Do you have the spirit of a planetary pioneer?

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Rose65

Well-known Member
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If you were in your youth and prime, living in the future, would you have the appetite to be a pioneer settler/coloniser on a suitable planet? Assuming the atmosphere and everything to sustain life was there, similar to those American pioneers like in Laura Ingalls books.
This would be the most extreme of moves, to leave earth never to return. Very likely be put into a state of hibernation for the light years of travel.
It's the ultimate adventure and I believe it will happen.Humans will use up this earth eventually and need to go elsewhere. We are well underway on that! Then our best most fertile and willing volunteers will need to re-seed our species.
 

Rose65 said:
It's the ultimate adventure and I believe it will happen.
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It was the then fanciful idea of so many of us boomers growing up during the space race. But, as I've grown older I came to realize we've a lot of work to do first - like learning how to get along with one another and respect our differences. We are going to meet a lot of differences out there so we need to be able to handle the difference just between ourselves.

What will the explorers look like? A diverse group of white, black, red, yellow, etc. or will they all be uniformally
one race? Will they be christian, muslim, jewish, atheist, etc. or will they all be one religion? Diversity is still an unfolding idea, but we have got to stop killing one another over our differences before we can reach into space. We will encounter different beings vastly different than we are. Will we kill them like the explorers past tried to kill and subjugate the native populations? We've got lots to do here between ourselves before we can begin to entertain the idea of space exploration. The United States already has a Space Army division in its military. Seems to me it expresses a frame of mind we need to rid ourselves of. We've a long way to go.
 
Makes for easy science fiction and fills some futurist news articles but in reality we humans are decades to centuries away from actually being capable of leaving our planet to live more than brief periods. Space biology is a major part of our current space programs, however news media tends to be bored addressing the subject. In future decades one can expect research bases on our Moon to understand living in space including how to independently make and maintain A to Z materials and infrastructure. But that will require multiple generations to figure out how to mitigate negative effects from lower gravity alone as well as how to develop growing food and necessary food and nutrients without a tether to Earth based products.

One needs to understand the human biome contains more bacteria than we have cells (35 trillion) and 10 times as many viruses. Some of those bacteria are absolutely essential for human food digestion and we are just in recent decades understanding what that means. It also means, even if faster than light speed space flight ever becomes possible that we earth creatures won't be landing on planets ala Star Trek at a whim due to possible contamination in both directions.
 
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David777 said:
Makes for easy science fiction and fills some futurist news articles but in reality we humans are decades to centuries away from actually being capable of leaving our planet to live more than brief periods. Space biology is a major part of our current space programs, however news media tends to be bored addressing the subject. In future decades one can expect research bases on our Moon to understand living in space including how to independently make and maintain A to Z materials and infrastructure. But that will require multiple generations to figure out how to mitigate negative effects from lower gravity alone as well as how to develop growing food and necessary food and nutrients without a tether to Earth based products.

One needs to understand the human biome contains more bacteria than we have cells (35 trillion) and 10 times as many viruses. Some of those bacteria are absolutely essential for human food digestion and we are just in recent decades understanding what that means. It also means, even if faster than light speed space flight ever becomes possible that we earth creatures won't be landing on planets ala Star Trek at a whim due to possible contamination in both directions.
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From a strictly science standpoint I believe that we are standing closer to the edge of exploration than you may think. Yes. You are correct about all the scientific reasons it will be difficult for humans to explore space. But, what if the explorers instead are our technological children. i.e. Robots containing an artificial intelligence we've created that is a mirror of our own? Possible? Very possible. It overcomes all the biological 'yes,buts' that make it impossible now. And, scientifically, we are actually closer to producing robotic and artificially intelligent beings than space biology. Also, this gets human kind around all the differences between us that we must overcome as noted in my comments before yours. No. I think we are scientifically closer than you may think.
 
True, agree with AI robots. I only limited my comment so to keep on subject because the OP was specifically asking if we humans would. Of course that is the average human mindset of what will happen and not AI robots.
 
Rose65 said:
If you were in your youth and prime, living in the future, would you have the appetite to be a pioneer settler/coloniser on a suitable planet?
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Not I... 🚀 I'm quite happy with Mother Earth. 🌎
I'll add though that across the country in a covered wagon would have been something I'd do... even with all the dangers involved back then. I've read a lot of books I've enjoyed with the theme.
 
No I would not! I have no desire to leave the USA much less space.I do like the covered wagon idea callmekate mentioned if I were 25 years younger .
 
I consider myself to be an adventurous person and have been in my younger days ... but the planet thing would be a step too far.

