We should focus on leaving this planet

[horbindr]

It is an educated guess right now due to technological limits. That won't be a limitation forever..

yeah but a single ship as primivite as we can make today, if even deep-space worthy at all, won't be able to change it's direction or improve its detection technology along the way with the resources avaiable.

ofc there is also the fact that if the world were not to end in 12 years, even a ship build 100 years from now would be able to overtake a ship we could build today easily. thats the really scary thing about generation ships, that when you arrive you find a fully developed civilization of your own species that treats you as a archeological curiosity.

[Alteiry]

If we literally kill this planet that has sustained us and all other life upon it then we're a disease and we deserve to die with it.

The planet has survived far worse than us in the past - just look at the Permian Extinction.

What we're doing is killing ourselves and many other complex organisms ill adapted to climate change - the planet will take a hit, but it's going to be just right as rain in a few millions years after we are extinct.

[Vargulf the Happy Husky]

i hate that woman. she is a product of an ignorant internet generation.

with that said, i agree, we should really be focusing on space travel and colonization. we start now so that in a few hundred years we can actually start to pull it off.

[Raelbo]

According to AOC cow farts are also dooming the world.

What I don't like about the cow farts argument is that it is often used as a red herring to deflect from the fossil fuel discussion. And not only that, but often the science of cow farts is not well represented anyway, so people tend to not understand the implications or what we're doing wrong re: cows. So what tends to happen is that a pictogram like this is shown and people get the wrong message:



You see, the image above completely misrepresents the problem, because even though it may be 100% accurate, it's also not showing the full picture. Cows may produce a lot of methane, but because the food they consume takes CO2 out of the atmosphere, a stable cow population does not result in increasing CO2 levels.

CO2 => Grass => Cow => Methane => CO2 => Grass => Cow => ..... and so on

A car consuming fossil fuels is just adding CO2 to the atmosphere and has a cumulative effect that keeps getting worse.

Fossil Fuel => Car => CO2
Fossil Fuel => Car => CO2
Fossil Fuel => Car => CO2
Fossil Fuel => Car => CO2
Fossil Fuel => Car => CO2

Now I am not saying that cattle farming isn't exacerbating the climate problem. It is. But all of those issues can be managed if people can commit to properly sustainable farming techniques (for example refraining from the destruction of existing ecosystems to produce more cattle). As long as the cow population can be stablised, they won't be contributing to a worsening of our climate.

[Mihalik]

We cannot get there today. We will get there eventually of course. Maybe not in my lifetime, but it's only a matter of time

Having a planet in the habitable zone literally means nothing. Venus and Mars are both technically on the edges of what is considered the habitable zone of our sun.

Venus has a massive runaway greenhouse effect and an atmosphere denser than the bottoms of our oceans. Mars barely has a magnetosphere. Most of the planets we found are several times the size of Earth, meaning they'll probably have very high gravity and very high pressure atmospheres. Assuming they have a biosphere, contact with it will likely induce anaphylactic reactions or infections we have no means of treating. All this after the fact that it would take centuries to ever reach one.

[tikcol]

If we literally kill this planet that has sustained us and all other life upon it then we're a disease and we deserve to die with it.

lol there's nothing we could do right now to kill this planet. The best we can achieve is destroy the conditions that let us live in it. The planet doesn't care if it's a bit hotter for us than it should be.

[Alteiry]

lol there's nothing we could do right now to kill this planet. The best we can achieve is destroy the conditions that let us live in it. The planet doesn't care if it's a bit hotter for us than it should be.

It's like a planet fever - it becomes just hot enough to kill the infectious organisms, then the body cools down to a normal temperature thereby returning it to a healthy state.

[Vordie]

I love when people pick and choose specific parts of a person's argument to completely misrepresent them, and then proceed to call THEM an idiot.

Her comments are in reference to a United Nations-backed climate report, published late last year, that determined the effects of climate change to be irreversible and unavoidable if carbon emissions are not reined in over the next 12 years.

They will be irreversible and unavoidable **IF** carbon emissions are not reined in over the next 12 years. You have a problem with that statement, take it up with the world-renowned scientists that published the report, I'm sure you're all more knowledgeable on the matter.

It's easier to say "A politician is stupid because they believe in X" than saying "99% of the world scientists are stupid because they believe X that is backed up by scientific facts/data".

[draynay]

We should focus on leaving the planet behind.

Good idea, you go first.

[announced]

According to Alexandrea ocasio-cortez the world will end in 12 years. Its clearly a lost cause. We should focus on leaving the planet behind. A generational space ship to get us to another habitable planet.

Although AOC is an alarmist, she isn't 100% wrong. While she is wrong about the world ending in 12 years we can still take some steps forward to reduce climate change. I would push for higher incentives if people purchase electric cars or perhaps they can trade in their old gas guzzler for some cash value or a credit towards a more energy efficient electric vehicle. Cows are a huge source of emissions, but I don't see anyone deciding to stop eating beef just to save the planet. Maybe push for more chicken based diets instead?

In any case if we can gradually solve the automobile problem we can help lower emissions, and work on cows at the same time. That would be a fine way to push forward, and it might even cost less than 90 trillion dollars.

