231–240 of 245 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
>> That's a "motte & bailey" [0] type of argument. >> This is a straw man. >> This comment is a straw man. There isn't, but there should be, an HN guideline against throwing formal fallacies at each other instead of just saying what one disagrees with.
Shh - don’t disturb the logical argument classifiers while they’re training.
Beep boop.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> the real cost of the rockets is an uninhabitable Earth I've seen more than one person here express this opinion - what about rocket launches makes you think they will render the Earth uninhabitable? They certainly aren't very clean, but the emissions they produce are dwarfed by commercial aviation and ICEs. Why all the rocket hatred?
To me, this feels more like a waste of resources just for something that is cool . It's completely useless to send people to Mars, just an expensive artistic performance. Meanwhile life on Earth is dying, because of the human activity. Some things are difficult to change (forcing everyone to use bikes all the time would be a big problem: how do you bring food into cities without trucks?), and others seem very easy: j…
_instead_ is the word I have a problem with. the idea that we must do one or the other. that either we fix climate change OR we go to Mars.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
One thing to remember is that our guessing how things would work out has always been laughable with [say] 5 insanely complex problems we didn't see coming for every 1 thing turning out much less complicated than anticipated. How much of what we did just the last 100 years was accurately anticipated and how much of it is down right magical? In hind sight, how complicated an idea was it really to heat water, get it to…
> How much of what we did just the last 100 years was accurately anticipated and how much of it is down right magical? How much more of what we did failed but nobody died (somebody died, but not always) because those failure happened in a hospitable environment for life? We didn't just "magically" progress, we failed 99% of the times to evolve the process until it succeeded. Now imagine launching 100 projects on Mars…
Well I'm just picking holes now, but in the Martian atmosphere is 95% CO2 - nothing will explode
> Would you still believe "everything's gonna be fine"?
Nobody said "everything's gonna be fine". The argument for sending people to Mars, at great peril, is that sitting _at home_ on Earth, and saying "everything's gonna be fine" is a bad idea.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> How much of what we did just the last 100 years was accurately anticipated and how much of it is down right magical? How much more of what we did failed but nobody died (somebody died, but not always) because those failure happened in a hospitable environment for life? We didn't just "magically" progress, we failed 99% of the times to evolve the process until it succeeded. Now imagine launching 100 projects on Mars…
> Now imagine launching 100 projects on Mars, most of which could lead to an explosion, and predict that 99 of them will fail (and probably explode) Well I'm just picking holes now, but in the Martian atmosphere is 95% CO2 - nothing will explode > Would you still believe "everything's gonna be fine"? Nobody said "everything's gonna be fine". The argument for sending people to Mars, at great peril, is that sitting _at…
This is so much our thing (perhaps culturally) that we build our entire civilization to endlessly progress or implode.
I wouldn't mind living in a cave, scavenging and hunting for food but that is not what we are doing atm, I didn't choose this formula nor do I have to like it but if this is what we are doing lets do it.
Some of us questioning the sanity of the project is also important. We might chose to do something else one day. Until that day we might as well be good at what we do.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Presume there are only 1 billion people left on Earth when we decide it's time to go The scenario that leads to have only 1B left from where we're at would entail such a catastrophic meltdown of society that even building a rocket would likely not be feasible, let alone anything significant for a human exode. Think about it, you're fighting against something that killed 7B people, be it the end of fossil fuels, cli…
The GP was just setting a lower bound of 1B to establish a basis for calculating the cost to move humanity offworld. The cost for 5B people or 7B people would be even more cost prohibitive. But also the shrinkage would not have to happen abruptly. In theory you might be able to get to a population of 1B over the course of 200 years without the kind of catastrophic meltdown you're describing.
But look at Covid for a reference point. I mean all things considered this was still too mild to reduce humanity to 1B. This almost immediately (in the span of a year) led to big issues with the supply chain. Products removed from the shelves, years long backlogs on cars. People getting sick all around you and hospitalized, and yet there were societal debates on whether the disease actually existed, whether we should wear masks, or take the vaccine. Climate change is in the same line, people denying change with snarky remarks every time we receive a snowflake, and any step forward being accompanied by two steps backwards (look at the Paris accords). What I mean there is that there is no change witnessed without actual pain, and the change required for something truly threatening for humankind (e.g climate) won't see any actual action till we're already greatly suffering, and probably beyond the point of repair.
Now imagine a large chunk of the population disappearing, even over the course of decades, and whether that would leave society in a state where it can afford a significant "gtfo of here" space program. My personal opinion, and that is only an opinion, is that this is not systemically possible ; and therefore I don't believe in GP's base assumption, even if that's departing from the motivation of simplifying that they made :)
In any case, beyond cost, short of inventing completely new physics, I doubt earth even has enough resources to catapult us all into and then out of orbit.
The most likely scenario to me is a handful of elites (which fortunately for them are fewer and fewer) embarking on rockets, accompanied with scientists and engineers to give them a fighting chance, plus a bunch of slaves to do the grunt work and die, because surviving ain't worth it if you can't enjoy life.
