“Have?”
If by “we” you mean humans, we only “have” one planet. And it’s habitable for now.
Aside from Earth, we have found some that might have liquid water, an oxygen-rich atmosphere, a relatively-close-to-Earth gravitational acceleration on its surface. But there’s no real likelihood that we’ll ever be able to get to any of those… like… ever. And I’d think probably even those would require some teraforming to be habitable.
I wish people would realize that terraforming is the only way we’re going to colonize other planets.
Sci-fi showed us landing on Earth-like planets and making a new home. Reality will show us dying in a completely alien biosphere as bacteria and viruses we have zero resistance against ravages our bodies the moment we’re exposed to it. And we’d expose the new biosphere to pathogens it has zero resistance to.
We might be able to adapt by living in a protected environment (i.e. our biosphere) and slowly exposing generations of our descendants to the new biosphere. But many, many of us would die in the process. Not to mention genetic mutations.
Reality will show us dying in a completely alien biosphere as bacteria and viruses we have zero resistance against ravages our bodies the moment we’re exposed to it
It’s really unlikely that alien bacteria and viruses (if alien life even uses the same building blocks ours does, such that microscopic life forms could even be called “bacteria” and “viruses”) would find our bodies terribly hospitable or be well adapted (at first) to live inside us. It’s much more likely that
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Even if an alien biosphere produces some mix of oxygen / nitrogen / carbon dioxide, that the atmospheric balance will be WAY off and we won’t be able to breath it (Avatar may have gotten a bunch of science stuff wrong, but it got THIS right, unlike every other sci fi movie ever). Changing it so that we COULD breath it would probably be a major extinction level event for most life in the native biosphere.
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We won’t be able to eat the local life (and it won’t be able to eat us). Our crops won’t grow in the soil (until we change it and introduce earth microbes and fungi). Once Earth life and alien life have co-existed for millions of years (long after we’re gone or evolved into something else) this may CHANGE (life forms from both biospheres may co-evolve and figure out how to parasitize and eventually consume each other).
I’m not saying we won’t die (if we ever try) for a whole host of reasons (and fuck up someone else’s environment in the process), just it won’t be (biological) alien diseases colonizing our bodies.
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No
There is no planet B.
Earth is the only place that could sustain human life.
We have not found any other bodies with the basic composition, atmosphere or temperature to have even the remote potential for sustaining life, even with the most extravagantly optimistic technology and unlimited resources to apply it.
Nix, nada, no dice.
We are not getting off this rock - and if we fuck it up, we’re done.
If we had the technology to terraform another planet, it would be far easier to just fix the climate on this planet. People like Elon Musk who are peddling this idea of terraforming Mars for habitation are charlatans.
To be fair, we know how to raise the temperature on a planet, but have never successfully lowered it
To be fair, some of us know how to lower the temperature but is hard to convince the other part that this is important and requires certain sacrifices, and execute the plan
And execute the
peopleplanWe’re doing our best! 🙂
While I agree Earth first. But just like most humans you are underestimating our level of risk. There is a very legitimate reason to have a goal of not putting all our eggs in one planet. That’s just a much more long term goal than our climate issues, but we shouldn’t stop trying to progress our technology for that end.
We will not accomplish any of this. Because we don’t even care for the biosphere of the planet we already have in the best state of “terrafoming” ever.
Humankind will speedily regress to much lower levels of organisation and technology soon. It’s inevitable.
True, but colonizing other planets is more distant a goal than making our own stable.
I agree that redundancy is a good way to mitigate risk, but there are so many problems between us and successfully colonizing another world that this is basically a pipe dream.
Astronauts experience a lot of health issues.
After less than a month in space, the tubules that fine-tune calcium and salt balance showed signs of shrinkage, which the researchers say was likely due to microgravity rather than GCR.
The study suggests that optic disc edema and choroidal folding contribute to spaceflight-associated neuro-ocular syndrome, whose symptoms include headaches and visual impairment such as far-sightedness (hyperopia), which causes near objects to appear blurred due to lower visual acuity at short range.
The scientists said the heart tissues “really don’t fare well in space,” and over time, the tissues aboard the space station beat about half as strong as tissues from the same source kept on Earth. […] Previous studies showed that some astronauts return to Earth from outer space with age-related conditions, including reduced heart muscle function and arrhythmias (irregular heartbeats), and that some, but not all, effects dissipate over time after their return.
And of course there’s all the problems caused by radiation exposure once you’re outside the Earth’s magnetic field (Mars doesn’t have a global magnetic field). Basically, we can put ourselves in a tin can and venture into space, but the human body evolved in Earth’s gravity and radiation profile and it doesn’t do well outside of that. At the present you’d have to be suicidal to try to live long-term away from Earth, and I don’t think these are problems that we can just engineer our way out of.
None of those problems get solved if you use the enormity of the task to excuse giving up. Everyone working on these projects is well aware of these issues. It does not devalue the work. But do not confuse my support of continuing towards the goal with support for goofballs like Elon Musk.
If we had listened to people like you during the infancy of the US space program we would have deprived the world of a lot of technological progress.
We set sail on this new sea because there is new knowledge to be gained, and new rights to be won, and they must be won and used for the progress of all people. For space science, like nuclear science and all technology, has no conscience of its own. Whether it will become a force for good or ill depends on man, and only if the United States occupies a position of pre-eminence can we help decide whether this new ocean will be a sea of peace or a new terrifying theater of war. I do not say that we should or will go unprotected against the hostile misuse of space any more than we go unprotected against the hostile use of land or sea, but I do say that space can be explored and mastered without feeding the fires of war, without repeating the mistakes that man has made in extending his writ around this globe of ours. There is no strife, no prejudice, no national conflict in outer space as yet. Its hazards are hostile to us all. Its conquest deserves the best of all mankind, and its opportunity for peaceful cooperation may never come again. But why, some say, the Moon? Why choose this as our goal? And they may well ask, why climb the highest mountain? Why, 35 years ago, fly the Atlantic? Why does Rice play Texas? We choose to go to the Moon. We choose to go to the Moon… We choose to go to the Moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard; because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one we intend to win, and the others, too.
Technically yes, but having people in this one probably makes it more complex.
The quarterly earnings report takes precedence over not destroying the planet.
We absolutely have the ability to fix this planet, it’s just too inconvenient. People would literally prefer famine, disease, war, and death to going without comforts and conveniences.
Earth is the only one. Even if we knew another planet humankind won’t be able to get there.
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Habitable.
Habital isn’t a word.
To answer your question, “no.” We have one and we’re already on it. It’s called Earth.
