gbaji wrote:
MDenham wrote:
gbaji wrote:
Lady Bardalicious wrote:
is gbaji condoning the government spending money on what could be seen as an unnecessary project?
In the context of long term species survival nothing is more necessary than manned spaceflight.
False, but most of the things that are "more necessary" would also be useful in large-scale manned spaceflight.
Maybe you're being a bit obscure with your point, but the human race can survive just fine with the technology we have today (far less in fact). Right up until the moment when a big bright light appears in the sky and wipes us all out (or some other global calamity strikes). You're confusing "comfort of existence" with "species survival" I think. Or you're speculating about other things which "might" happen, I suppose.
The *only* thing that prevents that eventual and
inevitable death of our species is if we can master manned spaceflight and leave our planet at some point.
The "inevitable" on that is only true on the time scale of the Sun's expansion.
The survival of humanity
to that point is entirely possible without manned spaceflight, even with the assumption that global catastrophes will occur that would wipe out an insufficiently shielded ecosystem.
Really, the first step is a culture that's capable of building
and willing to live within megastructures (NOTE: I'm talking structures on the order of tens of thousands of cubic miles in volume at a minimum). Once you have that down, multi-generational manned spaceflight becomes a
lot less problematic, which may be necessary if there isn't any means of going faster than light.
To be honest, though, once you're building structures on that scale, you have the engineering know-how available to probably just pilot the Earth out of its present orbit once problems occur.
Edited, Jul 27th 2010 10:59pm by MDenham