Evacuate Earth.

I'm very interested in cosmology and astronomy, so the idea of it is very intriguing. However, a lot of people don't even understand the incredible distances between stars. In order to have a habitable place for humans, we'd need to visit another planet that has it's own star.

The closest star to our own is roughly 4 light years away. This is roughly 24 TRILLION miles away. Even at the speed the Voyager is travelling at currently, which is somewhere around 30,000 miles per hour I believe, it would take around 80,000 years to reach the CLOSEST star to us, travelling at an incredible speed.

That's only 4 light years. Our galaxy is 100,000 light years across. Try to wrap your mind around just how massive our galaxy and the universe is.

 

I think they said that they would just keep like making new babies and shit and be self sustaining on the space ship so time wouldnt matter, sorry been a long time since i posted this video im pretty sure thats what it said

 

I really wouldn't want to live on a space ship or a new planet. It'll be like a third world country. If its time for the planet to end in whatever way im cool with dying.

If we were to live on a ship it would be like a military dictatorship. Life would not be fun.

 

The 'Sun' is the name of our star. There are no other suns, just different stars. But the concept of the idea is amazing. I'm sure it would be very chaotic trying to evacuate everyone, that is one fundamental floor. This is a very controversial topic and I personally believe it would never be done in our generation or the next two. We simply don't have the technology, in my opinion.

 

A sun is a star...

A star is a sun...

 

A sun is a star, while a star is not necessarily a sun. Squares and rectangles, my man.

 

This documentary is interesting because it questions our technical possibilities if we focused all of Earth's resources and knowledge on a single project. Although it seems impossible to be able to build a ship which is self-sustaining throughout interstellar travel, we base that entirely on today's circumstances.

NASA's budget for 2013 is projected to be under 18 Billion USD. If we assume the entire rest of the world's investment in space exploration is equal to NASA (which is an overestimation), then we can assume a total worldwide budget at around 36 billion USD. Worldwide Gross Domestic Product for 2013 is estimated at nearly 72 trillion USD for 2013. This results in approximately 0.05% of the world's output being put towards space and space exploration.

This documentary explores what could happen if this number of 0.05% were suddenly boosted to something immensely higher, over a period of 100 years. Knowledge investment would increase to a similar proportion. If this number went to 10% of world output, which is 200 times the current estimation, and then was continued for 100 years, the space program would be pumping out innovation that seems literally thousands of years away. We say certain things are impossible, and with current circumstances they basically would be.

The idea of being able to harness worldwide human output towards a very specific goal would require a ton of cooperation. This documentary argues that perhaps the only situation which could inspire this type of global focus would be certain extinction of the entire species. I'd like to think that has some truth to it. We'd just have to get the religious zealots out of the way.

 

Why would anyone still bother going to work, etc if they knew they were not getting on the ship?

 

This assumes that people only are interested in themselves, and have no interest in the continuity of the species. If we look in nature at other species, we see that many animals consider the health of colony to be above the importance of their own personal health.

The way things work right now, the health of the species is really not at risk. Although we have the continuous threat of global warming and depletion of resources, these are much longer term and very ambiguous. In the situation of certain annihilation of planet Earth, I'd like to believe that the majority of the people would kick into survival mode, not in terms of themselves, but in terms of the species as a whole.

Of course, you raise a good point. There will certainly be people who cause problems. Some will be religious nuts, some will be in denial, some will simply give up. At the end of the day, though, people still need to eat. If you are sitting on your ass as the world awaits its demise, don't expect handouts. I'd expect most social programs to slow to a halt.

 

bump, this thread guys watch the video and tell me what you think!

 

tell them mars has oil, government will be all over dat space oil

 

Cruel, what exactly does that have to do with this video?

 

im a big dick bandit and i dont give a fuck

 

Watching it now, will edit it later

 

omg thank you, 99% of the people posted on this thread without even watching 5 minutes..

 

Probably because you insist on calling stars "suns", and this thread gives them cancer, and they die before they can finish the video.

Anyway, an interesting update on this topic is the Alcubierre Drive's revitalization. In 1990-somthing, physicist Alcubierre devised a method for faster than light travel. The only flaw, however, was the amount of energy it would take to run the engine. Essentially, the Alcubierre Drive is a torus shaped craft, whose shape as well as whatever thought they put into the engine is purposed to inflate spacetime behind the craft, and deflate it in front of the craft. Space-time isn't bound by the rules of relativity, so this inflation and deflation can occur at any speed, and therefore, the aircraft (which is its own frame of reference, isn't moving very fast at all, and is therefore not breaking light speed) can travel exception distances in a short amount of time. Faster than light, theoretically as fast as you have fuel for.

I mentioned it's revitalization, and that is another physicist has devised a viable engine and fuel source to power the Alcubierre Drive, and is currently working on it.

So one can conclude inter-planetary travel to other earth-like planets will soon be possible.

 

Couldn't agree more.

 

Interesting topic, but I don't think at this point we could pull something like this off. We'd all die.

 

That's actually a very interesting concept. To be honest, I'd be most interested in the effects on relative time, i.e. the ageing of people in there compared to those on Earth. I find the fact that two objects experience a different time - something we all perceive to be constant (a second is a second, right?) - depending on its frame of reference. Eg the atomic clocks. Will have to have a proper read up on that physicist's journals, thanks for the share.

And @OP, I only just stumbled upon this, will have to watch the doco later and get back to you on that. Very very interested in this topic, from the science behind it to the fangirling over fictional shows like Stargate ;D

 

watching now. seems interesting, will edit my thoughts about this afterwards.