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No Planets.

1 (0.7%)

Dead Planets Only.

11 (7.7%)

Dead Planets and planets that have the potential to support life.

22 (15.5%)

Dead Planets, planets that have the potential to support life, and planets that have microbial life/proto-life.

37 (26.1%)

Dead Planets, planets that have the potential to support life, planets that have microbial life/proto-life, and planets with pre-existing biospheres that lack any sapient species.

43 (30.3%)

Dead Planets, planets that have the potential to support life, planets that have microbial life/proto-life, planets with pre-existing biospheres that lack any sapient species, and planets that are inhabited by other sapient species.

21 (14.8%)

Other.

5 (3.5%)

No Opinion.

2 (1.4%)

Total Members Voted: 142

[Criptfeind]

Okay. Heres the thing. I will go though it step by step.

CF: I say we colonize away!

A: No! We should stay on earth!

CF: That's silly. It would be hard to make earth support us!

A: If we just have tight controls, we can make the earth last forever!

CF: But the people would not want that! Do not force people to be so strictly regulated when it would be easier to just expand! It would be horrible to force people to stay on earth!

A: Whats so horrible about it? It will prevent a mass die off!

CF: What you talking about, the point we are arguing about is weather or not colonization would be a good thing. Not about the die that would happen with no regulation and no die off.

The argument here is about the ethics of Terraforming. Saying that there should be no Terraforming is a perfectly acceptable stance, but you should argue that vs other Terraforming options,  not against itself and the possible ramifications of such.

[Africa]

What I've been saying is that terraforming a planet with anything more than microbes is bad, but permissible in a hypothetical situation where it's the only way to create enough resources to keep people alive. That's my take on the thread question.

For the other, it's less of a "mass die-off" that I'm thinking of, than a continuation of today's situation, where huge numbers of people die of malnutrition, starvation, lack of drinkable water, and so forth, when there is in fact more than enough food to keep everyone alive and decently healthy.

[mainiac]

well, that is good to know. if space habitats don't require exotic materials, then I suppose terraforming would be restricted only to the worlds closest to earth conditions.

The really big paradigm shift that you need to make about colonization though is that even if we found a planet that was perfect in every way, it still wouldn't be better then an artificial habitat.  No planet has:

1) Earthlike gravity but no gravity well to keep you from launching ships
2) An atmosphere to breathe but no atmosphere to interfere with space travel or to create adverse weather
3) Sunlight to power solar panels 24/7 coupled with an easily controlled day/night cycle
4) A zero gravity environment industrial district just a short distance from the normal gravity residential and commercial areas
5) Essentially unlimited amounts of space to build in and a zero gravity environment to facilitate construction

Even if we found the garden of Eden, an O'Neil cylinder would be a better environment.  But there's enough material in the moon alone to make many billions of O'Neil cylinders.  Terraforming another planet just doesn't make sense because if you can make it up into space and live there long enough to go to another planet, it doesn't make sense to head down another gravity well.  It's like moving back into a cave after you've built yourself a luxury condominium.  No cave on earth could be better then what you can make for yourself.  Other planets might be useful as temporary greenhouses, mining sites or refueling outposts.  But in terms of long term habitation, space is just more friendly once you've tamed the environment.

[andrea]

yes, you are probably right. Although I guess some people would still like to live on planets.

the sun, the sky, the landscape... there is plenty of reasons to live on planets, even though they may not justify extensive terraforming.
It is not all about what makes an ideal habitat... it should also be interesting.

personally, I wouldn't mind living in a space station of some kind.[1]
but I think many people are going to stay planet dwellers. convincing a whole specie that living in space is better is going to take a long, long, time.

furthermore, for the planets easiest to terraform and even more for those who are already earth like the cost in resources per billion of inhabitants may be lower than that of just building O'Neill cylinders(or whatever else we are building). This last one is just a random guess, however, and should not be taken too seriously.

that said, I can hardly imagine any terraforming outside the solar system unless we get some faster than light magic.
compared to terraforming something that is light years away, just taking a space habitat and accelerating it in the right direction is almost trivial. ( well, unless you use some kind of von neumann machine, but that might open a whole other can of worms).

the only planet that could reasonably be terraformed without a deep change of either our understanding of the universe or of our culture, is Mars. Which seems to be quite dead at the present time, aviding the moral problems of the opening post.

anyway, all this post is based on opinions, so feel free to contradict what I said, or add to it.


