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How long time will pass before Mankind start colonizing planets?
We have several serious claims:

-Russians and Chinese are planing Moon base by 2030.
-US are planing man to Mars until 2040.

What do you guys think? My opinion is that we won't colonize Moon or Mars until 2100, maybe somewhere in the middle of 2100's.
And we won't colonize other stars until we find some FTL technology that can give us some reasonable time to get to the nearest star ( less than 4 years ).
So what do you think?

It seems likely that we will need to resort to planatary colonisation, however getting people to another solar system seems like something for the grimm darkness of the far future.

Eggs, multiple baskets, good idea.

My opinion is about 80-100 years away as well, but not in the poll.

At least properly, likely they would be mined for it's resources before that assuming we don't all die off here first.

Haonn wrote:It seems likely that we will need to resort to planatary colonisation, however getting people to another solar system seems like something for the grimm darkness of the far future.

I concur, but recourses of this planet are going very fast. It will not be long before we start lacking all the recourses.
On the other hand if we see here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kardashev_scale we can see that our civilization isn't even type I ( we are now type 0.72 ). Witch is not surprising with the fact that we still use dead animals and plants as fuel for almost everything.

Imperium of Man would be level III civilization.

Who's to say we havn't already colonized(been taken as slaves) other extraterrestrial bodies? Seriously haven't any of you seen Stargate......

I suspect/hope we will invent FTL travel before we start true colonisation of other planets.
(True Colonisation being the moving of civilians to other planets, not just scientists, etc.)
So the first planets we colonise will not be in this Solar System.

n0t_u wrote:My opinion is about 80-100 years away as well, but not in the poll.

This is my guess too. With the technological singularity (technically, the next singularity, as the appearance of a vertical line comes solely from one's frame of reference; compared to ten thousand years ago somewhere around the middle of the nineteenth century was a singularity, if not sometime in the first or second century BC) set to come around in 40 years or so, I can't see serious colonization efforts being more than a hundred years away. The main barrier to it now is there's no physical benefit, there's a great deal of risk, and a great deal of cost in it; a post-labor society would have none of those concerns, and would have the resources to spare on such awesome but pragmatically frivolous endeavors.

Sir Pseudonymous wrote:

n0t_u wrote:My opinion is about 80-100 years away as well, but not in the poll.

This is my guess too. With the technological singularity (technically, the next singularity, as the appearance of a vertical line comes solely from one's frame of reference; compared to ten thousand years ago somewhere around the middle of the nineteenth century was a singularity, if not sometime in the first or second century BC) set to come around in 40 years or so, I can't see serious colonization efforts being more than a hundred years away. The main barrier to it now is there's no physical benefit, there's a great deal of risk, and a great deal of cost in it; a post-labor society would have none of those concerns, and would have the resources to spare on such awesome but pragmatically frivolous endeavors.

I would also like that, my dream is to be space explorer and to claim planets in the name of Humanity. But the reality is that no country or man would invest millions in something they wont have any income back. And there is also a problem that no country can claim any territory outside Earth, so there is a lack of interest even with countries.

I think it will take some centuries to find a planet suitable for colonization, and getting there will take a while too. But then again, it´s impossible to know how fast our technology will advance over the next decades.

Until we have the capability to successfully terraform planets (because none of the other planets in our solar system are habitable without having some sort of base to perform basic tasks, such as recycling air and generating gravity), then I don't think colonisation in the sense of some of the Earth's populace moving to these planets is likely.

It would take a very long time for us to travel to a planet that is already habitable, and communication with that planet would be an issue.

I'd say we've still got a good few hundred, if not thousand years before the colonisation of planets is going to be much more than building an artificial base there and hoping nothing goes wrong with it.

I dunno. I put 200 years. Simply because the advancement of technology seems to be happening at an exponential rate.

200 years ago we were relying on horse and cart.

Today we can travel faster than sound and speak to someone on the other side of the world in real time.

Assuming the nature of mankind, colonization will only occur when they HAVE to change, or face death etc. It would be cool in our lifetime if we could go into zero-g in some economic matter.

I think colonization in the sense of "establish a breeding, self-sustained population on another world" will be feasible within a few decades, and will happen in about two to three times that, once it's cheap and reliable enough. It'll never be a source of resources for Earth or a means of reducing overpopulation, though, only the dissemination of humanity throughout the solar system, then the galaxy.

Murray wrote:Assuming the nature of mankind, colonization will only occur when they HAVE to change, or face death etc. It would be cool in our lifetime if we could go into zero-g in some economic matter.

Well we all know that we are going to ran out of recourses soon. And the planet is being little by little populated.
I say the sooner we start this - the better. But we don't have the tech yet to do something like that.


