will mankind need to leave planet earth and establish colonies in other planets to ensure our existence?

Answer 1

Not this year.

Answer 2

it's quiet possible that the answer might be no. yeah we might explore and try to colonilises the solar system in the next 100 years or so but because of the retrictions from the the law of physics (ie to travel faster than light is impossible) interstellar travel to find other habital planets is highly unlikely. even to get to the closest star would take 100s if not 1000s of years. however consider this scenario.... you are in a place where you are a godlike being with the ability to change into anything you desire for e.g. you could experience life throught the eyes of a T-rex for the day or you could sprout wings and fly like a bird. you could be immortal and never be harm by anything. create your own heaven or hell the only thing that can hold you back is your imagination.... sounds weird, well think again ..... virtual reality. we all seen or heard of the matrix, lawnmower man and eXitenZ the films however as technologies advances in cyberworld and they are rapidily. it is more possible in the 'not to distant furture' to download your mind into a cyberworld and perhaps do away with phyiscal body altogether. it might be the next step of evolution for humankind. it has been said that we might never find intelligent extra terrestrial life because they reach a point in there evolution and are living in there own cyberworlds.
it's more of a possibility than ever reaching the stars to find other habital planets.
even now just consider how much time we spend in front of computers in work, at home, playing games, buying online, emailing etc so if the option ever arose for us to choose between hooking up to 'the cyberworld' or travelling throught space for 1000s of years where you would die after 50 or 60 years on board the ship but you great great....great grandchildren might find a planet to life on. what option would you choose?
every generation has different views than the prior and observing the amount of time young people spend on computers of some form or other it would not surprise me if thats the road they would take.

it might not be the answer you like but it would ensure our existence no matter how strange it might sound.

happy new year

Answer 3

No.
There are to basic principals at work here, Chaos and Critical Mass.
All life adheres to the workings of Critical Mass (CM): life prospers and grows within it's environment, eventually it reaches a point of CM where, if it continues prospering in this way it will use up all the resources of it's environment and therefore die out, alternatively it dies back and can be sustained within it's environment.
If we have or will reach this point our only option is to stop and go back because we have no option to expand into a new environment. Distant habitable planets, should they exist would require travelling faster than light to reach. In other words not possible. If we tried to build a new environment closer to home, on Mars, or the Moon for example, we meet Chaos. The processes needed to sustain an alternative environment for people to live in are too complicated to control, any one tiny process can bring on it's demise. Think of the International Space Station, bad weather on earth delayed launches and nearly led to them being starved of fresh supplies. A fleck of paint could destroy it in the same way as Skylab. Biosphere projects have always run up against contamination no matter how carefully controlled, or small scale they were.
So it's not a question of needing to leave, it's a question of needing to stay.

Answer 4

Yes we will. In due course Earth will become uninhabital - if not through human action in the forseeable future, by the sun running out of puff eventually / next ice age / (un)lucky hit by a big atsteroid.

The thing is, even if we do, unless we live in a stable state universe we're doomed in the long term anyway. My understanding is that the universe could be:

1. closed ended - it will eventually stop expanding and start contracting back to a minute lump of incredibly dense stuff - no more mankind.

2. open ended - it will continue expanding until there is too little energy around to support any life - no more mankind.

3. stable state - it will eventually just stop expanding, but not start contracting - very, very lucky mankind in my opinion (or maybe that's unlucky?).

Of course it's always possible we could have some sort of continuing non-physical life, but I reckon this is unlikley too.

Pick your belief - I doubt we'll all agree!

Answer 5

Need? Maybe not in short term. Life might get worse because of crowding and global warming but we will keep going at least in some numbers. In long term - definitely because the earth will be destroyed in 5 billion years by sun expanding. (Probably made almost uninhabitable sooner by large collision)
Be able to? I suspect not. We have a really complex ecosystem with millions of species and the atmosphere in equilibrium. I doubt if we could make a new planet habitable within many hundreds or thousands of generations.

Answer 6

I think we may have missed the opportunity some years ago when the world economy was more healthy. Under the US Presidency of Jimmy Carter the USA and USSR were co-operating to jointly bear the cost of an L5 project aiming to start to move industry of planet, collect solar energy to beam to Earth and to the Moon by maser beam, and to mine the moon and asteroids.

Came Ronald Reagan and Star Wars and the USSR collapsed and the US economy has never recovered.

Now our resources are depleted. To quote T S Elliott, "..this is how the world ends.. not with a bang, but a whimper.."

Answer 7

Well it depends if mankind uses up all the earth and leaves the earth as a garbage can, yeah we will need to leave or we will die of poisoning ourselves. If we can maintain a non-toxic state of the earth, yeah we will stay here until the sun burns out (a couple of billion more years). We could always in theory colonize mars, although their are some difficulties, food, water, money (as always) and well humanizing it, make it normal. Humans tend to be hostile to things or people they don't know about for some odd reason, just plain bigotry and ignorance of each other to me.

Answer 8

Humans should establish viable breeding populations off planet to insure that they can survive any disaster that might befall your planet. Any species that evolves to the point where they ask the question "Why?" has to make the attempt to survive as a species, but humanity may not muster the necessary resources to pursue this course. You may end up a footnote in galactic history.

Answer 9

Yeah, I think so.

But first let's try and establish some colonies in, say, the Sahara Desert, in Africa, and over in the Sudan. Maybe, like , get those colonies working okay before going of half cocked to other planets.

We could, for example, drill some neat deep wells for fresh water and put in some solar generator pumps to operate the wells. Maybe set up some kind of all weather housing for say 20,000 starving homeless people and stuff like that.

Next, we could set up some farms irrigated by those wells, and plant some fruit trees and multiple kinds of high yield veggies for human consumption by these starving people. you know, get the plan working right and all.

Answer 10

we will probably will. but its gonna be a long time before we do. the earth is becoming a trash can for most people. a lot of animals have been extinct and a lot of forests where wild animals lived have been used to build factories or townhouses. but if we can maintain the earth clen for a few more years then we will not have to move so soon.

but i have heard that the sun will explode so even if for how much we preserve earth, there will be chances that we have to move to another planet

Answer 11

If we can deal with asteroid strikes then we should have about 5000,000,000 years before we're in danger of the sun wiping us out in its expanded red giant phase - since human beings have only been around a few hundred thousand years in a form we'd recognise its hard to imagine how we'd still BE 'human' after that long.

Its more likely we'd need to leave due to overpopulation but that won't solve the problem back home. It will be very difficult but in our lifetimes we're going to have to figure out a way to get population growth down to 0%.