Can you predict a timeline for 21st century space exploration?

Question

From the present until 2100 and beyond, if you'd like. Tell me what you see happening in the next century by milestones in our exploration of the cosmos. Best answer gets the points.

Answer 1

Major milestones (of course this assumes that we don't plunge into a dark period following a WWIII scenario most likely involving a 21st century crusade agains the crazy Arab extremists and nations):
Now and in the near future...more and more sophisticated robotic explorers go to many planets/asteroids, etc.

2015--space shuttle retires and NASA goes to cheaper, safer one-time use rockets for most missions.

2025--private company space tourist flights involving multiple orbits start...not just shoot your wad and go up then down
Also, NASA does manned missions to the moon.

2040--manned mission to Mars
also ion drive technology developed
shortly thereafter after proving..been there, done that...way too much money to continue and Mars missions stop within 10 years...much like abandoning moon missions in the 1970's

2050--1st space hotel (space station in orbit...still 0g)
Many more extra-solar system planets discovered...maybe discover multiple Earth-like planets

2060--Rover explorers have made landfall on every planet/moon in the solar system where operation is possible.
Also, the moon is continuously inhabited...not the same people, but rotations so always someone there.
Missions planned and probes sent off to explore planets outside of our solar system. Long range space probes can attain a travel speed of ~.1c (10% speed of light)

2070--Permanent orbital space station (s) with artifical gravity via cent. force (i.e. spinning)

2075--Space tourism becomes affordable to Upper-Middle class incomes...

2100-2200 Probes sent out from Earth to explore extra-solar system planets 40+ years ago send data back to Earth.

GOING Further...

2200-3000 Humans save themselves from extinction via an asteroid impact by diverting its course by some means.
Search for life concludes within solar system by having missions probing all planetary possibilities (including moons of planets). Manned missions to the surface of the non-hostile moons of Jupiter and Saturn.

3000 Permanent settlement/city/etc. on Mars...Now possible to be born, live, and die on Mars. Launched probes reach .5c

Answer 2

2008 - The first suborbital space tourists fly for $200,000 each.
2015 - The first private space station hosts its first orbital space tourists.
2020 - NASA finally goes back to the Moon.
2030 - Suborbital space tourism evolves into high speed world wide travel on suborbital space planes which can go anywhere in the world in 2 hours or less.
2040 - NASA abandons the Moon again, never having made it to Mars.
2050 - The first space tourists walk on the Moon.
2070 - NASA has been disbanded, but a consortium of space agencies from many countries, including a new US space agency, finally sends people to Mars.
2080 - Mars flights end amid cries of wasted money.
2100 - A world wide consortium of private companies start tourist flights to Mars and gets extremely rich.

Answer 3

it will be the end of the worl before 2100 i rekon either that or the same thing as what happend to dinosaurs... they will all wipe out or it will be the end of the world everything living thing will die then the world will start over....

Answer 4

by way of fact we on no account went in to area!!! yet heavily, the bible specializes interior the flaws that result us spiritually. purely by way of fact maximum individuals have faith that guy actual went to the moon (somewhat of being made on some action picture set) does no longer propose that the bible isn't precise. why is area being linked with the tip of the international in any case? are you asserting that we are interior the tip circumstances, by way of fact we probable are actually not interior the tip circumstances. guy's exploration of area has actual no longer something to do with the tip of the international or the bible, that's purely something that guy supposedly comprehensive

Answer 5

Philosopher and historian Thomas S. Kuhn has suggested that scientific disciplines act a lot like living organisms: instead of evolving slowly but continuously, they enjoy long stretches of stability punctuated by infrequent revolutions with the appearance of a new species--or in the case of science, a new theory. This description is particularly apt for my own area of study, the causes and consequences of mass extinctions--those periodic biological upheavals when a large proportion of the planet's living creatures died off and afterward nothing was ever the same again.
Since first recognizing these historical mass extinctions more than two centuries ago, paleontologists believed them to have been gradual events, caused by some combination of climate change and biological forces such as predation, competition and disease. But in 1980 the understanding of mass extinctions underwent a Kuhnian revolution when a team at the University of California, Berkeley, led by geologist Walter Alvarez proposed that the famous dinosaur-killing extinction 65 million years ago occurred swiftly, in the ecosystem catastrophe that followed an asteroid collision. Over the ensuing two decades, the idea that a bolide from space could smite a significant segment of life on the earth was widely embraced--and many researchers eventually came to believe that cosmic detritus probably caused at least three more of the five largest mass extinctions. Public acceptance of the notion crystallized with Hollywood blockbusters such as Deep Impact and Armageddon.

