When we colonize another planet.......

are we our own alien race. that last i seen we all live on this big blue/green rock. i dont think any of us came from another planet or are visitng from another planet where that would apply.
 
This is a question I have pondered for some time now.
My best guess is that the why would we do it question will be best answered by exploring why -historicaly speaking- we as a race have undertaken global exploration here over the past few thousand years. First continentally then eventualy globally rather.
The short answer is......wealth!
Many of the so called heavenly bodies are supposedly a cache of mineral deposits. Many may yet to be discovered. Who knows what minerals or elements may yet lay awaiting discovery on some miniscule orbiting asteroid or moon.
This brings to mind the story of Chuck Fipke who braved personal injury and financial disaster to explore what many considered a desolate wasteland in the north (Lac de Gras in Canada's Northwest Territories).
He did this not because he thought we were overpopulating earth and needed room to expand but in search of kimberlite pipes which he considered a tell tell sign of diamonds.
Point being, that the best reason to devote the resources needed to colonize a planet or to explore space will be as a form of investment that would hold the promise of an exponential return.
Can you imagine being the only country able to rocket off to an asteroid where you walk around and pick up diamonds the size of basketballs or gold nuggets the size of footballs until you stop simply because the addition of one more would exceed your payload by 70 pounds? :eek::cool:
 
Where do you think it could be?
How would we get there?
How long do you think it should take to get there?
What should we do when we get there?
If there is life already there, what should we do?
Should we wait to be contacted by another race before we go?

I could go on and on but i will let you add in what you want.

Let's make this a community effort and see what we can brainstorm.

Make no mistake we have a long and arduous journey to make if we're ever to make a successfull leap from Earth to say Mars or Venus or any of the proposed moons.
But..and there is always a but..many times when we as a race reach a certain threshold, we manage to break barriers thought of as impossible just a year before. Like aviation for axample.
It was the widely acceptable belief by most scientists that flight would be impossible because they saw no way of making man lighter than air. How could you possibly build an aircraft to carry a man that would be lighter than air they thought. Of course now we all know the principles of flight and air pressures and lighter than air gasses for blimps and such but then it was a literally absurd notion.
I imagine that someday in the near future we will again discover, maybe accidentally, a means to transport ourselves from A to B with light years in between with relative ease. We may just discover that Einstein with all his intellectual might, was wrong in regards to a few theories.
Faster-than-light travel may not mean that we leave and travel for a month but folks back on Earth age by a thousand years (gross exaggeration).
If that were the case and interstellar travel were possible in a manageable timescale we could be looking at mere decades for colonization of other planets or moons. Just by one breakthrough!
Generally though one great breakthrough like that is accompanied by many which could easily lead to feasible means by which man might expand and populate the stars.
When we get there we should take time to assess the planet, the environment and our impact there. Then we could move on to exploration, mineral exploration, colonization protocols and so on.
If there is life already there what would we do? Maybe the better question is what should we do? Thats indeed a moral problem that we need to sort out here.
The way we are, we would probably in the case of harmless life forms, poke, praud and humiliate the poor sob's in the name of science. In the form of advanced life, we'd likely study them from afar then if we deemed them conquerable and the circumstances like wealth were involved, we would probably wage war and take what we wanted.
What we should do is probably study as much as possible with as little impact as possible in any case. If only lower life forms were present then maybe we do what we want. If advanced beings are present maybe we gather intelligence and evaluate from there. If they are very advanced, they will likely detect us far before we land anyway. If they are hostile, the exploration team will likely never know it, lol. If they are friendly, every attepmt to make contact and exchange info should be considered very carefully and taken on a case by case basis.
This poses an extrordinary question confronted by Gene Rodenberry many years ago. Do you intrude and "mess" with civilizations or leave them alone?

I don't think we should wait to be contacted by another "alien" race before we go. That could be extremely dangerous! IMO we should excell to our limits as fast as possible. I think it was Mr. Hawking that said that contact by an advanced alien race would in all liklihood be extraordinarily bad for humankind. Most likely any race that was advanced enough to travel across light years would be able to take anything they wanted and would probably wipe out humanity for something maybe as insignificant to us as silicate or sulfer. I think we should be eager to advance to the point that we could, if need be, put up a good fight at least. this may mean that we are able to rely upon colonies on other planets to accomplish our very survival as a species.
 
There is another way to look at colonising worlds - don't.

I think we can all accept that any attempt to colonise another world nearby, the Moon, Mars, etc., would be unhealthy for the humans living there, if only from the point of view that they'd be unlikely to ever be able to return to Earth (if they wanted to) because of the extreme differences in gravity and its effects on their bodies.

But that doesn't mean either can't be used, for tourists, specialist medical and industrial, or even agricultural/landscaping purposes (Mars at least).

So where does that leave the puny Earthlings?

In the rings of heaven....... SpringWorlds

"Why live in the dirt, when we can have the stars."

:smiley:
 
~~Can we colonize other worlds?

Yes.....we can, and we must; as I said in an earlier post(I think it was in thread IIRC), man is by his very nature an exploratory creature. Who amongst' us hasn't looked upward and wondered what's out there. Now, can we at present. The answer to that is.....not at present; the technology isn't there yet.

