What Will Become of Planet Earth?

Question

How will Planet Earth be viewed once human beings colonize another planet?

Who will be left behind?

Will it become a wasteland, or something else unforeseen?

Answer 1

If it is done by NASA and no civilian business ventures then only a select few scientists and military types will get to go. Most of us would be living (or dying depending on circumstances) back on Earth since NASA will never have the resources to allow mass populations to go into space.

If private ventures are allowed to expand and exploit space for profit (that means it can pay for itself!) by abolishing the U.N. Outer Space Treaty and allow homesteading in outer space, then societies off Earth will appear, grow and hopefully flourish. The dreams of humanity, and hopfully humanity's survival will become a reality.

Answer 2

Colonization of planets within the solar system is going to be a very gradual process, funded by powerful governments. Assuming progress continues the costs will go down and the demand to move off world will go up. Eventually those rich people will need less wealthy people to do the more menial tasks. Some people will succeed off world and others will wish they had never left. That’s the same way colonization of the Americas occurred hundreds of years ago. The same is likely to hold true for settlement of this solar system as well as settlement of distant solar systems far in the future (whether it will be by space ships capable of either deep hibernation, transport of generations of populations, or some space warp/teleportation process is irrelevant; the economics will likely be the same).

Earth itself will remain like Europe of the colonial period. Perhaps it will remain dominant, but then perhaps some other location will be more prosperous. Even though Europe lost control of the Americas, Europe still exists and so it is likely that Earth will continue on as well.

Answer 3

My guess is it'll probably be a lot like life for Europeans who first settled in the Americas. People will initially still be loyal to Earth and follow directives and orders there.

But after some time, the descendants will want their own independence from the Earth, and chances are a civil war will break out there (similiar to the American Revolution), and unless Earth has some stuff up its sleeves (like a vital material that is needed for everyday life, and the other planet doesn't have it, or enough of it). But you can bet that the people living on the other planet won't like to be "bossed around" by people on Earth.

Earth will still have people living on it, because many will be too poor to leave the planet (and I doubt rich people will give the finances for the poor people to travel to another star system the way early Europeans were paid to come here and work to make a profit for the people back in Europe. Most likely they'll just use robots).

It'll be interesting to see, but I doubt we'll see anything like this happen in our lifetime, unless they make some drastic, new, and previously unheard of way to have a spacecraft travel to other stars in a short amount of time.

Again, distances are extremely vast in space, much farther than North America was from Europe. Even messages sent at the speed of light would take years to reach the other planet, so more than likely they'll want to be independent after settling in.

Answer 4

Are you asking if it will become a wasteland because everybody will leave? Very few people will leave, especially at the beginning. But there will always be people here. I suspect things will go politically the way they did with previous colonization...after several generations of being ruled over, the colonists will get become disgruntled and revolt. Earth will basically stay the same.

Answer 5

see first of all people of this planet have very less chances to move on to another planet because if you are thinking for mars then the temp there is -100 c so we have to live here but i think for a short time because after millions of years the sun is going to blast and all the living beings will start dieing and what will be left behind are all the nonliving things and our earth will become a Pluto

Answer 6

in accordance to 3 estimates, the Earth has a hundred time too a lot of human beings, meaning the optimum human inhabitants is purely 60 million human beings. we are presently at 6.5 billion and the estimate is that by using 2050 there'll be over 9 billion. we face international extensive disaster with the aid of affliction, famine, and warfare and we could see tens of millions an afternoon loss of life. thank you to flow human beings.

Answer 7

There are groups of people trying real hard to turn this planet into one gigantic shopping mall. I'm not sure if that is good or bad, but I am pretty sure I don't like it.

Answer 8

I'm not holding my breath for humankind surviving long enough to learn to colonize another planet...

Answer 9

It will be criminals- like "Escape from New York". It will become a penal colony and the new planet will end up just as messed up as this one is now..

Answer 10

I'm thinking earth in about 300 years will look alot like Newark does today.