Has it been too long ... ?

[Perraine]

Aye, and that's a sad thing to think about IMHO. As I stated in my OP, 'twas a press conference from some corporate type that prompted this thread, and which got me thinking Perhaps to the detriment of my spirit <sigh>

 

But I'm an olde fart too, and "pepperidge farm remembers" :happy: . The high's and lows's (even the small ones, like my first colour television) The birth of the Internet, the falling of regimes.

 

Things like this really tickle my squibbley's (ignoring some of the commentators self aggrandisement) But so few today seem to care.

 

Actual images of another world!!! One that seems almost like we could live there! We have desert regions here in Australia that I've been too and trained in that don't look much different to those images! You'd almost half expect to see clouds in the sky or, like we see in Australia, a "wet season" where that barren landscape suddenly transforms into something wondrous.

 

<sigh>

[Striker879]

So many of those images are ones I remember first seeing on APOD ... break out the 3d glasses:

 

Yogi And Friends In 3D

 

I rarely missed the latest news from Spirit and Opportunity, reveled in their successes and waited out their trials and tribulations with sincere hope they would prevail. For some reason Curiosity hasn't grabbed the same "mind space" with me. Perhaps it's just me getting jaded, but it also could be that I've grown into the notion that Mars is unlikely to become a second home to mankind. Yes we will land there some day, and may even establish a permanent presence but Mars lacks one thing that is essential if the planet ever had any hope of becoming anything more than a scientific station ... a magnetosphere on the scale required to preserve an atmosphere dense enough for unaided surface breathing. You terraform and turn polar and below surface water reservoirs into a thicker atmosphere only to lose it to solar wind again.

 

We'd once again be burning through a limited resource until we have depleted it.

 

Who knows, maybe that is humanity's destiny ... to become the locusts of the galaxy.

[Perraine]

Yeah, terraforming Mars is a fantasy, and I'm surprised people still believe it (although, then again, maybe I'm not) And not just because of the lack of a dense breathable atmosphere, but also the magnetosphere is required for it's radiation shielding as well.

 

I could see "bio-domes" being a thing without much "new" technology being required. Although the engineering requirements would still be staggering, and it would be way past our lifetimes before their would be a "Martian" born human, but it's something to pray for and definetly "doable".

 

It may be just me, but I tend to anthropomorphise "things" that I'm interested in, and I've kept track of the adventures of the Mars rovers since the beginning, and I'll admit, I shed a tear or two. Next however, they are sending a fricken' Drone to Mars! That is going to be some next level cool right there!

 

Maybe we are the "first" to reach this level of intelligence, and perhaps we are the ones who "seed" the Galaxy, But I feel it's going to take some serious re-construction of the human "condition" in order for us to get that far. I believe we will get there, but I'd prefer we do it the "easy" way rather than the "hard" way.

[Striker879]

You need to remember that in evolutionary terms we are still basically hunter gathers (who just don't do their own hunting or gathering anymore for the most part). All of those unbidden things that drive us were what got us to this point, allowed us to survive a population bottleneck in Africa that could have wiped us out, drove us to seek new lands to raise our families ... basically populate the entire planet. Even our microbiomes haven't been able to keep up with the changes we've thrust upon it (do you think we would have succeeded as a species with the dental problems that are endemic to us today ... we don't eat what we evolved eating for millions of years, and our mouth microbiomes reflect that change in diet).

 

Much of what drives us in the directions we are hurtling today is the same basic inner drives that drove my ancestor 50,000 years ago. If 50,000 years isn't enough time to change the inner man I doubt we're likely to "fix" us in a few decades.