Kepler-186,[4][5][6]
>red dwarf
see:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Habitability_of_red_dwarf_systems
Then, still in the first sentence:
>about 490 light-years (151 pc) from the Earth.[1]
To reach that with any plausible starship would take so long, we'd have to transport an entire stable breeding population, in a long-term sustainable habitat.
You might as well just park the thing in solar orbit and save the trouble and expense of engines.
It just keeps going:
> Kepler-186f receives about 32% (of solar radiation compared to Earth), placing it within the conservative zone but near the outer edge,
>similar to the position of Mars in our Solar System.[1]
>A very wide range of possible masses can be calculated
This goes on for a bit, but no conclusions are drawn.
> The chance that it is tidally locked is approximately 50%.
>Since it is closer to its star than Earth is to the Sun, it will probably rotate much more slowly than Earth;
>its day could be weeks or months long
>Kepler-186f is too distant, however, for its atmosphere to be analyzed by existing telescopes (e.g., NESSI)
>or next-generation instruments such as the James Webb Space Telescope.[5][14]
>Kepler-186f is too remote and its star too faint for current telescopes or the next generation of
>planned telescopes to determine its mass or whether it has an atmosphere.
> Kepler-62f (and possibly also Kepler-186f) may be massive enough to have a dense H/He
>atmosphere and thus be a gas dwarf instead of a terrestrial planet.
cont...
>>8109553
continued:
Finally, even if it has life, we probably won't just send people down to sneeze on the local flora and fauna, then come back to the ship tracking alien mud on the carpet.
A space-ark would probably spend years or decades studying the local life to determine if contact was safe for us and the local ecosystem.
>>8109555
If we found worlds we even suspected there could be life on we definitely fucking wouldn't send people first. I'd imagine we'd send painstakingly sterilized probes and leave them up in high orbit, and rather than let them burn up in the planet's atmosphere instead jet them off into the local star.
There are already sites on Mars we dare not send probes directly to because there are remote chances that alien life could possibly be around there and we'd royally fuck up everything if we contaminated that biome.
Even so though, life on another planet outside our solar system would be so distinct from us genetically (assuming it even uses DNA) it's doubtful we'd get sick or they'd get us sick. More like, bacteria from our world might be competitive against alien microbes etc.
>>8109403
why are those planets shaped like eggs?
>>8109515
Even if World War 3 happened, it wouldn't dent the total population that much.
>>8109570
Gravity forms spherical shapes. Tidal forces transform the sphere into an egg.
>>8109496
Venus isnt in the habitable zone
>>8109568
>If we found worlds we even suspected there could be life on we definitely fucking wouldn't send people first.
In the context of OP's "we gotta get off this rock" question, it wouldn't make much sense to spend centuries (millennia?) waiting for the probes to arrive, then centuries while the radio data reached us.
All using Kepler186f as an example (490LY distant).
>painstakingly sterilized probes
> so distinct from us genetically ... it's doubtful we'd get sick or they'd get us sick.
That would be hard enough with bacteria and viruses, but what about malformed proteins?
Mad cow disease is caused by a malformed protein, and no amount of cooking can make contaminated meat safe.
>>8109604
>Even if World War 3 happened, it wouldn't dent the total population that much.
Even without a major global catastrophe, we're likely to see the human population shrinking before the century is out.
>>8110133
Venus could be habitable with less co2 in the atmosphere
>>8110142
You CAN live in the atmosphere, which if possible would be more more suitable than colonizing mars due to the long distance.
>>8110133
>Venus isnt in the habitable zone
Seems to be right on the edge.
