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Re:Seven earth-sized planets discovered circling a star 39 l... by matwood on Wednesday February 22, 2017 @02:47PM (#13708583)
NASA is not standing still. Europa just went to the next stage for exploration.

http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/news.php?feature=6755

It just takes a lot of time to plan and build ships for space travel.

Re:Seven earth-sized planets discovered circling a star 39 l... by blueprint on Wednesday February 22, 2017 @03:16PM (#13708788)
You're completely missing my point.

We've known about climate change for a long time. Since the 60s/70s, no? But nobody has been able to realize what it really is, because scientists do not understand gravity yet. I've been begging people to confirm this for themselves instead of believing what others say about it. If people really knew what global warming was they would have started working on ships decades ago.

My point is, people on stable self-sufficient colony outside of Earth is priority number one. Not sending a probe to Europa. But somehow I get the feeling you have no interest in this reality.

Re:Seven earth-sized planets discovered circling a star 39 l... by Arizhel on Wednesday February 22, 2017 @04:48PM (#13709491)
You sound a little unhinged to be honest. If you're really worried that climate change on Earth is going to cause big problems for humans (which is not an unreasonable concern; climate change threatens to cause significant sea level rise which will cause big problems for people living in sea-level coastal cities), building self-sufficient colonies offworld is a rather extreme answer to that. A simpler answer is to simply move inland, and make sure your structures can handle extreme weather. That's a lot easier than trying to build an offworld colony.

The real reason to build an offworld colony is because you're worried about a big asteroid strike. But here again, it's a lot easier to just build observation systems to spot these threats, and weapons systems to handle these threats, than to build an offworld colony that's truly self-sufficient.

Finally, offworld colonies have gigantic problems with them: 1) people don't handle radiation well, and no place in the Solar System protects us from radiation the way the Earth does, so we'd probably have to burrow underground to mitigate it, and 2) we really don't know how well the human body can handle low-gravity conditions, but we do know that the human body does not handle zero-g well and that it causes massive health problems. There's no place in the Solar System with close to Earth-normal gravity, except for Venus which is a hellhole hot enough to melt lead (on the surface). Mars is only 1/3g, and the Moon is only 1/6g, and pretty much everything else is even less except the gas giants which obviously aren't livable.

Now what climate change and offworld colonies (in this system at least) have to do with our lack of understanding of gravity, I have no idea.

Re:Seven earth-sized planets discovered circling a star 39 l... by alphanumeric0 on Thursday February 23, 2017 @01:19PM (#13716262)
So all we have to do about climate change is build structures to handle extreme weather? Climate change is and will continue to affect our whole food chain that supports the some ~7 billion people on earth. It's not just the weather we will be dealing with.
Re:Seven earth-sized planets discovered circling a star 39 l... by Arizhel on Thursday February 23, 2017 @02:28PM (#13716905)
And you think it's easier to just pack up and move to Mars than to deal with the climate change? You think it'd be easier to figure out how to grow food on Mars than to mitigate climate change-caused problems with the food chain here?

There's lots of stuff you can do to grow food here even with climate change: greenhouses, indoor/vertical farming, etc. Good luck with all that on Mars.

Re:Seven earth-sized planets discovered circling a star 39 l... by maverick_iceman on Wednesday February 22, 2017 @05:23PM (#13709794)
Scientists understand gravity very well, pick up any book on general relativity.
Re:Seven earth-sized planets discovered circling a star 39 l... by flukus on Wednesday February 22, 2017 @06:38PM (#13710317)
> We've known about climate change for a long time. Since the 60s/70s, no? But nobody has been able to realize what it really is, because scientists do not understand gravity yet.

We know exactly what climate change is and it has nothing to do with gravity.

Re:Seven earth-sized planets discovered circling a star 39 l... by pavel_lishin on Wednesday February 22, 2017 @07:23PM (#13710558)
What does gravity have to do with climate change?