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Eventually survival is futile.
Indeed. Entropy always wins in the end. Perhaps our purpose in the universe is to delay entropy. Just think of how much time we spend cleaning things up - creating order from disorder. while we are killers and destructive as a species, the vast majority of our undertakings other than war tend to decrease entropy, not increase it - usually consuming energy in the process.
It's all about Need VS Cost, so we could automatically enter the space age by lowering the cost.
This could happen if we develop space age technology for earth use, as a lot of space tech will be beneficial to the people on earth.
Well the assumption is that the undeveloped world will
a): always be undeveloped
b): always be overpopulated
If either of those is not the case, then it does, to a degree, mitigate the other. Plus there's always the possibility of heavy handed population control tactics (which have been tried, but not successfully).
Survival, as I've stated, is kind of a tough one, mainly because most people just cannot think long-term and/or for the entire species. If presented with the argument that "we need to invest trillions of dollars into space colonization because we have to deal with future survival that includes the sun expanding (in billions of years, a certainty) and/or an asteroid slamming into us" I feel most people would be like "that seems utterly pointless considering the more pressing problems right now". In the future? It could happen.
In terms of resources, there is one resource that I can see being mined, and that's helium 4 (I believe it may be another one) that's needed for fusion reactors. There isn't a ton on Earth, and there's much more in abundance in space. That is the one resource reason I can see an expansion to space, mainly because even if we use robots to mine, someone's got to maintain them (as of right now), and there would be good reasons to set up more infrastructure for mining.
I can definitely believe the "because we can" argument of going to space being the most viable one. Eccentric billionaires like Elon Musk are certainly trying to push for that.
Here's another interesting reason that I think could potentially lead to space expansion (and is worth debating): alien contact. I feel like that if there was a certainty that alien sentient life existed, that would be reason enough to head out to space and expand a bit for things like trade, etc.
Why did we land on the moon? Why did Europeans colonise the Americas? Why, at the time, did humans colonise all those difficult to reach islands on Earth? Why do humans do anything?
I believe someone will, eventually. Perhaps in our lifetimes, if you follow the progress of organisations like SpaceX. There are over 7 billion people on the planet, it only takes a small fraction willing to strap themselves to rockets, and enough wealth to fund the whole enterprise.
It will probably be a combination of idealistic thing, nationalistic pride, adventure seeking madness and the desire for land / wealth. Whether any of these reasons will be justified in the short / medium and long terms is a different question.
I wouldn't be surprised if a lot of manufacturing starts moving into space. Its just a lot cheaper once the stuff is up there, and no need to move resources back down to the planet, just final products. Then asteroid mining doesn't just become something limited to extremely rare minerals.
I wouldn't be surprised if a lot of manufacturing starts moving into space. Its just a lot cheaper once the stuff is up there, and no need to move resources back down to the planet, just final products. Then asteroid mining doesn't just become something limited to extremely rare minerals.
It is not that easy to 'move' manufacturing to space. A lot of manufacturing technology that we have developed here on Earth has to be re-engineered for all the different planets because each has its own unique properties. They work here on Earth because it using Earth's gravity and Earth's atmospheric pressure, and the fact it's oxygen you are breathing not some other gas. You'd surprised how much we take the gravity for granted. Not just us, the plants here on earth also use gravity for their roots. Other planets...not so sure.
So how do you re-engineer them? Unless you can build simulation chambers here on earth for all different planetary configurations so we can test and iterate here, you most likely have to do it over there, which means you have to transport all the tools and so on. Since technology are built on top of each other, we probably have to start almost from scratch before we can build anything like a factory.
The 'tech-tree' on Mars, and on each planet, will be different than that we have built here on Earth.
The longer we survive as a species, the more stuff we discover. Perhaps some day in a few billion years we could discover a way to survive past heat death.
Plot twist: It involves burning massive amounts of coal...
As for population growth: It doesn't take long for rapid birth rates to be turned around. Great great grand father was one of 20 some kids. My grand father had 16. My dad had 3. I have none, and will be shocked if I have more than 4, surprised if I even have 2. It doesn't take much in the way of access to health care and the realization that kids are a lot of work and you could be doing other things with your life to change a growth rate from a booming positive to a near negative.
At the same time, we don't need to send millions of humans from earth to new planets. In reality a few dozen and a gene-bank are all that are needed to kickstart a healthy diverse population. Those kind of numbers are well within the realm of "Wealthy bored billionaires decide to go on an adventure" being a practical thing. Bring in robotic orbital refining and manufacturing and building a generational ship headed for another planet becomes an issue of time scale rather than economics as we know them today.
