I've always been passionate about astronomy. Recently I even bought a really cheap
telescope thinking it would give me the ability to look at distant planets, as
pictured on the box of the product, but really letting me only take a small
glimpse at some details of the Moon's surface. I like everything there is about
astronomy, and always wanted to make it my profession, and who knows, in the
future my computer skills might turn me into an asteroid hunter - now that would
be amazing!
Every once in a while, like every other normal person in the world (I hope), I stop and look at the sky at night wondering what the hell is going on. I mean, we live on this round thing, along-side other round things, that sort of float on this gravity pond. What the f***? Planets are beautiful, but if you just stop for one second and think about the universe being a bunch of round things floating around and releasing energy, it seems obvious that this universe we live in is too complicated for us to understand!
The fact that we don't understand the real essence of our universe doesn't mean we shouldn't travel in it. The enormous distances of planets, even in our own solar system, will make it really hard for us to travel. Our Earth is a beautiful thing, you would be a fool if you wanted to leave it in favor of something like Mars but that's what makes us human, the endeavour to explore the unknown.
This dark and scary future fortunately for us (as in people living in 2011) is still very far away and we must not stop to explore the depth of our universe so that we can find an alternative.
Like any other person that uses common sense, the simplest fix to this issue would be to be able to artificially replicate planet's earth environment even in absence of a star!
Think about this - the energy our Sun releases is magnitudes greater than the energy hitting our planet. In fact our planet only receives a really small percentage of that energy. We can easily realize from this that the energy needed to sustain life as we know it, can be times smaller than what a normal star is able to generate.
What I mean is that we don't need an entire star to sustain life.
If we are able to generate a star, or an energy source that behaves like a star, we could theoretically travel the depths of the universe with our planet without having to worry about our sun dying!
Life could flourish with the creation of multiple artificial planets with their own suns and they could independently travel into the cosmos and inherently conquer space!
I'm talking of "generating stars and planets" as if they were Lego's -- it's definitely not something we can achieve this decade, nor century, probably not even within the next hundreds or thousand of years, but fortunately we still have a lot of time before our batteries run out, and given what technology was able to give us this last century, I'm confident the future will hold amazing innovations and solutions to let us conquer space and, who knows, even more after that!
Every once in a while, like every other normal person in the world (I hope), I stop and look at the sky at night wondering what the hell is going on. I mean, we live on this round thing, along-side other round things, that sort of float on this gravity pond. What the f***? Planets are beautiful, but if you just stop for one second and think about the universe being a bunch of round things floating around and releasing energy, it seems obvious that this universe we live in is too complicated for us to understand!
The fact that we don't understand the real essence of our universe doesn't mean we shouldn't travel in it. The enormous distances of planets, even in our own solar system, will make it really hard for us to travel. Our Earth is a beautiful thing, you would be a fool if you wanted to leave it in favor of something like Mars but that's what makes us human, the endeavour to explore the unknown.
Humans will need to leave planet earth sooner or later
If you look at what we were able to explore this last century you'll see that we can precisely determine the lifetime of a star. In fact, by exploring other stars light behavior (this is really the only information we get from other stars) we can analyze how and when a star will die. Unfortunately this gives us a peek into our own future, and the ones of our solar system. The result is that sooner or later our lovely planet earth will be inhospitable to sustain humans and other life form as we know it.This dark and scary future fortunately for us (as in people living in 2011) is still very far away and we must not stop to explore the depth of our universe so that we can find an alternative.
Like any other person that uses common sense, the simplest fix to this issue would be to be able to artificially replicate planet's earth environment even in absence of a star!
Think about this - the energy our Sun releases is magnitudes greater than the energy hitting our planet. In fact our planet only receives a really small percentage of that energy. We can easily realize from this that the energy needed to sustain life as we know it, can be times smaller than what a normal star is able to generate.
What I mean is that we don't need an entire star to sustain life.
If we are able to generate a star, or an energy source that behaves like a star, we could theoretically travel the depths of the universe with our planet without having to worry about our sun dying!
Life could flourish with the creation of multiple artificial planets with their own suns and they could independently travel into the cosmos and inherently conquer space!
I'm talking of "generating stars and planets" as if they were Lego's -- it's definitely not something we can achieve this decade, nor century, probably not even within the next hundreds or thousand of years, but fortunately we still have a lot of time before our batteries run out, and given what technology was able to give us this last century, I'm confident the future will hold amazing innovations and solutions to let us conquer space and, who knows, even more after that!