"Remember...you have two days."

"We can't leave in two days!"

"There may be another message after, if all goes well."

It's like a cannon pointing directly at the heart of the galaxy

My guess is that JWST or a similarly powerful telescope might find biosignatures in the atmosphere of a nearby exoplanet in the next decade or so, if there is indeed life on them. But don't hold your breath for what we think "intelligence" will be. I personally feel like the combination of interstellar colonization making little economic and biological sense, and the risk (or even potential violence) of misunderstanding between different intelligences over interstellar differences, leads me to idea that our universe is full of shut-ins who never leave their home systems or attempt to communicate beyond them. I love Contact too - it's my favorite movie of all time actually - but I have to admit that Sagan's vision of a cosmos full of enlightened technological beings is kind of naïve.

So with that, I'll just be content if we can answer the question of LIFE itself existing beyond Earth in my lifetime. To me, that'll be confirmation enough that non-human "intelligence" is somewhere out there, just as it is still here on Earth too.

I remember that smell from when I went to the Banff hot springs. The acidic pool full of mineral deposits looked cool, but any closer than a few meters and you can't fucking breathe

I feel like civilizational collapse is more likely than not in the next century, so if all space exploration fails, I want to be able to say we finally answered The Big Question - is their life beyond Earth - while we had the chance. Like the Moon landings, that's something our descendants would be able to keep forever, no matter what happens to the world.

Who decides what counts as the ultimate human adventure?

I agree, it's exciting. When did I say I'm against exploration? I'm just not sure space is a place to explore directly, or where significant portions of us will ever live. Imagine how many probes and landers we could send to the outer planets for the amount of money they want to spend on building Moon bases.

Also, please read Aurora. Can't recommend that enough.

The question is whether or not they can do it and provision the majority of their food and resources from that landscape (or, to parallel what Elon wants to do with Mars, if they could build a city doing the same). That's the real test of any settlement project. I feel like an Inuit-style culture may have been able to set up shop there, had they been in the region, but they obviously wouldn't have been able to build any sort of large town or city.

The thing that I didn't really spell out in my original post is that any space colony (whether based on a planetary body or free-flying) we could realistically build in the next century or two will be absolutely dependent on resources from Earth, especially biological, and therefore depends on Terran nations being able to maintain robust, well-funded space programs. Ergo, space colonies need a healthy Earth-based technological civilization to exist, which renders the idea of using them as a backup for an extinction event on Earth a moot point. So a scenario like Elysium is unrealistic - the rich won't be able to run away to a Stanford Torus to escape the problems they've caused on Earth, or at least not before their closed loop ecologies inevitably fail.

Personally I think the best case scenario for Moon bases is maybe two small outposts (one American/ESA, one Chinese) by 2035. It'll be like the ISS, but far more expensive to maintain, and like the ISS its main research will consist of monitoring how humans live in low gravity, high-radiation environments.

Are we tho? We spread out to every habitable landmass on Earth, but we stopped after that. There wasn't any reason to go further. And the key word is "habitable". No one ever went for Antarctica, because there was nothing there for us in terms of living space. The Gobi and Sahara deserts are still very sparsely populated, without anything resembling what we call civilization. And that continent is far more habitable than either the Moon or Mars. To actually live on either (or anywhere else beyond Earth for that matter), we'd have to either reshape entire worlds to the biology of a body that evolved for a specific set of Terran environments, or reshape those bodies to the point that we redefine (or discard) the word "human". As much as I love sci-fi, I don't think sending people to live in hermetically sealed environments on other worlds can be remotely compared to either the wanderings of indigenous ancestors or the colonialism of more recent centuries (though space mining lends itself a lot to the latter). There's no "there" there, in terms of living space.

Just goes to show you how huge the Carina Nebula is in the sky even from a distance of 8500 light years 😳

Nice work! Is this an actual region on the Moon, or just an artistic interpretation of a random moonscape?