Quote:
Originally Posted by troutman
We will probably have permanent human colonies on the moon within our lifetimes. Mars is ambitious - I don't think they have really worked out how to protect us from the radiation.
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I don't see mankind ever colonizing places like the moon or mars, their magnetic fields are far to weak, Mars itself used to have a strong field but scientists figure it was bombarded away by huge asteroid collisions disrupting it's core convection. I highly doubt we'll ever be able to
give a planet/moon a magnetic field strong enough to bounce away the solar winds.
Quote:
Originally Posted by speede5
Does it really matter though? Even if we found a planet out there like Earth, what is the point? The human race probably won't survive long enough to have the technology to travel to it, communicate with it, or even get a close look at it. Given the rate we are filling the earth with people, our consuption of natural resources, we are headed for extinction pretty quickly, in the grand scheme of things. Unless by some miracle we figure out how to warp travel in the next hundred years or so, we're going to die staring at the sky. Heck I'd be surprized if we even see the day man lands on Mars, much less a planet in another solar system. Maybe I'm just missing the point.
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So were not even supposed to try? 100 years is a long time in this technological time, did people in 1910 think we would land on the moon? or go from New York to Los Angeles in 3 hours?
While it looks grim now that we'll ever figure out how to travel fast enough to reach the stars one never knows the future, and there's always the possibility that some older more advanced civilization out there figures it out for us.
