Living in our new POST-Copernicus world

Copernicus's "Revolution" was not unlike Stalin's in impact

peter ward's RARE EARTH

We are frequently told we live in a Copernicus World, contrasting it with the pre-Copernicus world, when humans still thought the Universe revolved around the Earth.

Pause a moment, for a snicker of scorn at our poor dumb ancestors.


When Copernicus told us that the Earth was but one of a group of planets circling the Sun, a certain type of human took away a very particular - one might even say, peculiar - lesson.

Let us call them Skygods and imagine them to look a lot like Pierre-Simon LaPlace or Rene Descartes.

They saw this Earth, as nothing special, just one of a half dozen equally inhabitable homes for Mankind.

Use one up, toss it aside and move on to another.

Earth-centric

The Pre Copernicus view, by contrast saw the Earth as the only place for their  form of Life, in the Universe.

Let us call them Earthlings and cite any number of founding myths from many cultures around the world, for a more detailed account on how early humanity viewed the Earth in relation to the stars.

Earth was their nest, their one and only nest.

How far they'd go in fouling that nest was still up in the air - but how far would a bird go, or any lifeform go, in fouling up their one and only nest ?

So two views : a powerful new Modern scientific view and an older, fading, primitive, powerless mythical view.

Cut to 1965 : Annus Horribilus for Copernicus and Modernity.

The first pictures and scientific measurements were coming back from Mars and Venus and they were not good.

If there was a Christian Hell, it came in two flavours: Hot for Venus and Cold for Mars.

The other planets ,closer or further from the Sun, were even worse.

Apparently The White Man had Spoken with a Forked Tongue : this was not just Earth 1.0 in a long lineup of planets to exploit and toss aside ----- it was in fact Earth one point everything.

All Alone - in a hostile Diracian Sea

Our only lifeboat, in a very big and very hostile Diracian Sea --- and it was starting to leak badly.

Call this new view of our fate counter-culture, hippie-dippie, green, environmentalist, post-modernist, global commensalist, call it what you will ---- but above all call it POST Copernicus.

Very,very,very,very Post Copernicus.

 Yes Copernicus & his latterday disciples (shout out to SETI, Drake  & Sagan !) : we are but one planet  among trillions in the Universe.

But so far, we are:

(A) the only known one attractive enough to ensure life survives on it.

(B) the only one known to permit intelligent life to flourish on it.

(C) if there are any equally or more attractive planets elsewhere in the Universe, they are so far away as to be beyond our fiscal and technological capability to successfully colonize.

The new Epoch of Rare Earth ?

A RARE Earth indeed : will two centuries from now, will we look back upon Peter Ward and Donald Brownlee the same way as some still look upon Copernicus : as people who ushered in a major new epoch in Human History ?

"Enough about Carbon worries" say Aussie papers in co-ordinated move," lets talk about deep SPACEY dreams instead"

Dreams indeed !

What better way to divert the minds of Aussie readers from deep thinking about the best way to reduce fatal excess carbon in our skies (carbon trading versus regulation versus revenue- neutral taxation for example) than some deep spacey dreaming.

Atta boy ! In times of deep trouble, don't worry, be happy : dream
deep spacey dreams.

Forget your bathing suit, come on in : the Acid has never been better.

So what should investors choose to spend their money on - trying to keep this Earth going a few more generations or finding out if there is life on a planet a million human-traveling years away ?

If I knew a 'better 'ole' perhaps I would go to it - but I don't - so I am 'Backing Britain' and all the rest of the earthlings with my investment dollars ......

HELIOS II off on 60 trillion year trip to send a message to Intelligent Life at edge of Universe

     Helios II is the fastest man-made object ever. If it survives, it will act as a sign of other intelligent life in the Universe for some possible Intelligent Life form living at the currently known edge of the Universe ,14 billion light years away.
   But fast as Helios II is, it is only about one four thousandth the speed of light, so it would take at least 60 trillion years to reach that civilization at the bleeding edge of the currently visible universe.

    Only if Intelligent Life is very close indeed , basically existing on the planets orbiting the stars closest to us, we should we care - ours and their civilizations will be long dead - by natural star death alone - long before we reach each other.
   Even without humanity's best current efforts to speed up the process (shout out to the denier classes !) , the Earth's life will be gone in two billion years .
     At Helios II's top speed (not really sustainable, in practise, for very long) that will take our messenger only 1/60,000 of the way across the Universe and back with its response, if it expects to find any humans left to care.
    I don't believe humanity will ever meet and greet other intelligent life - we might find a few invisible, but living viable, bacteria deep down a hole on Mars, at best.
   But we could get HG Wells in reverse - that Martian bacteria could end up killing all us humans rather than earthly bacteria killing all the Martians.
   Maybe its for the best, if we never find other life off Earth 1.0 ....

SETI travel is the American BARBAROSSA : very long, very cold, very short of food

     "Packing for Mars" (and points east) ?
     Been there, done that - got the t-shirt.
     It says :  "I barely survived OPERATION BARBAROSSA ,winter of 1941-1942".
     Most didn't: survive (or get the t-shirt).
     Cock-eyed optimists and utopian libertarians, the Nazis cheerfully set off on a summer trip to visit the Urals, thinking it would be exactly like all those the articles in the German popular science magazines.

    Cunningly, in those magazines, as in their North American counterparts, the SF is thinly guised as non-fiction, to trap the willingly-gullible.
    The Germans knew the miles involved, knew of the cold and the mud, knew of the desperate food shortfalls that were 'situation-normal' for the USSR.
    Knew them as words and numbers on a page - but couldn't feel them in their bones.
    That bone-chilling opportunity came during the horrible winter of 1941-1942 and the following almost as horrible winters of '42-'43 and '43-'44.
    German and Russian bones litter the utopian path to the Urals to this day.
     Despite this detailed - horrific - object-lesson from WWII, much of the world's perpetual teenagers (scientists with great math skills and zilch in arithmetic skills) seek to emulate Hitler and his mad scheme - this time in the ultra cold and dark perpetually Russian winter of outer space - with deadly radiation instead of snipers to kill the unwary.
    Half of Hitler's brain has been found, it seems - alive - in the heads of our science cum space community.
    Won't you please join in to help them stop hurting themselves - and us.....??

SKYGODS discover 'intelligent life' : now what and so what.....

     The fastest human-made (physical object) ever is Helios Two which travels at about .02% the speed of light. It takes 5000 years to travel the distance that man-made light signals would travel in one year.
   The next nearest star (with any sort of planets) would take Helios Two 40,000 years to travel to and back.
    But the first star with a planet very very very close to Earth in features (and thus supporting intelligent life) could easily be 100 light years away - taking Helios Two a million years to travel to and back to visit our closest relatives.

   So we decide to 'can' the holiday vacation to this particular paradise -pity because Jill Tarter's fund-raising SETI brochure looked so nice : no summer vacation is that long - not even for Canadian MPs.
   But since we got a signal from Planet X's beings (but we can't figure anything about the language it is in), we decide to type out a brief texting message back in English (hey it works with foreign waiters, doesn't it ?).
   And we wait and wait and wait (100 years) for the reply.
   Rather we don't - our great-great-grandchildren wait for the reply.
   Long distance ping-pong.
   And since the Chinese also invented water torture as well as ping pong, call it the slow drip,drip version ping pong.
    Yawn --- or maybe, SCREAM !!!!!!......