Our future. (or "Our death"; maybe the same thing)

Let’s think, for a moment, about some of the scientific ‘endgames’ in mind for this planet:

1.                We’ve destroyed this world’s ecosystem, and it cannot sustain us.

2.                We’ve nuked the shit out of the planet, and we can’t live here anymore.

3.                Population is too high, and we are out of room for everyone, and we are out of resources to eat/build with.

Now, the answers I always hear to these conundrums:

1.                We build gigantic spaceships, and either do circles in space until the Earth rebuilds itself, or move the entire population of Earth to some new planet(s)!

2.                Some people escape into space and form new colonies and survive!

3.                We build spaceships and start building colonies on asteroids and planets, and use them to both sustain life on Earth and to hold our overflow population!

No matter what apocalypse comes, for whatever reason the Earth is rendered uninhabitable, we seem to always fall back on space travel. Space is our safety valve.

Now, I’ll admit that I AM NOT AN EXPERT in any spacecraft technologies; I have no professional position from which to lecture on this subject. I’m simply speaking from what I think is current available technology.

So, let’s think about this, this idea that we’ll all hop on spacecraft and zoom away to a new planet which is perfect for us. Or maybe it’s not so perfect, but we overcome it with our incredible technology: terraforming to shape the environment to one hospitable, or at least habitable, to us; upright walking machine-gun-armed exoskeletons to protect us from the vicious wildlife; some way to extract pure water from rocks; etc. Totally plausible, right?

Um, how close have any such giant exoskeletons actually come to fruition? I believe that the hilarious failure videos Tony Stark showed in ‘Ironman II’ were more accurate as to our current technology than the behemoths in ‘Avatar’. I don’t believe we have yet discovered a way to make pure, or even potable, water from… well, from “not water”. And terraforming? It’s a great idea, and I’m sure there are people who have hypotheses about how it could actually be done and how it would work, but a hypotheses does exactly jack shit for you when you’re sitting on a black, airless rock, starving, freezing cold- or literally burning hot- and running out of the bottled water and PB&J in your backpack.

Oh, I’m sorry; is this a little unfair? After all, with the way technology is progressing these days, those will all surely be attainable someday, right? I do believe that if our technological prowess continues to advance with such speed indefinitely, terraforming entire planets and making food and water from raw waste materials will be not only possible, but easily accomplished- someday. The problem is that we don’t need it “someday”; we need it tomorrow.

I constantly hear new theories postulating how and when the world will end. A third of responses to the claims are proclaiming them outlandish, saying that they’re totally unrealistic, and that “such-and-such” proves them wrong. (“such-and-such” often being another theory like the one they’re declaiming) A second third are calmly saying, “yeah, that’s about right- we’re all going to die soon!” And then there’s the last group, who are the half-optimistic thinkers- the people who say that, yes, the world will end if we continue as-is, but that the technology which is coming ‘soon’ will make that particular doomsday irrelevant and easily avoidable.

But we keep getting closer to the day they’re predicting to be “the end”, and we keep saying that we have revolutionary, world-saving tech coming soon. Bitch, ever seen “Space Odyssey 2001”?! Okay, so I haven’t, but I know that it’s about a bunch of people in a futuristic spaceship, flying through space, with a fully-functional and sentient AI computer running the fucking ship. Oh, that’s pretty common tech these days, right?

To quote Leo McGarry (from “The West Wing”): Where’s my jetpack? My colonies on the moon?!”

We, as a species, as a society, are not close enough to rationalize, to reasonably expect, an exodus to the stars. And if we aren’t going to run away to the safe arms of space, (can you see the sarcasm dripping from that sentence?) we should probably get our lazy asses moving on some stop-gap measures, some way(s) to preserve our life here. If it sucks, like population limits and the requirement to have a job applicable to sustaining life (farmer, industrial worker, etc), then so be it. I’m sorry, but either we die as a species, or people get the fuck over having their wittle feewings hurt!

OK, I’m done. For now.