The Church and Space Colonisation

[antunesaa]

Colonizing space would require a faster than light drive on the order of 10 times the speed of light. As far as I know, such a drive is many years away.

Actually, it’s infinite years away. Unless modern physics are fundamentally wrong, nothing can travel faster than light. And traveling to Mars would not take that long. Mars is approximately at 4 minutes-light away from earth, so a spaceship traveling close to the speed of light would take only close to 4 minutes from Earth to Mars. More realistically, recent probes to Mars took only 7 months to reach the planet.

 

[antunesaa]

We will never travel even 1% the speed of light, let alone 10 times the speed of light. Cryogenics is more likely the answer–though it would be terrible to travel that way because by the time you reached your destination, everyone you knew back home would be long dead.

I think that eventually the Church would find its way to the Moon or to Mars. I would not be willing to go until I had confirmation that a Priest was either already there or traveling with me.

I would become a priest - were I not married - just to have the opportunity to go to other planets with my brethren and keep those who so wished in the Faith, provided there were solid probabilities of success. And how about having the opportunity of evangelizing aliens that we might happen to encounter?

 

[tabycat]

Apollo was too expensive to maintain. It was always a one-shot publicity effort.

Where we really lost it was all the corner-cutting with the shuttle and not developing a real orbital laboratory that could then be used to dock deep-space ships.

ICXC NIKA

We could have developed more efficentand larger rockets (with larger payloads) that could have reached Mars. Between the shuttle, the larger Russin rockets, and reuseable space capsels (manned and manned) we (the world) can still colonize the Solar System and beyond. :bounce::whacky:

 

[GEddie]

I would become a priest - were I not married - just to have the opportunity to go to other planets with my brethren and keep those who so wished in the Faith, provided there were solid probabilities of success. And how about having the opportunity of evangelizing aliens that we might happen to encounter?

If there are aliens, they aren’t on Mars. The place is as dead as an Egyptian mummy.

And were you a priest, you would be subject to obedience to your bishop and/or the superior of your congregation. They would not send you just because you wanted to go, to spend your life among a few dozen people, when there are thousands upon thousands here on Olde Earth who lack adequate religious ministry.

ICXC NIKA

 

[GEddie]

I suppose my problem is more with this method of going about doing that. Sending people there with supplies just sounds like a pathway to death by starvation, asphyxiation, or some other demise that could come about from some resources running out. If I were seriously considering this people would be among the last things I would send. For reasons of resource and psychological needs there is going to need to be non-human life on the planet too. To me it makes more sense to make Mars first an environment on which life could be sustained before sending people there. This is probably something that could not be done in a single generation or a single century.

Among our basic needs are water and oxygen which are in extremely short supply on Mars. If every one that went took all the water they needed and if there were some method for ensuring that absolutely no water escaped into the atmosphere or environment we would still have a scenario in which there are not enough resources to support any significant population growth.

If there were some way to get a massive amount of water added to the planet without depriving earth (and assuming that what ever removed the water that is thought to have once existed on Mars is no longer a threat) then from there I think there’s a starting point. But at that point I wouldn’t make humans the first ones there. I’d seed the planet with other simple forms of life such as algae or some type of photosynthetic bacteria to get the first part of an oxygen cycle started. I don’t know what nitrogen levels are like on Mars, but we’ll want to have some of that released into the atmosphere too along with finding some way of raising the surface temperature. As the temperature on Mars gets higher I would then start to send plants that live in warmer and warmer temperatures. Preferably plants that can reproduce both sexually and asexually and once the climate permitted sending over some form insects like bees (note: this would be a huge change in environment for the bees. It might be necessary to breed some bees on earth that are better suited for the Martian environment before sending them).

The environment would need to be gradually built up. It would not need to be a perfect replication of earth (Ex: humans can live off of lower oxygen levels than we experience on earth). But sending people to a red dusty rock that doesn’t provide their basic needs for life sounds like a plan for failure.

A million-year plan to make Mars a lesser Earth before anybody steps foot there is a non-starter.

It would also negate the purpose of going there in the first place. Human beings would go to Mars to study the workings and history of another world. Once the red sand was covered by ocean and topsoil, that would not be possible.

The whole planet need not be terraformed to allow a human presence there. Walling off a portion of say, the Marineris valley, would allow a sizable region of breathable atmosphere and liquid water within a few decades while the rest of the planet stayed the same.

And humans would be needed to direct the process. It would take just too long otherwise

ICXC NIKA

 

[Usige]

The biggest problem for a Catholic (outside of the lack of sacraments) is that most plans I’ve seen required early interplanetary settlers to essentially be sterilized. The reason is that human “entanglements” can lead to strife in a colony and having a “non-productive” dependent puts too much strain on already finite resources. Some plans have also suggested chemical castration to reduce sexual competition in a small colony.

