Author Topic: Let me............... Tel-e-port you!  (Read 84822 times)

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Offline The E

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« Last Edit: November 06, 2009, 05:39:39 pm by Colonol Dekker »
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Offline General Battuta

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Re: The Earth is uninhabitable
Quote
We are finely tuned survival machines that have evolved to survive in a niche on one particular planet in one particular epoch. Even our own planet is unimaginably hostile to our kind of life for most of its history.

This is one of the reasons that I find most SF in which mankind spreads across the galaxy remarkably silly.

We're an incredibly niche solution, even with the benefit of technology. Something much more rapacious and much more adaptive would probably do a lot better (something that needn't haul around a bubble of its absurd niche environment.)

 
Re: The Earth is uninhabitable
At least, most of the time.



Wow that's 5 minutes I'll never get back.

This is one of the reasons that I find most SF in which mankind spreads across the galaxy remarkably silly.

We're an incredibly niche solution, even with the benefit of technology. Something much more rapacious and much more adaptive would probably do a lot better (something that needn't haul around a bubble of its absurd niche environment.)

Humans are the most adaptive creatures known. We've colonised all four corners of the world and live for periods of time outside in orbit above the planet. There's no reason that humans won't spread across the known galaxy if it becomes both technologically possible and economically viable.

 

Offline iamzack

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Re: The Earth is uninhabitable
Yeah, I don't really get it. We're very resourceful and good at manipulating our environments to suit our needs.

I spose I'm just missing the point.

What's the point?
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Offline Colonol Dekker

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Re: The Earth is uninhabitable
We can't live anywhere unless we duplicate optimal conditions. Don't believe me? Sleep in your garden naked and don't go back inside for a week.
Campaigns I've added my distinctiveness to-
- Blue Planet: Battle Captains
-Battle of Neptune
-Between the Ashes 2
-Blue planet: Age of Aquarius
-FOTG?
-Inferno R1
-Ribos: The aftermath / -Retreat from Deneb
-Sol: A History
-TBP EACW teaser
-Earth Brakiri war
-TBP Fortune Hunters (I think?)
-TBP Relic
-Trancsend (Possibly?)
-Uncharted Territory
-Vassagos Dirge
-War Machine
(Others lost to the mists of time and no discernible audit trail)

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Offline General Battuta

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Re: The Earth is uninhabitable
Quote
Humans are the most adaptive creatures known. We've colonised all four corners of the world and live for periods of time outside in orbit above the planet. There's no reason that humans won't spread across the known galaxy if it becomes both technologically possible and economically viable.

Ah, but the point is that we're very narrowly adapted to a very rare set of environmental conditions and we've only been around for a very, very, very, very, very small period of time. We're talking a blink here.

If you just measure success by 'how long you stick around', the dinosaurs are still outplaying us tremendously.

I'll quote myself:

Quote
Something much more rapacious and much more adaptive would probably do a lot better (something that needn't haul around a bubble of its absurd niche environment.)

We're far from optimized for galactic domination. I'm sure there are designs out there that can do everything we can do, but do it better, and then do a lot more on top of it.

Saying that 'we're the most adaptive species known' is both silly (every other species we know is a product of the same environment) and dubious (cockroaches will probably survive a lot of things that we, as a species, couldn't.)

We can't live anywhere unless we duplicate optimal conditions. Don't believe me? Sleep in your garden naked and don't go back inside for a week.

Precisely! To get anything done, we have to drag a little chunk of our stupid home with us. Whereas Bob the Post-Singularity Xenomorph is a perfect, immortal machine, endlessly adaptable, at home in every environment from the cold of interstellar space to the accretion disk of a black hole. If it's got matter, and it's got energy (and arguably only one of the two is neessary) s/he/it can eat it and make more of itself!

 

Offline The E

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Re: The Earth is uninhabitable
Hmm. Okay then, what about the 70+ % of the Earth's surface that are completely uninhabitable? What about environments that do not have a Nitrogen/Oxygen/CO2 atmosphere at the right ambient pressure?
Remember, to survive, we need an atmosphere that has certain minimum and maximum criteria in terms of gases allowed. We need liquid water. We need an ambient temperature in a certain, rather narrow range. We need Gravity to be near or around 1g. We need radiation shielding. And then, of course, we need something to eat as well.

