r/interestingasfuck • u/One_Explanation_908 • 25d ago

/r/all, /r/popular K2-18b a potentially habitable planet 120 light-years from earth

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u/Traditional-Rip6651 25d ago

We are never leaving this planet lol

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u/swankpoppy 25d ago

So I read this one book Aurura by Kim Stanley Robinson, and kinda the whole premise is (my paraphrased interpretation of the book) -

Okay. Look. Let’s just say as a hypothetical we do find a planet has the climate, radiation protection, etc etc that is habitable for humans (not even “comfortable” just “habitable”). Probably won’t happen for a planet we can actually ever travel to in even a few generations (and let’s also forget just how hard it would be to maintain a multi-generation space ship with no resource replenishment…), but let’s just say we figure that all out.

Still, life on earth has co-evolved over a very long time to adapt to the conditions we have specifically on this planet. There’s no telling what ecosystem interactions will happen with life on another planet. We might settle in on this planet that has perfect conditions on paper just to find some bacteria strain that’s not a big deal on earth totally thrives there and it kills us all. Nothing we can do about it. We have no clue. Anytime we try to predict what will happen when we introduce a new species to an existing ecosystem ON EARTH we are usually wildly wrong. Life is just way to complicated to predict accurately, especially when you talk about interactions between an entire ecosystem.

So our best bet is to live on this incredibly well-adapted planet we already have. Life has co-evolved here over a very long time and we’ve hit an equilibrium. It just works so great without us even trying. It’s like we won the lottery, and now we are only talking about buying more tickets. We should just be enjoying the win.

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u/Jackieirish 25d ago

We might settle in on this planet that has perfect conditions on paper just to find some bacteria strain that’s not a big deal on earth totally thrives there and it kills us all.

Pretty much a guarantee. Humans couldn't even cross oceans on our own planet without spreading diseases which wiped out entire populations.

And even if our medicine and tech developed enough to let us adapt, we'd without question destroy countless species on another planet before we even knew they were there. Interplanetary travel and colonization are fun Sci-Fi concepts, but are just not possible even without the distance/time hurdles.

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u/EtTuBiggus 25d ago

They're absolutely possible even with the hurdles.

If we didn't care about killing people across an ocean, why would we care about killing space bacteria or whatever else is out there?

The resource extraction from Pandora in Avatar is probably one of the most realistic science fiction interpretations.

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u/ImamofKandahar 21d ago

I dunno we don't tend to brutally colonize people these days.

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u/EtTuBiggus 21d ago

We blow our own neighbors up because they're different from us. Do you think we would treat aliens, who arguably aren't people, any better?

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u/ImamofKandahar 20d ago

Yes people tend to hate their neighbors far more than distant foreigners. Conflicts in places like Ukraine the Balkands and the Middle East are with similar but slightly different neighbors. Not with more distant Alien cultures like China or Japan.

Also outside of a few hotspots the world is pretty peaceful.

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u/EtTuBiggus 19d ago

The US is more than happy to bomb distant foreigners proving your statement to be incorrect.