Let's Colonize Titan

This is a pretty neat idea. However as we know mankind is showing some pretty interesting features that can be found only in viruses.

"I'd like to share a revelation that I've had during my time here. It came to me when I tried to classify your species. I realized that you're not actually mammals. Every mammal on this planet instinctively develops a natural equilibrium with the surrounding environment, but you humans do not. You move to an area, and you multiply, and multiply, until every natural resource is consumed. The only way you can survive is to spread to another area. There is another organism on this planet that follows the same pattern. A virus. Human beings are a disease, a cancer of this planet, you are a plague, and we are the cure. --The Matrix"

What's the net energy on combusting hydrocarbon fuel when all your oxygen comes from breaking the oxygen bonded with H20? I'm betting it's not great.

I find the "colonize other planets" dream of the secular/scientific community to be most like the "you'll go to heaven when you die" idea in religious paradoxy. You would think we might have experimented with teraforming uninhabitable place here on earth - the bottom of the Mariana, or Death Valley. If that was a snap, then we might contemplate Moon or Mars or Titan.

But in fact we are systematically rendering our own planet uninhabitable. Our planet is the product of billions of years of biological teraformation that has created the narrow and extremely specialized spectrum of environmental factors in which we live comfortably. It is far easier to eat that up than it is to replicate it.

The answer is to drop our extreme hubris and misguided religious style escapism and instead develop some respect for planet e, and proceed with extreme caution moving forward, or we will find our own planet unfit for living on.

Not saying interplanetary travel isn't possible, however I strongly disagree with the statement in the article that 'humanity will remain the same' and adapt our environment to suit us. If we make it to other planets we will be so altered we will not recognize ourselves. IMO that's a long loooong way off and requires that we don't extinct ourselves in the meantime.

I don't believe parent was suggesting that current problems be the sole focus of our attention to the exclusion of all else. However there is a valid point to be made with respect to people's ability (or lack thereof) to line up behind even the most moderate of global proposals. For example, in the grand scheme of things we (human race) can't even accept a slight change to our lifestyle and moderate economic imposition in order to avoid significant climate change that will have far greater human and economic costs. On what possible basis then is it reasonable to expect that people would be willing to make an even greater investment in a far more marginal venture?

I get the feeling that some people view space colonisation as a kind of Deus ex machina that will magically give us a fresh start, unbound by the mistakes of the past. They don't realise that the mistakes of the past are carried with us wherever we go since they live between our ears.

I'm all for basic science and reaching for frontiers, but as a species we are proving incapable of making the mental and social leaps that the next evolutionary steps require of us. Would love to be proven wrong. :-(

The problem is that your notion of "real problems" is artificial. If our society prioritizes space colonization above eliminating nuclear stockpiles, and people are willing to accept the risk posed by the existence of those stockpiles, then there is no sense in continuing to refer to it as a "main issue facing our society". Maybe you consider it to be a main issue, but society doesn't. Or maybe society does consider it an important issue, but not so important that everybody should stop working on everything else until it is solved (and as if Earth won't have new, seemingly equally important problems, when that happens). At least the people who are excited about space colonization don't propose to start dealing with environmental problems only after we've colonized Titan. You can't pretend to care about society when you are willing to ignore the actual things people find important.

Your fallacy is the same as claiming that we should care more about car accidents than about terrorism, because car accidents kill more people, instead of realizing that the number of dead simply isn't the only thing people care about when considering threats of this kind.

It's also unclear to me why you choose to single out space colonization when the vast majority of what most people do on Earth has nothing to do with solving the problems you mention. If anything, working on enabling space colonization is far more beneficial to life on this planet than almost every other subject on HN.