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It’s dangerous to think humans have a destiny outside Earth

techeffect.substack.com

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Re: It’s dangerous to think humans have a destiny outside Earth

#241

Post by dreamcompiler »

machiaweliczny wrote: post #154
dreamcompiler wrote: post #98

It's at least 10x harder to build a human-staffed base on the Moon than to build one at the bottom of the ocean. And it's 10x harder still to build one on Mars. (And that's optimistic; those numbers probably need more zeros.) Likewise Level 5 self-driving cars. Every level is at least one more zero on the hardness multiplier. Neither is gonna happen soon. They will happen some day, and none of this means we shouldn't…

Why do you think moon is harder than bottom of the ocean?

Mostly because it's so much more expensive to move supplies there to build and sustain infrastructure.

Re: It’s dangerous to think humans have a destiny outside Earth

#242

Post by raptor99 »

GenerocUsername wrote: post #3

I've seen more anti-space rhetoric in the last few weeks than ever before in my life. What gives? Great advancements have cost. That doesn't make them not worth doing

It's right there in the 2nd paragraph of the article: "Just three days earlier, the Republican Party announced some of President Donald Trump’s priorities for a potential second term. The first two priorities listed were to “Establish Permanent Manned Presence on The Moon” and to “Send the 1st Manned Mission to Mars,” coming in ahead of “Develop a Vaccine by The End Of 2020” and “Cover All Pre-Existing Conditions” in health care."

Orange man like space travel. Orange man bad. So space travel bad.

Re: It’s dangerous to think humans have a destiny outside Earth

#243

Post by sto_hristo »

kwhitefoot wrote: post #162
sto_hristo wrote: post #55

The author is that very special type that will probably burn you at the stakes 300 years ago if you said that humans will fly like the birds one day. Physics today are incomplete and very flawed, with major theories being incompatible with one another and failing to answer basic questions. Even though they describe certain aspects of reality with some accuracy, it's universally agreed that they are a far cry from a g…

> they describe certain aspects of reality with some accuracy What point are you trying to make with this statement? Most of physics that is well understood and agreed upon has been verified to the limits of the instruments that we can currently create. See, for instance, https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2020/04/200409100338.h... and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tests_of_special_relativity

It's exactly that - special relativity for example does great at the big scale but fails at the small scales where quantum physics take over. This disparity between the two signals there is lots still to discover that will paint the whole picture.

Similarly Newtonian physics was also well understood and worked great, and still does; but as it turned out, there is a bigger story. The way things go, i think it's reasonable to suggest that current physics is just another stepping stone on our way to something even better that will unlock much more capabilities. It's been what - ~300 or so years since Newton and ~100 since quantum mechanics. We're basically in our infancy, can't draw ultimate conclusions about what is possible for our destiny. What will happen in the next 200 years?

Re: It’s dangerous to think humans have a destiny outside Earth

#244

Post by deadmetheny »

dmitriid wrote: post #187
eindiran wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> [Y]ou need to accept [that] everyone on Mars [will] live in relative poverty for generations. I think this point is by far the easiest one to address. Historically, there have always been people willing to do dangerous things (ie exploring the Arctic / Antarctica). I don't think you'd have any trouble finding people willing to give up their Earth lifestyle for a chance to explore the "frontier" even with the knowle…

Those explorers always have the luxury of going back to civilisation after relatively short excursions into the unknown. I doubt many people are willing to live the entirety of their lives in constant danger and constrained resources. And even fewer of those people will have the skills needed to run a complex technological society (and you will need a lot of technology to survive on Mars).

>Those explorers always have the luxury of going back to civilisation after relatively short excursions into the unknown. I doubt many people are willing to live the entirety of their lives in constant danger and constrained resources.

Yet a very large majority of North America is descended from people who did exactly that.

Re: It’s dangerous to think humans have a destiny outside Earth

#245

Post by janee »

> American citizens need to decide what they prioritize. Is it space exploration or is it a decent standard of living at home?

It's not like we're going to wake up one day, realize everything's awesome and say "HEY LETS EXPLORE SPACE"...it's a long term investment!

An article on gov. spending could better source the question, how to better a "decent standard of living at home"...I have a strong feeling spending on space exploration wouldn't move the needle in the greater scheme of things https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/0/09/NA...

Re: It’s dangerous to think humans have a destiny outside Earth

#246

Post by ordu »

johnmorrison wrote: post #13

This is frankly a blatantly wrong and quite foolish argument. Space exploration has already created many significant benefits for humanity on Earth , by advancing hundreds of new technologies with terrestrial applications and launching satellite networks that support a safer, more peaceful world for humans, with improved agricultural efficiencies as well as advanced warning and a better understanding of extreme weath…

> We can prioritize both, and frankly, life on Earth will be better the more we priotitize space exploration, not worse.