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Sir Pseudonymous wrote:I think colonization in the sense of "establish a breeding, self-sustained population on another world" will be feasible within a few decades, and will happen in about two to three times that, once it's cheap and reliable enough. It'll never be a source of resources for Earth or a means of reducing overpopulation, though, only the dissemination of humanity throughout the solar system, then the galaxy.

That's right, one scientist even said once: "In 100 years scientist will look at us like we are idiots. They will say: "They planed to Terraform Mars with trees".".
The problem is that it will not be cheap as soon as we hope so...

200 years... maybe a touch more...

Less than 100 years, I reckon.

You all should read The Martian Race by Gregory Benford:

http://www.amazon.com/Martian-Race-Gregory-Benford/dp/0446526339

Hard Science fiction that tells us how a cheap trip to mars could work.

Anyways if they did it this way, we could have a trip to Mars and start some colonization within 50 years.

I think we'll get to a point eventually where the last survivors on Earth pile onto a big spaceship and head off in the direction of a potentially life supporting system. They won't get there though...

We could do it now, we should do it now. But we wont for the same reason we wont in a hundred years or more.

Political will. The will to invest is lacking and will remain lacking because of human short sightedness.

The most likely group to break the barrier is a 'space cult'. It would have to be run as a commune and invested in by individual philanthropists. Lots of money but all for materials; the assemblers, scientists and astronauts would be working for a poor or non existant wage. That can work. Getting educated people to work for nothing and live communally to afford to do so is possible, cults do, and this is an educated cult, whose dogma is: 'send mankind to the stars, before it is too late'. All the lack of a wage packet would do is weed out the non committed not starve you of quality recruits, I do believe lots of people would sign up for this and of those many will have the skills or physique needed.
Yes your space/shuttle station building commune will need land, your philanthropist can see to that, permits will be harder to get. Also a good percentage of the personnel will be involved in support. The commune will need money so it can run a business, it will need medical staff as part of its key staff so medical and dental can be done in house. Families would be encouraged, and allowing for who the commune accepts levels of education would be good. So long as everyone is a volunteer and knows what they sign up for this can work, and the standard of living would be reasonably high, not as high as the best minds could get in private business or medicine but good enough to secure a comfortable life a good education for your kids health security. Children born to commune members while given a top education, for free, to degree level (if the commune is still on earth at that time), they are encouraged to join, but are free not to and may leave to seek their fortunes elsewhere and not have to repay for their invested education. Some may return of their own free will.

I think it would work, and we can do it now. The only danger of that not working would be again from scared self-serving governments.

The alternative is commercialisation. Richard Branson is opening that door, and good luck to him. But to get and actual space program to truly work you need more money that any billionarire can give if it is to be done fiscally, and if the corporate mogul wants his share said builder scientist and astronaut will want it too. As you need those people in the thousands to make your space civilisation start its not a practical way.

Orlanth wrote:We could do it now, we should do it now. But we wont for the same reason we wont in a hundred years or more.

Political will. The will to invest is lacking and will remain lacking because of human short sightedness.

The most likely group to break the barrier is a 'space cult'. It would have to be run as a commune and invested in by individual philanthropists. Lots of money but all for materials, the assemblers, scientists and astronauts working for a poor or non existant wage. That can work getting educated people to work for nothing and live communally to afford to do so is possible, cults do, and this is an educated cult, whose dogma is: 'send mankind to the stars, before it is too late'.

I think it would work, and we can do it now. The only danger of that not working would be again from scared self-serving governments.

The alternative is commercialisation. Richard Branson is opening that door, and good luck to him. But to get and actual space program to truly work you need more money that any billionarire can give if it is to be done fiscally, and if the corporate mogul wants his share said builder scientist and astronaut will want it too. As you need those people in the thousands to make your space civilisation start its not a practical way.

That's the big problem, no one want's to invest in that. And there is one more bigger that this - we are not united. As long as we are waging wars against one another or we are looking into this planet recourses - we are not going to advance toward space age.

So Im only 1 of 2 people that think the Ancient Astronauts will come back and take over again? Thats kindda sad

KingCracker wrote:So Im only 1 of 2 people that think the Ancient Astronauts will come back and take over again? Thats kindda sad

1 of 3. I forgot to comment on that bit.

BTW Ancient Aliens Season 3 starts this month!

Oh badass! BADASS!!!!!!!!!!! Im gunna set my DVR then!

Orlanth wrote:We could do it now, we should do it now. But we wont for the same reason we wont in a hundred years or more.

Political will. The will to invest is lacking and will remain lacking because of human short sightedness.

We could probably do it with creative application of modern technology, but at this point it's too unstable, costly, and risky to do so, not to mention the profound lack of infrastructure to deploy it. We need a dry dock in orbit before full interplanetary travel becomes viable, as well as cheaper ways of getting into orbit than rockets.

