Respectfully, I don’t exactly think this is a feasible undertaking.
To have all or most people on Earth (plus the increased population that would occur in the future) living in space instead of on a fixed planet would be a massive undertaking not worth ANY of the energy put into it.
People often forgot just how BIG planets really are. The Planet Earth is more or less 7900 miles wide, with a surface area of around 200 million square miles (58 million of which is land). To get food or resources to people on said planet; we can make use of ships, cars, planes, and other transportation that doesn’t necessarily require the use of fuel. However, if everyone lived in space, we would have to make use of MASSIVE amounts of rocket fuel propelling the necessary fuel into space (because there is just about no chance that we can produce everything in space). At the very least, the millions to near billions of tons of resources used daily by humans would need to be rocketed upwards into space for manufacturing.
In short, it would be far easier and more efficient to live on a planet. If anything, living in space would be considered a vacation destination, as humans can experience the wonders of zero Gs without being doomed to its effects due to long term exposure (not to mention radiation) and humanity not having to invest massive amounts of resources trying to artificially create what planets do naturally: provide stable places to live.
I was referring to the fact that a military budget couple help SMALL scale spacecraft zip around the solar system. You would need entire nations’ GDPs to build (let alone maintain) giant spacecraft capable of sustaining giant populations. The most efficient spacecraft we have now is the Starship, which can bring a payload of 100-150 metric tons into space at the price of 100 million USD.
I think people are coming to the realization that manned spaceflight and colonization of other star systems is not feasible (economically or energy-wise). Interstellar space is extremely hostile to our form of life.
Would could send robots, AIs and other light & hardy machines to the stars and maybe a von Neumann like probe could reconstruct humans or machine intelligences there. However, actually sending humans in ships is a long shot.
We can have manned spaceflights within our solar system, barely.
We would need radically better technological innovations to be able to reach other star systems within a generation. If the Earth is lost, then a generation ship might be the last option but I do not think Earth will be lost before Jesus returns.
And evolutionary science and Christianity very much agree on a lot - especially including this: the earth is our home; which is why it needs redemption and transformation into a new earth. We were created for this place and it was created for us. No other places can replace it. All the notions of huge space ships or terraforming other planets are science fiction pipe dreams - Isaac Arthur on steroids. He’s a jaw-dropping optimist; but the casual and completely naive optimism displayed in this thread makes him (Arthur) look like a curmudgeonly pessimist! He at least is aware of the engineering challenges involved!
It’s not so much the light and energy from the Sun as it is the apparent, almost perfect synchrony of the Sun’s light and energy, and the distance to Earth that allows life.
Unless you put something almost right where the Sun was, and with equivalent energies. It would either outright fail or not succeed as well as you would like.
First, we are talking about an almost unimaginable timescale, literally. Five billion years is 5000 million years. And even one million years is one thousand times one thousand years. Even that is unimaginable.
Second, I think the Final Judgment will come much, much, much sooner than that. To be honest, I think the chances of humanity making it to the year 3000 AD are incredibly low. I may be wrong, of course, but I believe we are living in the early stages of the Great Apostasy, which I think began in the 1960s.
I do believe we still have some centuries ahead of us, but I find it very difficult to imagine the son of Perdition (and consequently the Second Coming of Jesus) being thousands of years away, much less millions of years (let alone billions).
I also thought this was a joke at first. Are you aware that the New testament says that Christ has redeemed the “cosmos”? That means whatever would have happened had he not done that, or if he wasn’t going to return to earth to complete it, won’t then happen? Do you really think that God is bound by the laws of physics? He created them! They don’t say what will happen. Their Creator does! You’e thinking like an atheist instead of a Theist.
It would be a dream to see humans AT LEAST go to other worlds in our own solar system, but I’m beginning to join the camp that, while the study of space should be a vital consideration in government spending due to its role in inadvertently creating life-changing technologies, we should focus on protecting and maintaining Earth before we plan any major financial backing of a plan to colonize another world.
You’re going to see humans in the moon again. At least that. It will be awesome and you’ll likely remember where you were and what you were doing when they landed for the rest of your life.
I would not be surprised to see a short duration settlement there.
This is a lot of fun. Normally I have to ask why people think he’ll be so soon, but now I’m wondering why so late! But my real question is, why Stephonia?
Roy, I think that God created matter and this matter happens to move for some reason. Perhaps God made them move. And they happen to move in a manner that we understaand as laws of physics. God did not invent laws of physics, we discovered them through observations. God’s role was just creation of matter and Jesus had other roles.
So when the Sun runs out fuel it goes dark, that’s when I think Jesus will return again. I’m a Theist but a physicist too.
Shiningcloud, this is a physicist’s interpretation of Second Coming. Therefore, when the Earth gets rebuilt and lit by flood lights. Jesus will return to an Earth that will never see a sunrise or a sunset again. Unless Jesus gifts us with a new Sun. He may. That’s why Stephonia needs to be built so we will return to Earth when it cools.
ShinimgCloud, I think I figured out why Jesus is returning. Because our sun needs to be reignited. All he needs to do is split every helium atom into hydrogen atoms and then he needs to fuse hydrogen atoms which would instantly reignite the sun.
We can relax. The sun will never blow out. Even in the new earth to be created, we have it (though we won’t need it then). Nice decoration. The sun will go out soon though. In those end of days when all things are fulfilled and the reign of man comes to a close on earth. All black and O.U.T. Yet men will still be alive on earth. Some good news is that when Jesus returns shortly after that, the light comes back and all is well.
As good a reason for the name as any. That sounds more like our second coming at this point though.
By that point we might be able to split all those atoms ourselves, or just find other stars. But I always thought there were other reasons for him coming back.
Respectfully, I may have to disagree with you. The Sun is a celestial body just like Earth, in the sense that it’s a ball of matter shaped into a sphere by its own gravity. Our home galaxy alone, The Milky Way, has billions of stars like the Sun (most a lot smaller and much longer lasting, those being red M-type stars) and many being bigger stars that, in astronomy terms, are born and then blow away in the wind in moments (those being the big blue A, B, and O-type stars). It’s still up in the air whether Earth will be consumed when the Sun begins to go through its last stages of life (or just very badly scorched), but life (at least complex multicellular) will be impossible billions of years before then, and (as @Mervin_Bitikofer points out) humanity will most likely murder itself to death before any of this is possible.
If I have learned anything from my hobby of astronomy, humanity holds a pathetically minute role in the wide schemes of the Universe. I’m humbled that God would love such a small little dust in the wider scheme of such an amazing and beautiful Creation.
If left to our own devices maybe. What I actually said (or meant) is that all else being equal, something among a million other possibilities will have happened to us long before then. And all that is even without trying to predict what sort of nature a redeemed creation takes on.