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I think we can use some positive emotions in our lives and this 3:50-minute SF movie created by Erik Wernquist certainly delivers a positive view of our future in this solar system that seems to rather lack in stories coming out of Hollywood recently. Made my day again, same as movie shot by Juno probe at Jupiter. This really is a masterpiece and it must have taken tremendous amount of CGI work. Narration is by Carl Sagan reading the first chapter ("The Wanderers") from his 1994 book "The Pale Blue Dot." I wanted to describe the locations displayed in the movie, but it was too spoilery and you can easily guess most of them anyway.
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YH3c1QZzRK4
Vimeo: https://vimeo.com/108650530
Erik has a website with more films at http://www.erikwernquist.com/
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Grishnakh on Monday June 19 2017, @04:15PM (19 children)
I appreciate this guy's optimism, but it's sadly very naive. Humanity is not going to expand into or past this solar system; we're simply going to go extinct one way or another without really leaving this planet. Not that colonizing the solar system or traveling to Alpha Centauri is impossible; it's certainly not, but just not by us. We're too short-sighted and self-destructive. I say we have about 100 years max left. If there's any of us still alive then, life for them will look something like a Mad Max movie.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 19 2017, @04:22PM (5 children)
Indeed. We've been to the moon and there weren't any moonwomen to rape. Space exploration is done.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 19 2017, @04:29PM (3 children)
Eventually, a colony will be set up on the Moon, and so eventually there will be "Moon Women" to rape.
The survivors of the onslaught will escape to Mars, especially as they'll have a pretty good idea about how to set up a colony on a foreign planetary body; that means there will be "Mars Women" to rape.
The survivors will escape to various asteroids (making for "Asteroid Women"), and then on to the Jovian moons (making for "Jupiter Women"), etc.
"My God! It's full of rape and pillaging!"
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 19 2017, @04:35PM (2 children)
Real women aren't stupid enough to play along with your rape fantasy.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 19 2017, @04:43PM (1 child)
Caitlyn Jenner is a sign of the times to come.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 19 2017, @04:54PM
The future belongs to trans. Venus Plus X [wikipedia.org]
(Score: 2) by bob_super on Monday June 19 2017, @08:06PM
> We've been to the moon and there weren't any moonwomen to rape. Space exploration is done.
That's because you silly Americans kniggits just do not understand Good Cheese. Now, go to Mars, before I taunt you a second time!
(Score: 2) by ikanreed on Monday June 19 2017, @04:26PM (9 children)
Life like mad max is totally impossible. They'd fucking run out of water so fast, no one would live.
There will either be fresh water sources, and small civilizations will survive and grow around it, or there won't and everyone will be dead.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 19 2017, @04:30PM (4 children)
Everyone will be dead and nothing of value will be lost. At last the insects will have their chance to evolve into something better.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Grishnakh on Monday June 19 2017, @06:02PM (3 children)
Everyone will be dead and nothing of value will be lost. At last the insects will have their chance to evolve into something better.
Personally, I'm rooting for the birds. They kinda blew it before by not building a good space program before the K-T asteroid, but I think they should get a second chance.
The reptiles are pretty cool too.
Best of all would be if cats survived the cataclysm and evolved into intelligent space-faring beings.
(Score: 2) by tibman on Monday June 19 2017, @08:10PM (1 child)
If you think people are lazy, destructive, and easily distracted then i don't think you should have much hope for cats. I'm thinking something like Kzinti only instead of war-like they are west-coast surfer dudes.
SN won't survive on lurkers alone. Write comments.
(Score: 2) by Grishnakh on Monday June 19 2017, @08:22PM
Laziness isn't necessarily incompatible with developing advanced technology. After all, isn't one of the primary aims of technology to replace labor with automation, and make life easier? With enough intelligence, cats should be great at developing automation technologies.
(Score: 2) by pvanhoof on Tuesday June 20 2017, @08:46PM
The birds? No, no. The tardigrades are probably already more intelligent than huuumans. For sure they are already much more adapted to any kind of cosmic catastrophy. Plus they have an interesting level of horizontal gene transfer going on. Their DNA is borrowing survival know-how from many other species' attempts. Now that's clever. We huuumans with our memes will probably kill ourselves over differences of opinion long before we'll get the opportunity to watch any spectacle of any cosmic catastrophy. And the birds? Hmm. Well some of them will survive..
(Score: 2) by Grishnakh on Monday June 19 2017, @06:00PM (3 children)
Life like mad max is totally impossible. They'd fucking run out of water so fast, no one would live.
Well, I did say "something like a Mad Max movie", not something exactly like it.
Also, did you not see the first Mad Max movie? There were trees and greenery in it; it wasn't until The Road Warrior that everything had turned into a big desert.
Anyway, even in a post-apocalyptic scenario, it's hard to imagine there being no water at all. Even with massive desertification, there's going to be water somewhere: 70% of this planet's surface is covered with water after all. Even with fairly primitive technology (a solar still) it's not hard to distill freshwater from seawater, just not in large quantities needed to support civilization. But as long as there's oceans, there's going to be rain. Some small bands of survivors can probably hang on for a while.
