What are your thoughts on the very real possibility that during our lifetime humans will set foot on another planet for...

What are your thoughts on the very real possibility that during our lifetime humans will set foot on another planet for the first time? Or that thousands of years from now (assuming humanity survives that long) this event might be considered the single most important moment in history, on par with invention of the wheel, agriculture etc.?

Would it really be so celebrated? Reaching Mars might be a benchmark, but that wouldn't make it some kind of spectacular achievement. Most everyone's life would remain the same.

That's why I said thousands of years from now. Like you said the impact on people living now would be minimal, hardly more than trivia, but if you look at it from the perspective of someone living in an advanced society spanning multiple planets or even galaxies the year man first left earth for another planet is surely a game changing moment in history from their viewpoint. Like the invention of agriculture was except this time there's a clear recorded time and place for it.

It'd be neat, might give us some scientific progress, but its utility is limited. Earth is already the best planet for humans, no planet nearby has anything better to offer.

You won't

Unless we somehow fuck up and make Earth inhospitable (and I'm optimistic that won't happen long-term), planets are basically just for resources and energy. The real game-changer is going to be when we have renewable energy with the fuel density of gasoline, and automation capable of performing 95% of tasks currently done by man. At that point we will be limited only by human ingenuity and the laws of physics; we can always exploit deep-sea reactors rather than going to distant planets for high pressure, we can always go the the moon for any low-gravity needs, etc.

What really gives me tfw is knowing we will probably attain biological immortality within 1000 years (personally I'd bet on 200 years), so incredibly close on the scale of human existence, let alone life on Earth, yet I will still miss it.

>no planet nearby has anything better to offer.
Nearby is a very relative term and we know incredibly little about any planet not in our solar system. In our search for earth-like exoplanets we've covered less than one percent of what we can observe even with our current technology, barring all future scientific advancements. People don't seem to understand just how much there is packed into every "inch" of sky from our viewpoint.
>planets are basically just for resources and energy
Yes, but we don't know what resources lie out there. Even if we could never find a planet better than earth, and managed not to fuck it up, mining distant planets could still prove extremely valuable to society.
>What really gives me tfw is knowing we will probably attain biological immortality within 1000 years
I'll let you have your feels, but I'm incredibly skeptical of this. Personally I don't believe this goal will ever be met, even while acknowledging how many other things the same has been said of. Certainly not in the next thousand years.

god that image makes me mad with how dumb it is

>age of exploration
>spend months on a ship working 12+ hours a day every day
>after the first week the water has algae growing in it
>fruits and vegetables only last around 10 days, after that you're just eating biscuits and the occasional meat so heavily salted that it makes you want to drink the water
>biscuits are infested with grubs, but that's a good thing because its protein
>get scurvy
>suffer horribly
>die from malnutrition and complications of your untreated syphilis

And the thing about space exploration is that its almost certainly not going to be done with people on ships boldly going, but rather by nano-machines.

>Yes, but we don't know what resources lie out there. Even if we could never find a planet better than earth, and managed not to fuck it up, mining distant planets could still prove extremely valuable to society.
What could we possibly need? If we do need uranium or other rare valuable fuels in order to progress to the point of interplanet travel, then we will likely never get there in the first place and we'll be condemned to be stuck here. Once you get to the actinides and such, uses become very specific and limited. Our future will likely be continue to be built on carbon and silicon.
>I'll let you have your feels, but I'm incredibly skeptical of this. Personally I don't believe this goal will ever be met, even while acknowledging how many other things the same has been said of. Certainly not in the next thousand years.
Just in one hundred years we've gone from "Yeah there are these things called cells and they do some microscopic shit and reproduce, they contain this shit called protein and nucleic acid but we don't really know what it's used for" to the fuckton we know now.

Granted, there's a lot we don't know, but our knowledge is accelerating, especially thanks to improved computational power and statistics that let us dissect massive webs of genetic interactions. In model systems in mice we've already been able to extend lifespans significantly, and in other species like some jellyfish we know that biological immortality is at least possible for animals.

I'm not saying it will be a magic pill or "gene therapy bath" or anything that simple. However, if China continues with their eugenics and gene editing programs for just 100 years, we could start to see embryos at least of mammals successfully modified to significantly lengthen things. From there, we continue to attack age-related diseases like Parkinson's, Alzheimer's, cancer, etc on a case-by-case basis, systematically mutating-out whatever alleles promote for those more.

oh also forgot to mention that maiming accidents while working on those ships were the norm rather than the rare exception, any small cut that got infected would require an amputation because there was no other way available to treat it. Also it was quite common for a ship to get hit by a storm and go down with all hands killed.

Why the fuck would anyone want to go on an expedition like that?

