A study analyzes how the birth rate collapse will reduce the world’s population. Experts warn governments to prepare for the challenges of living in an emptier world
Lol space will NOT make any difference at all. That technology is not progressing at a rate where we could have millions, let alone billions of people inhabiting space in the near future. We’d also pretty much be completely limited to our solar system, meaning planet-wise we have maybe Mars and Europa and Titan at best… but there’s absolutely no chance of any meaningful colonial activity on those planets, Mars would probably have something similar to Antarctic research facilities on it but that’s about it.
Technology is the only option besides euthanasia or actually killing people in a regular basis - and I doubt very much we’d like any of the latter options.
Technology doesn’t have to progress at any rate - we already have the technology to build self sufficient stations. It’s just very expensive.
Being limited to the solar system isn’t an issue, because the issue is fundamentally that the planet can’t sustain this many people without a lot of help. Meaning, a few 100k is enough to use the technology on planet earth as well.
Why do you think the planet can’t sustain some amount of people? It’s not because we don’t have enough space, we have plenty of space – especially if we prioritize car-free or low-car dense urban infrastructure design. The problem is we don’t have enough resources. Even if we could send a bunch of people into space, that doesn’t do anything for our problem at all. In fact, it just increases the strain on our resources.
Space stations require a lot of maintanence and monitoring, we can’t just make a few billion of them and then hope it’ll work out. It’s far too complicated and unsustainable without very hard-to-find professionals. And a few easy mistakes by this completely untrained and unprofessional crew of an unimaginable amount of people can put everyone in danger. Whatever habitat could fit hundreds of thousands to millions of people has a TON of failure points, with our current technology it is in a sense too big to not catastrophically fail in a short time period. Space is dangerous, death is easy, sabatoging the entire vessel carrying everyone is easy, and maintaining one is extremely difficult and it would have many easy-to-miss potential problems. It’s not as nice as video games make it out to be, especially considering those are usually hundreds of years in the future or in a totally different universe.
We’re all going to die of worldwide war before we find any use in sending a million people into space, and we’re going to die before we can even feasibly do it at all, probably. I would like to see it, but it’s just a massive waste of resources if we’re being realistic – there is nothing to achieve with it.
Technology is not going to save us - escaping to space is a pipe dream: hugely expensive and frought with technical challenges and harsh realities like cosmic radiation that will kill anyone outside of Earth’s ionosphere for too long. And even if, somehow, we solve all of that, what makes you think that we can make Mars habitable when we can’t even keep the planet we’ve already got habitable?
Technology is the only option besides euthanasia or actually killing people in a regular basis - and I doubt very much we’d like any of the latter options. Cosmic radiation is solvable and I never said it’s Mars we need.
Apart from that: The planet is and will be habitable for quite some time - but we’re going back to square one and the question will be: Euthanasia or outright killing those that have no say.
There is another way, the one we seem to have chosen already - do nothing and wait for nature to take its course. Lots of people will die, but mostly the global poor who are far enough away from the 1% for them to care.
realistically, living in space doesnt mean making mars habitable, it means getting good enough at life support and indoor farming and building bigger structures in space to just live inside artificial habitats, be that on mars or some other planet, or in space itself, forever. Its not a solution to climate change or such though, even if simply because being able to do it at scale means that the climate changing is no longer an existential threat anyway.
Making a self-sufficient space station is not any easier, and you still need to solve the cosmic radiation problem. How many people are you expecting to live on this thing any way, and how do you propose to lift a space craft big enough to support them all into space? These projects are so pie in the sky I’m lost for words…
its much easier than terraforming an entire planet, orders of magnitude easier. Its difference between building a city and building an entire world. I dont think this is something we’ll see anytime soon mind, Id imagine the better part of a century at the earliest for even the most basic ones.
that being said, the answers to the latter two questions are actually much easier: You solve the radiation issue by putting a lot of stuff between the people inside and space, what stuff depends on where the structure is. On a place like mars, itd probably just be a lot of dirt piled on top, or you build underground to begin with. as for the latter, you dont launch it all at once, just as you dont build a colony on another continent by loading an entire city onto a ship. You harvest most of the needed materials from wherever you plan to build it, and construct it in space. You probably send people back and forth in a large number of trips with multiple smaller ships. This sounds very difficult now because we do not have much infrastructure in space yet, and launching mass is very expensive. Once one can both mine materials in space and refine and assemble them into useful forms there, the task is dramatically easier as one just has to launch the people. We wont really be doing any space colonies without building that kind of in-space economy first, which will be a slow process
How many people are going to live on this space station? Thousands at most. What about the rest left on a dying planet?
Cosmic radiation goes about 10kmt through the earth, so a pile of dirt won’t help. A metric fuck ton of water or an incredibly strong magnetic field would be the minimum. Earth is habitable because it has the later.