I honestly don't believe that eventually people would be sent to colonise another planet because of overcrowding on earth, I actually believe that those in power will make laws preventing the earth from becoming even more overcrowded in the first place.. The current and fast trend for Al robots.. is really speeding up the near future lack of jobs, and this will really bring to the fore just how many people have little or no practical use in the world..and if these people continue to procreate, it doesn't take a genius to see how disastrous that would be..

IMO.. that will be stopped at source.. whether through Chinese style one child laws.. or other mandatory sterilisation etc. Horrifying thought but I can see it coming...
 
hollydolly said:
IMO.. that will be stopped at source.. whether through Chinese style one child laws.. or other mandatory sterilisation etc. Horrifying thought but I can see it coming...
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I think only limiting procreation might be optimistic. We can't sustain our current population at our current rate of consumerism.
 
hollydolly said:
perhaps you're right ...so what do you think might happen instead ?
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If human population and resource consumption exceeds the world's carrying capacity for a long enough time without a deliberate adjustment to population and consumption, then what will probably happen is the situation will resolve itself through an unplanned reduction in human population.......an unpleasant scenario to experience.
 
Repondering said:
If human population and resource consumption exceeds the world's carrying capacity for a long enough time without a deliberate adjustment to population and consumption, then what will probably happen is the situation will resolve itself through an unplanned reduction in human population.......an unpleasant scenario to experience.
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in what way ?...war ?...:unsure:
 
hollydolly said:
in what way ?...war ?...:unsure:
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Resource scarcity wars; migration to better locations and the stresses resulting from such migration; hunger, malnutrition and the diseases resulting from such stresses......take your pick. I'm not saying these scenarios are a certainty, but they are a set of possibilities that it would be well to take measures to avoid. And this is to say nothing about climate change.
 
hollydolly said:
perhaps you're right ...so what do you think might happen instead ?
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Repondering said:
If human population and resource consumption exceeds the world's carrying capacity for a long enough time without a deliberate adjustment to population and consumption, then what will probably happen is the situation will resolve itself through an unplanned reduction in human population.......an unpleasant scenario to experience.
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@hollydolly I love post-apocalyptic fiction (PAW) and one of the things about reading it is that good authors do research for realistic PAW events for their works and how those scenarios might play out. One of the most interesting is written by Ginger Booth. Before she started writing, she worked primarily as a computer programmer including conducting environmental simulation work for Harvard and Yale including human demographic studies.

Some of her fiction is inspired by her climate programming work and her scenarios are especially interesting. In her fictional debut series Calm Act the plot revolves around a deliberate culling of the US population with mentions of the same going on in other parts of the world. I can see some of her plot devices realistically happening including suicide clinics, deliberately lacing street drugs with lethal poison, instigating mass casualty events in inner cities and those are the more mild culling methods.
 
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AnnieA said:
@hollydolly I love post-apocalyptic fiction (PAW) and one of the things about reading it is that good authors do research for realistic PAW events for their works and how those scenarios might play out. One of the most interesting is written by Ginger Booth. Before she started writing, she worked primarily as a computer programmer including conducting environmental simulation work for Harvard and Yale including human demographic studies.

Her fiction seems inspired by her climate programming work and her scenarios are especially interesting. In her fictional debut series Calm Act the plot revolves around a deliberate culling of the US population with mentions of the same going on in other parts of the world. I can see some of her plot devices realistically happening including suicide clinics, deliberately lacing street drugs with lethal poison, instigating mass casualty events in inner cities and those are the more mild culling methods.
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I don't read fiction any more , but Annie..thanks for that..I'm tempted to go and find this authors work.... so many things from fiction... none less than Star Trek itself.. have come to pass years later, so I would be interested in reading this book, thanks for letting me know
 
I've just put the Calm Act books 1-4 into my watch list on Amazon... they're for the kindle.. I can't find any hardback versions of this series.. which in all honesty I prefer when I'm very involved in a heavyweight series of books.. the kindle for me is fine really for anything more metaphorically lightweight... but it looks like I may have to download these to my kindle which is a shame..
 
hollydolly said:
I've just put the Calm Act books 1-4 into my watch list on Amazon... they're for the kindle.. I can't find any hardback versions of this series.. which in all honesty I prefer when I'm very involved in a heavyweight series of books.. the kindle for me is fine really for anything more metaphorically lightweight... but it looks like I may have to download these to my kindle which is a shame..
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She's an indie author. Only publishing companies do hardbacks though I do think she has paperbacks. Her work would be hard to market for a publishing company because she includes whimsy with the dark themes. It's strongly female oriented, not PAW for survivalist compound types.
 

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