Beyond the Limit of Human Ambition?

[Vexen]

Um, you played a computer game, i.e. a water-ed down simulation, so that makes it a complete possibility? Really?

I challenge you or anyone to say otherwise. My enthusiasm for it was enhanced by the video game, but it's not the foundation of my thoughts on the matter. NASA and other private space companies are just waiting to terraform Mars(http://quest.nasa.gov/mars/background/terra.html).

Edited December 11, 2014 by Vexen

[imatfaal]

!

Moderator Note

 

Vexen - we try and keep threads focussed and on-topic so I have split this comment away so that other's may respond to it

 

 

 

I challenge you or anyone to say otherwise. My enthusiasm for it was enhanced by the video game, but it's not the foundation of my thoughts on the matter. NASA and other private space companies are just waiting to terraform Mars(http://quest.nasa.gov/mars/background/terra.html).

 

I will say otherwise (glad that you didnt ask me to prove otherwise). I don't believe that humanity in its current state can seriously consider terraforming mars; we will be able to one day but only when we have transformed ourselves enough that we will be almost unrecognizable. I am not claiming a change in genotype / phenotype would be required - but a change in civilization. A change with the same level of impact as the renaissance in western europe, and with the sort of long term consquences of the change from the Ancien Regime of Absolute Monarchy to the Modernity of the Enlightenment.

[swansont]

My objection is similar — we haven't done anything close to what would be necessary. We haven't sent people to Mars, much less a terraforming mission. We haven't ever terraformed anything — one well-known attempt at living in a sealed environment, Biosphere II, was a failure. When doing that at a remote location, you are working without a net. We are decades away from being able to do this.

[Ophiolite]

We are decades away from being able to do this.

I'm not sure what Vexen's original claim was in detail, but - speaking as a geologist - decades away is now. Realistically I would have said it was one to three centuries away, but that is still quite close.

 

I recommend anyone interested in the topic to read Kim Stanley Robinson's Mars trilogy (Red Mars, Green Mars, Blue Mars). It has a great deal of hard science in it (plus some authorial presumptions) and does a neat job of examining the views for and against terraforming. Personally I hope some of my descendants have an opportunity to go wind surfing on the Hellas sea.

[swansont]

Realistically I would have said it was one to three centuries away, but that is still quite close.

 

 

Which is many decades

 

The original comment was

 

I don't know about you, but I live in a universe that is billions of light years in size. Let's terraform Mars or some other planet. I just finished playing mass effect, it's completely possibility. We could build a citadel like the Protheans.

I questioned the citation of a computer game to buttress the claim. (But that was embedded in another discussion, so it didn't get split)

[Vexen]

Do I have to put a smiley face if I'm being sarcastic?

[swansont]

Do I have to put a smiley face if I'm being sarcastic?

It would help. When you double-down on it, it's usually assumed you wish to be taken seriously.

[CharonY]

Yah, hard time to find sarcasm there. On terraforming, considering that we have a hard time to influence climate (and other global things) in a way that we want, despite having all our resources right here, I find it hard to imagine that we are going to do it successfully and in a sustainable way off-planet.

 

Heck, we did not even successfully establish a sustainable closed microenvironment on Earth (if the biosphere experiments are any indication).

[Vexen]

Yah, hard time to find sarcasm there. On terraforming, considering that we have a hard time to influence climate (and other global things) in a way that we want, despite having all our resources right here, I find it hard to imagine that we are going to do it successfully and in a sustainable way off-planet.

 

Heck, we did not even successfully establish a sustainable closed microenvironment on Earth (if the biosphere experiments are any indication).

Almost everyone 100 years ago would have never imagined the iPhone, space travel, genetic engineering, antibiotics,and Internet.

 

You just another one of those people. The Wright brothers faced adversity from the negative people who spent their lives doing nothing but bad critism.

[swansont]

Almost everyone 100 years ago would have never imagined the iPhone, space travel, genetic engineering, antibiotics,and Internet.

 

You just another one of those people. The Wright brothers faced adversity from the negative people who spent their lives doing nothing but bad critism.

