There is a huge amount of valuable real estate swirling around our solar system, waiting to be claimed by bold explorers and prospectors. Who will be the ones to lay claim to the richness of the asteroids, the outer system, the Kuiper Belt and the Oort Cloud? Who are the brave adventurers and explorers, and who are the good-for-nothing incompetent couch potatoes?
Created by British astronomer Scott Manley, the three-minute clip – which is the equivalent of two months per second – starts with a sprinkling of white ‘dust’ around the edge of the planets....The footage shows the discovery of every new asteroid over the past three decades and charts it on an increasingly congested map of the solar system.
Over the years, and as more telescopes are added to the experiment and detection methods improve, this becomes a dense green ‘ring’ as the number of ‘minor planets’ found in the asteroid belt increases. _ImpactLab_from_DailyMail
Humans are faced with many challenges -- challenges both true and fabricated. Many of these "earth-shaking" challenges can only be taken seriously if humans are to be stuck on this one planet for the next thousand years, restricted to using technologies of the past and confined by nonsensical rules based upon phantom fears such as carbon hysteria.
If, on the other hand, we unleash the human imagination and human resourcefulness, we will begin to discover resources far beyond our ability to exploit for tens of thousands of years.
Imagine the green area coated with a mixture of rotating human settlement and motionless robotic outposts which were all connected via a line-of-sight laser communications network. It would form a civilization so large that it would make Earth look like a ten acre campground. And the chance of a central government being able to enslave such a mass of people would be slim to none and slim just left orbit.
ReplyDeleteThe first Europeans to reach the New World brought Spanish. Yet Spanish has since been relatively unimportant -- much less significant than English or Portugese.
ReplyDeleteThe first humans to reach the Moon spoke English. I fear that the language of space will become Chinese, or possibly Hindi.
It is incredible that a society successfully based on technology would then turn its back on the very idea of technological progress which brought such self-evident rewards. I guess that the rewards are not so self-evident to the women who did not die in childbirth or the children who did not work down mines.
Well the common language still used is English, and cutting edge Space exploration technology is still developed in America, but not necessarily by Americans. I was told recently by a man from Europe that recently opened a factory here in the US that he was excited to tears. When I mentioned the down economy he replied "A depressed American Economy is better than a booming European one." That is when I realized, Americas standard of living attracts the best and the brightest. Perhaps the new explorers might be Chinese or Indian but I bet the common language between the two of them will be English.
ReplyDeleteReally dumb question:
ReplyDeleteIt looks like quite a few of those asteroids loop through earth's orbit and then back out to the larger ring.
How hard would it be to hitch a ride?