The Space Program

[Keanumoreira]

IMO, what we need to do is leave the stars alone for now, and focus on our own system. Let the Hubble Telescope and SEDI do their thing. It's high time that we improve our communication systems and start branching out into space communities and test society there before we waste precious resources on things we can't even reach at the moment. We can research and improve our jump drives or Ion engines or whatever the hell it is- later, and focus on what is actually important: expansion. Discovery can come later. Edited September 25, 2011 by Keanumoreira

[WrathOfDeadguy]

Agreed fully. We already know we have one probably inhabitable world (Mars) in this solar system other than our own, possibly two more (Titan and Europa, the latter of which definitely has liquid water beneath a crust of ice). We know that our sun has a projected lifespan of several billion more years before its later stages threaten life on Earth or any other potentially habitable body. We can put human beings on another world in our own solar system and retain the ability to communicate with any colonies we establish within our solar system. We cannot yet put human beings on a planet in another solar system- indeed, despite the knowledge that there are planets in other solar systems that lie within their stars' habitable zones, we don't even know if those bodies can be landed on at all. Again, we know we can land on Mars. We've been doing it since the Viking probes with every conceivable landing system from braking rockets to parachutes to airbag cocoons- and often a combination of those methods.

 

Other solar systems can wait until we have further developed our own. The chances of an event colossal enough to disrupt our solar system's habitability are substantially lower than those of our planet suffering partial or total devastation. We know that Earth has been struck numerous times by objects large enough to cause mass extinctions. We know that such impacts still occur in our solar system. That knowledge presents us with a credible and immediate threat to our existence, yet we devote few resources and even less media attention to dealing with that threat. Once we have secured our long-term survival at a planetary level of redundancy, then we will be in a better position to conduct the research necessary to make extrasolar missions feasible.

Edited September 27, 2011 by Wrath_Of_Deadguy01

[Jopo1980]

Some argue that in order to guarantee our survival as a species we MUST become a two planet civilization at the very least. So in our own solar system we have to get to Mars and eventually colonize and terraform it and that will take huge amounts of resources. Right now just getting to orbit takes a lot of effort. The first important step I believe will be the development of non-rocket space launch techniques like the Space Elevator which would allow us to send personnel and material to orbit much easier and allow for bigger construction projects there. For resources we could consider mining the asteroid belt just beyond Mars. So there´s plenty to do just in our own solar system, and when we are advanced enough to go to other star systems we will undoubtedly do that as well.