BUZZ on Howard Stern.."No to the Moon"...Denies wanting to be "First"!

On 4/19/2010 4:03 AM, KK wrote:

Earth is going to have to be in pretty sorry shape before it becomes
more inhospitable than the Moon or Mars. A lot of fairly advanced
lifeforms survived the giant impact (or whatever croaked the dinosaurs)

Well, not really. It depends on your definition of "fairly advanced".

Although a lot smaller in size, both mammals and birds were every bit as
complex as dinosaurs from a biological viewpoint.

Most or all of humankind wouldn't have survived.

It only takes a few to make it through; note the genetic bottleneck in
Homo Sapiens that occurred at the same time as the Toba supereruption
around 73,000 years ago:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toba_catastrophe_theory

And the Cretaceous
event was 65M years ago - it happened in the most recent 2 percent of the
earth's lifetime. There will inevitably be more life-extingusihing
events - whether another big impact, or a gamma-ray burst, or some solar
event. It's not a matter of "if", it's a matter of "when".

65 million years may be short in geological terms, but it's very long in
human history terms; we started evolving around 5 million years ago, so
that's around 13 times as long as we've even been around in any form
whatsoever.
As far as the history of our own species goes, that's only around
200,000 years ago, so that's 65 times as long as the Homo Sapiens has
walked the Earth.
As far as recorded history (writing) goes, that's only around 7,500
years ago, so that's around 1,700 times as long as we've been writing
things down.
At the moment we would be far better equipped to survive a major impact
as a species than the dinosaurs ever were due if for no other reason to
the fact we are omnivores and can ingest a fairly wide variety of
foodstuffs to maintain our internal energy and heat level.
The dinosaurs had the worst of both worlds; the need for large amounts
of food to maintain their endothermic metabolism (unlike the exothermic
reptiles, who could just reduce their metabolic rate in cold
temperatures) combined with very specialized feeding adaptations (I
don't know if there even were any type of omnivorous dinosaurs; they all
seem to be plant eaters, carnivores, or carrion eaters of one sort or
another) that meant that any major climate upset would take out the base
of their food chain and they would all die in fairly short order.
Setting up humanity on the Moon or Mars would save you from a giant
global catastrophe, but it won't help a bit against a gamma ray burst,
as that will envelop the whole solar system.

at the end of the Cretaceous period, even as catastrophic as that
was...they wouldn't have lasted even a minute in Lunar or Martian
conditions.

No ****. Has anyone suggested we pack up and move there now? But a long-
term (hundreds or thousands of years) goal of beginning to expand our
footprint in the Universe is the only way for us to survive the
inevitable in the long-term.

In that scenario there's plenty of time to wait for technology to
develop further and greatly simplify the process of getting around,
either inside or outside the solar system.
Columbus had a lot better luck setting out into the Atlantic in sailing
ships than he would have in dugout canoes, and would have had even
better luck if he had something like a modern cargo ship handy.

Maybe that means finding a hospitable
place, maybe it means using terraforming to change a place to make it
more suitable.

I think that terraforming a planet is going to be a pretty challenging
operation, as we can't even do much to modify Earth's environment or
ecosystem in any controllable way, without trying to build one up from
scratch on another planet that will be self-sustaining and stable.
That having been said, I still think they should seed the atmosphere on
Venus with some sulfur-eating bacteria just to see what happens.
It would be a good way to pay that awful planet back for all the flu
germs it keeps sending our way:
http://www.datasync.com/~rsf1/vel/1918ss.htm
Besides, what are the odds that their would be anything on Venus that
would get angry if we started screwing around with its planet?:
http://www.badmovies.org/movies/ymir/ymir7.jpg

Pat

On Mon, 19 Apr 2010 09:40:06 -0800, Pat Flannery wrote:

On 4/19/2010 4:03 AM, KK wrote:

Earth is going to have to be in pretty sorry shape before it becomes
more inhospitable than the Moon or Mars. A lot of fairly advanced
lifeforms survived the giant impact (or whatever croaked the
dinosaurs)

Well, not really. It depends on your definition of "fairly advanced".

Although a lot smaller in size, both mammals and birds were every bit as
complex as dinosaurs from a biological viewpoint.

Most or all of humankind wouldn't have survived.

It only takes a few to make it through; note the genetic bottleneck in
Homo Sapiens that occurred at the same time as the Toba supereruption
around 73,000 years ago:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toba_catastrophe_theory

And the Cretaceous
event was 65M years ago - it happened in the most recent 2 percent of
the earth's lifetime. There will inevitably be more life-extingusihing
events - whether another big impact, or a gamma-ray burst, or some
solar event. It's not a matter of "if", it's a matter of "when".