Right now, space is just a novelty, so to speak. Aside from communication and navigation satellites, there's little practical use for it. We also wouldn't be able to produce a long-term unsupported colony on another planet, in all likelihood, and certainly not one able to sustain a healthy breeding population of humans. Literally anything short of something that obliterates the planet, or at least a significant portion of its crust, will be friendlier to human life than any other planet in this solar system. A thermonuclear holocaust would be survived by those in hardened bunkers and remote locales, and the resulting radioactive winter would be infinitely more conducive to humans than Mars is. An "extinction event" meteor could hit Earth, and we'd have enough warning to know where it will hit, and build bunkers and backup infrastructure in those areas safest from it, and the charred waste it left behind would still be easier to live in than Mars.

With any other planet, you're looking at having to live in tunnels and airtight structures, run some form of agriculture, keep air purification equipment running, recycle everything, including biological waste, and have either no resupply in case something important breaks to a point you can't fix, or else at least a year of waiting for a new part to arrive. A multi-trillion dollar facility on Mars could support a dozen people, all of whom would have to be trained engineers, and all of whom would be guinea pigs for the equipment they're counting on just to survive. The worst disaster on Earth would just fill the air with toxic smoke for a few months or years; on Mars there is no breathable air to start with, so you'd never have any more than what you brought with you. The Earth's ozone layer could be stripped away, and you'd still be better off than on Mars, where there's not the more-important magnetic field to keep the really nasty radiation at bay.

The most likely group to break the barrier is a 'space cult'. It would have to be run as a commune and invested in by individual philanthropists. Lots of money but all for materials, the assemblers, scientists and astronauts working for a poor or non existant wage. That can work getting educated people to work for nothing and live communally to afford to do so is possible, cults do, and this is an educated cult, whose dogma is: 'send mankind to the stars, before it is too late'.

They'd be kind of like a weirder version of Seasteaders: unhinged, unfunded, and hopelessly unable to accomplish anything (only even more so than Seasteaders).

The alternative is commercialisation. Richard Branson is opening that door, and good luck to him. But to get and actual space program to truly work you need more money that any billionarire can give if it is to be done fiscally, and if the corporate mogul wants his share said builder scientist and astronaut will want it too. As you need those people in the thousands to make your space civilisation start its not a practical way.

There's absolutely no commercial benefit to colonizing other worlds, mostly due to logistical costs: there's no way to extract valuable resources and send them back to Earth, at least not without spending millions of times as much as just gathering it on Earth would cost; there's no feasible way to have tourism outside of orbit, on account of the astronomical costs and time of transit, to say nothing of the risks involved; and lastly, there's no "better life" colonization options, which were what drove commercial emigration throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, as life would harder than that of all but the meanest of third world peasants currently face, and they don't have the funds to escape even that, let alone pay billions to go to Mars and fund the construction of their habitat, not to mention lacking the skills to keep things running once there.

Commercialization may very well lead to the orbital dry dock and cheaper methods of attaining orbit that we need for government backed colonization to be remotely viable, however. By that point, we may very well have gotten propulsion methods that enable us to reach Mars in a few months, instead of in excess of a year, at which point sinking money into establishing a test colony, and later a larger, self-sustained population become reasonable expenses, for PR reasons, as well as staking a claim to Mars. Hopefully it won't be China behind it, since sabotaging something like that is pretty risky, and China can't be allowed to establish a foothold offworld...

That would all change if we break the Warp Barrier.

Never. We need to invent something that allows you to 'fax' matter across long distances first. Which will probably never happen.

Heres what we need to do. Make a giant vaccum cleaner type contraption, and use it to suck say...... hydrogen/helium/methane and other important gases from the planets that are many times the size of ours and can afford to let us suck it out. We then make a new automotive industry built around using these gases to power their cars, charge a premium for it but say it gets 100mpg and has 0 emissions. Thatll get us out there, and we will obviously need colonies out in space for some middle man reason. Problem solved. Vote KC for President

KingCracker wrote:Heres what we need to do. Make a giant vaccum cleaner type contraption, and use it to suck say...... hydrogen/helium/methane and other important gases from the planets that are many times the size of ours and can afford to let us suck it out. We then make a new automotive industry built around using these gases to power their cars, charge a premium for it but say it gets 100mpg and has 0 emissions. Thatll get us out there, and we will obviously need colonies out in space for some middle man reason. Problem solved. Vote KC for President

Do this, but over Venus. There's plenty of inert and volatile gases for us to exploit there. And when we're done sucking out all the methane, venus might actually be a hospitable planet

I think Venus should be a last resort... I mean...its terrifying there. Sulfuric acid rain? 800+ degree temps....no thanks



BUT! it would make a nice tourist destination once cleaned up. Your hired