Peak Oil and Population reduction

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That's something I rather like about it. It is one of the few things I feel strongly about

I may be atheist but I'm not offended by religion


That is a good way of looking at it. It is basically the same as mine, though you have a divine mandate, while mine is evolutionary, the end result would be the same - take life out into the universe and spread it. I'm of the opinion that like life moving from water to land, from island to island, eventually it can evolve to such a point that through technological (or maybe even non-technological means) it will spread to the other clumps of matter with tenuous gases surrounding them


Yeah, I would love that. If there was tech available that made it possible for any small group to pick up and go anywhere in the solar system and have an equal quality of life to where they left, I think we could finally see the end of war. I also think there would likely be a lot of experimental communities, or religiously chartered colonies


I'm not ready to criticize his policy yet. He did this supposedly to allow the private industry room for growth and to allow NASA to commit entirely to exploration and not have to be a freight company. It might be that later on this decision will have turned out to be wise, or a total failure. But I have read about most of the private companies and I am suitably impressed with their plans and vision

The top-line budget is the same, and was due to be raised by $6 billion over 5 years. But that's very unlikely to happen in Congress with the deficit fighting mood. NASA will likely be holding in the ~18 billion range for the near future.

What they did was end the Moon program and try to follow one of the suggestions of the Augustine Commission for space travel. That's a pretty detailed topic so I wont discuss it. Congress then modified the WH plan. But everyone was using the same pool of dollars to pursue their favorite strategy for space.

If you read that NASA's budget was slashed, that was wrong.

You mean like every republican blamed Clinton for everything from 9-11 to Iraq to the economic collapse?

No, I mean like how some people continue to blame Bush for everything the fall of the Roman Empire to the existence of bacterial colonies upon armpits.

By the time they were assembling in space you'd be 10-15 years behind. That warning sign would come too little, too late. At that point they are only 2-5 years away from planting a flag.

If China did want to race to the Moon and Mars, that would be great for us as it would get the nationalists on board with boosting NASA funding. I just don't see it happening any time soon.

In the early 70s Nixon was offered a Mars plan by NASA. He rejected it and a moon base. When he arrived funding was at $21 billion/year. When he left it was $11 billion/year (2007 dollars) Wernher von Braun quit when he saw the writing on the wall. Maybe if the Soviets had still been racing us we might have continued.

I know you are saying this tongue in cheek but is one of my favorite ploys.
admit that a tactic is bad, dishonorable or dishonest and then defend its use by say the other side does it. Turn about is fair play

very powerful when coupled with strawmen.
-Jake

Maybe this question has been covered earlier in the thread but what are the potential benefits to the human race of space exploration relative to the economic cost?

Do you blame the sky for the rain? This sort of thing has been going on since God invented dirt.

ruveyn

In terms of this thread, space exploration - and more importantly emigration into space - would allow for there to be more resources per capita. The infrastructure in space would need to be in place before such emigrating could begin, but once the space industry is finally self sufficient it would be able to enable its own further expansion to the not-completely-lethal planets and moons of this solar system as well as the construction of more and more vast space stations. Being able to produce agriculture aboard centrifugal stations is a prerequisite to the further development of the space industry, but once that hurdle has been surpassed I think the rest would follow soon after.

I don't think that space exploration can every provide a greater return of resources than those expended to obtain them.

Personally, I see neither population nor peak-oil as grounds for despair. Rather, I seem them as opportunities.

We can feed 9 billion people, and we can do it easily. Sub-Saharan Africa (and to a lesser extent South America) are vastly underfarmed. Many of the challenges have to do with a lack of infrastructure to get product from field to marketplace, but those challenges are easily addressed, provided that we are willing to break the stranglehold that currently exists on food production in the OECD.

We can cope with peak oil. The technologies exist and can be improved. The economic demand for energy will never abate, so when petroleum ceases to be able to supply that demand, the market will respond. Sure, it will be a dramatic change. Certainly the public sector is ill equipped to mitigate the damage caused by that change. But we can see it for what it is, and we will be increasingly unable to ignore it.

So long as we have oil for the petrolium based fertilizers, pesticides, and fuel for the crop dusters.

Only a few problems with both places, and most are from the fact that a good proportion of the world's rain-forests and wildlife also occupy this arable land. The land that they have set aside is generally poorly managed, but I have seen some good trends, such as abandoning mono-culture and also public gardens in a few Latin American / African nations.

Another issue is that the practice of farming is not profitable, Africa has gotten way too used to importing food or being given food via aid organizations. An independent farmer just can't compete. So direct investment into African / Latin American co-op ventures would be necessary to see this through. But I still don't think we can realistically feed 9 billion and should work to stabilize and decrease the population through voluntary, humane means over the next century, if not just for food and resources but for jobs. As we move forward with robotics and newer smart technologies a lot of the hands on work will become redundant and technological unemployment could be a huge issue, possibly a violent one

I think that if more coordinated irrigation, fertilization, and planting with some forethought were to be done - as in working against the processes of desertification, - prior to the inaccessibility of oil by price or supply, that there would probably be more than enough to feed everyone. It would be wise to start the utilization of space before such a point may be reached though, since the costs of space travel is extravagant enough now it will only be worse as time passes by. So, we ought to act in prudence while we still can rather than despair later on when the construction of space stations may no longer be feasible.

Aside from orbital habitats there is no other place in the solar system where we can live, but here on Earth. And since the stars are so far away the solar system is the only neighborhood we shall inhabit for the foreseeable future.

ruveyn

I work in oil and gas exploration, and I assure that we are nowhere near running out of oil.