65 million years may be short in geological terms, but it's very long in
human history terms; we started evolving around 5 million years ago, so
that's around 13 times as long as we've even been around in any form
whatsoever.

What does "we started eveolving around 5 million years ago" mean? How
did life become more complex and specialized for the billion or so years
prior?



As far as the history of our own species goes, that's only around
200,000 years ago, so that's 65 times as long as the Homo Sapiens has
walked the Earth.
As far as recorded history (writing) goes, that's only around 7,500
years ago, so that's around 1,700 times as long as we've been writing
things down.
At the moment we would be far better equipped to survive a major impact
as a species than the dinosaurs ever were due if for no other reason to
the fact we are omnivores and can ingest a fairly wide variety of
foodstuffs to maintain our internal energy and heat level. The dinosaurs
had the worst of both worlds; the need for large amounts of food to
maintain their endothermic metabolism (unlike the exothermic reptiles,
who could just reduce their metabolic rate in cold temperatures)
combined with very specialized feeding adaptations (I don't know if
there even were any type of omnivorous dinosaurs; they all seem to be
plant eaters, carnivores, or carrion eaters of one sort or another) that
meant that any major climate upset would take out the base of their food
chain and they would all die in fairly short order. Setting up humanity
on the Moon or Mars would save you from a giant global catastrophe, but
it won't help a bit against a gamma ray burst, as that will envelop the
whole solar system.


There are whole books devoted to lists of things that could wipe humans,
or life in general, from our planet. Eventually they will come to pass -
maybe a Cretaceous-event-like event, maybe a bigger one. Maybe
radiation, whether via a cataclysmic external event or due to the
diminshing of our magnetic field.

There are hundreds or thousands of scenarios that could jeapordize
humanity.

The repeated point remains true: to survive for the long run (millions of
years) humankind needs to expand beyond this planet.




at the end of the Cretaceous period, even as catastrophic as that
was...they wouldn't have lasted even a minute in Lunar or Martian
conditions.

No ****. Has anyone suggested we pack up and move there now? But a
long- term (hundreds or thousands of years) goal of beginning to expand
our footprint in the Universe is the only way for us to survive the
inevitable in the long-term.

In that scenario there's plenty of time to wait for technology to
develop further and greatly simplify the process of getting around,
either inside or outside the solar system. Columbus had a lot better
luck setting out into the Atlantic in sailing ships than he would have
in dugout canoes, and would have had even better luck if he had
something like a modern cargo ship handy.

Maybe that means finding a hospitable place, maybe it means using
terraforming to change a place to make it more suitable.

I think that terraforming a planet is going to be a pretty challenging
operation, as we can't even do much to modify Earth's environment or
ecosystem in any controllable way, without trying to build one up from
scratch on another planet that will be self-sustaining and stable. That
having been said, I still think they should seed the atmosphere on Venus
with some sulfur-eating bacteria just to see what happens. It would be a
good way to pay that awful planet back for all the flu germs it keeps
sending our way:
http://www.datasync.com/~rsf1/vel/1918ss.htm Besides, what are the odds
that their would be anything on Venus that would get angry if we started
screwing around with its planet?:
http://www.badmovies.org/movies/ymir/ymir7.jpg

Pat

You're just being an argumentative 'tard.

The only point I've had:

The repeated point remains true: to survive for the long run (millions
of years) humankind needs to expand beyond this planet


.... was, and remains, true.


On Mon, 19 Apr 2010 14:07:30 -0800, Pat Flannery wrote:

On 4/19/2010 9:44 AM, KK wrote:

What does "we started eveolving around 5 million years ago" mean? How
did life become more complex and specialized for the billion or so years
prior?

I was referring to the point where the line that would lead to Homo
Sapians broke free from the original simian line.


There are whole books devoted to lists of things that could wipe humans,
or life in general, from our planet. Eventually they will come to pass -
maybe a Cretaceous-event-like event, maybe a bigger one. Maybe
radiation, whether via a cataclysmic external event or due to the
diminshing of our magnetic field.


Our magnetic field has diminished and flipped before, the last time
around 780,000 years ago, but it didn't wipe out our ancestors.
But none of the more recent field reversals (there have been thousands
of them total throughout earth's history) has lined up with a major
extinction event:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geomagnetic_reversal
Besides, neither the Moon or Mars has a significant magnetic field, so
whatever would happen to Earth during a magnetic flip would be the
standard day-to-day situation on those worlds.
You may be able to stick a breathable atmosphere on Mars via
terraforming, but how are you going to give it a magnetosphere?
On the Moon you can do neither.

