Considering the Rate of Advancement In Space Travel Throughout the Fifties and Sixties...

no oil on mars is my guess.

We'll go to Mars but who wants to live there? The most inhospitable places on the surface of this planet are a paradise compared to Mars.

Who says we don't have secret bases on Mars? Who says Venus isn't colonized? Who says Uranus hasn't been thoroughly explored?

I'll bet it has.

For the simple reason that we can't afford it. America is ***CRUSHED*** beneath the weight of welfare and entitlement spending.

For example, in a non-covid year, if they cut every single cent of the Defense / Military Budget, all of our Welfare / Social spending would STILL put the United States into more debt.

Quote from Iron

We'll go to Mars but who wants to live there? The most inhospitable places on the surface of this planet are a paradise compared to Mars.

There's quite a few places in the US alone that I'd rather head to Mars than live in.

I dunno, do we really want a war with Mars or those damn Jamaican talking belters?

I think a major reason is we haven't been challenged for our survival in a long time. Big leaps in technology tend to happen during times of great war for instance (WWI, WWII, Cold War etc). Pretty unlikely to make huge leaps and bounds when we're fat dumb and happy.

I have said many time.

Sooner or later the big yellow ball in the sky will burn out. The ONLY way humanity survives is to get off this rock and out of the solar system. It may be millions of years from now or tomorrow but it will happen.

Quote from redwing7

I have said many time.

Sooner or later the big yellow ball in the sky will burn out. The ONLY way humanity survives is to get off this rock and out of the solar system. It may be millions of years from now or tomorrow but it will happen.

Best estimate is we have about 1-5 billion more years. We will be long extinct by then.

Quote from Slamfire

Best estimate is we have about 1-5 billion more years. We will be long extinct by then.

You will be. I'm already planning my birthday. You know, the big 5 oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh.

Because rather than wasting the money on space travel we wasted it on the Great Society’s s war on poverty because the problems here are worth wasting $15 trillion

Quote from Slamfire

Best estimate is we have about 1-5 billion more years. We will be long extinct by then.

Are those the same people who brought us covid estimates?

Quote from redwing7

Are those the same people who brought us covid estimates?

No this is long established scientific theory that pretty much nobody disagrees with - the life cycle of stars is well understood.

Five Billion years is a very long time away... in fact the earth is close to that age, so many epochs will pass until then (we will be without question long extinct by then or will have possibly evolved into another form of life). My bet is several life ending asteroids will hit the earth long before then. Maybe a massive gamma ray hit by some Quasar, or some such shit. We don't stand a chance long term.

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The Sun does not have enough mass to explode as a supernova. Instead, when it runs out of hydrogen in the core in approximately 5 billion years, core hydrogen fusion will stop and there will be nothing to prevent the core from contracting. The release of gravitational potential energy causes the luminosity of the star to increase, ending the main sequence phase and leading the star to expand over the next billion years: first into a subgiant, and then into a red giant.^{[129][131][132]} The heating due to gravitational contraction will also lead to hydrogen fusion in a shell just outside the core, where unfused hydrogen remains, contributing to the increased luminosity, which will eventually reach more than 1000 times its present luminosity.^[129] As a red giant, the Sun will grow so large that it will engulf Mercury, Venus, and probably Earth, reaching about 0.75AU.^[132][133] The Sun will spend around a billion years as a red-giant branch star and lose around a third of its mass.^[132]

Evolution of a Sun-like star. The track of a one solar mass star on the Hertzsprung–Russell diagram is shown from the main sequence to the post-asymptotic-giant-branch stage.

After the red-giant branch, the Sun has approximately 120 million years of active life left, but much happens. First, the core, full of degenerate helium ignites violently in the helium flash, where it is estimated that 6% of the core, itself 40% of the Sun's mass, will be converted into carbon within a matter of minutes through the triple-alpha process.^[134] The Sun then shrinks to around 10 times its current size and 50 times the luminosity, with a temperature a little lower than today. It will then have reached the red clump or horizontal branch, but a star of the Sun's metallicity does not evolve blueward along the horizontal branch. Instead, it just becomes moderately larger and more luminous over about 100 million years as it continues to react helium in the core.^[132]

When the helium is exhausted, the Sun will repeat the expansion it followed when the hydrogen in the core was exhausted, except that this time it all happens faster, and the Sun becomes larger and more luminous. This is the asymptotic-giant-branch phase, and the Sun is alternately reacting hydrogen in a shell or helium in a deeper shell. After about 20 million years on the early asymptotic giant branch, the Sun becomes increasingly unstable, with rapid mass loss and thermal pulses that increase the size and luminosity for a few hundred years every 100,000 years or so. The thermal pulses become larger each time, with the later pulses pushing the luminosity to as much as 5,000 times the current level and the radius to over 1 AU.^[135] According to a 2008 model, Earth's orbit will have initially expanded significantly due to the Sun's loss of mass as a red giant, but will later start shrinking due to tidal forces (and, eventually, drag from the lower chromosphere) so that it is engulfed by the Sun during the tip of the red-giant branch phase, 3.8 and 1 million years after Mercury and Venus have respectively suffered the same fate. Models vary depending on the rate and timing of mass loss. Models that have higher mass loss on the red-giant branch produce smaller, less luminous stars at the tip of the asymptotic giant branch, perhaps only 2,000 times the luminosity and less than 200 times the radius.^[132] For the Sun, four thermal pulses are predicted before it completely loses its outer envelope and starts to make a planetary nebula. By the end of that phase—lasting approximately 500,000 years—the Sun will only have about half of its current mass.

The post-asymptotic-giant-branch evolution is even faster. The luminosity stays approximately constant as the temperature increases, with the ejected half of the Sun's mass becoming ionized into a planetary nebula as the exposed core reaches 30,000 K, as if it is in a sort of blue loop. The final naked core, a white dwarf, will have a temperature of over 100,000 K, and contain an estimated 54.05% of the Sun's present-day mass.^[132] The planetary nebula will disperse in about 10,000 years, but the white dwarf will survive for trillions of years before fading to a hypothetical black dwarf

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5 billion years is so long that probably life on earth will be mostly wiped out several times and new life will flourish. Probably 2 or more very intelligent species will come around and study our relics/ruins/fossils in amazement. Make sure you carve a few big middle fingers in stone before you go so they know we care about them.

We need to leave stuff like this in our ruins for our intelligent squid like cyclops decedents to find:

Ultimately we're fucked.

Nuthin' lasts forever kid.