[1]As long as there are windows, access to zero g areas ( who knows, may be restricted for industrial maintenance use only), space walks and possibly semi-frequent spaceflight ( even if I don't get to fly anything).
without those it would just be like living inside a tin can. A comfortable one, but still a tin can.

[Bohandas]

Gonna need to set up on other planets anyway in order to get the kind of resources needed for the kind of giga-construction projects that people keep talking about.

[MetalSlimeHunt]

From the poll, the only thing we all seem to agree upon is that we have to get the hell off of Earth.

[mainiac]

Gonna need to set up on other planets anyway in order to get the kind of resources needed for the kind of giga-construction projects that people keep talking about.

Asteroid belts would be a better source of materials then planets.  The entire point of the O'Neill cylinder view is that low gravity is a boon.

[1]As long as there are windows, access to zero g areas ( who knows, may be restricted for industrial maintenance use only), space walks and possibly semi-frequent spaceflight ( even if I don't get to fly anything).
without those it would just be like living inside a tin can. A comfortable one, but still a tin can.

Half the world lives in urban environments (and much higher in richer nations) where their access to green space is severely constrained by real estate prices.  Whereas in an O'Neil sphere environment, real estate is free and basically limitless, even in a dense city.  In a fully developed space city of several thousand stations clustered together you could even have entire garden stations with nothing else.  In a space environment, the cost of urban land is no more then the cost of steel.  So it's actually terrestrial, not space life that would feel crowded.

[andrea]

So it's actually terrestrial, not space life that would feel crowded.

I think you missed the point of that part. In fact, I don't think I have said anything about it in my post... even if I was alone , if there was none of the things I listed it would be like living in a very small world. and knowing that there is something else outside, that might as well not exist because I am refused access to it, would be terrible for me. I would feel like a fish in a ball, if the ball was not transparent. TRAPPED!

in an huge space city like you described, with thousands of linked cylinders, most of those problems might be solved anyway... either it is a tube so long that I can travel for a very long time without seeing its end, which may be enough, or the cylinders are scattered , and to get from one to another you need to go through space, which is exactly what I wanted when In first place.

[Criptfeind]

Won’t you lose ‘gravity’ if you tie a bunch of these things together?

[andrea]

if speed doesn't change, no. "gravity" depends on tangential speed ( velocity? I think I read that the vector was called velocity) and radius.

unless by tie together you mean side by side. in that case, you are probably going to make a mess and blow up the whole thing.

( ok, a bit exagerated maybe... but when you deal with rotating things, it is always better to link them on the axis.

[rarborman]

Other planets should not be fucked with, earth should be only home for humans.

[DJ]

Sure, terraforming of other planets will mean destruction of entire ecosystems, but so did human expansion on Earth, and I doubt you'd find many people who think we should've stayed put in Africa. IMO it's our manifest destiny to colonize all the worlds that we can.

[MetalSlimeHunt]

Not to mention that once we reach a certain point of technological advancement, it's not going to be possible to keep people from leaving the old Blue Marble to set up shop elsewhere. Even if we never crack FTL travel, our star system is still farily easy to traverse.

[lemon10]

Not to mention that once we reach a certain point of technological advancement, it's not going to be possible to keep people from leaving the old Blue Marble to set up shop elsewhere. Even if we never crack FTL travel, our star system is still farily easy to traverse.

I gotta disagree. Terraforming and making a interstellar craft ages (depending on the tech level that we end up having), and would be costly enough to probably take a massive corporation or large government to do.
I can't imagine any government or corporation doing it due to the massive costs of both making a interstellar craft and transforming, in addition to the lack of any type of returns for centuries.

While it is possible that interstellar ships and off planet habitats might be cheap enough for a small company or very rich people to afford them, I doubt terraforming will ever be cheap and fast enough to pay for the cost.

[DJ]

Well, terraforming may not be quite the right word, since I don't really think that other planets will be made into replicas of Earth. Instead they'll just be reshaped to better suit the colonists' interests. So while humans may still live under domes and wear protective suits and oxygen tanks, the planet will still by heavily changed through replacement of native biomes with farms of either genetically engineered crops or useful native lifeforms. Or hell, if the planet isn't too hostile, they may even modify humans themselves to be able to breathe the local atmosphere.