STEPHEN HAWKING: WE HAVE 100 YEARS TO LEAVE EARTH

Me think climate change is the biggy here. At some not too distant time, the whole system is bound to go haywire and endanger food production.

Temporarily

Assuming there is a generalized warming effect, (which of course makes sense unless one want to predict the end of the world) areas that are currently not suitable for high yield will increase in fertility.

Thank God!

I was thinking I would have to move to Mars by the time I was 163!

Malthusian Theory has been largely discredited and dire Neo-Malthusian predictions have fallen by the wayside.

Rather than any attempts to artificially reduce population growth, the emphasis should be on raising the standard of living globally (through the tried and true means of capitalism) and not get in the way of technological advances like GMOs.

I do share your concern about the destruction of the world's rain forests and it's here, rather than in the questionable theories of global warming, that developed nations should be sharing their wealth to preserve a common resource.

I agree with Finn (except for the complete faith in capitalism).

No economic system has done more to raise the standard of living than capitalism. This is simply true.

It doesn't mean that there won't be victims along the way but the same can be said about every other system

There is no system that will better 100% of the population.

we gotta loong way to go. Wht you say is "theoretically" possible. Even ENglqnd, during the Victorian era , shut away and isolated their poor and did very little to raise the standards of living.

CApitalism ad extremis trends very closely to morphing into fascism.

When ever you say something like "this is simply true", you can be sure that you are making an illogical argument. Nothing is simply true. What raised the standard of living was the rise of science and industry which happened to happen mainly in a moderately capitalist society. That doesn't prove anything.

I believe in regulated capitalism. There are clearly cases where government/public endeavors are more efficient than free market ones. I would include the obvious success of public education in the US over the past century and a half, the moon landing and robots on mars and the development of the internet.

It seems we are getting off topic. But what you claim to be "simply true" isn't.

There's no reason to assume the warming will stop at any time in the next few centuries. The climate is not going to stabilize to a new normal before a very long time.

People toss around the idea of colonizing Mars as though it were a simple matter of a little applied science. Musk talks like a moron. Most of the land on Mars has a surface atmospheric pressure of 10 to 12 millibars. To put that into context, the surface atmospheric pressure on this planet, at current mean sea level, is 1013 millibars. The pubiacle of Mount Everest runs about 330 millibars, and people have to take oxygen with them. Daytime temperatures on most of Mars run around 220 to 230 degrees Kelvin. Thats about -46 to -64 degrees Fahrenheit. The warmest spots on Mars, in the near equatorial "tropics" south of the Martian equator reach maybe 70 degrees Fahrenheit in daytime. The temperatures plunge, overnight, because the atmosphere is too thin to hold any heat. In the Hellas Basin, in the southern hemisphere of Mars, the surface atmospheric pressure might reach 20 millibars. You need about 350 millibars to get oxygen (of which there is none in the Martian atmosphere) into your lungs--that's why climbers on Everest need to take oxygen with them. To do any useful work, you're going to need at least 500 millibars, and an oxygen-rich atmosphere. That means habitats, and habitats deep underground. What they showed in The Martian would explode from the pressure differential.

You can't just scratch any old dirt you find, poop in it, and grow potatoes. So far, the rovers have found what planetologists expected--the martian dirt is highly salty--you won't be growing anything in that. The soil we take for granted is a living organism. You'd have to take your soil with you, and for centuries, you'd have to slowly, painfully process martian dirt. You'd need halophiles, micro-organisms which like salt. Then you'd need to gradually introduce it into the terran soil you had brought with you. Of course, you could do hydroponics, but for that you need to bring the necessary organic chemicals, and you need water. Most of the southern polar cap is carbon dioxide, almost all of it, in fact. There's a good deal of water ice in the northern polar cap--which means you'd have to mine it, and bring it to where you live.

These are just some of the considerations for starters. The amount of solar radiation falling on Mars, with no magnetosphere, and precious little atmosphere is just off the scale for terran organisms. Walk around in one of the goofy space suits they show in The Matian, for just a couple of hours a day, and in one terran year, you'll be exposed to about 15 times the radiation of a lifetime of dental x-rays. And that radiation is blasting away what little atmosphere there is on Mars. You could fix that, relatively soon, in say a couple of centuries. You could convert the CO2 of the southern polar cap into oxygen and carbon, and spread the carbon on the cap as black dust. Pump up the atmosphere with that much CO2, and at a conservative estimate (as opposed to the unrealistic ones bandied about), you'd need about 20,000 years of terran plant life growing widely on the surface to scrub the CO2 from the atmosphere. Or, you could get the huge snowballs that make up the rings of Saturn and crash land them on the Martian equator. Better not set up your habitat near the equator. But you still need nitrogen, and where will get that? You could get it from Titan, Saturn's largest moon--it's atmosphere is very dense and more than 98% nitrogen. How do you get that to Mars? Don't let the tree-huggers hear about your plans.

Without going into any more detail, it would cost trillions and trillions of dollars to make truly viable colonies on Mars. You'd want to send at least a few thousand settlers. With the current spacecraft we use, one solar flare would fry the crew and colonists before they got there. You'd need a lot better technology than we have been using.

Which brings me to my point. The great flaw in the so-called Fermi Paradox is how naïve Fermi was. He ignores human nature, which in one form or another is likely to be common in any sentient space-faring culture. Why would the population of Terra be willing to make substantial, even painful sacrifices for generations, just to set up a colony for a few thousand elites? Who is going to take that one way ticket, to live underground for the rest of their lives? Earth's gravity is more than two and a half times that of Mars. Any colonist who lives there for even a few years would be unlikely to survive a return to Terra. Anyone born on Mars would probably be committing suicide to attempt to come here. The slogan of any such colonizing effort should be "You can never go back."

I believe we should colonize Mars. I also believe it ain't likely to happen.

Welcome to Unreality Central.

Might as well use the ancient Mayan predictions.

Cite examples of alternative economic systems that have been as successful in raising people out of poverty.

You won't lose you Left Wing membership card acknowledging reality.

So you believe that the earth is doomed to become Venus?

That's pretty radical even among Climate Change true believers.

ya know that all EXXON Rigs in the North sea have taken climate change as a fact so that all their power on the rigs is either wind or solar, and theres total C capture (flaring is a no no)

Seems that the "deniers" do one thing while preaching Trumpty Dumpty alterntive facts to the masses

Do you feel that America is a capitalist system?

Off the top of my head...

The Roman Empire. The Egyptian Pharoahs. The Ancient Hebrew Theocracy. Several Chinese Dynasties. India in the 1700s.

Not quite as bad as Venus. Progressive too. 1000 yr from now maybe we'll settle for a tropical climate on the north and south hemispheres and a desert in between. Or something. But it's bound to disrupt agriculture for long periods of time, in my mind.

Why has this become a political rant?

Jesus wept, I am so sick to death of conservative hate-mongers. Go somewhere else with that BS>

Edgarblythe, the virus-bot.