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Another silly space poll.

Discussion in 'Fred's House of Pancakes' started by daniel, Mar 18, 2012.

?

Please read the first post before answering. Would you go?

  1. Yes.

    3 vote(s)
    23.1%

  2. No.

    8 vote(s)
    61.5%

  3. Only if <fill in the blank> would go as my partner.

    2 vote(s)
    15.4%
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  1. FL_Prius_Driver

    FL_Prius_Driver Senior Member

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    It's only in the past few decades that a larger awareness of exactly how the interconnections work between all the plants, animals, geology, sun's radiation characteristic, moon tidal effects, etc. We have (or had) it good. Hard for so many to comprehend.

    While many look at the chemical and human biology basics necessary to keep a few humans alive for a single space flight, the larger picture of sustaining human life requires a PERFECTLY suited sun, planet thats ~75% covered with water, moon......and former indigenous planetary life that provided the exact right mix of atmosphere, etc. Creates a bit of a paradox, we have to kill off the non-earth life that provided the planet we are taking over to provide our life. Count me out on that. Love to visit non-intrusively, but not more that that.

    It did start as a silly space poll, but there were times when threads evolved positively and this is one.
     
    #21 FL_Prius_Driver, Mar 20, 2012
  2. daniel

    daniel Cat Lovers Against the Bomb

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    I actually kind of agree with this. All but the part about needing a planet with 75% water surface area. No reason to think that 25% could not support us. Otherwise, yes, the odds of finding a planet capable of providing for our needs is extremely remote. Still, the tone was supposed to be that it's a silly poll. The point was to ask whether people would commit themselves and their kids to life aboard a space ship, in order to create a human colony, some generations into the future, on another planet around another star.
     
    #22 daniel, Mar 21, 2012
  3. FL_Prius_Driver

    FL_Prius_Driver Senior Member

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    To me that is a wonderful question. I really do not know how much of our ocean life must be present to be sustainable. Since most of the O2 comes from the ocean, it's not easily answered. What drove me to say 75% is any planet that deviates significantly in any biological aspect could easily turn out to make human/earth life very unsustainable. Don't know if it's 25% or not.
     
    #23 FL_Prius_Driver, Mar 21, 2012
  4. hyo silver

    hyo silver Awaaaaay

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    Life on Earth exists within very narrow parameters. If any of the major factors vary by more than even a few percentage points, life here would not be possible. I don't recall at the moment what those factors are...I'm pretty sure none of them is the number of memory cells in the human brain. :p
     
    #24 hyo silver, Mar 21, 2012
  5. daniel

    daniel Cat Lovers Against the Bomb

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    Life actually exists in some very extreme environments, from deep-sea ocean vents under thousands of atmospheres of pressure, to deep underground in rocks with only the tiniest amount of water, to under the arctic ice. It appears that life as we know it can survive anywhere there is liquid water.

    Humans can thrive only within much narrower limits, but live from the arctic to the Sahara.

    Realistically, very few planets (percentage-wise) will have conditions for humans to live without artificial environments. But there are a hundred billion stars in the Milky Way, and hundreds of billions of galaxies, and it's turning out that a lot of stars have planetary systems. If only one planet out of a trillion has the right conditions, you've still got billions of suitable planets.

    Problem is, the distances are so great that none of the suitable ones may be accessible to us during the time they continue to exist. We may have to aim for an area where star formation has not yet even begun, in order to arrive there while there is a suitable planet. And no way to know where such a planet will be at the time we can get there.

    It's the reason UFOs from other planets are so unlikely to be real: It would take them so long to get here that they'd have had to start out before our sun even began to coalesce from the galactic cloud.
     
    #25 daniel, Mar 22, 2012
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