51–60 of 325 posts
It's good to think that we should be able to leave Earth at some point. The problem is not that line of thinking.
The problem is that we're spending money on military eq instead of medicine, proper education and development. I think we'd be a lot further than we are now. For now we are still "savages" in the grand scheme of things.
This is a restatement of the "we shouldn't do anything in Space until we solve (all/most/the most important) problems on Earth" argument. If our ancestors would have used this they'd never would have, say, colonized the Americas, or even left Africa. Because there's always something broken at home. Has there been a single moment in history that would have satisfied that argument ?
It is dangerous to think fish have a destiny outside Ocean, said a vocal member in a school of fish 400 million years ago.
Currently organized human civilization as we know it has a much less than 1% chance of surviving the next 400 years.
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
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 grand unified theory that describes everything consistently. Everyone is still looking for that one. So realistically whether we have a destiny outside Earth or not is a very open question we will still be looking the answer of.
The choice of whether to set a Moon base or not will bare 0 effect on those that wish to stay in the cave.
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 not that great advancements have cost. The argument is that focusing on space exploration deflects from facing the realities of climate change on our planet. If people start to think that space exploration could yield a solution to an increasingly uninhabitable climate on Earth, it could create a scenario where we spend even more on space exploration and less on addressing Earth's climate.
> 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. I haven't heard anyone make this argument in earnest. What I have heard are arguments to the effect that we _must_ expand past the Earth…
Thing is, I can't imagine anything that will happen to earth that will render it less habitable than Mars. Not nuclear weapons, not rogue states, not even asteroids. We could "colonize" an uninhabitable Earth more easily than any other planet. The fact that we could colonize a different planet makes us different from past species in mass extinction events. That's not to say we shouldn't do it (though I personally wou…
Human civilization on Earth is founded on the assumption that the environment will be Earth-like.
Yes, if we had all of the resources/organization we have now, we could "'colonize' an uninhabitable Earth" but following a cataclysmic event, we wouldn't.
As a species, we _might_ survive but even just a nuclear war between say the US and Russia would probably set civilization back by, say, a thousand years.
That's with current military technology. Weapons don't get less dangerous or harder to use over time.
There’s undoubtedly much we have yet to learn about the universe, and exploring it is the obvious way to learn. Yet I have long seen it as the height of hubris to think we could replace this planet from which we arose.
Everything from gravity to day length to soil composition, never mind the atmosphere which is at least theoretically reproducible, is something with millions of years of adaptation encoded into our genes, and has no compatible world within our known universe.
We can and should explore, and some will choose to make their home among the stars, but as a species, nothing can replace our Earth.
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 not that great advancements have cost. The argument is that focusing on space exploration deflects from facing the realities of climate change on our planet. If people start to think that space exploration could yield a solution to an increasingly uninhabitable climate on Earth, it could create a scenario where we spend even more on space exploration and less on addressing Earth's climate.
And what exactly is "addressing Earth's climate" ?
This naive hope that green parties keep pushing "if we cut carbon emissions it's all going to go back to the way it was" ?
Carbon levels have already risen and climate change is already happening - nobody can realistically predict the specifics or the time scale. All existing predictions I've seen have been way out of error margins - and stuff like thawing ice and releasing trapped methane etc. can have huge non-linear contributions.
Saying that X% cut in emissions is going to reduce temperature increase by Y on Z timescale is just wishful thinking, and we don't even have mechanisms to enforce X% cut across the world.
Investing in technology that could help settle Mars is a way to protect from the inescapable negative climate effects we will have to live with, the sooner we start to deal with those the better (eg. start building for hurricanes/floods/large temperature differences, etc.)
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I've posted this before, but I see terraforming other planets as a necessary step to learn how to take care of the Earth. Large-scale geoengineering will be necessary sooner or later on Earth. However, it almost certainly has failure modes that we don't know about, and won't know about until we can experiment with it. Testing the effects on Earth, with nearly 8 billion people, is wildly reckless. Testing the effects…
You’ve got it exactly backwards IMO. Terraforming Mars or Venus will take millennia at least, millennia that we don’t currently have the luxury of waiting around for. We need to terraform Earth first — restore some of the damage we’ve done over just the last century or two — before we can think about the much more difficult project of terraforming other planets.