That's the point, though — it took 100 years of development for such things to happen. There was no serious "let's go to the moon" talk until after ballistic missiles had been developed. Genetic engineering wasn't thought of because DNA hadn't been discovered. The iPhone and the internet required the development of quantum mechanics.

 

What you call bad criticism I call a more realistic assessment of the obstacles and our current accomplishments. Nobody here has claimed that terraforming will never fly.

[Vexen]

That's the point, though — it took 100 years of development for such things to happen. There was no serious "let's go to the moon" talk until after ballistic missiles had been developed. Genetic engineering wasn't thought of because DNA hadn't been discovered. The iPhone and the internet required the development of quantum mechanics.

 

What you call bad criticism I call a more realistic assessment of the obstacles and our current accomplishments. Nobody here has claimed that terraforming will never fly.

Agreed

[Ophiolite]

Almost everyone 100 years ago would have never imagined the iPhone, space travel, genetic engineering, antibiotics,and Internet.

 

You are just another one of those people. The Wright brothers faced adversity from the negative people who spent their lives doing nothing but bad criticism.

Charon Y has raised some very reasonable points. The implication in your posts is that we could commence a successful terraforming program as soon as we got to Mars. That is what Charon is, rightly, questioning.

 

Dreaming is a wonderful thing. However, the people who make dreams into a reality are the people who address the hard questions head on. Charon Y has asked a couple of hard questions. Making a personal attack is not a convincing retort to such valid questions. A more effective response would be along the lines of:

 

I agree that we do not currently have the technology, or the underlying theory to carry this out, but developments that we might reasonably anticipate in the next two hundred years seem likely to address both theoretical and practical aspects of the problem. In regard to the failed Biosphere 2 experiment, keep in mind the fact that this was a first attempt, then recall the number of attempts (and failures) associated with any new technology.

 

Edit: Cross posted with swansont

Edited December 15, 2014 by Ophiolite

[CharonY]

I will treat Ophiolite's suggestion as an actual comment as it is a valid argument. The timeline of 100-200 years suggests that we simply have no idea and cannot reliably extrapolate from what we currently can do. In 50 years (or if some pertinent development happens, maybe earlier) we could revise that timeline. But for now, 100 or 1000 or 100,000 years are almost equally likely.

With regards to Biosphere, I see it more as an issue of complexity as to my knowledge there was really no new technology involved. But just trying to control seemingly simple fluxes in a sustainable fashion was shown to be unreliable at best. Although, it is possible that in large-scale systems some problems are actually easier to fix.

 

As a side note, penicillin was discovered almost 100 years ago and and antiseptic substances (some based on antibiotics) were along for longer than that. In that particular case, key discoveries were already made (i.e. the presence of antiseptics, whatever their nature would be). The Wright brothers had ample example of flight, too. In all the examples the discoveries were not made in a vacuum but, as swansont pointed out, were enabled by key discoveries. These, as far as I can tell with my limited knowledge on the subject (but evidenced by the fact that we are still unable to control pertinent parameters on Earth), are still missing.

[StringJunky]

I agree with CharonY. Until we understand all the important interconnecting relationships in our own weather system and can tinker with it purposefully and successfully, planetary terraforming is out of reach.

[swansont]

With regards to Biosphere, I see it more as an issue of complexity as to my knowledge there was really no new technology involved. But just trying to control seemingly simple fluxes in a sustainable fashion was shown to be unreliable at best. Although, it is possible that in large-scale systems some problems are actually easier to fix.

 

It would be interesting if that experiment could be attempted again, to see if it was simply on too small of a scale to work and trying to fix some of the things that went wrong. The failure showed a loss of oxygen, and the injury to one member shows the need for redundancy in skill sets, and the need for proper medical treatment capability to be included in such a mission.

 

But even then, if you get it to work, you can't be sure that some random elements just happened to go the right way, and that you could properly compensate for the different circumstances you'd encounter on Mars — less solar radiation, lower surface gravity, weak magnetic field, etc.

[imatfaal]

Almost everyone 100 years ago would have never imagined the iPhone, space travel, genetic engineering, antibiotics,and Internet.

