The Universe - a worthless pile of poo or the future?

[13ig_VV]

i think we all know about the population problem on this planet. i remember in middle school learning that the population increases by about 200,000 each day, and I've been thinking for a while on how this can be solved. there's many crazy ideas, like genocide, or following the chinese and forcing a max of 2 children (or is it 1?). but i think both of those, as well as the many other crazy ideas floating around, are poor choices. ones like genocide are sickening, and pretty much there's nothing more to be said. but then the Chinese method of population control is also startling. it prohibits something natural, to reproduce and create the next generation, as well as destroys a great freedom. so the best solution i came up with is to branch out into our solar system, or even better, the milky way galaxy and the rest of the universe. it seems like our destiny to branch out across the galaxy. we sure are capable of producing the technology with the resources at our disposal now, yet we don't. take the NASA program. they use space shuttles 30 years old. it's pathetic. i'll have to search for it, but i remember there being a competition put out by a billionare worth 10million dollars for the first person to develop a tourist space plane, and it was very succesful. the space plane was fantastic. not to mention it would be awesome to meet aliens and share ideas, technology, etc with them (as long as their not hostile, hahahaha). so what do you guys think? should we expand into the universe as a way for dealing with the population problem as well as to further our knowledge of the universe and find new things?

[chris_uk_83]

Good luck finding a habitable planet that's even remotely reachable within a few thousand years.

It's also amazingly expensive to get anything off the planet. If land is an issue it'd be cheaper to colonise deserts or the ocean floor than other parts of the universe. If we lived underwater we could eat more fish, and sea plants, at least there would be something to eat, unlike out in space where there's nothing.

[David Deas]

Good luck finding a habitable planet that's even remotely reachable within a few thousand years.

It's also amazingly expensive to get anything off the planet. If land is an issue it'd be cheaper to colonise deserts or the ocean floor than other parts of the universe. If we lived underwater we could eat more fish, and sea plants, at least there would be something to eat, unlike out in space where there's nothing.

So when the Sun finally converts into a red giant, do you think the human race will die out for lack of a solution? Or will we have already been extinct by then?

[Simetrical]

So when the Sun finally converts into a red giant, do you think the human race will die out for lack of a solution? Or will we have already been extinct by then?

If we've survived that long as a thinking race, I think it's reasonable to suggest that we'll have long ago uncovered all there is that can be known and be able to do anything that can be done. If we do survive that long, it seems implausible that we won't be spread throughout the entire universe, not even just our galaxy. It would only take what, ten million years to get to Andromeda at 0.2c? Shouldn't be hard, when we have five hundred times that long before the Sun becomes a red giant.

[LilleOle]

Not to mention the effects of space on the human body.. Muscle and bone tissue suffer greatly if one spends prolonged times in space, no gravity makes our bodies not function as they should.

Colonize the moon would be the first step to anywhere at least, as that would make it easier to mount expeditions to other planets in our solar system..
The moon, and to some extent mars could be colonized in time, but that would be huge undertakings costing trillions and taking several generations to complete(im not talking terraforming, making the planet hospitable, but underground instalations etc). Then it would be posible to create better suited spacecraft and launching them at a lower cost in space, not having to deal with stuff like earths gravity pull etc..

[scottishranger]

It would probably be smarter to (like Chris said) create habitable are in desserts, ie: stop dessertification in Africa and reverse it, and also to create habitable spheres in the ocean underwater. RememberT he area of the Earth surface is equal to 510,100,000 km2. Land covers 148,800,000 km2 (29.2%) and the World Ocean covers 361,300,000

[ajm317]

I believe most of the U.N. projections have population leveling off in a few decades. As birth control becomes more widespread and the world economy continues to grow the birth rate is declining. In Europe the birth rate is already generally below 2 children per couple. In the U.S. it's right around that. In India the population growth rate recently stopped increasing I believe, and will probably begin to decrease in the comming years. Some projections even have the world population going down by the end of the 21st century.