There are hundreds or thousands of scenarios that could jeopardize
humanity.

There are hundreds or thousands of scenarios that could jeopardize me
personally, but I'm not going to go live in a cave because an airplane
may hit my apartment building, or wear a suit of armor 24/7 because the
mountain lion might escape from the Dakota Zoo down in Bismarck and head
for Jamestown with murder in its eye. Both of those events are a lot
more likely than a giant asteroid coming down on my head, or a
supervolcano coming up under my feet.
If you wait long enough, sure, some sort of huge catastrophe would
probably wipe out all of humanity, but the odds of that occurring in any
particular year are pretty slim, to put it mildly.
So although it will probably be a good idea to move out to other planets
at some future point, it's probably something we don't need to devote
much effort to at the moment; we can wait and see how our technology
improves over the next few hundred years and maybe go places a lot more
easily than we can imagine today.

The repeated point remains true: to survive for the long run (millions of
years) humankind needs to expand beyond this planet.

Considering that Homo Sapiens has only been around for under a quarter
million years, what makes you think that it would still be "humankind" a
million years or so down the road? Even with natural evolutionary forces
at work it would probably be a different species, and considering all
the work being presently done on genetic modification, it may well be a
new species in just a few hundred years from now instead of a quarter
million.

Pat

On 4/19/2010 11:51 AM, KK wrote:
You're just being an argumentative 'tard.

Well, you put me in my place, sir. :-D

Pat

wrote in message
...


On space solar power...... a serious what if question

what backup would be used if volcanic eruption suddendly obscured the
power transmission link?


Microwaves are still just radio waves. I would think the signal could
only be reduced somewhat, not blocked.

On Apr 16, 4:09*pm, "Jonathan" wrote:
wrote in message

...

Space travel mean colonizing a rat hole under the surface
of some very bleak and distant
place..................................Trig

Exactly my sentiment.

And the notion we must colonize to survive is absurd.
If we can't sustain ourselves here, the closest place
to Heaven within light years, we certainly can't make it
in some dusty, dry and entirely dead hell-hole.

I am not saying not to work on it. But it will take vastly
better tech. Interesting things can be found, tech and material
sciences can be improved for other earthly uses.
And I do love the science and the views. It is best to
plod along and not get silly. Flags and footprints
are just a vanity.

But I rather colonize the top of some 24,000 foot mountain
than colonize Mars. Or live under the sea than live in a
large asteroid. Perhaps a dome could be built with
an Eden inside but I prefer this earth. I suspect
the "Eden" would do well to last a 100 years and
likely would be a marginal operation requiring
very active monitoring to function.
And I'd go to Antarctic in a heartbeat provided my needs
were meant.

And if life is common, there maybe the H.G. Wells effect
if we land on another earth-like planet. Then microorganisms
might try to eat us or poison us. If planets are
common and life is really rare, then perhaps generation
ships might make some sense. Or perhaps an improved
version of human with an extended lifespan such that might
consider the jump like a long sea voyage.

I recall one science fiction universe in which robots
went out ahead of mankind and sterilized the
solar systems that lay ahead including planets
with civilizations.

Trig

On Apr 20, 8:25�pm, "Jonathan" wrote:
wrote in message

...

On space solar power...... a serious what if question
what backup would be used if volcanic eruption suddendly obscured the
power transmission link?

Microwaves are still just radio waves. I would think the signal could
only be reduced somewhat, not blocked.

ever hear of rainfade for satellite tv?

even uplinks can get rainfade.....

satellite signals are just radio waves

On Tue, 20 Apr 2010 20:25:40 -0400, Jonathan wrote:

wrote in message

...


On space solar power...... a serious what if question

what backup would be used if volcanic eruption suddendly obscured the
power transmission link?


Microwaves are still just radio waves. I would think the signal could
only be reduced somewhat, not blocked.

So is light, Einstein.

KK wrote:
On Tue, 20 Apr 2010 20:25:40 -0400, Jonathan wrote:

wrote in message

...

On space solar power...... a serious what if question
what backup would be used if volcanic eruption suddendly obscured the
power transmission link?

Microwaves are still just radio waves. I would think the signal could
only be reduced somewhat, not blocked.

So is light, Einstein.


Different frequencies of radiation are attenuated differently by
different media.