Escape
So where can we escape to? Even against the problems of food, oxygen, and the lack of gravity causing anything you deposit in the toilet to come back up for a rematch, it'll be hard to find anywhere vaguely hospitable.
THE MOON : It's our closest neighbour and would give stunning views of the Earth. But the lack of gravity would eventually take its toll, and your muscles would wear down to a muscley pulp. You might end up like Kif in Futurama - "Actually, my race doesn't have bones. We move via a series of water-filled bladders." Also, there is no way to generate food except huge bio-domes, which wouldn't be strong enough to survive an asteroid, meteor, or "stray" American nukes.
MARS : Some gravity. You'd waste away a little slower than on the moon, which has got to be worth something. Getting stuff to land on Mars seems rather hard (a large proportion of missions there have failed - I blame the Martians). There is water but it would need to be melted off the poles, and the planet would need terraforming. The basis of an atmosphere gives us something to work with, but just getting there with current technology requires months, during which time a crew must be kept alive while also taking with them equipment to survive for a long time. Challenging.
VENUS : Apart from the Sulphuric Acid rain and the standard temperature hot enough to melt lead, a lovely place.
TITAN : A full atmosphere. No oxygen, nasty gases.
There are also various artifical places we could live, like Ringworlds or the brilliant Dyson's Sphere. You simply (it's infact incredibly hard and would require an insane amount of time and labour) create a sphere around your sun. Then, you cover it with solar panels. Et voila, a crazy amount of energy. The materials alone would need you to devour several planets though. Possibly not a good solution right now.
Any other ideas about how we could save the human race when the Earth becomes uninhabitable?
THE MOON : It's our closest neighbour and would give stunning views of the Earth. But the lack of gravity would eventually take its toll, and your muscles would wear down to a muscley pulp. You might end up like Kif in Futurama - "Actually, my race doesn't have bones. We move via a series of water-filled bladders." Also, there is no way to generate food except huge bio-domes, which wouldn't be strong enough to survive an asteroid, meteor, or "stray" American nukes.
MARS : Some gravity. You'd waste away a little slower than on the moon, which has got to be worth something. Getting stuff to land on Mars seems rather hard (a large proportion of missions there have failed - I blame the Martians). There is water but it would need to be melted off the poles, and the planet would need terraforming. The basis of an atmosphere gives us something to work with, but just getting there with current technology requires months, during which time a crew must be kept alive while also taking with them equipment to survive for a long time. Challenging.
VENUS : Apart from the Sulphuric Acid rain and the standard temperature hot enough to melt lead, a lovely place.
TITAN : A full atmosphere. No oxygen, nasty gases.
There are also various artifical places we could live, like Ringworlds or the brilliant Dyson's Sphere. You simply (it's infact incredibly hard and would require an insane amount of time and labour) create a sphere around your sun. Then, you cover it with solar panels. Et voila, a crazy amount of energy. The materials alone would need you to devour several planets though. Possibly not a good solution right now.
Any other ideas about how we could save the human race when the Earth becomes uninhabitable?
posted by Mkzrj at 3:57 pm
3 Comments:
I'm all for the sphere of solar panels. It sounds excellent and we wouldn't have any energy problems; imagine that if we can use the energy currently picked up by 2% of the surface area of Earth. A giant solar panel would provide so much energy, we could do practically unlimited things.
Fire up the Improbability Drive and turn Earth into a gigantic turnip. But not only that, a turnip that can support life.
How about....
...constructing a giant balloon into which we transfer some of the Earth's atmosphere and create artificial land?
...building a machine which shrinks everyone to a tiny size so they can inhabit a much smaller space?
...travelling back in time and inhabiting the past instead?
Post a Comment
<< Home