@Leadfoot,
Leadfoot wrote:
Ya know, for a ‘Spiritually minded guy', you seem terribly stuck in the material world.
I have no idea what spirituality means to you or why you would bring it up except as an attempt at a personal jab.
Quote:I will agree with you to the extent that 'Mars' (or any other planet or moon) is not going to be a viable alternative for us before harnessing fusion or similar power source first. I don’t know enough about small scale fission reactor technology to know if that's a possibility. But Chemical rocket technology is a bit too crude to do the job that Elon wants to do. So far, our maned space program is a high tech version of Mike Hughs' antics. (RIP Mike) It’s really a stunt. But stunts can be fun too.
The bottom line is that people on Earth need to come to terms with how Earth has traditionally worked as a self-sustaining energy system and work on fitting into that. People just don't understand that trees and plants and even animals and other consumers all absorb latent waste-heat from the environment and utilize it productively because their cells are water-based nano-machines whose operations go faster as temperature rises and water molecules speed up.
Every form of industrial power we use has to derive its energy from either fossil/nuclear fuels that contain stored-up energy OR it has to tap into present-moment solar energy, such as solar panels and wind turbines.
Neither solar panels nor wind turbines absorb latent waste-heat from the environment to repair themselves and propagate/reproduce, the way biological life forms do.
We can use some industrial power, but we have to reverse the trend of allowing industrialism and its products (including buildings and infrastructure) to displace biological life forms that need to colonize all the space they can on Earth to keep Earth working as it has evolved to throughout Earth's life as a planet.
We can work on building/discovering other places for humans to live in outer space and beyond, but those have to be self-sustaining and not dependent on Earth for resources and energy.
Eventually, humans who travel between Earth and other human-habitations outside of Earth should be like people traveling between totally-independent energy/resource economies. Rockets might be used to transport human bodies into orbit, but once they arrive, everything else that sustains them there should be harvested and constructed/maintained from extraterrestrial materials/resources, assuming we can find places to colonize/mine that are totally disposable in terms of their indigenous evolutionary/developmental histories, which is unlikely.
Basically, humans need to develop permanent sustainability as a species and then apply the same paradigm of permanent sustainability and resource conservation to anywhere else they/we go in the universe.
That is difficult because we haven't developed this fundamental cultural sensibility yet, the way native Americans seemed to have, for example. We have always thought in terms of finding some new source of resources that we can justify exploiting without caring about maintaining it in a sustainable way and in a way that honors its existence prior to our having discovered it as a resource.
It's not easy to find a pile of resources and resist the temptation to just dig in and enjoy the bounty. What we have to learn to do is to stop and reflect upon finding resources as to how those resources got there, how they are currently being used, and how we can interact with the existing system in a way that is mutually beneficial and respectful of other life-forms (assuming those other life forms share our values of respect and mutual benefit, of course, which not all will).