So, our adaptiveness stops when considering other planets in our solar system, or even a large range of environments on our own planet.

Recreating an environment that allows all those conditions indefinitely from scratch is a non-trivial exercise (as several large-scale experiments in the 90s proved).
For the very same reason, Space Colonisation is highly unlikely.
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Offline Black Wolf

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Re: The Earth is uninhabitable
We can't live anywhere unless we duplicate optimal conditions. Don't believe me? Sleep in your garden naked and don't go back inside for a week.

I could do that - hell, the aboriginals did that for 40000 years. We don't all live in frozen wastelands you know :p

And what's with the hate-on for humanity here recently? We can and do live on all sorts of weird environments that most of us would consider uninhabitable, from the arctic to the sahara. They're not ideal, but we can live there. We have long term presences in Antarctica which could turn into permanant residences if there was a reason to make it so - only power would be a concern (and even that would only be six months of the year - full time solar for the rest) - otherwise, with enough impetus and enough associated funding, we could have a self sustaining antarctic settlement - something the often vaunted cockroach can not do (there are no cockroaches in antarctica).

In fact, the reasons we don't live in some of the ****tier places in the world is almost entirely because there're nicer places to live - it's not that we couldn;t do it, just that we don't have a good enough reason to. And as for the 70% of the world that's uninhabitable, tell that to the people who live and work on those massive ocean liners - relatively minor modifications - I'm mostly thinking about food supply and again, power - and you could have something completely self sustaining where someone could live for years at a time without ever needing to go onto dry land. But again, why bother when there are perfectly good places to live already on the land? Now granted, these examples still have the atmosphere, gravity, ozone layer and magnetic fields and whatnot, but I can guarantee you that if we found some way to move around at a reasonable speed and the only planets we found were as cold as Antarctica or covered with an ocean, we'd eventually find a way to colonize them. If the past 10000 years of human civilization (and the 50000+ year African diaspora) has proven anything it's that we can do anything we set our minds to as a species.
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Offline General Battuta

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Re: The Earth is uninhabitable
Not a hate-on at all. Humanity is adaptable and amazing. But we need to keep our perspective here; we have no evidence that we're doing particularly well in the long-run, or that our highly cognitive strategy necessarily leads to a survival advantage.

 

Offline Colonol Dekker

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Re: The Earth is uninhabitable
Early survival was based on factors like passed on knowledge and pre-established success. Like hunting routines and sheltered domicile. Even birds use nests. Imagine if a dozen people were miraculously beamed halfway across the galaxy to another slightly less habitable environment.........with zero support.



What would the odds be?

by the way, i'm not hating Humanity just being objective in expressing a viewpoint :)
Campaigns I've added my distinctiveness to-
- Blue Planet: Battle Captains
-Battle of Neptune
-Between the Ashes 2
-Blue planet: Age of Aquarius
-FOTG?
-Inferno R1
-Ribos: The aftermath / -Retreat from Deneb
-Sol: A History
-TBP EACW teaser
-Earth Brakiri war
-TBP Fortune Hunters (I think?)
-TBP Relic
-Trancsend (Possibly?)
-Uncharted Territory
-Vassagos Dirge
-War Machine
(Others lost to the mists of time and no discernible audit trail)

Your friendly Orestes tactical controller.

Secret bomb God.
That one time I got permabanned and got to read who was being bitxhy about me :p....
GO GO DEKKER RANGERSSSS!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
President of the Scooby Doo Model Appreciation Society
The only good Zod is a dead Zod
NEWGROUNDS COMEDY GOLD, UPDATED DAILY
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Offline The E

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Re: The Earth is uninhabitable
Seriously, this is not hating on humanity. Unless being aware of humanities' limitations is somehow hating on it*.

And seriously, unless you can have a 24/7/356, autonomous presence in Antarctica, the Gobi desert, and the Ocean floor, without the people living there having to get back to nicer areas of the globe every once in a while, I don't think space colonisation is really viable.


