111–120 of 159 posts
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Jamestown went to a place where humans had lived for thousands of years. They used shipments from England, but they didn't need them at any time.
The colony would have failed without those shipments. They desperately needed them.
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I just made a comment in another thread that Cape York, a huge chunk of northern Queensland has a mere 18,000 inhabitants. It's more sparsely occupied than northern Alaska by nearly a factor of two. Why? Because it is low-value land due to monsoons turning the dirt into mud, and that dirt doesn't have enough minerals in it so agriculture is too difficult to bother with. It has free oxygen. It has 1g gravity. You can…
The desire to fly to space can be compared with such for going to Everest, the place less hospitable than Cape York, yet having quite an interest from all sides. However, exploration of space could be way more practical than conquering the highest point on Earth - it serves scientific goals, and after science often come applications. There are many useful technologies which grew from space exploration and particularl…
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That's 3/3 complete bullshit, and first two doesn't even take high school level math to disprove completely. I get it though. This is just how naturalism looks like when runs out of arguments in its favor.
Feel free to disprove them completely since you're so confident
"The Earth has more land than mankind will ever need."
"The Earth has effectively infinite energy from the Sun.
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Work is a necessary evil. If it is not necessary, then it is just a regular evil. There are no credible arguments that going to the moon is necessary, or supports some other necessary goal. Of course by work, I mean work directed by somebody else to serve their ends, in exchange for money to live your own life. If we could afford to have people work five hours a week and still maintain a functioning society, then sur…
Work is a good.
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Work is a necessary evil. If it is not necessary, then it is just a regular evil. There are no credible arguments that going to the moon is necessary, or supports some other necessary goal. Of course by work, I mean work directed by somebody else to serve their ends, in exchange for money to live your own life. If we could afford to have people work five hours a week and still maintain a functioning society, then sur…
> There are no credible arguments that going to the moon is necessary, or supports some other necessary goal. “the superfluous is highly necessary” – Voltaire
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Work is a necessary evil. If it is not necessary, then it is just a regular evil. There are no credible arguments that going to the moon is necessary, or supports some other necessary goal. Of course by work, I mean work directed by somebody else to serve their ends, in exchange for money to live your own life. If we could afford to have people work five hours a week and still maintain a functioning society, then sur…
> Work is a necessary evil. I get fulfillment via work. > Working less is the pretty much the only thing we should be putting energy into. A life without purpose leads to sloth and early death.
Did you read the part where I said voluntary work is fine?
> A life without purpose leads to sloth and early death.
Almost no work provides the people doing it with a sense of purpose. People have a purpose in spite of work, not because of it.
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> endless money poured into innovation The US put 5% of the federal budget into the original moon mission. NASA and SpaceX and the US Space Force combined don't spend anywhere close to that on R&D.
That's part of my complaint. More and more money is poured into 'innovation' across our society, but what do we have to show for it?
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The goal is entirely different. Apollo - Cold war. USA must do it before Russia and win the space race. Money is not a restriction. USA did it before Russia and won the space race. Artemis - Prove a multi-national program can function under financial, economic, political, and even technical restrictions. We can't simply land and observe, it needs to be a team effort under a tight budget. https://www.planetary.org/cha…
> won the space race Some of it. Not first to the space, not first to the Moon, not first in human spaceflight, not first in spacewalk, etc.
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Work is a necessary evil. If it is not necessary, then it is just a regular evil. There are no credible arguments that going to the moon is necessary, or supports some other necessary goal. Of course by work, I mean work directed by somebody else to serve their ends, in exchange for money to live your own life. If we could afford to have people work five hours a week and still maintain a functioning society, then sur…
> If we could afford to have people work five hours a week and still maintain a functioning society, then surely it is a moral obligation for us to do that. I wonder what this would look like. I feel like nearly all of mankinds greatest achievements are due to our current structure of employment or at being forced to do something at the behest of someone elses ends.
Woah, really? More than cheap fuel, scientific research, social welfare, political work towards peace?
The only good thing I can think of that is actually directly caused by the way we employ people is that some things (delivery, food) are very cheap, cheaper than they would be if people worked at a sustainable rate. But that comes at the immense cost of the health and wellbeing of a vast underclass of people.
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> I feel like nearly all of mankinds greatest achievements are due to our current structure of employment or at being forced to do something at the behest of someone elses ends. like out-of-control global warming, depletion of freshwater reserves, destruction of soil, mass surveillance, extremely uneven distribution of resources. I mean all previous innovations which were supposed to allow working less somehow never…
> I mean all previous innovations which were supposed to allow working less somehow never materialized in working less, and the quality of life improvements are greatly questionable, The bone evidence of pre-Columbian Indians in America is one of periodic starvation. For the colonists, the bone evidence is one of extremely hard labor and short lives. America's poor have a higher standard of living than medieval kings…