Science March Needs To Broaden Its Horizons
Keith’s note: I had a few thoughts about this official Science March T-shirt design.
There is a Planet B. Thousands. Millions of them. Without @NASA @NSF science funding we will never find them. #ScienceMarch pic.twitter.com/F4Lru8dH2d
— NASA Watch (@NASAWatch) April 21, 2017
They’re joking right? There’s no planet B any time in the next century or two, certainly not for the overwhelming majority of people. At best you’d be talking about a small colony of Mars, with a dubious degree of resource and tech independence from Earth.
The technology needed to build the nearly closed life support systems needed for a small settlement on Planet B will also support the large settlements existing on Planet A.
I’m sorry Keith, but I cannot determine the matter at issue or your position from the tweet. Is the graphic a sign held by someone in the march, or your modification of it? Sorry if I’m a little slow on the uptake but I hate to make assumptions without facts.
its their official t-shirt.
It’s confusing ok, there are about 100 of these posters out there but none have that ‘subtitle’ on them.
So the word “wrong” does not appear on the actual T-shirts? And what is “Planet B”? If it is an extrasolar planet capable of sustaining life, there are many possibilities, and hopefully funding for the search will increase. if it is somewhere the entire Earth’s population can go in the next few decades if “Earth A” becomes uninhabitable, it seems highly unlikely. A few humans already live off-planet, and hopefully the number will increase.
But for the foreseeable future almost all humans will be on “Planet A”, which I believe is the meaning the marchers intend.
It comes from a quote from UN SecGen Ban Ki-Moon during the 2014 Climate Summit, “There is no Plan B, because there is no Planet B.”
The second half was adopted by a number of green groups for their posters and merch, such as WWF, Greenpeace, Occupy Earth, Earth Day organisers, various Green Parties, and the H.Clinton election campaign, (and of course, every internet site selling t-shirts and stickers), and it was brought out again during the recent science marches.
This is the specific version that Keith altered:
https://sciencemarchshirts….
But there’s a huge range of variants produced over the last few years.
https://static1.squarespace…
https://s-media-cache-ak0.p…
https://image.spreadshirtme…
https://i.guim.co.uk/img/me…
http://i.dawn.com/large/201…
https://static1.squarespace…
https://cdn.shopify.com/s/f…
Thanks. Nice pics. I have to agree. There are a lot of planets, and we should do everything we can to learn more about them. Some of them may support life. But there is no substitute for Mother Earth. At least not until Childhood’s End.
Along these lines, i am extremely enthusiastic about the increasing support and innovative ideas for monitoring the Earth’s environment from the ISS. Earth is one planet that we know can support life, and might someday even support intelligent life.
It seems stupid to hope for a planet B. Planet teraforming is incredibly hard if not impossible. They never will have the right gravity, atmosphere etc. Also putting yourself inside another gravity well is also stupid.
On the other hand, making spinning space settlements that have the right gravity, right atmosphere is possible with today’s technology let alone in a century. There will be no gravity well to climb out of. You can build thousands or millions of such settlements and if one gets hits by an asteroid, nothing will happen to the others.
As an aside searching for alien life is also uninteresting to me. I don’t care two bits whether we are alone or not.
“The are”
There are no “ready to go” Planet B’s in our solar system. Mars is a bit of a “fixer-upper” due to lack of a suitable atmosphere and likely also due to scant water resources.
Beyond our solar system there may be Planet-B’s, but finding them and then getting a colony started there would be quite “challenging”.