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BRanson, Bezos, Musk: Why do these billionaires with worldly wealth focus on space travel? Tesla founder Elon Musk, debate After becoming “multi-planet”, humans may be “fail-safe” protection from the risk of extinction or planetary collapse, and Amazon’s Jeff Bezos said “Save the earth“. If civilization dies on one planet, these billionaires seem to think we have backups elsewhere.
Bezos, Musk, and Richard Branson seem to be motivated by a lofty goal: to secure the future of mankind by entering space.Many people think this is Billionaire bluff Little attention is paid to practical, down-to-earth issues such as environmental collapse. To make matters worse, others say it echoes the greedy, historic land grab. But “going to space” and “saving mankind” are long-standing ideas that have attracted people on Earth. Their shared history explains why we are still fascinated by this prospect, regardless of who is its cheerleader now.
For centuries, the West has been assuming that the universe is Full of life And intelligence. The other option—human beings are basically alone, an oasis of wisdom surrounded by a lifeless, barren void—is too unacceptable. Many assume that other planets are inhabited by basically the same creatures as us. Because of this, no one admits that the end of the earth will mean the end of human life at the same time. And there is no reason to imagine that humans will migrate to other planets and bring life to an inanimate universe.writer imagination Go to visit other celestial bodies and their humanoid inhabitants, but will not permanently settle in these spaces.
But in the Victorian era, some people began to admit that the destruction of the earth could mean the end of human life in the universe. Scientists are beginning to set deadlines for the future of the earth. They think the sun is burning its fuel, shrinking and cooling. HG Wells and other writers Suggest When the sun dies, humans may relocate to planets in the solar system, such as Venus. However, curling up around the embers of a dying star only prolongs the inevitable time. The estimate is pessimistic: by the end of the 1800s, physicists predicted that only a few million years of sunlight were left.
The first real manned navigation proposal Other stars appeared in the early 1900s. In the 1920s, British-Indian geneticists JBS Haldane To be bold, if humans have ever settled in other star systems, its future—migrating from one sun to another—may be tens of trillions of years.he caveat If we are still connected with the earth, our entire future will be only a small part of it. Haldane saw that humans may live at the beginning of human history, and if they leave their birthplace, their best achievements may be ahead. But others have been skeptical. In 1962, CSLewis predicted that interplanetary travel would only create a kind of “new colonialism.”
By the 1960s, the question of whether there was life near our universe was finally positively tested. Satellite antennas search the sky for signals from other civilizations. The search found nothing; only silence. Unlike the Welsh generation, scientists now know that there is no advanced civilization on Mars. The possibility that we are the only civilization in the galaxy and the entire observable universe has been determined.Space exploration is not “neocolonialism”, in the general understanding of the term, because at least internally In our solar system, there is no complicated life anywhere we settle.
Since the advent of nuclear weapons, the extinction of mankind is no longer as distant as the dying sun that plagued early physicists. Nuclear missiles capable of destroying our species make this threat imminent and man-made. In this unstable post-nuclear context, writers and thinkers such as Isaac Asimov and Stephen Hawking hinted that if we care about protecting humans, we might be anxious to settle on Mars. If human beings eventually become “interstellar”, we may be living in the first infinite hour in the entire history of civilization.What’s the peak and advantage can be realised Maybe in that future.
But in the short term, we urgently need to deal with extreme risks such as the climate crisis, the possibility of emerging viruses and engineered pathogens. This will not only improve the lives of the living, but it will also protect the lives of everyone who might follow them. Currently, only astronauts or billionaires like Musk and Bezos can leave the Earth’s atmosphere briefly.Indeed, as the sun ages, the earth will become uninhabitable one day, and the broader universe still has potential capabilities Support complex The eternity of life transcends this.
However, whether humans have the opportunity to settle on other planets depends entirely on the behavior of people who are currently alive.Therefore, our top priority should be protection Our environment and to ensure that everyone is protected from extreme risks.
We have created the means of self-destruction and are leading the collapse of our environment-but we have not yet developed the system or collective wisdom to prevent this from happening. Protecting people from these extreme risks is an urgent task before mankind embarks on large-scale, intergenerational projects such as reaching the stars.
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