What if we dropped interstellar ambitions and focused on understanding our home system?

The post demonstrates how infeasible it is to travel to a location outside our solar system anytime in the next several generations.

What are some things you would like to see humanity do within our solar system within the next century? When do you think it is feasible to achieve that goal?

  • shiri
    14•1 year ago

    @saba @Recant We’re definitely not going to have a moon colony in our lifetime, and a manned mars mission would only be a disaster.

    The reason we haven’t really gone back to the moon and don’t have a colony there is because it’s much more expensive to access and offers no real benefit over space stations. It’s perk is low gravity instead of microgravity, but it trades off in massively increased fuel and time costs as well as the inability to “dodge” hazards. The moon has no special resources, no capacity for terraforming, and if we were wanting to build enclosed habitats we could do that more easily in a space station.

    Mars is kinda worse because as far as I can tell we’re finding problems faster than we’re finding solutions. My favorite recent example of this is that we discovered anyone we sent would go blind before reaching the planet (microgravity destroys your vision over time, it took us forever to find out because the astronauts were hiding it so they wouldn’t be disqualified from future flights).