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AP-NORC poll: Asteroid watch more urgent than Mars trip
Americans prefer a space program that focuses on potential asteroid impacts, scientific research and using robots to explore the cosmos over sending humans back to the moon or on to Mars, a poll shows.
The poll by The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research, released Thursday, one month before the 50th anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing, lists asteroid and comet monitoring as the No. 1 desired objective for the U.S. space program. About two-thirds of Americans call that very or extremely important, and about a combined 9 in 10 say it's at least moderately important.
The poll comes as the White House pushes to get astronauts back on the moon, but only about a quarter of Americans said moon or Mars exploration by astronauts should be among the space program's highest priorities. About another third called each of those moderately important.
"More than 80% say the United States is not leading the world in space exploration."
(Score: 3, Interesting) by NotSanguine on Monday June 24 2019, @10:28AM
Okay. Let's say it's 50 years from now. And the population is now growing at 500,000 per day. Now we need to transport nearer a million people a day, along with supplies (you know air, water, food, etc.) for a trip to where, exactly?
Could colonies on the moon or Mars (or even in space) handle 200,000,000 people a year? Every year? That would means that in 20 years we'd need to support approximately the current population of earth in hostile environments with raw resources and not much else. And that doesn't count any children born to those people over that time.
It's not like the Puritans landing at Plymouth rock, or even the Polynesians colonizing the Pacific islands. There was already air, food, building materials, fertile soil and on and on. You'd start with none of that on the moon, Mars or in space.
But even if we could come up with the raft of technologies to move and keep alive 200,000,000+ people in space every year, who's going to pay to develop it? Where are you going to site the *massive* infrastructure to lift that many people out of the gravity well?
Who has the resources, political will and political/economic/military clout to make this happen without bankrupting at least half the planet and forcibly moving hundreds of millions of people off-world *every year*?
Think through what would need to happen, the costs, the upheavals, the environmental damage, the political and military risks, the economic impacts. It's never gonna happen.
Because even if we solve all the problems with getting folks off the planet (fat chance), we still need to find a way to clothe, house, feed and provide atmosphere to the current population of the Earth *every* twenty years or we won't be reducing the population of Earth anyway.
And don't forget that we'll certainly need to implement *forced migrations* for hundreds of millions every year.
You really haven't thought this through. I invite you to do so.
To recap:
From a technological standpoint, it is *theoretically* possible to move that many people into earth orbit every day. However, even if we could, we have no place to send them that can support that many people on an ongoing basis. We don't have the science, let alone the technology or engineering know-how, and we aren't anywhere close, nor will we be anytime in the foreseeable future.
And if that's the case, it will no longer be 200,000,000 per year we'd need to move, but 500,000,000-1,000,000,00 every year.
What's more, the economic costs of such a project would likely bankrupt the planet.
But that's not even the worst part. There's no way you're getting 200,000,000 people to *volunteeer* to leave the friendly confines of planet Earth *every* year. I'd be amazed if you could get 2,000,000. Which means forced relocations. Which means internment. Which means using violence to 'convince' folks to 'volunteer'.
Anyone who even attempted to do something like this would make Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot, Hitler and Attila *combined* look like amateurs.
Space colonization is not, and never will be, a workable mechanism for population reduction on planet earth. Fuil stop.
No, no, you're not thinking; you're just being logical. --Niels Bohr