(Score: 2) by ikanreed on Monday June 19 2017, @07:05PM (2 children)
I'm just saying civilization and agriculture goes with water sources, and a lack of them means total death. Your post-apocalypse is going to be defined by some kind of substantial social structure, almost certainly including a government, if human beings survive at all.
Virtually everything post-apocalyptic is virtually obsessed with the notion of anarchy, and the reason for that is more to provide a vehicle for power fantasies than a realistic assessment of what a collapse of the current social order would like even 2 or 3 years out, much less 20.
If there is an apocalypse, and we both survive, come track me down, I'll put a wager of a week's water rations on it.
(Score: 2) by Grishnakh on Monday June 19 2017, @07:22PM
Why is anarchy unrealistic after a really big collapse? With a sufficiently large collapse of the human population, there simply wouldn't be enough people left to form an actual "civilization", there's just be survivors wandering around in the ruins trying to survive or figure out what to do next.
Just as an example, suppose there's a collapse caused by some horrible viral plague. Even really deadly and virulent pathogens always leave some small part of the population alive, due to natural immunity caused by genetic variations and mutations in that population. This was seen with DDT: it killed most of the mosquitoes, but left a very small number, which then continued to breed until the populations were restored, but now were all DDT-resistant. So with a human plague, if it kills of 99% of the population, that's going to completely eliminate any form of society or governance, unless you're counting the small warlords that'll inevitably rise up afterwards (post-apocalyptic fiction usually includes this BTW). (Also, humans aren't like mosquitoes; they take far longer to reproduce so they're not going to repopulate the way insects do after a collapse. They also tend to limit their population even more in the absence of society and government due to murder and tribal warfare, something that insects and most other animals don't do.)
(Score: 2) by unauthorized on Monday June 19 2017, @09:28PM
You can grow food with seawater or closed loop hydrophobic farms. Not enough for billions, but certainly enough to have a functional society after the majority dies off.
That's not true, one of the more common post-apocalyptic theme is the emergence of a dystopian society after the collapse. In my very biased personal view, I find such settings to be far more common than Mad Max knockoffs.
(Score: 2) by r1348 on Monday June 19 2017, @10:34PM
Every generation has its own apocalyptic cults, you're just a member of the last one in order. Not so much time ago, a sizable part of the Christian world was sure we were done with the year 1000. Some wackos even though that the whole 2012 mayan whatever bullcrap was worth believing in.
My point is: there has never been so much humanity in history, it has never been so prosperous and long living and, in relation to its size, never been so peaceful. Whoever is spelling doom is just fooled by a media bubble that feeds on outrage, not grasping the true greatness of the times we're living in.
Does that mean we have no serious challenges facing us? Absolutely not. We shouldn't rest on laurels, so to speak. But we should also bear in mind that we made it in much direr times than this, when our extinction was a realistic prospect, and we probably weren't even aware of it.
(Score: 2) by takyon on Tuesday June 20 2017, @10:08AM (1 child)
Grishnakh shits on short film, but nowhere to be found on Elon Musk Publishes Mars Colonization Plan [soylentnews.org] article that ought to be a prime target for his fate of humanity pessimism.
Your argument is pretty Sad! You acknowledge the feasibility of space colonization, but predict a doomsday for the human race. We've lived with atomic weapons for nearly 72 years. Nobody bats an eye at them anymore. Even if a few were launched or stolen and detonated, it would not put a lasting dent in the global population. Pandemic threats are manageable. Economic collapse can be mitigated by universal basic income.
Lunar and Mars colonization attempts will take place in the coming decades, long before your hundred year deadline is up.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 2) by Grishnakh on Tuesday June 20 2017, @06:42PM
We've just been lucky so far, and our leaders haven't been nearly as incompetent. Our luck is running out. And we're not getting UBI; it's a great idea, but the largest economies will never implement it.
Look at the history of human civilization: civilizations *never* fix their problems. They always collapse instead, and are replaced by another. But in the past, big collapses didn't have the potential to ruin the planet like they do now.
As for Lunar and Mars colonization, have you forgotten about how badly human biology interacts with zero-g gravity? We don't know yet the effect of 1/3g or 1/6g gravity, but it's probably not good. And thanks to all the radiation (and lack of a protective magnetosphere), colonists on those worlds would be condemned to live underground for most of the time, which doesn't exactly sound like fun or a way to attract many colonists unless the Earth has really turned to shit (which of course is looking pretty likely, but it'd have be really really awful to be worse than living in an underground colony on a world with low gravity giving you massive health problems). So likely the colonization efforts won't go far enough before a big collapse event happens here. If we really wanted to do offworld colonies the right way, we'd build huge, rotating space stations at Lagrangian points, but that takes too much competence and effort for us so it'll never happen.