101–106 of 106 posts
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That's basically Bezos's vision. Well Bezos's vision is to move manufacturing off of Earth and into Space, turning Earth into a gigantic park.
Deeply dystopian sounding. Move all the manufacturing and workers off, leaving the planet to the company owners.
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> Terraforming and space mining are absolute necessities for human survival. Is that so? Which timeframe are we talking about then, because for the entirety of humankind's existence, including its ancestors (so going back at least 4 million years), Earth was a mighty fine place to be. The occasional ice age didn't stop our non-technological ancestors from spreading all over the globe either. > You really only can arg…
I guess we're disagreeing about various highly speculative parameters there. Let's put that aside for a second: Life belongs on planets. Free-floating habitats are the soylent of living arrangements.
Well, life belongs into the environment it's adapted for.
Planets are just a collection of physical and chemical parameters that can be emulated without life "knowing" or "caring about" the difference.
A culture of bacteria in a petri dish couldn't care less about the nature of its habitat provided it gets the nutrients it needs.
You argument already falls part with regards to humans: we can take the same idea and argue that humans don't belong in houses and that cooked food is unnatural and therefore wrong. Same difference.
Another quote from Carl Sagan: For all its material advantages, the sedentary life has left us edgy, unfulfilled. Even after 400 generations in villages and cities, we haven't forgotten. The open road still softly calls, like a nearly forgotten song of childhood. We invest far-off places with a certain romance. The appeal, I suspect, has been meticulously crafted by natural selection as an essential element in our su…
Something tells me a trip to Mars and life inside an artificial habitat won’t feel like the open road .
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I guess we're disagreeing about various highly speculative parameters there. Let's put that aside for a second: Life belongs on planets. Free-floating habitats are the soylent of living arrangements.
> Life belongs on planets. Well, life belongs into the environment it's adapted for. Planets are just a collection of physical and chemical parameters that can be emulated without life "knowing" or "caring about" the difference. A culture of bacteria in a petri dish couldn't care less about the nature of its habitat provided it gets the nutrients it needs. You argument already falls part with regards to humans: we ca…
The idea of colonizing other planets and terraforming them, on the other hand, sounds appealing.
Either are just fantasies at this point, but one of them is timid, the other is bold. I'll go with bold. Bold or bust.
> we can take the same idea and argue that humans don't belong in houses and that cooked food is unnatural and therefore wrong. Same difference.
Not quite, there's a balance to be struck here. I certainly don't think humans belong in tiny apartments where they eat processed foods while hunched over their media terminals.
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> Life belongs on planets. Well, life belongs into the environment it's adapted for. Planets are just a collection of physical and chemical parameters that can be emulated without life "knowing" or "caring about" the difference. A culture of bacteria in a petri dish couldn't care less about the nature of its habitat provided it gets the nutrients it needs. You argument already falls part with regards to humans: we ca…
It's not so much an argument but an opinion. If you people want to eat soylent and live in free-floating space habitats, that's cool. I find that idea revolting. The idea of colonizing other planets and terraforming them, on the other hand, sounds appealing. Either are just fantasies at this point, but one of them is timid, the other is bold. I'll go with bold. Bold or bust. > we can take the same idea and argue that…
How do you get from free floating habitat to soylent green pray tell? A field inside a free floating habitat grows the same wheat that a field on a planet does.
The air and water you breathe and drink on Earth has gone through many a dinosaur and you breathe molecules that Dschingis Khan breathed in with every breath you take here on Earth. Just because you don't realise that everything you eat, drink and breathe on planets is recycled as well (I guess that's what you're referencing when talking about "soylent green"), doesn't make it any less true.
> Either are just fantasies at this point, but one of them is timid, the other is bold. I'll go with bold. Bold or bust.
While it's true that both aren't achievable with current technology, one isn't any less bold than the other. Given the same amount of effort, one can create living space equivalent to hundreds of Earths, while the other yields a fraction at best.
Simple economics suggests that one is more efficient than the other. "Boldness" is very subjective and thus not something I'd choose as a basis for my argument. But YMMV.
IMO Planets are for research and recreation. Space is for living, working, and expanding into - why try so hard to escape one gravity well and its consequences, only to go back down into another?
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It's not so much an argument but an opinion. If you people want to eat soylent and live in free-floating space habitats, that's cool. I find that idea revolting. The idea of colonizing other planets and terraforming them, on the other hand, sounds appealing. Either are just fantasies at this point, but one of them is timid, the other is bold. I'll go with bold. Bold or bust. > we can take the same idea and argue that…
> If you people want to eat soylent and live in free-floating space habitats, that's cool. I find that idea revolting. How do you get from free floating habitat to soylent green pray tell? A field inside a free floating habitat grows the same wheat that a field on a planet does. The air and water you breathe and drink on Earth has gone through many a dinosaur and you breathe molecules that Dschingis Khan breathed in…
Like I said, I'm not making an argument, I'm expressing an opinion, a matter of taste. If you don't get why the idea behind things like Soylent are repulsive to some people, I don't really have the words to explain it either.