SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
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: 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.