James Cameron the latest to back Obama's new Space plan

[JamesG]

Not to mention that you would be waiting a long, long time when we are just one natural or man made disaster away from extinction.

 

[Keatah]

Not to mention that you would be waiting a long, long time when we are just one natural or man made disaster away from extinction.

Then it be best we get going developing high density power systems and materials to build them with.

 

[Hielor]

Then it be best we get going developing high density power systems and materials to build them with.

You do realize that the vast majority of Star Trek/Star Wars stuff is absolute fantasy and could never work in real life regardless of how "high-density" your power systems are?

 

[Keatah]

Probably quite a bit. But much of the magic we see in star trek comes from harnessing said energy in elegant ways using exotic materials able to operate in extreme conditions. Materials that make titanium look like newspaper!

We pretty much have the necessary computing power today to cover communications/management/navigation. And development can easily be stepped up if so desired. Much of the programming done today is designed around e-commerce. We just have to set different priorities.

 

[JamesG]

His point is that ST/SW and just about any other Sci-fi you care to reference blatantly ignores or is ignorant of real life physics. So even if the technology of ST is developed, it won't look like it does in the shows.

But yes, between sqawabbling with and stealing from each other, its going to be a long time.

 

[Hielor]

Probably quite a bit. But much of the magic we see in star trek comes from harnessing said energy in elegant ways using exotic materials able to operate in extreme conditions. Materials that make titanium look like newspaper!

No, the magic we see in star trek comes from a special effects crew.

 

[Ark]

No, the magic we see in star trek comes from a special effects crew.

And lots of thin technobabble excuses.

 

[T.Neo]

Star Trek and Star Wars blatantly mess up physics. Sorry.

Although I do agree that the time will come when "casual" spaceflight becomes a reality. Probably not to a layperson, but compared to what we do now, it'll be far easier.

I think some technologies could be reminiscent of things seen in Star Trek, a la the tricorder and cellphone. But it won't work the same way.

Not to mention that you would be waiting a long, long time when we are just one natural or man made disaster away from extinction.

I've said this many times before, and I'll say it again: humanity is not nearly as vulnerable as one might think.

Civilisation probably is rather vulnerable, but as a species we're remarkably adaptable. Far less adaptable organisms have survived worldwide extinction events.

 

[JamesG]

Sure, if you want to wait for tens of thousand to several million years for that "adaption" and recovery...

 

[T.Neo]

Sure, if you want to wait for tens of thousand to several million years for that "adaption" and recovery...

lol.

Humans can adapt their environment to suit them, whereas other organisms need to adapt themselves to suit the environment.

By being able to create and implement concepts that do not yet exist, adaptations such as shelter and hunting techniques can be done in months or years, as opposed to the thousands or millions of years required by other animals.

I also doubt that recovery of civilisation would take tens or thousands or millions (!) of years. H. Sapiens has only been around for around 100 thousand years, and advancement from simple civilisation to where we are now took perhaps 10 000 years. And that is without prior knowledge of civilisation or technology.

So, yes. While the concept of humans being a vulnerable species is a fun one, it doesn't work out biologically.

 

[Urwumpe]

Sure, if you want to wait for tens of thousand to several million years for that "adaption" and recovery...

Evolution works much faster. Just look how the ability to digest milk is spreading over the world, despite actually being a tiny local mutation only a few thousand years ago.

 

[JamesG]

Depends on how traumatic an effect we are talking about.

A gamma ray burst, "dinosaur killer" asteroid, wild-fire plague, or other sudden catastrophe will annihilate humanity just as completely as the rest of the life on this planet. No time to adapt or hide. Earth starts over from microbial basics (again).

You knock a small group or isolated groups of human beings down to the stone age and within a generation most the knowledge and culture they had known will be lost forever. They will literally have to start over, and what comes will be totally different. There isn't even any guarantees that they won't go completely out if conditions are bad enough or they don't get a few lucky breaks.

Don't kid yourself.

 

[Dambuster]

There is a very real probablility that most spy satilites had/have proximity and tamper self destruct charges*. Robotic, this is just an annoying risk. Manned, its a show stopper.

Is this really true?

 

[Urwumpe]

Is this really true?

No. But they had more nasty self-defense algorithms, which moved them to a new orbit if needed. Self-destruct charges are idiotic, because you would just need to trigger them to destroy a satellite. So why have them at all?

 

[T.Neo]

A gamma ray burst, "dinosaur killer" asteroid, wild-fire plague, or other sudden catastrophe will annihilate humanity just as completely as the rest of the life on this planet. No time to adapt or hide. Earth starts over from microbial basics (again).

Please read up on mass extinction events.

Multicellular life has gone through several of the events you describe (bolide impacts, gamma ray bursts, huge flood basalts) and survived. If it went "back to microbial basics" both of us wouldn't be here.

The worst effects of a bolide impact similar to the one at the K/T boundary would be over in perhaps a human lifetime. Humans could easily avoid the heatwave by taking shelter, and could survive the period of darkness and the global temperature drop by taking refuge near coastal regions and by stockpiling food.

It must be remembered that animals survived this with FAR less initiative and intelligence then humans.

A wildfire plague would still be stopped by action with vaccines and in a worst-case scenario, natural immunity. The reaction to swine flu, a rather low-level threat, would be dwarfed in the example of a widely transmissable pandemic of an ebola-like virus.

A gamma ray burst is a bit of a stretch, for the majority of land life as well as humans, but since the real threat will come from ozone degredation and UV radiation, we could survive if we stayed indoors and found a means of obtaining food.

And don't go into a supervolcano eruption. We actually already survived one of those...

Comet impacts, for example, could be predicted months in advance, asteroid impacts decades in advance.

Even the extremely sudden catastrophes would leave us with time to adapt and hide. We are damn smart animals.

You knock a small group or isolated groups of human beings down to the stone age and within a generation most the knowledge and culture they had known will be lost forever. They will literally have to start over, and what comes will be totally different. There isn't even any guarantees that they won't go completely out if conditions are bad enough or they don't get a few lucky breaks.

Oh no, I'm not talking about 100 or so individuals, I'm talking about perhaps billions or millions of people. Our growing population has one advantage in survival.

And such an event won't make technology disappear. Structures, firearms and perhaps even some vehicles would survive. So they wouldn't be in the stone age literally, it'd be more like subistance living.

And technological development is not random, like evolution.

 

[JamesG]

Believe whatever you want if it helps you sleep better at night.

Killer spy satellites:

The fear wasn't destruction (which is easy and they could just put up another one). The fear was technology capture, either in space or after re-entry. Orbit plotting and trajectory changing wasn't as perfected in the early 60s. The risk was it might run out of fuel, orbit decay, come down where it could get captured. The early "Keyhole" sats had them (they are still classified), and its assumed that the Soviet ones did to. Do today's? Who knows? They now can move around better and are built to burn up completely on re-entry, but they still go dead.

 

[Urwumpe]

JamesG: So you admit you don't know, but suggest they still used the most idiotic solution for protecting their satellites? Again: Such a system can easily be abused for intentionally destroying your satellite. Even from afar. So why have it? Fear that somebody can catch it before you can shoot him down by other means? Why don't you also include self-destruction devices in aircraft, for preventing them from landing in hostile territory?

 

[T.Neo]

Believe whatever you want if it helps you sleep better at night.

Yes, please do so.

I've provided case-by-case refutions of your arguments, while you have only provided "hewmunz is vulnerable lulz" while seemingly having no knowledge of extinction events at all. Usually I don't like stepping down to mild insults at the opinions of others, but for issues like this I make an exception.

 

[Andy44]

Back on topic, please.