(once again, I confess is a pessimistic vision, and is also departing a bit from the initial statement from GP)
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The idea of finding another Earth is not so much about moving everyone from Earth to somewhere else, but rather about "backing up" our species and civilisation in additional places. If an asteroid is going to wipe out Earth, we can't evacuate 8 billion people, or even 8 million people. but if we had a few generations of colonists in domes on Mars, or floating in the clouds on Venus, or somewhere else, the species its…
Why do we care about our species having a "backup" if it isn't us? "It sounds hard and I am bored" is a reason I can at least understand, but arguing we would be " crazy to keep all of our existential eggs in a single basket" implies some objective inherent value to humanity existing in the abstract that we all must be willing to sacrifice for, and that requires a lot more explication.
Almost everyone agrees that life, not just human life is important and meaningful.
Another way to look at it is consider the opposite bet. Suppose that you could improve every Earth organism's life by 10%, but at the cost of requiring all life to stay on a single volcanic island in Hawaii. Would you ever take that bet?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The idea of finding another Earth is not so much about moving everyone from Earth to somewhere else, but rather about "backing up" our species and civilisation in additional places. If an asteroid is going to wipe out Earth, we can't evacuate 8 billion people, or even 8 million people. but if we had a few generations of colonists in domes on Mars, or floating in the clouds on Venus, or somewhere else, the species its…
I genuinely don't get the "save the human species" argument. We are living a mass extinction which is caused by the human species. So one species (humans) is essentially destroying most of the variety of life. If you care about preserving humans, why don't you care about preserving life? Of all the miracles of evolution, ending up with a few humans surviving on Mars is not a success in my book.
In contrast to this worldview that humans are the agents of mass-extinction, it's much more likely that humans are the only ticket to survival for every species on earth. No other species has been able to escape Earth's massive gravity well, nor has come anywhere close to harnessing the energy required to do so.
Let's set aside the part that making a planet where we could live is hard. Just presume we did that, to start. Let's talk Logistics . Presume there are only 1 billion people left on Earth when we decide it's time to go. How do you get them there ? The gravity well holding us here (and holding the air down so we can breath it) is pretty darn strong. Today we're hoping to get cost-to-orbit down to around $100/kg. I wei…
> I weigh a bit less than 100kg, so that's $10,000 just for my mass- not including the life support system I need. That doesn't seem all that unreachable, honestly. The average middle-class income could swing that with a payment plan (said incomes commonly cover car payments already), and even for those who can't afford it, an enterprise seeking workers could surely cover that as part of an employment contract. We co…
It's crazy to think that going to Mars will soon be about the same relative cost as a trip across the Atlantic.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I genuinely don't get the "save the human species" argument. We are living a mass extinction which is caused by the human species. So one species (humans) is essentially destroying most of the variety of life. If you care about preserving humans, why don't you care about preserving life? Of all the miracles of evolution, ending up with a few humans surviving on Mars is not a success in my book.
Humans would clearly bring other life with them to Mars just as we have to almost every part of the earth. In contrast to this worldview that humans are the agents of mass-extinction, it's much more likely that humans are the only ticket to survival for every species on earth. No other species has been able to escape Earth's massive gravity well, nor has come anywhere close to harnessing the energy required to do so.
Do you have an idea of the ratio between the species human has been moving around vs the number of species in existence?
> In contrast to this worldview that humans are the agents of mass-extinction
Wait wait wait. This is a fact. We are living a mass extinction now, it is acted. We, human, have removed 2/3 of trees, 2/3 of mammals, and 2/3 of insects from Earth. Mostly because of the loss of habitat (not Climate Change, this still has to come as a bonus, and definitely won't help).
It is not hypothetical, it is not a worldview. It is a fact. Of all the species that lived on Earth at the same time as humans, the number of species that got decimated because of humans is so much higher than the number that humans may bring to space (should we ever succeed, which is far from certain) that it feels absolutely wrong to consider that "humans are the only ticket to survival for every species on earth". Pretty much every species on Earth would be better off without humans.
And again: preserving life on Earth is much easier than bringing it to space (and we are failing at it right now). The asteroid scenario is completely ridiculous: again it's far easier to prevent the asteroid from colliding with Earth than to send a few species to survive in space.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
To me, this feels more like a waste of resources just for something that is cool . It's completely useless to send people to Mars, just an expensive artistic performance. Meanwhile life on Earth is dying, because of the human activity. Some things are difficult to change (forcing everyone to use bikes all the time would be a big problem: how do you bring food into cities without trucks?), and others seem very easy: j…
> just don't put all those resources into useless Mars, and instead try to save life on Earth. _instead_ is the word I have a problem with. the idea that we must do one or the other. that either we fix climate change OR we go to Mars.
But the other thing is energy. Our entire society depends on fossil fuels, which are not only causing the climate problem, but are also limited. Planning to go to Mars in 50 years assumes that we will have enough energy to live on Earth and to launch rockets. Let's be honest: right now we don't have a replacement for fossil fuels.
We mostly have hope, based on "promising tech" oversold by startups surfing on the green economy idea. Wind/solar is growing a lot, but thanks to fossil fuels. Nuclear plants take a lot of years to get built, and in many places in the world we are more closing them than building new ones.
So it is quite likely that we will have a critical energy problem before we manage to send people to Mars. The climate/energy problem is not something that we can solve later, because we are slowly running out of time. And it feels like all the resources that we put in advanced projects like Mars could be (or even should be, at this point) put somewhere else. Because that's a lot of money and competent people. Also it goes with over-consumption: it's not that one such project in itself is too much, but rather that we should start cutting into many of those superfluous projects, to survive.