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Now still another transformation in our thinking about life's punctuated past is brewing. New geochemical evidence is coming from the bands of stratified rock that delineate mass extinction events in the geologic record, including the exciting discovery of chemical residues, called organic biomarkers, produced by tiny life-forms that typically do not leave fossils. Together these data make it clear that cataclysmic impact as a cause of mass extinction was the exception, not the rule. In most cases, the earth itself appears to have become life's worst enemy in a previously unimagined way. And current human activities may be putting the biosphere at risk once again.


MORE ON THIS ARTICLE

OVERVIEW
· Mass Extinctions

SIDEBARS
· Killer Greenhouse Effect
· Patterns of Destruction
· Slow Poisoning
· Hydrogen Sulfide Eruptions
· Headed for Another Extinction?




After Alvarez
To understand the general enthusiasm for the impact paradigm, it helps to review the evidence that fueled it. The scenario advanced by Alvarez, along with his father, physicist Luis W. Alvarez, and nuclear chemists Helen V. Michel and Frank Asaro, contained two separate hypotheses: first, that a fairly large asteroid--estimated to have been 10 kilometers in diameter--struck the earth 65 million years ago; second, that the environmental consequences of the impact snuffed out more than half of all species. They had found traces left by the blow in a thick layer of iridium--rare on the earth but common in extraterrestrial materials--that had dusted the globe.
Within a decade of this prodigious announcement the killer's thumbprint turned up, in the form of the Chicxulub crater hiding in plain sight on the Yucatán Peninsula of Mexico. Its discovery swept aside most lingering doubts about whether the reign of the dinosaurs had ended with a bang. At the same time, it raised new questions about other mass extinction events: If one was caused by impact, what about the rest? Five times in the past 500 million years most of the world's life-forms have simply ceased to exist. The first such event happened at the end of the Ordovician period, some 443 million years ago. The second, 374 million years ago, was near the close of the Devonian. The biggest of them all, the Great Dying, at the end of the Permian 251 million years ago, wiped out 90 percent of ocean dwellers and 70 percent of plants, animals, even insects, on land [see "The Mother of Mass Extinctions," by Douglas H. Erwin; Scientific American, July 1996]. Worldwide death happened again 201 million years ago, ending the Triassic period, and the last major extinction, 65 million years ago, concluded the Cretaceous with the aforementioned big bang.

In the early 1990s paleontologist David Raup's book Extinctions: Bad Genes or Bad Luck? predicted that impacts ultimately would be found to be the blame for all these major mass extinctions and other, less severe events as well. Evidence for impact from the geologic boundary between the Cretaceous and Tertiary (-K/T) periods certainly was and remains convincing: in addition to the Chicxulub crater and the clear iridium layer, impact debris, including pressure-shocked stone scattered across the globe, attests to the blow. Further chemical clues in ancient sediments document rapid changes in the world's atmospheric composition and climate that soon followed.

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For several other extinction periods, the signs also seemed to point "up." Geologists had already associated a thin iridium layer with the end Devonian extinctions in the early 1970s. And by 2002 separate discoveries suggested impacts at the end Triassic and end Permian boundaries. Faint traces of iridium registered in the Triassic layer. And for the Permian, distinctive carbon "buckyball" molecules believed to contain trapped extraterrestrial gases added another intriguing clue [see "Repeated Blows," by Luann Becker; Scientific American, March 2002]. Thus, many scientists came to suspect that asteroids or comets were the source of four of the "big five" mass extinctions; the exception, the end Ordovician event, was judged the result of radiation from a star exploding in our cosmic neighborhood.
As researchers continued to probe the data in recent years, however, they found that some things did not add up. New fossil analyses indicated that the Permian and Triassic extinctions were drawn-out processes spanning hundreds of thousands of years. And newly obtained evidence of the rise and fall of atmospheric carbon, known as carbon cycling, also seemed to suggest that the biosphere suffered a long-running series of environmental insults rather than a single, catastrophic strike.


