Edit: A bunch of yall don’t seem to grasp the concept of a theoretical question
No. Slower than light travel will still enable a smaller amount of colonization of the local area. Where if we do anything that destroys the planet, that’s kinda putting all your eggs in one basket. If that goes catastrophically wrong, as things sometimes do, then everything gets fucked up.
It’s just an unnecessary risk.
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I love the idea of our expansion being dependant on destroying our own home planet.
I’d nuke all of you in a second to get to travel the stars. Maybe carve “Later, bitches!” Into siberia with my motherfucking space lasers.
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I like the way you think.
Oddly specific… What are you doing OP? Should we be worried? Honestly “faster than light” travel is already too generic: do you mean going actually FTL or breaking the space barrier with wormholes or space displacement shenanigans that “look like” FTL? That said, Earth destroyed in a few decades because of the research or the PRODUCTION of such method? A little bit of context would made answering this question way more interesting…
The question is to make us think about the moral and practical aspects of advancing technology, leaving room for different interpretations to encourage diverse discussions. It’s like a ‘what if’ scenario, helping us explore the consequences of scientific progress without prescribing a single answer.
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Would you sell your house for a magic flying car?
Would you sell your house to be ejected into unknown and never have chance to go back?
I don’t have a house.
And you have no magic.
Of course.
Not if I have good reason to believe I won’t get another one like the old any time soon.
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No. While faster than light travel might secure the human race’s survival and intergalactic presence, is the human race more important than our planet? I don’t think so…
While I value human life, we’re just hairless apes that are both too smart for our own good and still incredibly simple-minded and tribal. Our importance is self-importance. What is the benefit of human-kind for the universe? So far we’re making existence worse for other species. We’re already destroying our planet.
Emotionally and selfishly I want us to continue going, but I think our existence has been far more detrimental than neutral, and certainly far from a positive impact on nature. We’re parasites to this planet, and I think a life-supporting planet is more important than the selfish and detrimental endeavors carried out by one species.
The Earth is more important than our selfish asses.
What is the benefit of nature? Worth and importance are intrinsically human judgements, the universe doesn’t give a damn about birds and plants any more than it does about us.
If you value life in general, humanity is the best chance life on earth has of ever getting off planet earth and into the galaxy before the sun dies.
we’re just hairless apes that are both too smart for our own good
By that same logic the Earth is just a rock floating through space with self replicating molecules on it. What makes it any more or less important than us? It’s all rather meaningless, no?
We’re a virus on Earth, but just like viruses don’t care about invading and killing the host - why should we care about killing the Earth? Don’t misunderstand me - I think we should try and stop climate change from getting out of control from a practical standpoint. We’re stuck here so rising temperatures will have serious long term impacts on our global society. But I think this idolization of nature argument falls flat - feels almost religious.
Main reason for me is that we are just as part of nature as anything else. To assume otherwise is arrogance.
For some reason this discussion brings to mind that one very short episode in Love Death and Robots.
No way.
Earth is the homeland, it’s the botanical gardens, the tribal reservation, it comes first.
Now, if you could do it on, say, mars, absolutely.
Yea, FTL travel implies that we have somewhere else to go.
Now while I assume there are plenty of other habitable planets out there, strictly speaking we don’t know that.
Habitable also doesn’t imply that we are compatible with the local ecosystem, just that we could bring the plants and animals we are compatible with, but for that they would still need to exist to take some.
Personally no. There’s so many other obstacles to overcome with populating other planets that getting there isn’t worth destroying the only one we have.
If we had others then maybe.
No. FTL travel does not mean we have the means to transport billions of people and the entire ecology around us including specific conditions of Earth’s orbit in terms of temperature, day, month and year length and many other parameters each of those plants, animals,… requires to another place within a few decades.
what for
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FTL in general and FTL that can evacuate entire planets worth of even a single species are very, very different scales of technology.
Brontaroc will feast on that passenger list.
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I don’t think a civilization which would destroy their home with the single-minded goal of spreading throughout the universe in the blink of an eye should be allowed to spread beyond their local star system at all. Maybe re-evaluate after giving them a few centuries to mature.
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Considering it’s the only known one to have life on it…
Yes… that’s actually quite a bit of intrinsic value that may not exist on any other planet.
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We just really like this one.
Where would we go? We don’t know of any other planets that we could easily live on.
Kepler-452b for starters but with FTL travel we could probably find quite a few more
Unless FTL travel is significantly faster than light, it’s usefulness would be limited. Kepler-452 is located about 1,800 light-years from Earth, which means it would take light 1,800 years to travel that distance. Even if our theoritical FTL travel was twice as fast as light, it would still take us 900 years to get there…
Once we get there, it is still unlikely that the planet would be habitable for humans. Quoting Wikipedia:
However, it is unknown if it is entirely habitable, as it is receiving slightly more energy than Earth and could be subjected to a runaway greenhouse effect.
There are closer exoplanets (closest one we know about is Proxima Centauri b), but even those are likely to be poorly suited for humans since we evolved to live specifically on Earth.
1800 years as observed from someone else watching the light travel. However, when travelling at c, you experience no time. From a photon’s point of view, no time passes between when it is emitted and when it is absorbed.
Earth isn’t travelling with you though so Earth would be toast long before you arrive.
And in addition to the peculiarity of relativistic travel, if we were to utilise something like wormholes, the elapsed time would be equivalent to the time traveled across the newly formed wormhole (plus getting to it and from it).
It would depend on the flavour of FTL, if it means physically moving through space at supraluminal speeds (which would of course be impossible according to our current understanding), time would be flowing backwards.
Even traveling at the speed of light would be sufficient as it would mean getting to the destination the instant you achieved that speed.
But we do not even have to go as fast. Even doing constant 1G acceleration half the way with subsequent 1G deceleration for the other would enable us to reach the edge of the obervable universe withing the span of a human lifetime iirc.
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Have you been playing Starfield? This is related to something in the game.
That’s a very specific scenario.
I would say no. But there’s going to be a lot of factors that go into that decision. That I don’t have the data for.
I think it’s far more likely The Earth is going to live just long enough for us to have multiple planets colonized. Once we have multiple planets destroying a single planet becomes a viable military strategy. So that’s when the earth will die.
The Earth will be fine once it’s got rid of us.
Not if we hit it with a high velocity large mass!
If we’d ever discover FTL travel, the universe and causality would be broken. Earth might as well be a dragon at this point.
