The Final Frontier

Some of us don't believe we're meant to go any farther, that we're met to sit and stew here on Earth until we stagnate and die, and drag as many of our fellow creatures along with us as possible. We're not GOOD enough to survive, apparently. Too many of us are stupid, petty, or cruel. Or all of the above.

I reject that premise with everything within me. We are children of the Earth, but also children of the universe, and if we are to survive, and I believe we are, we must break free of this gravity well and move first into the solar system. All the resources we need to thrive, to explore farther, exist out there, and that's what we MUST do if we are to survive.

We fought our way out of the caves, domesticated both plants and animals, built vast civilizations, and have sucked nearly dry the most accessible resources on our world. As just about ANY sentient creature with the drive to do anything but sit in the dark and chew raw meat WOULD do. It doesn't make us monsters, just curious and occasionally foolish monkeys.

Some of the folks here are just as bad in their perception of the human race as the most fundamentalist of Christian. We're inherently evil and we deserve to be doomed to some horrible fate, or to disappear from existence entirely.

Fuck that.

We have brains, hands, and imagination, and a drive to explore our boundries that never seems to fade. Our ONLY fate if we stay here is destruction and anyone who wishes that on us earns nothing but my disdain.

Our future is OUT THERE. Here we'll only find stagnation and death.

I know which I'd choose for my children and grandchildren.

I think short-term, the idea that we could use the Helium-3 on the moon to solve our current energy and global warming problems is fascinating. Long-term, our place in among the stars.

:thumbsup:

I guess I'll have to earn your disdain. :D Oh well. I'm not saying space exploration is a waste of time, I just don't think that it's the end all, be all. I don't think our very SURVIVAL depends on it, in other words.

I don't personally take such a cynical and pessimistic view of our planet's future. I trust we are evolving in ways which will awaken us to our common humanity and war will become a thing of the past.

That's my hope, anyway, and I'm teaching my children with those values. We create our future by the mindset we have NOW. I'm interested in how we can live our lives fully, HERE and NOW, on planet earth and explore the final frontier of our collective consciousness.

To me the final frontier is about shifting our perspective from Separation, towards ONENESS.

others need to explore outside, to push the boundries beyond what they currently are. We can't, nor should we, expect everyone to conform to the same philosophies. We need thinkers, and dreamers, and we need explorers and pioneers.

We COULD survive here, possibly, without getting out there, but without a new frontier, we WILL stagnate and that might well be a fate worth than death.

:D

how can we be stagnant when there is so much CHANGE in the world and so many different ways of being??

We can embrace our common humanity at the same time we explore new territories, new ways of being, either on the planet or not.

Inner/Outer....it's all the same, imo.

Changing our ways to sustainability through a philosophy of oneness with Earth and each other here at home and branching out in search of other potential homes and resources abroad.

I believe this combination will give the best long range assurance of human survival.

I also agree with the other poster's opinion on this thread, that stated, we are stardust.

A few months ago, Nova on PBS had a special on the beginnings of the universe's formation after the Big Bang. It occurred to me then as to how form and function are similar on a macro and micro level. The rocky planets such as Earth gradually took shape from the dust and debris created by the explosion, becoming circular in shape and forming building blocks for life to begin, but the rocky planets were barren as unfertilized eggs, gradually over millions of years they were struck by millions of comets; in the general shape of sperm cells, bringing water and life giving compounds with the result of continually evolving and dividing cells of life.

Then we had a thread here at D.U. some time back on the subject of Dark Matter; and how it can't be seen by the human eye and yet it holds everything together and I couldn't help but to think of it as a universal form of placenta and just as a forming embryo wouldn't be able to see the placenta surrounding it. The universe it self has been expanding since the Big Bang just as an impregnated uterus would. I haven't figured out the Black Holes yet, where even light can't escape their gravitational pull, whether they be digestive tracks or birth canals.

Of course this could just all be coincidental, but the similarities seem logical to me at this time.

Inside each human is the potential for ultimate hope and ultimate misery. What will you nurture?

:thumbsup: :hi:

We deserve stagnation and death.

Bryant

since YOU are a human, are you saying YOU "deserve stagnation and death"? :shrug:

That's not very empowering.

We (at least some of us anyway) are capable of so much more.

We have the capacity to live with humility, compassion, and respect, for the earth and for each other.

We just need to do it.

Obviously we are capable of creating beauty; but for every beautiful think we create, we create a dozen miseries.

Bryant

but I still think there's a possibility of change. Maybe a remote one, but one nonetheless.

You must be fun at parties.

:rofl: ouch.