 

You just another one of those people. The Wright brothers faced adversity from the negative people who spent their lives doing nothing but bad critism.

 

Just a note - Gagarin's first orbit in space was closer to 1914 than it is to 2014 and Jules Verne wrote about journeying to the moon in the mid-19th century.

 

Pasteur dreamed of utilising the "anti-life" properties of micro-organisms against other micro-organisms again the in 19th century - these ideas came to fruition well over 50 years ago; Domagk got the 1939 Nobel for his work on sulfonamides and by the end of WW2 Antibiotics were a major part of medicine.

 

Just as examples - we were imagining these things many many years ago - the technology caught up with our imagination slowly

[swansont]

 

Just a note - Gagarin's first orbit in space was closer to 1914 than it is to 2014 and Jules Verne wrote about journeying to the moon in the mid-19th century.

 

Pasteur dreamed of utilising the "anti-life" properties of micro-organisms against other micro-organisms again the in 19th century - these ideas came to fruition well over 50 years ago; Domagk got the 1939 Nobel for his work on sulfonamides and by the end of WW2 Antibiotics were a major part of medicine.

 

Just as examples - we were imagining these things many many years ago - the technology caught up with our imagination slowly

 

 

I'm a little leery of leaning on fiction as a basis for predicting technology. There's also a lot of things writers come up with that have never (and will never) be developed, so that's kinda cherry-picking the successes. Mars had canals and little green men that were going to invade, too.

[imatfaal]

I'm a little leery of leaning on fiction as a basis for predicting technology. There's also a lot of things writers come up with that have never (and will never) be developed, so that's kinda cherry-picking the successes. Mars had canals and little green men that were going to invade, too.

 

I nearly included the HHGG as pre-figuring the iphone

 

I agree with your comment - but my post was in response to a comment saying "Almost everyone 100 years ago would have never imagined" - imagined being the concept I was zeroed in upon.

 

Individual works of fiction are very poor for predicting what will be the technology of the future - as you say most of the examples normally given are those picked because they were successful. But the general trend and topic of fiction does show what society at large is focussed upon; as an anecdote I recall my father noticing that fiction for children nowadays has a distinctly retrogressive, mystical, and nostalgic air whereas the books/comics/films of his youth were almost entirely forward looking and space/technology based. Harry Potter has ousted Dan Dare.

[swansont]

I agree with your comment - but my post was in response to a comment saying "Almost everyone 100 years ago would have never imagined" - imagined being the concept I was zeroed in upon.

 

But what's inside the black box is important, not just what the outside looks like. People in the past imagined heavier-than-air flight, too, but if it was huge machines with flapping wings, how much credit do they get for their vision? Do we give Chester Gould (creator of Dick Tracy) credit for having two-way wrist radio/TVs — is that what drove the advancement in battery technology, which is just one component that made smartphone voice/video communication possible?

 

Along with that, you also have the people that predicted flying cars would be ubiquitous. The same lack of understanding of science (what's possible and what's not, plus what's easy and what's hard) is present in both kinds of predictions.

[Vexen]

I nearly included the HHGG as pre-figuring the iphone

 

I agree with your comment - but my post was in response to a comment saying "Almost everyone 100 years ago would have never imagined" - imagined being the concept I was zeroed in upon.

 

Individual works of fiction are very poor for predicting what will be the technology of the future - as you say most of the examples normally given are those picked because they were successful. But the general trend and topic of fiction does show what society at large is focussed upon; as an anecdote I recall my father noticing that fiction for children nowadays has a distinctly retrogressive, mystical, and nostalgic air whereas the books/comics/films of his youth were almost entirely forward looking and space/technology based. Harry Potter has ousted Dan Dare.

 

I concede. I should choose my words more carefully.

 

But I'm talking about scientists/inventors trying to go against the convention.

[CharonY]

What is the convention? You make it sound that innovations are made by people doing things differently, whereas in truth they are heavily based on what is known and expanding it.

[StringJunky]

What is the convention? You make it sound that innovations are made by people doing things differently, whereas in truth they are heavily based on what is known and expanding it.

...standing on the shoulders of giants.