*Disclaimer: I'm an Extropian
If I'm just aching this can't go on
I came from chasing dreams to feel alone
There must be changes, miss to feel strong
I really need lifе to touch me
--Evergrey, Where August Mourns

 

Offline mxlm

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Re: The Earth is uninhabitable
Not a hate-on at all. Humanity is adaptable and amazing. But we need to keep our perspective here; we have no evidence that we're doing particularly well in the long-run, or that our highly cognitive strategy necessarily leads to a survival advantage.

Yeah. The Industrial Revolution isn't more than a couple centuries old, and we can hardly say for certain it's going to be viable long-term. There're certainly a number of plausible scenarios (NBC apocalypse, anthropogenic climate change) in which it proves anything but.
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Offline Dark RevenantX

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Re: The Earth is uninhabitable
We need teleportation.  It's the only feasible way to get across these distances...

 
Re: The Earth is uninhabitable
*Disclaimer: I'm an Extropian

See Scrubs, episode 1.

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Offline Flipside

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Re: The Earth is uninhabitable
Bloody silly way of checking for inhabitability :p

 

Offline Bobboau

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Re: The Earth is uninhabitable
I don't see why our environmental needs are much of a handicap, we are extremely good at manipulating it.
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Offline Kosh

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Re: The Earth is uninhabitable
Quote
We are finely tuned survival machines that have evolved to survive in a niche on one particular planet in one particular epoch. Even our own planet is unimaginably hostile to our kind of life for most of its history.

This is one of the reasons that I find most SF in which mankind spreads across the galaxy remarkably silly.

We're an incredibly niche solution, even with the benefit of technology. Something much more rapacious and much more adaptive would probably do a lot better (something that needn't haul around a bubble of its absurd niche environment.)


Actually it isn't so silly given that we can create our own artificial habitats, such as the International Space Station or in the not too distant future a real moon base. A more down to Earth example is modern nuclear submarines. They can stay submerged I've heard from 8-12 months (correct me if I'm wrong, but either way it is a very long time). Now, doing that is 100% unnatural, yet we do it anyway.

Quote
And what's with the hate-on for humanity here recently?

Indeed. One thing the nature worshippers don't get is that "Nature" is not gentle kind and loving, but rather (if it can be anthropromorphized) it is a cruel sadistic ***** that's out to get us, and at one point almost succeeded. 99.9% of all the animal species that have ever existed have been wiped out in one way or another. Of course I'm not saying that we should pollute our environment to death because it is still our life support system to a degree, but we should most definately NOT worship it or even respect it. We are at the apex of evolution on this planet, we shouldn't forget that.
« Last Edit: October 29, 2009, 09:03:49 pm by Kosh »
"The reason for this is that the original Fortran got so convoluted and extensive (10's of millions of lines of code) that no-one can actually figure out how it works, there's a massive project going on to decode the original Fortran and write a more modern system, but until then, the UK communication network is actually relying heavily on 35 year old Fortran that nobody understands." - Flipside

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Offline Scotty

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Re: The Earth is uninhabitable
I'm okay with not worshipping it, but not respecting it is completely different.  Respect is not deference.

 

Offline Rodo

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Re: The Earth is uninhabitable
So, what's to argue about this :P ? We are well aware of our limitations when it comes to survivability outside of our optimal environment, yet I think what makes us good candidates to conquer the universe is that, aside from all other known life forms, we are actually able to manipulate our environment and even taking it with us into space.

Yeah, we are lame, but we are still the best out there ^^
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Offline General Battuta

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Re: The Earth is uninhabitable
Quote
We are finely tuned survival machines that have evolved to survive in a niche on one particular planet in one particular epoch. Even our own planet is unimaginably hostile to our kind of life for most of its history.

This is one of the reasons that I find most SF in which mankind spreads across the galaxy remarkably silly.

We're an incredibly niche solution, even with the benefit of technology. Something much more rapacious and much more adaptive would probably do a lot better (something that needn't haul around a bubble of its absurd niche environment.)


Actually it isn't so silly given that we can create our own artificial habitats, such as the International Space Station or in the not too distant future a real moon base.

Yet we can't build our own self-sustaining biospheres. In the future we probably will be able to, but the fact that we need to is itself a major handicap.

Quote
We are at the apex of evolution on this planet, we shouldn't forget that.

Not yet. We're the current dominant species, but we haven't held that seat for very long.