[Mihalik]

I wouldn't say at all that the Goldilocks zone is meainingless, as it's always easier to search for something if you can limit your search area. As well I remember reading that the closest one we have seen (iirc before some idiot screams at me for misremembering some small detail) to our gravity was about double of Earth's. There is a lot more to do obviously, but with how many 'new' planets NASA (and even highschool students!) are finding these days it is only a matter of time before we find Earth's doppleganger, and I seriously doubt it will take centuries. Remember just one hundred years ago we barely had the technology to make a car function, now we are observing space almost 50 billion light years away from us. If we can make the same jump in technology in the next hundred years just imagine where we will be.

Again, finding a planet through a looking glass doesn't mean traveling there is feasible. Planet side conditions are neigh impossible to confirm without actually sending a probe there or something. That would take centuries in itself, assuming we find something that is literally next door (consider that you can only realistically reach only a fraction of light speed, and this has nothing to do with technology but with the limitations imposed by relativistic physics and the power curb requirements for accelerations).

Assuming you found a planet just with the right gravity, a similar atmosphere, a liquid core with a sufficient magnetosphere and a biosphere...you might have just found yourself a silicon based biosphere where everything will fucking kill you if a single spore, bacteria, or something makes it into your body.

The probabilities of finding a planet where we can simply go and live with only a manageable amount of discomfort (keep in mind, Mars is far, but you would be hundreds of years away from the nearest help, so if you have a pandemic, a crop failure, a technical failure that you can't fix on your own on the spot, you are dead) are absolutely ridiculously astronomical.

It would literally be more economically and technologically feasible to terraform Mars or Venus.

[Shibito]

Congrats on completely and entirely intentionally missing her point like every other dumbass alt-right troll on twitter, go you.



Don't bother, dude. These idiots get their soundbites and get to feel superior to that silly dumb congresswoman, that's all they care about.

Ahahahaha the butthurt alt left

[Dhrizzle]

Congrats on completely and entirely intentionally missing her point like every other dumbass alt-right troll on twitter, go you.

Don't bother, dude. These idiots get their soundbites and get to feel superior to that silly dumb congresswoman, that's all they care about.

Look on the bright side, "the Right's" obsession with AOC means they're actually remembering facts like this. They might not be accepting reality yet but at least they're acknowledging it, that's progress.

[Mihalik]

Ahahahaha the butthurt alt left

There's no such thing. Progressives don't need to rebrand themselves, they aren't in the business of fascism.

[Mihalik]

Look on the bright side, "the Right's" obsession with AOC means they're actually remembering facts like this. They might not be accepting reality yet but at least they're acknowledging it, that's progress.

The only reason why 99.99% of America even knows who the Junior Congresswoman from NY is, is because Trumpkins can't manage their desire to hatefuck AOC.

It's pure seething sexual frustration.

[Dark-Zarupia]

If the earth or at least the condition of life ends in 12 years it will be our own fault.

We should just accept it.

[Dhrizzle]

Yeah I said that it will not be in our lifetimes, as we are way too limited by our technological capabilities, but of course the world will not end in 12 years and maybe our grandchildren will see the first manned-spacecraft to leave our solar system, or maybe the worm hole theory becomes reality, or maybe something we cant even fathom today gets discovered which changed the game entirely in space travel. Who knows :P

Maybe wizards will open portals, or the Almighty will scoop us up in his hands and put us down on a new Eden.

[Mihalik]

Again you are looking at it through the lense of today's technology. I am trying to imagine how far we will have advanced in that regard in, say, 100 more years or so for the year 2120. I think centuries is bit of a lengthy stretch to say it will take that long. Stephen Hawking was working on that worm hole theory up until he died so what if that ends up panning out in the next 50 years? Travel all of the sudden just became much more of a reality and non-issue in that scenario.

I would argue that (assuming travel does becomes a non issue) the probability of finding a planet where we can simply go and live is just a matter of time and looking and the chance of finding one only increases with time. If we can see 50 billion light years away today, wtf will we be able to see 100 years from now? 200 years from now? Things are only going to get easier and easier in these regards.

Terraforming Mars would be interesting though lol. Didn't they recently say there was evidence of water or something there?

We can't see 50 billion light years away. We can see something under 14 billion light years. Something we are seeing 1 billion light years away very likely isn't even there anymore, or doesn't look anything like what we are seeing. Something 100 light years away that might seem completely great might not even be there anymore, could have been blown away by an asteroid 97 years ago or something.

The probabilities that we will circumvent the limitations of relativistic physics are slim to none. Again, the problem always ties back to energy requirements. As soon as you start talking about things like creating wormholes (this is only slightly less hypothetical than space folding) you are in the realm of requiring you can harness more energy than the entire energy output of a sun.

[tikcol]

You said they’re “considered habitable” numerous times (that’s confirmation) and then said NASA also has said that. NASA hasn’t said that. None of the planets are considered to be anything. They don’t know if they’re rocky, liquid or gaseous. They only roughly know their size and that they are in -what we consider- as a habitable zone.

That's not true. There's more than one way to ascertain the conditions of planets light years from us.

[Mihalik]

Well I was using the radius of what we can see in the observable universe to get that number, which is actually 46.6 billion.

Your second point is also true. When we look at stars in the sky we are literally looking into the past, which is sort of a mind fk if you really try to wrap your head around it lol.

As far as energy requirements go, (this is a bit off topic)don't we already have something built that can produce more energy than the sun? Something in China maybe? I feel like I've read about something like that. Or was it the temperature?

Radius doesn't really matter as whatever you are observing is in a direct line from you. And I seriously doubt that supposed news about some energy source that produces more energy than the sun, considering the sun is a fusion reactor several million times larger than our planet itself.