The other problem is that once you're half way there, you have to start flinging mass in the other direction to slow down. Otherwise you get there but are going too fast to do anything more than just wave as your destination goes by.

Quantum wormholes

All done in a habitable environment. What you couldn't take with you to support life could be found at the destination.

This is completely different than trying to travel to any destination that cannot naturally support life (which is basically everywhere but Earth).

We had a hell of a time (with huge costs and risks) just getting to the moon and back to bring back 800+ pounds of rocks. This was when there was a national mandate to achieve this (which pretty much dried up after Apollo 11).

The forces against establishing a huge sustainable national mandate to go anywhere beyond the moon (Mars) would be formidable and could cause a collapse that would jeopardize any life sustaining support from Earth (mandatory for survival).

Dan

Its certainly a lot harder than colonizing the earth, but our ancestors (Homo Erectus) got from Africa as far as southeast Asia somewhere around a million years ago. So we've had time to develop quite a bit of technology since then.

The Apollo project was impressive for its time, but its more than half a century ago.

Both the Moon and Mars have water and carbon, which are the most essential bits, though Mars has considerably more. Further than that is difficult with near-future tech, but doing those first will develop more tech.

If you look at the development from the Wright brothers to Apollo in 66 years, its clear humans can make amazing progress if they put their minds to it.

Its difficult to predict. I doubt the US has the energy to do this sort of thing anymore, we are like the British Empire post WW2, once a globe spanning power, but now letting others take the lead. China might decide to do space. Soon they will have the only active space station, but whether they will see though a moon, then mars manned mission is hard to guess. I'm giving them even odds.


All done in a habitable environment. What you couldn't take with you to support life could be found at the destination.

This is completely different than trying to travel to any destination that cannot naturally support life (which is basically everywhere but Earth).

We had a hell of a time (with huge costs and risks) just getting to the moon and back to bring back 800+ pounds of rocks. This was when there was a national mandate to achieve this (which pretty much dried up after Apollo 11).

The forces against establishing a huge sustainable national mandate to go anywhere beyond the moon (Mars) would be formidable and could cause a collapse that would jeopardize any life sustaining support from Earth (mandatory for survival).

Dan

If you find your perfect Little Blue Marble twenty plus light years away what are normal germs to us might just wipeout an entire planet of fellow galaxy occupants.

Ask the Native Americans how it went when the Europeans first landed in North America.

Or it could go the other way, what is a “normal” germ to them wipes out all of the newly arrived earthlings.

I still stand by we might as well take good care of our little Blue Planet, invest in what is smart, walk away from what is stupid (there’s a lot of that now days) and use our precious resources wisely because it’s all we’ve got.

You first.

Mike C.

You first.

Mike C.

I've been musing this morning on the contrast between SpaceX's booster problems with Nasa/JPL's Mars Rover missions.

Those missions involved getting many components to work perfectly in sequence: earth orbit, interplanetary flight, Mars capture, Mars braking, soft landing, open the panels. I really admire that level of competence.

I understand that new tech often fails before getting it right.

A third possibility is that the development of lifeforms capable of the science and technology development that we've achieved is far, far, rarer than we currently presume, and we are really very alone in the galaxy.

For your second item, you could imagine even if we can't push living beings through wormhole or whatnot, that we could (and would) send probes if we detected another civilization and had the means to get something there.

I think you have that backwards. The traditional Nasa way is to spend billions over decades to make small incremental gains. That approach would never have been able to produce the falcon 9 - the most reliable and economical ride to orbit in history, by an order of magnitude. Space-x should be viewed as a template to follow.

There will always be dreamers and visionaries in a sea of skeptics and cynics. A few generations ago it would be a pipe dream to be able to travel to just about any other location on the planet in under 24 hours, but that's where we sit today.

Generations from now, that same reality will exist between Earth, the Moon, and Mars, and hopefully more after that. It's next, and there's stuff out there to explore.

Of course it's harder than the last new thing we did. If it was easier, we'd have done it first.

Don't discount how much the SpaceX success in the 21st Century was predicated on the technical innovation and output from NASA in the 20th.

There's absolutely technical advancement happening across the space industry, but their baseline was from a textbook on NASA's prior successes and failures.

Another way to look at it is this:

In the 4.6 billion years this planet has been around, billions and billions of species of all forms of life of have inhabited and roamed this planet, billions became extinct while new species took their place.

And after all of this, exactly one species (us) advanced to the point of even being able to ask this question. To expect another planet to advance to this stage would be asking a lot (in my opinion).

Dan

How do you know that?

That is "sun revolves around the Earth" kind of thinking, using only our perspective to decide what exists.

Mike C.