Too Late for the Earth, Too Soon for the Stars
newdesigncongress.orgDepending on how you define exploration, there's still an enormous amount of things and places left to explore on Earth, and not just inside its absolute most unreachable areas such as the deep ocean.
Even today, humanity, though widely spread around the globe, concretely occupies only a tiny fraction of the plant's surface, leaving enormous hollows with all kinds of curious secrets.
This is the very reason why even now we constantly have news of newly discovered species, newly discovered geographical features and new discoveries of ancient ruins even. Hell there are even major unclimbed mountains left in the world, now, in 2023.
Should even these be too much to ask for, simply finding places to travel to and looking into their more obscure corners, especially if you accompany this with some sort of hobby, like photography, or collecting or cataloging certain things, could leave you busy with adventure for decades.
No, nobody is going to discover any new continents or be the first ever to set foot in some large new region of the world, but reframing your expectations can work wonders for realizing just how much of the world is far from completely categorized, sorted, filmed and fully pigeonholed. It's absurd to think that only the void of space and the worlds within it are what's left for the deeply curious and adventurous.
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"We are the middle children. Too late to explore the continents of Earth, too early to explore space. I do not understand your sorrow. My friend, we stand upon the backs of explorers whose sacrifices nurture us. We hold in our hands the keys to the garden of space in which the infinite spring of adventure pours. The fountain of youth is not one where old men go to stave off death's embrace, but it is where we send our children and their children so that they may live.
Brother, we are the Gatekeepers, the Architects, the Creators, the Bridgemen. It is our age that connects one era to another, one explorer to the next. We are not explorers, we were never really meant to be. Our children are the ones who will touch the intangible, ride asteroids around the stars; when they wake up, it will be stardust they scrape from their eyes.
Sister, our children cannot come into their own if we do not come into ours. Do not mourn a destiny that was never yours. We must make for them their future through our own sacrifices.
If you must, chug your alcohol and go to bed, but please be ready in the morning - we have work to do." - /u/bumrumble
We haven't even identified all of the bird species, and many prevalent bird species don't have complete life histories.
And that's before we talk about botany, which has vast frontiers that remain unexplored.
So we are certainly not "too late for the earth", unless we drive these species to extinction before we are able to study them.
It is a problem that will be eventually solved, either because we discovered the remaining species, or that the unknown ones are all already (and probably recently enough) extinct, or that we run out of explorers/humans.
But I'm not sure what will happen first.
I think there is a lot to explore, its just not easy wanderlust to run away from the problems of a dense society. The whole endavour to keep that society going & developing for really long term without it crashing as it did in all more fragile habbitats humanity has touched, thats a huge adventure.
Just not a comfortable or pleasant one.
Why do people think are too late to explore the Earth? We’ve got no idea what’s at the bottom of the oceans.
James Cameron knows as he has been to the bottom of Challenger deep :)
In all seriousness it doesn't mean we've explored literally everything, but a lot of the wonder is missing. It's frustrating that there might be millions of planets we can inhabit out there with limitless exploration....maybe billions or even trillions of worlds depending on how many galaxies to include, but it's all out of reach. We haven't even left the kuiper belt not to mention the Oort Cloud and have no idea how to do something remotely like warp to reach distant stars in a reasonable amount of time and maybe never will. Star Trek may be the wrong solution too. Perhaps it's more likely we have a singularity event first and can then increase our intelligences rapidly and then figure something out. Or maybe we just build our own simulations to dwell in and direct our exploration more inwards <End Rant/>
If everything else doesn't work, at least we can treat the whole planet Earth as a very slow, random walking spaceship. If we learn how to maintain a technological civilization here sustainably, without wrecking it's life support systems, it will take us to the next destination in a bit over 1Myr, for free: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gliese_710
Or bring us a lot closer in a 'measly' 30..40k years. See "Distant future and past encounters" here:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_nearest_stars_and_br...
Maybe that's our 'test' as intelligent lifeform: have opportunities to 'jump ship' to other solar systems, potentially discover alien life there, if only we can survive & maintain space-travel capability long enough for other star(s) to come within hopping distance?
Looking at that little rotating starfield, it reminds me of an idle problem I occasionally think of: "If I was somehow lost in space and found by helpful aliens, what useful information could I provide--from memory--for locating my home planet again?"
The best I can think of offhand are ratios that could help them filter existing records:
1. It's the third planet from the Sun, the majority of it is covered with water, etc.
2. It has a moon 1/6 its mass
3. The largest planet in the system has a little over 70% of all the planetary mass
4. The largest planet in the system is 5.2x further from the Sun than my third-planet
But on a larger scale... Somewhere around the middle distance of an arm in a galaxy? I doubt I would have triangulation distances from major quasars memorized.
I get the frustration, but it also sounds like a whiny teenager. "Mom, I'm bored." "You could read a book, or play a game, or go for a walk." "All of those things are boring."
It always sounds like an excuse to me. They've picked a thing that they can't do and set it as the only meaningful goal, to avoid having to do anything that might actually matter.
I'm sorry that they got denied the thing that they specifically want to do. They can join the line with all the kids that fail to become movie stars and tech CEOs. It's a club called "everybody", and we meet at the bar.
I don't understand what you're trying to say. Nobody is saying everything is boring, they're just saying the kind of exploration that was possible for most of human history and which may be possible in the next thousand years or so is no longer available to us. That's it. Just an observation and a longing.
When we have reached the point to explore extrasolar worlds, we will probably have also reached the point that a spacecraft can map an entire planet as soon as it has reached it.
True, but you'll still be the first humans climbing it's mountains and walking through it's forests and beaches. It still counts.
Or the wonder is right here and we just don’t see it. That was the point of “ Star Trek IV”: The aliens came to Earth, and our conceit is that they would only come to talk to us.
There's surely wonder in our planet including creatures like dolphins, whales, octopi (is that the plural form), monkeys, and many others. Scientists are working on trying to better understand how those animals work.
Science (or knowledge in broad sense) will be always unexplored, because humans are born ignorant.
When people talk about exploring they usually have in their minds the great explorers of the previous centuries, who managed to get to “new” places on earth and discovered countries.
I think this is directly related to our means (and speed) of transportation. From the very old days where horses were used, then with cars, trains, boats, planes and so on. We’re “the middle children”, as the post states, stuck on this planet without sufficient speed to break our earth bound chains.
Let’s hope that Faster Than Light travel, or some other exotic way, will allow us to roam the stars and continue our civilization (with its bad and good behaviors).
I'm a person, when I talk about exploring I think about Len Beadell who taught me how to shoot stars and use a theodolite, I think about Tim Cope riding a horse 6,000 miles across the Eurasian steppe from Mongolia, through Kazakhstan, Russia, and the Ukraine, to Hungary, about the women who have solo crossed Australia with camels and the lass that rode a horse across the southern coast during the pandemic, about Bruce Parry scaling Mandela after sneaking through the jungle of New Guinea dodging the Indonesians.
These are all examples of human exploration in my lifetime, the kind of thing that inspires you to hitch a ride on a pearling lugger and shoot the horizontal falls in a home made sea kayak, scope out the tower in Sydney for the Chris Hilton climb *, cross the NZ south island and Tasmania on foot and all manner of fun things still left in the world.
That's an exaggeration. Certainly there are new species of fish (and molluscs, annelids, etc.), to be discovered in the sea, especially at deeper depths, but it isn't as if there is something beyond the usual additional biodiversity to be found just like exploring the remoter parts of the Amazon rainforest.
>> got no idea what’s at the bottom of the oceans.
We are pretty sure it is high pressure and high maintenance.