No, our environment is Earth, and only because we evolved to its conditions, and only by a very much luck that had them be in a very narrow zone that was good for life (and even Earth could not care less about us).

Our immediate environment aside from Earth is the vastness of the solar system, in planets totally unsuitable to support us, and with extreme costs to even get us to the nearest one, and with vast expanses of space and radiation to go through to get to the next.

We got humans to the closest rock for a few years, on a huge cost and effort, and with big risks (and some casualties), based on the competition of 2 superpowers. Since then, not only we haven't established any "base", but we haven't even been there for 48+ years (almost half a century)...

And even if by a very slim chance (which people who view technological progress as some kind of boundless Paolo Coelio fairy tale take for granted) we manage to do something in those planets, the next step (some earth like habitable planet elsewhere) is extremely more challenging, and speed of light limits would apply (of course people who view technological progress as some kind of boundless Paolo Coelio fairy tale bypass them with exotic contraptions that have us riding wormholes and what have you...).

And that's if war and climate mayhem doesn't have us concentrate all our efforts here...

Some food for though: don't concentrate on the pedantic details, but the high level arguments:

http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2009/11/the_myth...

http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2007/06/the_high...

I think the idea that science is some kind of fairy tail or magical solution to all our problems is a bit off. But, ask someone in the 1800s how they feel about the future and you’d get some pretty ignorant and wildly inaccurate responses.

The thing is, you and I are no more qualified to speculate on the future than someone from 100 years ago would be qualified to speculate on the Internet. However I can say one thing: if we even make a fraction of the progress in the next 100 years compared to the progress in the last, I don’t think we have anything to worry about when it comes to energy or transportation.

>The thing is, you and I are no more qualified to speculate on the future than someone from 100 years ago would be qualified to speculate on the Internet.

I'd say we are.

We don't expect the speed of light to change for example. Whereas people in the 1800s didn't have any such hard limit (e.g. based on Newtonian theory).

We also have the benefit of hindsight, and can see the rate of technical development (and e.g. that the low hanging fruit were on the late 19th century, increasing on early 20th century, and dropping down after the later half of the 20th century.

>However I can say one thing: if we even make a fraction of the progress in the next 100 years compared to the progress in the last, I don’t think we have anything to worry about when it comes to energy or transportation.

Compared to the progress in the last 100 years, or the last 50 years? Because already the progress in the last 50 years is laughable compared to the progress up until 1970 or so.

E.g. we had electricity, nuclear energy, combustion engine, radio, tv, film, digital imaging, lasers, microwaves, satellites, internet, computers, airplanes, transistors, rockets, radars, and tons of other fundamentals already available by 1960s -- not so much huge progress later on aside from evolutionary stuff.

(Well, we did have the slinky)

> not so much huge progress later on aside from evolutionary stuff.

shouldn't the internet be considered the greatest achievement yet?

The internet is not a technology unto itself. Rather, it's an application of technology. The internet of today is vastly different from the internet of the 1960s (which GP included in their list), but it's not fundamentally different at a technological level. The change of the internet from ARPANET to today is driven by nothing more than incremental improvement in existing technologies.

When was the last time a new technology reached commercial success?

that's a weak argument imo. all technologies can be considered applications of other technologies, from steel making to space faring.

Well, even if "all technologies can be considered applications of other technologies" some are less so than others.

Besides we're not talking about mere products here, but core technologies, e.g. inventions. The steam engine, the combustion engine, electricity, the telephone, laser, microwave, satellites, and so on, weren't mere "applications of other technologies" and even less so a mere incremental bump in the way modern internet vs 60s/70s internet is.

We already had the internet invented in the 60s (ARPANET). And even a better conception of the www idea (Xanadu). The rest is evolutionary stuff -- and we haven't done better since, just spread the technology to everybody.

Yeah right, how much does it cost to ship 1kg in space again ?

Do we even have the raw resources on earth / the tech to move everyone to a new planet and terraform it before we're all toast ?

Even if we do what's your moral standpoint on the fact that humanity destroyed 3+ billion years of evolution on earth in a few hundred years ?

Who in their right mind think that terraforming a planet is easier than just stopping destroying our home planet ?

Even if we do move to a new planet, in what kind of conditions will we live, I doubt we'd have even 10% f the comfort we have today. So why not scale down here, on earth, in the first place ?

> Yeah right, how much does it cost to ship 1kg in space again ?

a moon base would cost upwards of 20 billion USD.

the increase in the US military budget for FY2018 is 58 billion USD, bringing it to a total of 639 billion USD. that's just for FY2018. there is currently no world war.

> Do we even have the raw resources on earth / the tech to move everyone to a new planet and terraform it before we're all toast ?

no one mentioned anything about terraforming or moving people in this thread. i made a comment regarding finite resources, which aren't finite if you just look at the sky instead of the ground.

>a moon base would cost upwards of 20 billion USD.

It doesn;t have much to do with the original topic, but I think you're way underestimating it.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7ouiTMXuDAQ

"A moon base" meaning what in this context? I'm guessing it means a NASA research based designed to host no more than a dozen astronauts at a time. That number is basically meaningless when it comes to colonization. We simply don't have the technology to establish an independent colony on the moon. We might be able to do it on Mars, but it will cost trillions of dollars.

> Even if we do what's your moral standpoint on the fact that humanity destroyed 3+ billion years of evolution on earth in a few hundred years ?

didn't the earth go thru numerous planet-wide extinction events? and those were much much faster than a few hundred years.

