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Dec 20, 2009, 11:30pm

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Topic: Humanity Among The Stars (Read 131 times)

JP Dellova
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Humanity Among The Stars
« Thread Started on Jan 31, 2007, 2:01pm »

Intelligent Species in the Universe

At the moment I’m talking about our human variety. Where do we end up? It seems all higher forms on planet earth are, inevitably slated for extinction through one circumstance or another, including homo-sapiens, so how do we go about making sure we’ve got a future?

Let me set some basic premises so those who don’t see things in a similar vein will be able to stop reading without wasting any more of their time.

1) I don’t believe God one day put some gook together and called it man and then made woman from one of his ribs etc & etc. I don’t believe all the creatures of the earth were made in one big rush nor do I believe they were all preserved on a large boat in pairs of two. I believe the earth is much older than the 5,000 or so years some people assign to it. As an aside, I’d like to point out that is not an ancient belief, but one that was come up with a couple of hundred years ago when someone tallied up the numbers in the bible. At that time scientists were saying man couldn’t take the stresses of flying and, if humans moved at over twenty miles per hour they’d die. To me that’s all archaic gibberish, technology has proven it to be false and, for the life of me, I can’t see why otherwise intelligent people insist on taking bible stories literally. They were written thousands of years ago. You wouldn’t use ancient wisdom in building a television set, why use it in building your life.

2) Dinosaurs once roamed the earth and before them something else roamed the earth and so on going back a billion or so years, when the place became conducive to basic forms of life.

3) The earth and the other planets and the sun formed about 4.5 to 5 billion years back. This belief isn’t dependent upon believing in The Big Bang Theory, which I’m inclined to think we still don’t have a clear understanding of, though, of course, it’s obvious that the galaxies are pulling away from central point. But I do find it hard to believe it all started with something the size of a pea that expanded to the size of a grapefruit and so on, beginning 17 billion years back, whatever – and if the universe doesn’t fall back on itself in cycles, what came before that incredibly dense and unstable pea? But, as I said, where all of that is still a bit murky, at least to laymen like myself, we’ve got much stronger evidence about the formation of the solar system, and I believe the scientific version over the Old Testament account, or any other religions version (two celestial elephants having sex or whatever).

So, species evolve and planets are in a constant state of flux, you know, geological plates moving around, volcanic fault lines, magnetic poles reversing every so often, ice ages coming and going, that sort of thing.

Even if we find a way in our near future to avoid mass extinction events from outside our planets from affecting us – asteroid and comet collisions – how do we survive things like mega-volcanic eruptions like the one that will, inevitably, occur at Yellowstone?

I don’t think we do. I think something like that happens and most of the earth becomes uninhabitable for human beings. Most of our agriculture gets obliterated, and the land unusable for centuries afterward, etc & etc. So, if it happens today, out of our 6 billion perhaps a handful of millions survive to carry on the species. And, if a large asteroid or comet strikes during the recovery, we don’t survive at all and it’s back to evolutionary drawing board. Highest life form is the rodents, exactly as it was 65 million years ago, and after a period of vying with giant birds various higher mammals become dominant again and fast forward 60 or so million years to see who’s calling the shots.

So, if we want to survive as a species, we need to have large, self-reliant colonies throughout the solar system that will continue to exist, and move forward, even if planet earth becomes unfit for human life.

Where will they be?

My thoughts are our moon, the moons of Jupiter, and planet Mars. Conditions in those places are so hostile to human life that our colonists will need to live in sheltered cities. Not a new concept, they’re usually envisioned as being huge transparent domes with their own atmospheres, and a self-contained city. In my view the spaceport is outside the dome, perhaps the ships being boarded within and moved to the periphery for launching, conversely landing outside and being pulled within for offloading.

Water and all the other basic needs we’re vitally dependent upon, where do they come from? Comets, asteroids, and other natural objects that, in the natural course of events would collide with planetary bodies, depositing their properties over the course of millions of years. But we haven’t got millions of years to sit on a dry crust waiting for a water delivery, so we need to go out and find the things and put some device on them that will serve them up to the point they’re needed at. No point crashing them into Mars or anywhere else, where the resultant scattering of materials would be random. No, they’ll need to be guided into our colony and processed.

In New Earth, humanity has needed to get away from the inner planetary orbits as the sun, contrary to all earlier expectations, expands outwards 90 million or so miles, right about where Earth orbits, and a tad short of Mars.

So humanity, a part of it anyway, takes off and moves out toward the outer planets.

In the process it needs to absorb whatever it can in the way of water, metals, elements of all kinds, and all the rest.

When I first began writing the novel, my thought was that New Earth would be some hellhole of a planet in a different star system. It’s changed since then. With the help of an ultra advanced, no longer physical species that has long ago mastered gravity, the human race sets about building its new home. It does this literally, drawing the surviving parts of the old solar system into a single huge planet, basically Jupiter with everything else added to it. And this planet isn’t set up for man to walk on, or build houses or cities. No, it’s a resource that is used for tapping into. Humanity, living on it’s new home, mini-world star ships, orbits the new giant world at several locations, drawing power from the new huge red star that was once our sun, and preparing for the next phase, which is moving from one star to the next, or perhaps settling between them with the ability to move again at will to avoid wandering black holes, nearby super nova, and other unpleasant developments that would extinguish us for all time.

Anyway, those are some of my thoughts. I’d love to hear yours.

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