Perhaps if you were setting up the initial colony with just men (or women) you’d be better off sending astronaut monks (or nuns). They are already used to living in cloistered communities so maybe a religious priest could be sent. Anyone know of an order that has extraterrestrial colonization as part of their chrism?

That being said the whole concept of 4 persons and then 4 more people every other year is a recipe for disaster. There is a good likely hood that the first 4 colonist wouldn’t even survive before the next four got there.You also will need people trained in medicine, mechanics, electronics, agriculture, organization, construction, etc. just to get things started. Finding (or training) 4 people to cover all the needs (and having at least 1 backup) would be nearly impossible. Also having a community that small could lead to psychological problems. It takes a very special type of person that might interact with say 20 people their whole life. It’s not impossible, but it is very difficult to build an artificial community with that small a group.

 

[GEddie]

There would be no point in sending people to live out life on Mars unless procreation were envisioned. As savage as it sounds, that is the only way that human viability on Mars can be determined.

(I personally think it is no accident that the time of pregnancy, and the female body clock, are determined by months, eg. by the cycle of the moon. Would those functions work normally without it above her head?)

The intractable difficulty is that in space, the radiation levels are very high, and so also on Mars. This makes human gestation very risky.

ICXC NIKA

 

[missionarygirl]

I started a Star Trek-ish novel once with a starship of Catholic missionaries, boldly preaching where no one has preached before! Unfortunately, I never finished it. It’s underneath a mountain of other papers that I really should sort through…

Sorry, that’s a tweency bit off topic…

 

[Alberti_Devoveo]

I started a Star Trek-ish novel once with a starship of Catholic missionaries, boldly preaching where no one has preached before! Unfortunately, I never finished it. It’s underneath a mountain of other papers that I really should sort through…

Sorry, that’s a tweency bit off topic…

As a fan of all Star Trek brands who was always utterly disappointed at the blatant atheism on board, I will suggest that, if it still interests you, please complete the novel.

I recall one episode of Voyager where Captain Janeway (played by Kate Mulgrew) stated something along the lines of “we had dispelled those wrong notions of religion years ago” due to “advances in science” and sometime later congratulated Chakotay (her first officer, played by Robert Beltran) for his sticking to his pagan Native American rituals. My reaction was . Christian, Jewish, and Muslim religions were abolished due to advances in science but pagan religions were totally okay?

 

[GEddie]

I started a Star Trek-ish novel once with a starship of Catholic missionaries, boldly preaching where no one has preached before! Unfortunately, I never finished it. It’s underneath a mountain of other papers that I really should sort through…

Sorry, that’s a tweency bit off topic…

In case you guys did not know it, once-famous scifi author Ray Bradbury died today. Aged 91.

He once wrote a short story about a Catholic priest who travels to Mars to evangelize the Martians, who are beings of globular blue energy.

The title is “The Fire Balloons”. I won’t spoil it further, although it is out of print.

Go in peace RB.

ICXC NIKA

 

[tabycat]

I started a Star Trek-ish novel once with a starship of Catholic missionaries, boldly preaching where no one has preached before! Unfortunately, I never finished it. It’s underneath a mountain of other papers that I really should sort through…

Sorry, that’s a tweency bit off topic…

It sounds a bit like Poul Anderson’s (sp?) The High Crusade. The plot is that an alien starship lands just outside of a 14th century English village and it gets taken over by the villagers (including at least one priest). I don’t remember much of the plot but at the end they are found by an Earth starship (it would be from our future).

ps.for anyone else intersited and haven’t heard Andre Norton on March 17, 2005.

 

[ThinkingSapien]

As a fan of all Star Trek brands who was always utterly disappointed at the blatant atheism on board, I will suggest that, if it still interests you, please complete the novel.

I recall one episode of Voyager where Captain Janeway (played by Kate Mulgrew) stated something along the lines of “we had dispelled those wrong notions of religion years ago” due to “advances in science” and sometime later congratulated Chakotay (her first officer, played by Robert Beltran) for his sticking to his pagan Native American rituals. My reaction was . Christian, Jewish, and Muslim religions were abolished due to advances in science but pagan religions were totally okay?

In Start Trek TNG season 3 (episode 4 I think) there is an episode called “who watches the watchers” that is centered on religion. After an encounter with Captain Picard and his crew some bronze age people conclude he is the great one in the sky and start to interpret his will. Will Riker says “they are beginning to believe in a god.” From his tone of voice it sounds like he sees this as a bad thing. “The Picard” beams down from the sky and breaks the prime directive to put an end to it.