The very big difference is that we are, at least partially, causing it, aware of it, aware it's going to be bad, and we know how to improve it. So we're making the decision, as a specie, not to care.

But sure in the big scheme of things it's not changing much, it's more of a personal / moral position.

But plenty of things cause extinction events, hell humans were causing the Wolly Mammoth to go extinct long before we had anything resembling a civilization. Plenty of other plants and animals will drive other animals to extinction. It’s the circle of life, one which we, being animals, are a part of.

I don't think that's where the question is. The issue is that other species dying might very well take us down too. It's an ecosystem where everything is interconnected, sure you can remove a few species here and there and nothing will change, but remove enough of them and we'll start seeing the consequences.

A good analogy is the Eiffel tower, you can remove a bolt, 10 bolts, 100 bolts, it'll still hold fine, remove one too many and it'll collapse. The metal will still be there (earth) but it won't be the Eiffel tower anymore (Life).

> The current rate of extinction of species is estimated at 100 to 1,000 times higher than natural background rates.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holocene_extinction

When I say about confusion in climate discussions (like elsewhere in the thread), I talk about precisely this. You arrived at the correct (IMO) conclusion that the primary and pressing issue with environmental damage is that systems humans depend on to live may collapse at some point, possibly quite suddenly. But in comments upthread, you argued about moral issues of letting species die. Those are two very separate problems! One of them is an issue of conscience, the other is an impending catastrophe that threatens to kill a lot of people and make even more suffer, and could likely be a civilization-ending process. I think bundling them together (which is common) is making people in general less receptive to the changes that need to be done.

Yes, but we weren't there as a civilization then. And the next one could wipe us all out.

In which case it will be little consolation that amoebas or even cockroaches and squirrels might survive...

Those are all much better arguments than your previous one. Be careful about doing a "motte and bailey", even if inadvertently.

The universe might be infinite, but growth will eventually be limited by the speed of light.

Per capita energy usage is about 6 MWh / year and our population has been doubling every 53 years. Assuming that continues, in 10000 years we'll be using 4e69 Wh / year. If we figure out 100% conversion of mass to energy, that's 1e56 kg of fuel, which is a lot more than all the matter in the visible universe.

You can play with these numbers a little, but even reducing the energy usage per person by a million only gives us another 1000 years. Soon we'll be growing so fast that every year we'll use all the resources within one light-year.

You should check out Hans Rosling's lectures [1]. Statistics points towards the fact that as people become more wealthy, they have less children. It should stagnate around 11 million people by most models.

[1] https://youtu.be/FACK2knC08E

> but our environment is the universe, and the universe is infinite in resources...

Get a human permanently and self-sufficiently out of LEO and i'll agree a limited part of the solar system is our environment.

For the foreseeable future our environment is earth and not a lot else.

for the foreseeable future we're planning on mining asteroids and the having a base on the moon... so i don't understand your point.

For the foreseeable future those involve a handful of people getting there as a novelty (in the same way people having been on the ISS for decades), not 8 billion needing to survive.

Not to mention they're still vaporware... Brochures are easy.

In 30 years Miami might be under the waters, and we'd still be extremely lucky if we have a 200 sq ft base on the moon.

(On which a man haven't even set foot for the last 48 years).

See that's exactly what I'm talking about.

We have a very real thing happening right now on earth with extreme consequences: major species extinction, air pollution, water pollution, soon to be ecological refugees, &c. But the answer is mining asteroid and having a moon base.

Why would we care about asteroid gold and the few (<100) people that might go to the moon and live an extremely strenuous life. It's not like we'll all go to the moon, crack open a cold one and watch the moon superbowl.

Try telling someone from a few hundred years ago they’d catch a jet airplane to an undiscovered continent thousands of miles away for a quick vacation. And on the way they could crack a cold one traversing oceans that explorers would spend months trying to traverse in a wooden boat. They could even buy tickets on a magic handheld machine which can teleport information through thin air to anywhere on the planet in fractions of a second.

If you change your sense of scale from a few years to a few hundred, yeah, I think it’s likely humanity will be watching the moon superbowl, in fact it’s probably the most dull and conservative view of the future someone could have.

We don't have time to wait a few hundred years for technology to improve though. The fate of the climate is decided in the next ten to twenty years. If we don't stop catastrophic climate change now, it's quite likely that technological society will be busy fighting for scarce resources here instead of building space colonies.

It will take at least a century of focused effort until an off world colony can be self sufficient. Think of how complex even the simplest things are that you interact with on a daily basis and how difficult it would be to replicate the industries that manufacture them on the Moon or Mars.

> Why would we care about asteroid gold and the few (<100) people that might go to the moon and live an extremely strenuous life.

scientific progress.

Unless we make a breakthrough in physics (which is pretty unlikely to be possible in our current understanding), the universe will be limited to us. The best we can do is a sphere of human economy expanding its radius at near the speed of light. That still leaves out a good chunk of universe forever inaccessible to us. Physics does seem to put a limit on growth.

Our current environment and resource reach only extends to low earth orbit.

Even the moon which is the closest stable near earth resource is at least a couple of decades away from any practical use.

Chances are that the climate of earth will become more unstable before any kind of space based economy can really be taken seriously.

The moon is "a couple decades away from any practical use" in the same way that fusion power is. Likewise, there have been models of orbital economies for decades, and no one has even tried to actually do it. For all practical purposes our current reach extends to the surface of the Earth and no further.

You are correct but infinite resources of universe are out of our reach at the moment and if we will not work smart with Earth local resources we may never reach a level at which we will be able to benefit from resources outside of our planet.