>What could we possibly need?
How could I know? There could be materials with possible uses I couldn't even dream of. The most valuable commodities now weren't in fashion 200 years ago, and we at least knew about the existence of most of them. Why would anyone want tantalum?
>Just in one hundred years we've gone from
True, but there's a stark difference between what we know and what our bodies are capable of. Not downplaying scientific advancements of course but most of our knowledge is purely hypothetical and we have barely done any human testing even on stuff we feel certain about. Not to mention everything we know realize we don't know.

I'm sure medical science will keep advancing exponentially and embryo screening etc. will have an impact on our lifespans, but I'm skeptical as to how much our lives really can be prolonged. To 200 years for sure but immortality?

Getting to space has huge overhead though. Why go there to find more tantalum or platinum or whatever else when it's cheaper to deep-sea mine?

Fair, immortality-immortality is extremely theoretical. Everything breaks down eventually which will require artificial brains/brain transplants, something we haven't even scratched the surface on. Most other aspects we're improving on quickly though. It won't be a sudden breakthrough but a gradual improvement of human lifespans until they virtually approximate immortality. An average immortal person living today would still die within 1000 years iirc, due to disease, car accidents, homicide, etc.

>Getting to space has huge overhead though.
Now it does. Flying across the globe to just for a business meeting probably seemed like a ridiculous idea 100 years ago too.
>Why go there to find more tantalum or platinum or whatever else when it's cheaper to deep-sea mine
I was more thinking of the possibility of discovering new elements not found on earth than replacing the ones we've mined out, but even there I could see a large scale mining operation off-planet being more financially profitable than deep-sea mining. We only have one planet to deep-sea mine and the deposits might be incredibly scarce. We have billions and billions of planets to choose from for our mining operation. We could find a planet where the "new aluminium" is literally covering the earth everywhere you look.

Mars could have some type of valuable resource we can use, an indication of life or water or some sort of scientific break through and/or discovery. Regardless, will be a major achievement of human intelligence and capability.

Yeah maybe it won't change much for the people on Earth dramatically but it will be pretty incredible to just say it happened, that we did it and we can set the flag pole further next time.

I hope it happens. Anyone saying it's a waste of money should take a look at the ratio of American government defense/military budget and all the global NASA/other space orgs funding/investments and costs. Try more than 10:1.

Earth, as great as it is, is on a time limit.

Assuming humans don't wipe themselves out, or a surprise extinction event happens, the Sun will eventually become a red giant and render Earth inhabitable.

If humanity wants to still be around billions of years later, we HAVE to expand beyond Earth.

Yay a barren wasteland full of craters and rocks how exciting

Same happened when Columbus found the americas. Even more extreme when Leif did. Almost nobody was affected by it immediately.

>we will probably attain biological immortality within 1000 years (personally I'd bet on 200 years)
I will never understand how people could be this delusional.

Mars is a lethal desert with extreme storms. America is only hard at first, but still not a wasteland.

I love it. And I think that when people say that we spend too much money on space trave they are literally retarded. It's like a 15th century Britton saying that they spend too much money on seafaring.

Settling space and expanding to offworld endeavors is the single most important thing right now for the continuation of human civilization. There are so many things that are just so much easier to do in space than on a planet, and if developed properly, the solar system can hold quintillions of people and still feel rather sparsely populated. With quintillions of people you can have entire earths worth of researchers working on anything from a cure to cancer to a beautifully illustrated trap doujin.

We're already exploring our solar system, but no one seems to care. Maybe we should have another manned moon expedition, only this time it'll be open to volunteers.

you know a good realistic book about boats, and realistic pirates in medivela/pre-modern times?

would love to know stuff about all of this

Extremely interested in the possibilities of terraforming and am aiming for PhD programs in related areas next year.
I doubt I'd live to see the fruits of my labour. A man can dream though, a man can dream.

Dude we can't get our shit together on earth. We're waiting for Christ or building nukes. No one seems to give a fuck about doing anything thereselves

>What can be more palpably absurd than the prospect held out of locomotives traveling twice as fast as stagecoaches?

>during our lifetime

Not possible. The closest solar system is several light years away, and it's almost guaranteed that the planets in that solar system are dead or unlivable because most planets are.

WHAT ABOUT EXPLORING THE OCEAN FLOOR?? ANYONE??

terra firma not agua mkay? james cameron is not my explorer and brobably alien too :DD
praise elon musk

>What really gives me tfw is knowing we will probably attain biological immortality within 1000 years (personally I'd bet on 200 years)
Maybe we will. Trouble is, we'd still be exposed to the risk of dying from accident. And in an existence where humans are biologically immortal, accidents seem like they could assume greatly inflated significance. All of a sudden getting hit by a vehicle doesn't just rob you of several decades of existence, it robs of you potentially thousands of years of existence. So in a world of biologically immortal humans, I imagine that some people would be too paranoid to ever leave extremely well-controlled environments, while other people would say "fuck it" and take a lot of risks. Well, it's already like that, of course, but it would be a more extreme version.