Atheistically Speaking Book Club discussion

This is the discussion thread for the last quarter of Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space and the book as a whole.

18. The Marsh of Camarina
19. Remaking the Planets
20. Darkness
21. To the Sky!
22. Tiptoeing Through The milky Way

THis last part of the book seemed to me more the dreams of a young boy then the discourse of a scientist....
In my view, Sagan fails to make a case for colonizing other worlds. Although the ideas of 'terraforming' Venus or Mars are interesting, he does not really adress the time it would take to do so. On Earth, it took (I think) microbes and algae 100s of millions of years to change our atmosphere to the oxygen rich one we have now. THerefore I don't see that working on some reasonable time scale.

Further, his most compelling argument for colonizing other planets is to avoid the risk of extinction of humans due to impact of a large asteroid/meteor. But wouldn't it be far easier to try to survive on our asteroid-hit world, with all its biological resources everywhere (be it damaged after the impact) then try to survive on Mars with no biological resources whatsoever nor oxygen. Would not building an underground savehaven(s) on earth be a much better option to let the human race overcome an impact? Instead of making that haven on Mars? Seems by far a lot cheeper and even the asteroid-hit earth would be much friendlier to our kind of life than Venus or Mars by far.

Nevertheless, the just-because-we-can argument does appeal to me. So, lets not try to give it an economic reason. Lets go just for the 'wandering' sake. I would be ok with that. And the money? Well, medieaval people spent lots of money on these grand cathedrals. And those are totally useless as well, since there is no actual god being worshipped therein. But it did drive the economy back then.

Marcel wrote: "THis last part of the book seemed to me more the dreams of a young boy then the discourse of a scientist....
In my view, Sagan fails to make a case for colonizing other worlds. Although the ideas o..."

For the most part, I agree. Sagan tends to be very romantic and idealistic when he talks about the future. That's good, since he intends to inspire and give grand optimistic views. I think his point here was more for the far far future of humanity. Sadly, as we can see with how we've treated global warming and fossil fuels, we probably won't have the foresight or motivation to make other worlds habitable before we destroy our own. If we survive long enough, I think we may eventually inhabit other worlds, but only as a last desperate attempt to live on.