The universe speaks: 'It's time to get off your rock!'

"Science fiction writer Robert Heinlein summed it up best: "Once the human race is established on more than one planet and especially, in more than one solar system, there is no way now imaginable to kill off the human race."

There is; religion.

And more specifically, religious fanatics/nutters. Just give them access to some nice education and a selection of nasty viruses and thats one planet gone. Given enough time, friendly rivalries will turn into outright aggression and ultimately thermonuclear winter will kill off everything but the cockroaches.

Name it iRock

Then as it enters the atmosphere a crack team of lawyers can sue it out of existence.

I have to agree with this article's title

Step one is figuring out an economical way to get people and materials into orbit. Until we can do that the best you are going to get is "we managed to build a spaceships for a few hundred/thousand people and we called it saving humanity".

I happened to mention this issue...

...to a group of my friends in a pub a year or so ago, and suggested that , out of all the threats I knew about, this one really needed to be addressed.

The general consensus was that I was either drunk or insane.

This seemed to be based on the belief that WE are down here, and SPACE is up there, and so the two things are nothing to do with each other. Furthermore, anyone who starts talking about space as if it was somewhere to go is obviously living in the far future - 'thousands of years hence' was mentioned. Indeed, one wag suggester, to general approval, that humans would have evolved into another species before we needed to worry about what was on the Moon.

Anyone who wants to address defences against meteorites will have to address this attitude first...

"Watch out, human beans"

Or dat big, black hole gonna getchoo.

Doomed...

They swore blind the planet was about to be eaten by an enormous mutant star-goat, or some such thing

Paranoia

I know I am paranoid. The question is am I paranoid enough? Am I paranoid about the right things?

I would guess that living with this little dilemma is the basis for all the religious foo foo rah that has been going on for as long as there have been human beings. Maybe we really need just a little bit of faith to go along with all our new knowledge. I would also wager that no one will be heading off of this rock any time soon without taking time to say a little prayer about making it back in one piece.

Did the commentards call for an asteroid proof shield to be built over every nuclear power station yet?

Picture a moldy cheese ball a couple of days before el reg's xmas party

Everyone knows that the nut-covered ball will vanish long before the cheap wine and the partiers do. Thriving on the surface of the cheese ball dwells microscopic colonies of anxious mold. And their thoughts were about the immenent destruction of the cheese ball, into the maws of voracious IT writers. In the most intelligent circles, the very best and brightest of Moldo sapien, the discussion was how best to escape their birth cheese ball to a better ball, and save their mold line from extinction. There were Bries and Camemberts and Goudas all around but inter-cheese travel was olny dreamed about and hadn't been developed. The furthest they had travelled was only to other cheeses on the same cheese plate.

Could they ever get to the wheel of Emmentaler at the nearby cheese store?

Certainly not before el reg's xmas party.

Why the suprise over the russian hit?

Meteors and asteroids are the products of collisions and its safe to say the huge one that passed us by was going to have some debris following it. It was the size of an Olympic pool Friday but it would have been even bigger thousands of years ago, did they think the fallout from millions of old collisions just evaporated?

Babylon 5 and "all of this was for nothing unless we go to the stars" quote

So, apparently we have to "go to the stars" for anything to be worthwhile. Let's try to clarify this:

How many of us have to go there? You, me, our kids... what if it was just the Murdoch and Koch and Ellison and Gates and Jobs and Putin and Romney and <insert lots more 1% names> families? They're humans, too... and they have a lot more resources at their disposal than most ordinary people do. Why shouldn't they be entrusted with the stewardship of the works of Buddy Holly and Aristophanes, etc? Who gets to be the payload, and who gets to be discarded as early stages of the great rocket of humanity?

Do the ones that go have to be the same species that we are now, or some offshoot of humanity? Will they even care about all that culture? I am trying to convince my son to care about Aristophanes, but he's more interested in Minecraft. How far removed from us could any descendants be and still care about carrying the essence of "us" into space somehow? Do you feel that you are representing for the Homo Habilis crew every time you make a tool?

What about just sending some AI carrying all of recorded human knowledge/culture, which can explain it all for someone else to appreciate? What's so great about my 1,000th generation descendant shrugging at the works of Marilyn Monroe and Buddy Holly before getting back to Space Minecraft version 4982? Perhaps something that is not in anyway descended from my or any other human loins might feel more appreciation for "Peggy Sue"?

I know for a 100% fact that I will die. Sometimes in the meanwhile I get to enjoy being alive just doing my own thing, but apart from that it's all about how I interact with the living, reacting world around me; people, and animals, and even the plants in my garden. Of my small impact on that world, even less would ever have a chance of being known unto these wonder-entities who will carry all the "proper achievements" like Marilyn Monroe out into space and eternity; guess my life is worthless. Oh well.

Flame away, space lovers...

No need to travel afar. The young-rich-famous-and-fertile could board an Earth-orbiting station, accompanied by robotic orbiting capsules containing post-apocalypse survival supplies. Caviar, pate and other essentials. Durable necessities could be cached in secret locations on earth. Wait out the disaster, then return when the smoke clears and repopulate. If the whole planet goes "pffft" then at least they have a front-row seat. Free beer and crisps for the rest of us.

Here I am thinking about doom and forgetting to work..

I had better get coding or I won't be able to afford either-

A: a ticket with Bill &Co, or

B: a mind transfer into the probe thingy A.I., or

C: oh and why do we always want to put a 'C' in every list of alternatives??

It's all too much :-)

Icon of doom!

Armageddon alone has 168 physical impossibilities

What? You mean we can't land a bunch of out-of-shape guys on an asteroid, have this drill a big hole, and drop in a nuke all to a soundtrack that includes Aerosmith and ZZ Top? Dang. Guess I need to make new retirement plans.

On a more serious note, Deep Impact was a much better movie. Why does Armageddon get all the media love?

Hammond

Strangely, I can only read this article with the voice of Richard Hammond (TG) in my head. Makes it seem more DON'T PANIC! for some reason.

Issue of priorities

The human race needs a priority check!

We live on this planet as if we believe that nothing will ever knock us off our perch.

How immature and naive of us. its embarrassing to know that most people on this site, who share the same ideology share some fragment of their DNA with the " intellectuals" and the "powerful" individuals who call the shots around the world and set the priorities on behalf of all of us.

There needs to be a wake up call, and unfortunately i don't believe it can happen subtly. We have fallen too far into a sleep like state that we've built for our selves in form of all sorts of distractions, where we've stopped excelling in what has gotten this species to the point where we are now. The basics of exploration have taken a back seat . Something that was at forefront of our forefathers, before the world got smaller.

We need to rewrite our priorities if we are to pro-long our existence as a species.

We're ignoring the most obvious signs, we dont control all aspects of nature, as much as we think we may do. We are at the mercy of it and so very vulnerable.

The world's list of priorities is currently steered by rich individuals who are driven by impulse of greed and this extends to all current governments around the world. If their priorities are not in research of ways to sustain our species than their priorities are purely superficial.

What technological advancements have we progressed in over the past 50 years? microwaves and internet, smart phones and flat screen TVs? its obvious that "people" have been suppressed and our advancement curved to almost a standstill where there are more "new" advancement in the virtual form than there are in the actual hard reality.

Whilst the progress and priorities are driven by money and money is controlled by rich short sighted individuals, I'm afraid the voice of the realism is just that, a voice and nothing else....