But thankfully, you don't speak for all of us.

beyond that, we are far from the most successful life form on the planet.

dinosaurs had been around for several 100 million years, we on the other hand look to be doing ourselves in, in less than 5 million.

To quote Achilles, "humans are wretched creatures".

as well as cruelty and hate.

We are neither entirely good or entirely bad.

Self-hating humans are pathetic.

Yes, we are capable of creating unbelievable beauty, however, if iraq is any example, we are also capable of unbelievable acts of self destruction.

until wars are fought by competing works of art, our path of self annihilation is laid out before us in the terms of who can get there first.

we are still very primitive as a race. Until humans enroll in-mass into an anger management course, I sadly believe we will continue in our self destructive ways.

Enlightenment may come from the most unexpected source, however, we are all positive that it certainly won't come from war, however, it appears that there is a whole section of the population that has yet to figure that out.

In the Shuttle program you'll only find stagnation and death.

Somebody'd better get busy on that warp drive concept. Otherwise, there's no way to traverse the vast distances (there's a reason they use the term "astronomical") to the next neighborhood.

If Einstein is right, and there's no way to exceed the speed of light (which is pretty damn fast, after all), we're gazillions of years away from any place inhabitable.

Bake

Some non-human person who can easily survive a 100 G acceleration, who doesn't need water or oxygen or room temperatures, who can do a atmospheric re-entry in their own skin, who can copy their entire thought process and memories into another body... such a creature is much better equipped for space exploration than human beings are. We are creatures of this earth. It's a tad bit awkward for us to be dancing around in alien places like the martian surface, or floating around in open space.

But maybe such a non-human space-fit person is not so interested in frolicking around on earth's beaches with naked and nearly-naked monkey people. Kids have different interests. Maybe such a person might have a lot more fun frolicking with others like itself on a Martian sand dune, and maybe they figure out a means to bring a meat-person along with them. ("Sorry, guy made of meat, you'll have to wear this funny suit, and you can't stay out in the sun too long...)

Sure, humans will go into space, walk on mars, maybe create entire cities away from earth, but there will never really be any significance to that beyond our art, or much more likely our usual instinctive and pointless territorial expansions.

Go ahead, build a pleasure dome on the moon -- the possibilities for the art of low gravity ballet would be spectacular -- or imagine soccer games on a thousand meter playing field with teams of a hundred players. But any of these accomplishments would be no greater spiritual adventure than that enjoyed by some stay-at-home human sitting on a bench in San Francisco's Golden Gate Park watching a hummingbird.

For what little we know, intelligence is as common as dust in this universe, all the children of other creatures who have long left their cradle worlds. Perhaps we are simply too dim witted to perceive that living universe... yet.

innate need to expand his/her horizons. The usual outlets, historically, have been exploration or war. (Scientific exploration is an interesting variant.) Personally I find exploration vastly preferable to war, & being as how we've run out of room on the planet, I feel that space exploration & particularly cooperative ventures, such as the International Space Station, are increasingly vital.

Are the solutions to our problems somewhere out there? Will it be like the discovery of the New World? What problems did that solve?

http://casaubonsbook.blogspot.com/2007/08/getting-over-final-frontier-part-i.html

mythology is for children.

One of my regrets is that I wont get to live long enough to see all the cool shit we'll find out in space. Hopefully future generations will get to enjoy that experience.

Sure, it's far-fetched, but it's how I like to view the future. He didn't deny that humanity did terrible things, and that World War III took place. In the end, though, humanity grew beyond its past barbarism and began to embrace the better aspect of its nature.

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the rest of us are going to the stars!'

We as a species aren't as bad as everyone makes out. We just freak out when the concept of "scarcity" gets introduced, and when people do things that we don't approve of.

We can find ways of fixing scarcity, and we can get over other people's preferences. It's called being innovative grownups, and just because the people in charge right now are spoiled little brats, that doesn't mean we all are or desire to be such.

The universe is only as small as your mind. It would help if we all did a bit of expanding in that regard.

:hi:

The thinking that we can live among the stars is somewhat faulty. It may one day be technically possible to travel to other suns but it will never be economical to do so. It would be cheaper to build cities in the deepest ocean than on the moon much less the stars. Having said that I would like to praise the author of the post for having faith in humanity and some optimism for the future. It is A commodity in short supply here. We deserve to survive if only because we are the only intelligent beings we know of and therefore unique.

How about the dogs, cats, killer whales, bears, etc?

We're all a bunch of monkeys, but we are creative and persistent, and we look at other species and copycat their abilities. We are survivors, and we find solutions.

We just need to find a solution to our inability to leave each other alone.