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Astrobiology

Science March Needs To Broaden Its Horizons

By Keith Cowing
NASA Watch
April 21, 2017

Keith’s note: I had a few thoughts about this official Science March T-shirt design.

NASA Watch founder, Explorers Club Fellow, ex-NASA, Away Teams, Journalist, Space & Astrobiology, Lapsed climber.

11 responses to “Science March Needs To Broaden Its Horizons”

  1. TheBrett says:
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    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.

    • ThomasLMatula says:
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      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.

  2. Daniel Woodard says:
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    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.

    • kcowing says:
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      its their official t-shirt.

    • Al Jackson says:
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      It’s confusing ok, there are about 100 of these posters out there but none have that ‘subtitle’ on them.

      • Daniel Woodard says:
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        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.

  3. dd75 says:
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    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.

  4. Paul451 says:
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    “The are”

  5. Jeff2Space says:
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    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”.