Would You Be Interested In Colonizing Another Planet

If we could colonize other planets would you be one of those who wanted to go or would you want to stay here? Keep in mind you’d have to spend your whole life just starting a civilization without really seeing it finished.

No civilization is ever finished. It’s always a work in progress. If it is ‘finished’ it’s days are over. However, if you are interested in visualizing, conceptualizing and thinking about what it might take to create a community on Mars, take a look at this project with HP and Nvidia: Explore | HP Mars Home Planet Everything from education to robotics, to health to growing food and more - all here. This is about how to set Mars up for one million inhabitants - great stuff! “With the help of earthlings and Technicolor we will collectively endeavor to create the world’s first collaborative Mars VR Experience” Autodesk is also involved: Mars Home Planet

How close is humanity to colonizing different planets and having interstellar flights?

We are 1000 years from practical colonization of Mars, according to National Geographic. They have some videos you can search for on the web.Everything else is harder and farther.We have already sent spacecraft outside our solar system, the Pioneer spacecraft, but it will be too long before they get anywhere. We could in a decade or two send a faster mission, but not so fast anyone would be interested.We are currently launching new telescopes and finding planets like crazy. I expect in a few decades there will be some serious candidates to visit, which will motivate more serious planning for probes. At first, telescopes will improve fast and probes will not have much capability, just light weight things thrown by lasers or solar reflectors. After a century or two or three, if there is a really interesting nearby planet, someone may fund a more serious probe. It might be possible in that time frame to get up to a few percent of light speed for a flyby mission that would just zip through another solar system.I did a semi-serious study of this a few years ago. Assuming human energy use progressed at 20th century rates (and it is *not* doing that right now), the interstellar age might start between 3000 and 4000 AD (1000–2000 years from now). Here is my slide:

Why is man interested in colonizing Mars?

There are several excellent reasons. The main one that Elon Musk espouses is providing a second home for humans, and creating the first step toward making man a multi-planet species. Our current problem is that there are a million ways for the entire species to perish, either from war, runaway climate change, a giant meteor, a cosmic gas cloud, a solar hiccup, a renegade planetary object that gets close enough to Earth to mess with its orbit, etc. With two planets populated, the likelihood that all humanity or life will be eliminated due to some arbitrary and accidental cosmic event, or our own stupidity, will be considerably reduced. And, of course, you will have a population totally free of those moronic flat-earthers and moon-landing deniers. There will be no room for idiots on Mars.Two; if life ever existed on Mars in any form (or still does), this will be the most important biological/evolutionary discovery ever made. It would mean that instead of a single data point for the abiogenesis of life on Earth, we would have two data points on two planets in a single solar system. It would take us from our current position of ignorance regarding the profundity of life in the universe, and tell us that the universe is likely teeming with life everywhere. If it were a different form of life, using a different batch of amino acids, this would be even more significant.Three; Because we can. Mars has a day close to Earth’s in length. It has a lot of easily accessible resources. People have been discussing ways to terraform Mars for decades. Now there are people with a crapload of money who are willing to burn the resources to do it, and aren’t answerable to a government with a 4-year attention span that constantly flip-flops. There are a lot of things we have yet to learn about living on a planet like Mars, like surviving in a closed environment for 100 year, but Mars is the training ground for this. It’s the stepping stone.

Is there any economic reason to colonize other planets?

Definitely.There’s the transportation/vacation side of it, eventually at least. Instead of going to Mexico over the winter holidays, one day we might just decide we’re gonna go to Mars instead.There’s also obviously technology and science. Tech is a multi-trillion dollar industry that’s rapidly growing. There’s always gonna be people willing to pay for new inventions and innovations. As space exploration picks up, demand will increase for new space-related tech. There’s money to be made.There’s also mining. Who knows what kinds of weird, useful resources can be obtained from other planets? There’s asteroids floating around in space made of so much iron, nickel, even diamonds, that they would be worth quadrillion’s of dollars here on earth. (For comparison, the global economy is currently worth around $300 Trillion). Obviously with supply and demand, the price of these things would plummet, so you couldn’t actually make quadrillion’s of dollars, but you could still make a ton of money to begin with.There’s lots of opportunity out there, most of which is probably still unknown to us. There’s still a lot of work to be done before we go vacationing on Mars and mining diamonds off asteroids, but when we reach that level of advancement there won’t just be an opportunity to make money in space, that will be the primary way of doing things.

What countries would colonize alien planets first?

I have very little hope in the feasibility of permanent settlements on other planets.Landing humans on Mars is feasible, as well as keeping them alive for a little while. It seems that most of the means to get there are based in the US.I hope that all future great achievements of mankind, including space ones, will come from international efforts. Space exploration started as a childish contest of who had the biggest rocket, and who would be the first to erect a flag on the moon.Even if we are optimistic and assume that planets beyond our solar system can be reached and colonized, it won’t be before a very long time. Let’s hope that by that time, humans will be more mature, that the notion of nationalism is over, with scientists working for the benefit of mankind, not just to serve some ideology.After all, the ISS is a collaboration between many different countries, there was some international cooperation in recent Mars rovers, Russian rockets are now launched from French launchpads. Private companies are now a big part of the picture, and they are not as tightly linked to a country as traditional space agencies.

Why can't humans colonize gas planets? What level of terraforming would be needed?

It’s possible that they could. There’s a domain on both Neptune and Uranus, if you’re floating in the clouds in a “cloud city” where the pressure is near 1 atmosphere and gravity is near 1 gee (around 10 meters per second squared). This is also true of the upper atmosphere of Venus, which has the added advantage of being of mild temperature, so if you wanted to build a balloon-city (floating in the sky), you actually could if you don’t mind the lack of breathable air or the sulphuric acid vapor.The downside of Neptune and Uranus is that they are both friggin’ cold. However, thanks to the discovery of literally thousands of new planets nearby, we know that there are also “hot gas giants,” not necessarily from internal heat. These can be hot enough to kill you quickly, but knowing that there are very cold, small gas giants (Neptune masses about 15 Earths) and very hot ones, implies that there are probably some in the Goldilocks “just right” temperature, where you could walk around in a t-shirt and breathing mask.But you still have to have a city buoyant enough to be floating in the air. If you fall off your city, the pressure at lower altitudes would kill you well before you hit the ground (or ocean). If you are interested in this subject, there’s a wiki entry for colonization of Venus that talks about floating cities.No terraforming would be required, unless you wanted free oxygen, and that would all depend on the chemistry of the planet you’re settling and whether or not you could custom-design some flying bacteria to do the job for you.