 

[Shmedrin]

Just because some group in the Netherlands (BIG space program they have there, right?) says they have a “plan” for Mars, doesn’t mean much. There are already NASA plans for deep space exploration to Mars (Google “MPCV”, the “Multi Purpose Crew Vehicle”, which is intneded to take humans to the Moon, asteroids, and Mars). Mars probably won’t happen until at least the late 2020’s, probably later (if the earth lasts that long).

NASA has left the low earth orbit stuff to private companies now (Space-X, Blue Origin, etc) so they (NASA) can be freed up to push the frontier ever so farther. No “Netherlands” group has any monopoly on anything that might happen with Mars, and in fact they might not even be players after all is said and done.

So don’t worry about being left out. Perhaps the Catholic Church Itself will one day have its own space ships and be able to send missionaries and yes, colonists, to Mars itself, and beyond.

 

[GEddie]

Just because some group in the Netherlands (BIG space program they have there, right?) says they have a “plan” for Mars, doesn’t mean much. There are already NASA plans for deep space exploration to Mars (Google “MPCV”, the “Multi Purpose Crew Vehicle”, which is intneded to take humans to the Moon, asteroids, and Mars). Mars probably won’t happen until at least the late 2020’s, probably later (if the earth lasts that long).

NASA has left the low earth orbit stuff to private companies now (Space-X, Blue Origin, etc) so they (NASA) can be freed up to push the frontier ever so farther. No “Netherlands” group has any monopoly on anything that might happen with Mars, and in fact they might not even be players after all is said and done.

So don’t worry about being left out. Perhaps the Catholic Church Itself will one day have its own space ships and be able to send missionaries and yes, colonists, to Mars itself, and beyond.

Oh, barring an interplanetary collision, the earth will be there in the 2020s. The living part may not be very pretty or comfortable for human life, but the Earth itself is so much bigger than we are, we couldn’t wreck it if we tried.

And there wouldn’t be missionaries without first having colonists. No world our technology can reach (ie, our inner solar system) has anybody to witness to.

ICXC NIKA

 

[TheDoors]

There are two points that I’d like to answer before I head in to my daily tasks:

For the point made that a “mission to mars” sounds like traveling to a barren rock with no life, no water, and little chance of survival… well, the middle east was the birthplace of our faith. It’s still barren, the water is nearly ALL polluted now, and they’re still throwing rocks at people. For those who are all worried about supplies, I can’t imagine that a permanent colony would be established without some kind of supply run every few years at the very least.

The second was a point about obedience to one’s bishop as a priest. This was very well made, and I’m sure is a consideration by the Patriarchs and his Holiness. However, lay ministry is a large part of life in areas where a priest is not available on a regular basis. Perhaps we should be building a “space colonist” preparedness kit with a liturgy of the hours as well as the tang.

 

[GEddie]

Sure, it’s “barren” and dusty in a lot of Israel, but at least you can breathe!

And Mars has no Sea of Galilee, at least not above ground.

In making Mars a human world, science will seem to go our LORD one better in turning dust or ice to oxygen!!

ICXC NIKA

 

[tabycat]

If it’s water (H2O) ice, you can make oxagen out of it. Melt the ice and run a electric courent throught the water.

 

[GEddie]

If it’s water (H2O) ice, you can make oxagen out of it. Melt the ice and run a electric courent throught the water.

It is H2O at the north pole, dry ice or CO2 in the south.

That’s still a LOT of energy, though. One wonders if they have a nuke reactor socked away for shipment.

ICXC NIKA

 

[missionarygirl]

As a fan of all Star Trek brands who was always utterly disappointed at the blatant atheism on board, I will suggest that, if it still interests you, please complete the novel.

I recall one episode of Voyager where Captain Janeway (played by Kate Mulgrew) stated something along the lines of “we had dispelled those wrong notions of religion years ago” due to “advances in science” and sometime later congratulated Chakotay (her first officer, played by Robert Beltran) for his sticking to his pagan Native American rituals. My reaction was . Christian, Jewish, and Muslim religions were abolished due to advances in science but pagan religions were totally okay?

I do hope to one day finish it, but writer’s block is a horrible thing.

I think there was more openness to religion in the Original Series, but you’re right that there’s a lot more respect for pagan religions than others. If you look close you can always find that the authors’ underlying desire for a deeper meaning is transferred to their characters, (especially so in Spock, though he tries to cover it up with his beloved logic).

 

[missionarygirl]

In case you guys did not know it, once-famous scifi author Ray Bradbury died today. Aged 91.

He once wrote a short story about a Catholic priest who travels to Mars to evangelize the Martians, who are beings of globular blue energy.

The title is “The Fire Balloons”. I won’t spoil it further, although it is out of print.

Go in peace RB.

ICXC NIKA

I’ve never heard of that but it sounds interesting. Maybe I’ll check it out.