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Last Exit: Space is a new documentary on Discovery+ that explores the possibility of humans colonizing planets beyond Earth. Since it is produced and narrated by Werner Herzog (director of Grizzly Man, guest star on The Mandalorian) and written and directed by his son Rudolph, however, it goes in a different direction than your average space documentary. It's weird, beautiful, skeptical, and even a bit funny.
In light of the film's recent streaming launch, father and son Herzog spoke with Ars Technica from their respective homes about the film's otherworldly hopes, pessimistic conclusions, and that one part about space colonists having to drink their own urine.
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Why Werner Herzog Thinks Human Space Colonization “Will Inevitably Fail”
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(Score: 2) by Michael on Tuesday March 15 2022, @05:54PM (2 children)
If you're talking about doing it this week, then yes, not really feasible.
Just like the colonisation of America was infeasible - just before it became feasible. (And then reliable, and then easy.)
Given the pace of progress in the material sciences etc, I don't think it's going to be long before planetary colonisation is feasible.
The obstacle to planetary colonisation, I predict, will be that the technology which makes it possible will also make large, safe, relatively luxurious orbital habitats possible. The lower gravitational barrier seems like it could make those preferable. Assuming energy consumption is the basis of our resource distribution systems.
As soon as the next industrial revolution starts (self replicating molecular machines), I think humans are going to explode like puffball spores all over the solar system.
Then again, maybe we implode. Molecular machine technology also probably means you can read the pertinent data represented by a human brain and make a machine computationally dense enough to run it with better spatial/temporal/energetic efficiency.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Tuesday March 15 2022, @09:53PM (1 child)
It would seem at the present moment that the great environmental collapse is progressing much more quickly, and may well derail planetary colonization before it happens successfully.
🌻🌻🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 0, Troll) by khallow on Wednesday March 16 2022, @04:24AM
There's that yearning for the Bug Paste Utopia [soylentnews.org] (BPU) again and again [soylentnews.org] and again [soylentnews.org]. It is truly unfortunate that reality isn't cooperating in the realization of the BPU.
Rivers no longer catch on fire (well, at least in the US), vast amounts of land are put under conservation, orcas eating healthy in oil spills, not forced to eat said bug paste, huge pollution declines in the developed world with more and more of the world joining that developed world, and producing things without massive ecological harm like slash and burn.
Maybe JoeMerchant, you can get into your pickup, roll coal, and turn back the tide of human progress. The BPU is clearly the superior choice. And maybe if you really help out a lot, we can reverse all that green progress so that we can achieve that glorious environmental collapse that we obviously want so much that we're willing to deny reality in order to achieve.