But it got me to thinking....where would we start?
You start with the worlds closest to Earth, namely the moon and Mars. The trick is going to be developing technologies to live off the land, using ISRU materials. For instance, a lot of spacecraft traveling through the Solar System already utilize ISRU, namely solar radiation(a/k/a sunlight). Any colonization of the moon or Mars will almost certainly have to use ISRU in order to avoid having to continually shuttle supplies to said colonies.

On the moon materials present for ISRU include Anorthite which, when burned through an on-site smelter, could produce aluminum and silica, which can then be used to buttress and support a colony there. The lunar bedrock, known as Regolith could serve as a construction material for building colonies on the moon, as well as for production of oxygen and hydrogen.

On Mars, the Martian atmosphere could serve as an excellent ISRU base for colonization. For instant, the large amts. of carbon dioxide in the air could serve as a base for making propellant for return trips to Earth(the 2 possible chemical reactions that would need to be utilized are, (1)Sabatier reaction, which would use carbon dioxide and hydrogen to produce methane and oxygen, and (2)electrolysis, which would be used to divide carbon dioxide into oxygen and carbon monoxide. In addition, many of the same ISRU techniques that would need to be used on the moon could, with adaptation, be used on Mars, which would allow man to colonize Mars without having to spend money developing new technologies specifically just for Mars.
 
It's not whether we're capable of colonizing other worlds. It's whether we're qualified.


Man is indeed qualified; I've said it before and I'll repeat it again.....man is an exploratory creature who by his very nature will go out and seek new horizons, new places to explore, and so forth, regardless of what others may think.

Did Columbus think to himself, "I'm not qualified to explore the New World; I'll just stay home in Europe and let someone else do it?" No....he went and explored the New World. Now we could argue about the impact of European exploration of the New World(wouldn't that be an interesting debate......... ;) :eek: .....) but someone, someday, is going to make that first exploratory step off of this pale blue dot we call Earth. Then we'll know whether man can indeed colonize other worlds. Until then, everything we say here is academic theory and supposition.........nothing more, nothing less.
 
i think you all have the right ideas, one way or another but the one that struck me the most is the by bridman, in regards to colonizing for minerals. lets look at frank herberts 'dune' for example. look past the over ambitious emperor and the warring houses and all you have left is the 'spice'. look at it, the initial navigator had been using spice for over four thousand years. the novel is set in the year 10,191, so back date and you come up with roughly year 6000, ok 5000 years from now. that is not saying how long before the year 6000 that spice mining on only one planet that it was available had been going on.

so lets give a guestimate here. lets say that spice mining had been going on for a prior 2000 years. that backdates it to the year 4000, take into account that in that time space exploration has been steadily going on but lets say that they knew of the existence of arrakis since he year 3000. now lets put into play when humans started to explore and colonize and backdate that now. could it possibly be that herbert was thinking so far ahead that he wrote this novel with the possible premise that we might start to explore and colonize other planets around the year 2000?????

ok, now that i have almost completely gotten off subject, yet i think i made my point without mindless rambling. what ya think?
 
Being "exploratory" does not mean one is either capable or qualified. No matter how many times one says it again.

Rapists are exploratory. Rats are exploratory. ******ates are exploratory.

The "can" here flies in the face of the mess we've made on this planet, the "must" is basically a relgious belief. The more emphatically held, the more others doubt it.

There are no "musts" in science.
 
then when i 'must' have to go to work to pay the bills it really is religion? when i 'must' go to the bathroom then am i praying to the porcelain god? come on, lets get real here. of course there is 'must' in science or we wouldnt be finding new things. if it wasnt for 'must' then we wouldnt have the technology we have today.

we even wouldnt have this wonderful place called the World Wide Web to which we are now typing in this forum the answers to each others question.

there cant be religion in science (tom cruise proved that, LOL). seriously though, religion and science is a deadly mixture cause your going to have some fantatic somewhere who doesnt want to expand himself outside his own little world and wants to keep us all mired down in the thoughts that we cant do anything nor am cappable of doing anything.
 
then when i 'must' have to go to work to pay the bills it really is religion? when i 'must' go to the bathroom then am i praying to the porcelain god? come on, lets get real here. of course there is 'must' in science or we wouldnt be finding new things. if it wasnt for 'must' then we wouldnt have the technology we have today.

Total nonsense. You don't have to go to work, you don't have to go to the bathroom. Of course those are pretty silly counters to the "must conquer other planets" thing. So if you want real, go get some.

And no, there was no must, in developing the internet or the steam engine or your apparent bathroom god.
 
so your saying that building rockets, travelling outside our atmosphere, etc is not a must? if not what is it considering that it does sound like it is a must.

we 'must' build a rocket to escape that atmosphere cause we conquered shooting one across the ocean and even shot one 10 miles or more higher. we 'must' build a structure to see if it is possible to live in the emptiness of space.

these are all must and human desire to achieve more is a must also. it is a part of us.

and my friend i will say it is a must to go to the bathroom. kinda hurts if you dont after a few days.
 
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