What even is the goal here? A tiny group of people are now just about surviving on a small spaceship so they don’t have to… just about survive on a dying planet? Not sure I see the win here…
Well, yes - unless we actually get out in space before 2050, which could make a big difference
Lol space will NOT make any difference at all. That technology is not progressing at a rate where we could have millions, let alone billions of people inhabiting space in the near future. We’d also pretty much be completely limited to our solar system, meaning planet-wise we have maybe Mars and Europa and Titan at best… but there’s absolutely no chance of any meaningful colonial activity on those planets, Mars would probably have something similar to Antarctic research facilities on it but that’s about it.
I disagree.
Technology is the only option besides euthanasia or actually killing people in a regular basis - and I doubt very much we’d like any of the latter options.
Technology doesn’t have to progress at any rate - we already have the technology to build self sufficient stations. It’s just very expensive.
Being limited to the solar system isn’t an issue, because the issue is fundamentally that the planet can’t sustain this many people without a lot of help. Meaning, a few 100k is enough to use the technology on planet earth as well.
Why do you think the planet can’t sustain some amount of people? It’s not because we don’t have enough space, we have plenty of space – especially if we prioritize car-free or low-car dense urban infrastructure design. The problem is we don’t have enough resources. Even if we could send a bunch of people into space, that doesn’t do anything for our problem at all. In fact, it just increases the strain on our resources.
Space stations require a lot of maintanence and monitoring, we can’t just make a few billion of them and then hope it’ll work out. It’s far too complicated and unsustainable without very hard-to-find professionals. And a few easy mistakes by this completely untrained and unprofessional crew of an unimaginable amount of people can put everyone in danger. Whatever habitat could fit hundreds of thousands to millions of people has a TON of failure points, with our current technology it is in a sense too big to not catastrophically fail in a short time period. Space is dangerous, death is easy, sabatoging the entire vessel carrying everyone is easy, and maintaining one is extremely difficult and it would have many easy-to-miss potential problems. It’s not as nice as video games make it out to be, especially considering those are usually hundreds of years in the future or in a totally different universe.
We’re all going to die of worldwide war before we find any use in sending a million people into space, and we’re going to die before we can even feasibly do it at all, probably. I would like to see it, but it’s just a massive waste of resources if we’re being realistic – there is nothing to achieve with it.
Technology is not going to save us - escaping to space is a pipe dream: hugely expensive and frought with technical challenges and harsh realities like cosmic radiation that will kill anyone outside of Earth’s ionosphere for too long. And even if, somehow, we solve all of that, what makes you think that we can make Mars habitable when we can’t even keep the planet we’ve already got habitable?
I disagree.
Technology is the only option besides euthanasia or actually killing people in a regular basis - and I doubt very much we’d like any of the latter options. Cosmic radiation is solvable and I never said it’s Mars we need.
Apart from that: The planet is and will be habitable for quite some time - but we’re going back to square one and the question will be: Euthanasia or outright killing those that have no say.
There is another way, the one we seem to have chosen already - do nothing and wait for nature to take its course. Lots of people will die, but mostly the global poor who are far enough away from the 1% for them to care.
I disagree too.
Degrow already.
realistically, living in space doesnt mean making mars habitable, it means getting good enough at life support and indoor farming and building bigger structures in space to just live inside artificial habitats, be that on mars or some other planet, or in space itself, forever. Its not a solution to climate change or such though, even if simply because being able to do it at scale means that the climate changing is no longer an existential threat anyway.
Making a self-sufficient space station is not any easier, and you still need to solve the cosmic radiation problem. How many people are you expecting to live on this thing any way, and how do you propose to lift a space craft big enough to support them all into space? These projects are so pie in the sky I’m lost for words…
its much easier than terraforming an entire planet, orders of magnitude easier. Its difference between building a city and building an entire world. I dont think this is something we’ll see anytime soon mind, Id imagine the better part of a century at the earliest for even the most basic ones.
that being said, the answers to the latter two questions are actually much easier: You solve the radiation issue by putting a lot of stuff between the people inside and space, what stuff depends on where the structure is. On a place like mars, itd probably just be a lot of dirt piled on top, or you build underground to begin with. as for the latter, you dont launch it all at once, just as you dont build a colony on another continent by loading an entire city onto a ship. You harvest most of the needed materials from wherever you plan to build it, and construct it in space. You probably send people back and forth in a large number of trips with multiple smaller ships. This sounds very difficult now because we do not have much infrastructure in space yet, and launching mass is very expensive. Once one can both mine materials in space and refine and assemble them into useful forms there, the task is dramatically easier as one just has to launch the people. We wont really be doing any space colonies without building that kind of in-space economy first, which will be a slow process
How many people are going to live on this space station? Thousands at most. What about the rest left on a dying planet?
Cosmic radiation goes about 10kmt through the earth, so a pile of dirt won’t help. A metric fuck ton of water or an incredibly strong magnetic field would be the minimum. Earth is habitable because it has the later.
What even is the goal here? A tiny group of people are now just about surviving on a small spaceship so they don’t have to… just about survive on a dying planet? Not sure I see the win here…