Here's a graph of world population growth rates (which accounts for births and deaths), with projections up to 2050:

http://www.census.gov/ipc/www/img/worldgr.gif

You can see population just beggining to level off a bit by 2050 in this graph:

http://www.census.gov/ipc/www/img/worldpop.gif

Of course if the population levels off at 20 billion people you have to question whether that's good enough, but I think that the Earth can probably support a lot more people than it currently does.

I don't really see space as a viable solution. It's just too expensive and difficult to go there, and I don't see that changing in the next few decades. Even if it did, you'd have to prepare a place for them to live, and I'd question whether people would really want to leave the Earth. Space is a nice place to visit, but does anyone want to live there?

[13ig_VV]

props ajm for the research. i didn't even think of going underwater. space just seems so cool. besides the dark depths of the oceans, it's one of the only frontiers left and i think it would be awesome to explore and colonize. unfortunately, i haven't taken physics yet so i dont really understand worm holes and all those complicated things that would allow/not allow us to travel very quickly through space. just thought it was an idea. but since stopping the growth of the deserts was proposed, i'm curious as to how this would be fixed. as well as how we would live in the ocean. i know space is very deprived of anything at all, but its not like we can breath water and water is a very corrosive medium (especially ocean water) so the structures would have to be very strong and not break down easily. (imagine if a hole was made in the structure - it would probably be catastrophic for the whole entire building. yikes!)

[Simetrical]

unfortunately, i haven't taken physics yet so i dont really understand worm holes and all those complicated things that would allow/not allow us to travel very quickly through space.

1. They don't allow anything because they haven't been found to exist, and if they were found would most likely allow the passage of only individual particles, and even then the other end would probably be farther from habitable places than our end. Superluminal travel is science fiction. You want to get to Alpha Centauri, you travel at a few percent the speed of light for a century or so.
2. You aren't going to know anything more about wormholes after you take physics courses than you know now, unless the physics courses you refer to are graduate-level general relativity courses.

just thought it was an idea. but since stopping the growth of the deserts was proposed, i'm curious as to how this would be fixed.

Deserts are places that water doesn't reach. There are plenty of ways to get water to them, and ways to store water already gotten. In particular, where deserts are eating away at non-desert land, they're doing so because of sutff like inadequate protection against erosion and whatever. You can do stuff like just plant lots of trees on the border of the desert to slow down and start to reverse desertification.

as well as how we would live in the ocean. i know space is very deprived of anything at all, but its not like we can breath water and water is a very corrosive medium (especially ocean water) so the structures would have to be very strong and not break down easily.

Water is not corrosive, in the sense of being acidic or basic. It tends to rust and tarnish things, but that's hardly an issue if your domes are made of fifty-foot-thick plastic or are treated for protection against rust. Either way, this is nowhere near being economically feasible yet, but it's still a lot closer than space bases.

[chris_uk_83]

i know space is very deprived of anything at all, but its not like we can breathe water

well we can't, but I'm sure we could run a tube up to the surface or something. There's a more than adequate supply of air on the planet that I'm sure we would be able to transfer below the water in one way or another if we needed to.

[Chaigidel]

its much more reasonable to learn how to manage the vast but limited resources we have on earth, once we can do this properly we can think seriously about making more worlds like earth ( like mars through some process)-- but like chris says its just so insanely expensive at the moment to move people and resources around in the gulfs of space.

[Chaigidel]

my vote is extinct.

[Bootsiuv]

That's roughly 5,000,000,000 years in the future. I think we'll have either evolved into an entirely different species (or homo sapiens could be very far down the line by that point i.e. several intelligent species would have evolved from us by then), or we'll have left this planet far, far behind. I fail to believe that we'll never reach the stars, it just won't be in my lifetime, or my great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great grandkids lifetime for that matter. But what is that, like a 1,000 years worth of greats? There's a big difference between that and 5,000,000,000 years.