Starships: More Important Than Climate Change
Starships: More Important Than Climate Change
NASA's Ames Center, Pete Worden announced an initiative called the "Hundred Year Starship". NASA has granted $100,000 to the project and another $1 million from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). This may not seem like much, but one can be sure that this will not be all. Such announcements in a time where climate change needs to be at the top of every country's agendas is more than a little disturbing.
Directing money toward such grand ideas only takes away what precious little time and resources we have left to solve our common crisis here on Earth. Climate change will not wait for us to decide that it's time to solve it. It will keep marching along at an exponential rate regardless how much we may try to wish it away. As the project is called, it's still a century in the future. A future that, on the short term, looks very bleak and is filled with uncertainty.
Over the next 26 years will be a steady degradation of climate conditions that will accelerate the more time we waste until the entire ecosystem collapses. Once that happens life will die off at an incredible rate, Earth's land masses will become dessert and the oceans will steadily disappear, and that's just the natural processes. A quarter century may seem like plenty of time to solve this problem, until we consider the human factor.
When conditions get bad enough, which will be sooner than later, people will start fighting for food, water and other resources necessary for survival. The social systems we have developed over time will collapse, as will governments, first the smaller ones then the big ones. Larger nations may get together to stem the violence and it may succeed for a time. But even that will break down as resources dwindle and tension builds. Human mortality due to violence, starvation and disease will ramp up until our population is small enough that contact between groups are sporadic. The violence will drop very fast, but the deaths will not stop. Because we will still have a massive increase in infant mortality and the inability for women to carry to term, which will later degrade to the point where humans and animals alike will no longer be able to conceive offspring. One would expect that some organization someplace will try other methods of conception, but by that time it will be far too late.
It is uncertain how long it will take before governments start falling, but it will be a number of years before 2034, the year where it will be too late to even undo the damage of climate change.
It's all about time, money and the ability to put it all together. In 2004 it was reported that we had 30 years before the problem becomes irreversible. 6 years have ticked away leaving us 24 years before it really is too late and the runaway greenhouse boils the oceans away.
A recent poll was done in the US, indicating that 54% of Americans are still not convinced there's a problem. They prefer to use the wait and see approach.
It has been argued that such research into colonization and starships can give us some needed insight into ways of fixing the problem in the way of spinoff discoveries. But spinoff discoveries are far too random and unpredictable. Direct research into solving climate change will produce much more return on investment and maximize our chances of saving 4.5 billion years of nature's work.
Putting a colony on Mars may save our species for a time. Yet, there is much doubt that enough humans could be saved to repopulate without severe genetic degradation and eventual extinction. this would only delay the inevitable for a short time. And that starship? Would never have gone past the talk-about-it stage.
Consider that approximately 40 years ago we were warned things would get just as bad as they are now if we didn't do anything about it. We were told that we could stop climate change dead in its tracks by burning less fossil fuels. But we ended up burning more and now climate change is here. We didn't stop it. Now we have been given an even shorter time to reverse it. Will we now blow away the next 24 years too?
Is it not proper to put all possible pressure on organizations like NASA, the Ames Center, governments, politicians etc. to bring all resources possible to bear on the problem? Is it not required to stop distracting needed funds, researchers and other resources on projects that will not matter one iota within 24 years?
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