Not So Sudden Impact
The lesson of the K/T event was that a large-body impact is like a major earthquake leveling a city: the disaster is sudden, devastating, but short-lived--and after it is over, the city quickly begins rebuilding. This tempo of destruction and subsequent recovery is reflected in carbon-isotope data for the K/T extinctions as well as in the fossil record, although verifying the latter took the scientific community some time. The expected sudden die-off at the K/T boundary itself was indeed visible among the smallest and most numerous fossils, those of the calcareous and siliceous plankton, and in the spores of plants. But the larger the fossils in a group, the more gradual their extinction looked.
Slowly, paleontologists came to understand that this apparent pattern was influenced by the sparsity of large-fossil samples for most of the soil and rock strata being studied. To address this sampling problem and gain a clearer picture of the pace of extinction, Harvard University paleontologist Charles Marshall developed a new statistical protocol for analyzing ranges of fossils. By determining the probability that a particular species has gone extinct within a given time period, this analytical method teases out the maximum amount of information yielded by even rare fossils.

In 1996 Marshall and I joined forces to test his system on K/T stratigraphic sections and ultimately showed that what had appeared to be a gradual extinction of the most abundant of the larger marine animals, the ammonites (molluscan fossils related to the chambered nautilus) in Europe, was instead consistent with their sudden disappearance at the K/T boundary itself. But when several researchers, including myself, applied the new methodology to earlier extinctions, the results differed from the K/T sections. Studies by my group of strata representing both marine and nonmarine environments during the latest parts of the Permian and Triassic periods showed a more gradual succession of extinctions clustered around the boundaries.

That pattern was also mirrored in the carbon-isotope record, which is another powerful tool for understanding rates of extinction. Carbon atoms come in three sizes, or isotopes, with slightly varying numbers of neutrally charged particles in the nucleus. Many people are familiar with one of these isotopes, carbon 14 (14C), because its decay is often used to date specific fossil skeletons or samples of ancient sediments. But for -interpreting mass extinctions, a more useful type of information to extract from the geologic record is the ratio of 12C to 13C isotopes, which provides a broader snapshot of the vitality of plant life at the time.

That is because photosynthesis largely drives changes in the 12C-13C ratio. Plants use energy from the sun to split carbon dioxide (CO2) into organic carbon, which they exploit to build cells and provide energy; happily for us animals, free oxygen is their waste product. But plants are finicky, and they preferentially choose CO2 containing 12C. Thus, when plant life--whether in the form of photosynthesizing microbes, floating algae or tall trees--is abundant, a higher proportion of CO2 remaining in the atmosphere contains 13C, and atmospheric 12C is measurably lower.

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By examining the isotope ratios in samples from before, during and after a mass extinction, investigators can obtain a reliable indicator of the amount of plant life both on land and in the sea. When researchers plot such measurements for the K/T event on a graph, a simple pattern emerges. Virtually simultaneously with the emplacement of the so-called impact layer containing mineralogical evidence of debris, the carbon isotopes shift--13C drops dramatically--for a short time, indicating a sudden die-off of plant life and a quick recovery. This finding is entirely consistent with the fossil record of both larger land plants and the sea's microscopic plankton, which underwent staggering losses in the K/T event but bounced back rapidly.
In contrast, the carbon records revealed by my group in early 2005 for the Permian, and more recently for the Triassic, document a very different fate for plants and plankton during those two mass extinctions. In both cases, multiple isotope shifts over intervals exceeding 50,000 to 100,000 years indicate that plant communities were struck down, then re-formed, only to be perturbed again by a series of extinction events. To produce such a pattern would take a succession of asteroid strikes, thousands of years apart. But no mineralogical evidence exists for a string of impacts during either time span.


Indeed, further investigation of the evidence has called into question the likelihood of any impacts at those two times. No other research groups have replicated the original finding of buckyballs containing extraterrestrial gas at the end Permian boundary. A discovery of shocked quartz from that period has also been recanted, and geologists cannot agree whether purported impact craters from the event in the deep ocean near Australia and under ice in Antarctica are actually craters or just natural rock formations. For the end Triassic, the iridium found is in such low concentrations that it might reflect a small asteroid impact, but nothing of the planet-killing scale seen at the K/T boundary. If impacts are not supported as the cause of these mass extinctions, however, then what did trigger the great die-offs? A new type of evidence reveals that the earth itself can, and probably did, exterminate its own inhabitants.
Ghastly Greenhouse
About half a decade ago small groups of geologists began to team up with organic chemists to study environmental conditions at critical times in the earth's history. Their work involved extracting organic residues from ancient strata in search of chemical "fossils" known as biomarkers. Some organisms leave behind tough organic molecules that survive the decay of their bodies and become entombed in sedimentary rocks. These biomarkers can serve as evidence of long-dead life-forms that usually do not leave any skeletal fossils. Various kinds of microbes, for example, leave behind traces of the distinctive lipids present in their cell membranes--traces that show up in new forms of mass spectrometry, a technique that sorts molecules by mass.
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