wall street star trek

The trouble with space is that it is large and largely empty. Watching popular shows like Star Trek, Star Wars, and others you may get the impression that there are plenty of planets, solar systems, and galaxies to visit and colonize. In these shows, it is but a short hop from one planet to the next. The reality is a bit different. There are lots of stars to be sure, but they are all very far away. Even with a little magic like faster-than-light travel, distances are unimaginably large. Finding another planet to colonize is not as easy as finding the Americas was in the 16th century.

The other trouble is that humans are extremely well adapted to earth. All kinds of earth-specific variables are deeply imbedded into our bodies and their operation. These are not things we can get around easily. Even moving around on our planet isn't trivial. There are good indications that dark skinned individuals encountered major trouble when moving away from the equatorial regions. Studies indicate that lack of vitamin D, due to darker skin color led to increased susceptibility to infection, metabolic disorders and possibly cancer. Similar problems are encountered by light skinned individuals moving to sunnier climes.

Again, our impressions are a bit misleading here. We like to think of ourselves as "universal machines." Machines that can survive anywhere. But the truth is that we are specific and highly adapted to the prevailing conditions where we grew up. So much so, that global warming will be a serious challenge for us to overcome. Space, even with all the clever tricks we have up our sleeves is a very inhospitable environment for humans. It is highly unlikely that we can thrive there for long enough to survive a meaningful journey.

So far, experience on space stations has been rather sobering. Humans staying there for more than a few months encounter all kinds of physiological trouble, a fact that NASA and other space agencies are aware of but rather not discuss. It will take a serious leap in technology to remedy these problems. And as any physiologist knows, six months is a rather short time for a study on "long term" effects of anything. To give a trivial example, most drugs that are taken off the market for life-threatening side-effects survive much longer than that. Problems with COX2 or Phen-Fen did not surface during the first couple of years.

Unlike story book tales, real life settlements require more than two humans of opposite sex. It takes a small army of people to have any reasonable chance of success. To say nothing about a trip that is likely to last many times longer than the life-time of any one human. All-in-all the whole space escape adventure is extremely unlikely. Any space tourism venture as a stepping stone towards intersolar travel is enormously naive. The only thing space tourism is likely to achieve is becoming another mega-source of CO2 to speed up our demise as a species.