Why not to start to invest into research and technologies allowing us to terraform planets? We have a climate catastrophe in a near future, why no to try something to do. Like to grow forest over Sahara, I mean no just Egypt trying to do it in a small scale, but as a multinational project, with tons of invested resources? It could allow to try technologies, to learn economics of such projects, to check climate models and so on.

Or maybe there are better ideas than turning Sahara into a rain forest? What they are? Should we try them maybe?

Re: It’s dangerous to think humans have a destiny outside Earth

#247

Post by Udik »

jodrellblank wrote: post #169
Udik wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can read as what you want, when people arrived to the Americas, the continents were covered in lush vegetation and had plenty of water, food and space. When we'll arrive to the only planet in reach where it is even vaguely conceivable to survive for more than a couple of hours, we'll find a freezing desert with high radiation levels and no air where every cubic centimetre of living space will need to be created f…

Not only that, but Mars is smaller than the Earth. Even best case for teraforming all of it into paradise and shipping half the world's population there gives ~one more population doubling time to being "full" again. Planets are not an efficient way to make surface living space with all that matter inside them. Whatever you think of the difficulty or possibility of it, it will be easier to work out how to support 2x…

Mars is the size (surface) of the Pacific Ocean. And infinitely less habitable than the Pacific. We could settle a few billion people in entirely self-sufficient and zero-impact communities floating on the Pacific and it would be absolutely cheap and straightforward compared to doing the same on Mars.

Re: It’s dangerous to think humans have a destiny outside Earth

#248

Post by mcguire »

"The problem with this line of thinking — and the Trump administration’s ideological and monetary support for NASA exploring the solar system — is that it perpetuates the myth that, through technological developments, humans are destined to leave Earth and find a utopia elsewhere."

No, the problem with this is the "monetary support" line. NASA's budget has been relatively flat and was increased by Congress over the requested budget in 2018, IIRC.

Re: It’s dangerous to think humans have a destiny outside Earth

#249

Post by forest_dweller »

kstenerud wrote: post #10

> Indeed, the idea that technological developments will solve all of our problems —eventually allowing us to leave Earth — is instrumental to political mobilization on behalf of the powers that be. It helps to perpetuate the current socio-economic system that is designed for the one percent to stay in power and the working class to stay working. Sorry to say, but almost EVERYTHING big that happens on this planet help…

> Sorry to say, but almost EVERYTHING big that happens on this planet helps to perpetuate the current socio-economic system that is designed for the one percent to stay in power and the working class to stay working.

Sorry this is false.

The top 1% owning everything has been since the beginning. Pareto discovered this last century. It doesn't matter what the socio-economic system is. It is just a reality of life.

> One of Pareto's equations achieved special prominence, and controversy. He was fascinated by problems of power and wealth. How do people get it? How is it distributed around society? How do those who have it use it? The gulf between rich and poor has always been part of the human condition, but Pareto resolved to measure it. He gathered reams of data on wealth and income through different centuries, through different countries: the tax records of Basel, Switzerland, from 1454 and from Augsburg, Germany, in 1471, 1498 and 1512; contemporary rental income from Paris; personal income from Britain, Prussia, Saxony, Ireland, Italy, Peru. What he found – or thought he found – was striking. When he plotted the data on graph paper, with income on one axis, and number of people with that income on the other, he saw the same picture nearly everywhere in every era. Society was not a "social pyramid" with the proportion of rich to poor sloping gently from one class to the next. Instead it was more of a "social arrow" – very fat on the bottom where the mass of men live, and very thin at the top where sit the wealthy elite. Nor was this effect by chance; the data did not remotely fit a bell curve, as one would expect if wealth were distributed randomly. "It is a social law", he wrote: something "in the nature of man"

This is known as the "Iron law of oligarchy". Elites will always end up running everything and collecting everything. If you remove the current set of elites a new set of elites will take their place. Unfortunately these facts forms the basis of fascism. However that doesn't mean the observation isn't valid.

Re: It’s dangerous to think humans have a destiny outside Earth

#250

Post by cwhiz »

This person seems upset that NASA has a budget of $22.6 billion. Apparently he or she has never seen the US annual budget. $22 billion is a rounding error.

The US spends $3.6 trillion per year on health care expenditures. If we shut NASA down, and diverted all of their budget to health care, we could pay for ~2.5 days of health care for everyone in the US.

I mention health care only because the article also laments that a GOP "priority" is not "cover all pre-existing conditions."

Perfect is not the enemy of good.

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