Are We Multiplanetary Yet?
arewemultiplanetaryyet.comBut on the bright side, we may not stay uniplanetary either!
Multiplanetary is easy, multistellar will be a whole different game
I think he's talking about the very real possibility of humans ending up spreading to -1 planets.
I really thought he was talking about relocating mankind to asteroids and orbital stations
Even two-planetary wont be happening anytime soon.
And zero-planetary (extinction) is quite likely as well...
Do not go gentle into that good night.
I will never subscribe to such negatively fatalistic views.
What counts as multiplanetary? Landing as small group of people on Mars who don't last very long probably doesn't meet the criteria.
We're still trying to figure out the propulsion side of the problem, which frankly is the Asylum Demon of colonising another planet.
We're not prepared to countenance two things:
1) That some form of propellantless propulsion may in fact be 'a thing'.
2) That exotic propulsion technologies may be 'born secret' by default — even if you or I invented them — because of their national security implications (can be formed into an ICBM platforn). There would be no publicly-referenceable classification list informing you of this, because that is not how it works and would defeat the purpose. Our best precedent on this is in fact the Manhattan Project. Living then we would not know that isotope fission methods were restricted data, even while speculation could be bandied about in amateurish publications (cit. Alex Wellerstein's excellent blog https://blog.nuclearsecrecy.com/2014/03/07/death-dust-1941/ ) Moreover, we would see those few scientists who were actually pursuing relevant study under government auspices actively misrepresenting (i.e. lying) to the press. cit. Urey on heavy water:
"...it got Harold Urey, the guy who discovered heavy water, to write a letter to the editor saying I don’t have any clue what this is about. There is certainly no way to use this in war, which is a total lie."
https://ahf.nuclearmuseum.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/Ful...
The whole idea of a "born secret" novel propulsion technology seems unlikely to me. You need to start with basic research showing such a technology is possible in principle–and nobody would make that classified because it is way too remote from practical application. If you did, all that would happen is someone else would discover the same thing sooner or later, publish it openly, and then your own researchers would be demoralised about being denied credit for their own breakthroughs.
And then it is a very long and hard slog to get from basic research to something practically usable. Even if at some point you start classifying it, other teams can follow the same path openly in parallel.
Something is unlikely to be "born secret" unless it is developed in a government lab like LANL or LLNL. Are those kinds of labs even working on spacecraft propulsion? And even if they are, are they likely to be getting ahead of open research (academic, private sector, non-classified government labs)? Being classified can actually slow research down, by adding bureaucratic red tape and removing opportunities for collaboration and getting more eyeballs on a problem.
This sounds more like something out of fiction than reality.
The Manhattan Project was different because it was during a World War.
>The Manhattan Project was different because it was during a World War
We were in a mass fear-inducing Cold War (that anyway became 'hot' at times through proxy wars like the Korean war) for 45 years from postwar onward.
Information control during WW2 was a lot stricter than during the Cold War.
During WW2, the US government had an official "Office of Censorship". It had the legal authority to censor all communications between the US and its territories and the rest of the world. While it didn't have any formal legal authority to censor communications within the US, the mainstream US media voluntarily committed to cooperate with it. On 15 November 1945, three months to the day after the end of the war, the office was formally abolished; those last three months of its existence were mainly devoted to winding up its operations.
During the Cold War, the US had no equivalent.
Today's world is too transparent and connected. I can open the web page of an university where a bunch of PhDs research this and send them an email. There are legions of nerds that would immediately spot any inconsistency and make a total online outrage out of it.
1) You do not necessarily have the email address of a government scientist working on a black project. 2) And if you do, the Urey example cited demonstrates that they are fully empowered to lie to you about the importance of a research line of interest.
You don't need it. You find someone else out of the thousands of people working in that field across the globe.
Are we brainwashed yet? Absolutely.