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

techeffect.substack.com

71–80 of 325 posts

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

#71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I understand we are at risk of large populations being displaced. But you seem to be under the impression we are facing a human extinction event, is that something backed up by science?

I think that’s a risk on the right tail, although not a very likely one. But even the modal outcomes — 2 or 3 K of warming relative to the preindustrial baseline — will likely kill hundreds of millions of humans and lead to the extinction of countless nonhuman plant and animal species. I’m comfortable saying that we should do whatever possible to mitigate that outcome instead of focusing on creating Martian bunkers for the 1% of the 1%.

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

#72

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

Space exploration and research is necessary for our long term survival (1000+ years) as species, provided that us and our civilization survives short term threats like global warming and ecosystems destruction.

Space exploration is not a fix for local and urgent problems, nor is a contingency plan. That is an idea that should be eradicated. Something that may blow off, at least partially, this century, can't wait the hundreds to thousands of years for the backup plan that may provide the space exploration.

Yes, it is something that we should keep researching. But it won't be a solution for our urgent problems.

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

#73
post #31

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

Agreed. People are having a hard time when orange man does or says something that they actually agree with. They need to find a glass half empty way of looking at it.

You have no way of knowing that a significant portion of people who criticise this priority would not have done so if it came at the same moment but under a different administration. You're assuming so as a form of broad insult against your political enemies.

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

#74
post #33
post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe the last several months of what is going on here on Earth has made people reconsider if the massive investments required for space exploration would be better spent on something else.

Really? The first thought they had was fuck NASA and they completely ignored the trillions being spent on the US military complex?

This is a false dichotomy.

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

#75

It is dangerous to think fish have a destiny outside Ocean, said a vocal member in a school of fish 400 million years ago.

This analogy makes no sense. The argument stands without the assertion that we certainly will not ever have a future in space.

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

#76

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…

>The author is that very special type that will probably burn you at the stakes 300 years ago

Your comment easily stands on its own without first committing such a dramatic, emotional insult. It's quite easy to accuse people of being violent murderers of you just frame it as "N hundreds of years ago".

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

#77
post #11

This reminds me of the debates in the Three Body Problem series (fictional) around 'Escapism'

It reminds me of the attitude of the totalitarian party in charge of the US in Larry Niven's Fallen Angels:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fallen_Angels_(Niven,_Pournell...

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

#78

It is dangerous to think fish have a destiny outside Ocean, said a vocal member in a school of fish 400 million years ago.

Columbus had a hard time finding anyone to fund his idea of traveling west to seek India until the new monarchs in Spain decided it was cheap enough to risk and he found a whole new land mass (sadly to loot). People have always taken risks and gone to new places and found things not imagined by others. Space will be no different; the only difference is we already know a lot about it. Whether governments or industry o…

Columbus had a hard time finding anyone to fund his suicide expedition. Everyone (well, everyone sufficiently well educated) knew the Earth was round, and knew the approximate size. Columbus mistranslated units and ended up with a world about half the circumference of Earth, putting the far east in easy reach. NASA actually has an article on this [0].

Had the Americas not existed, Columbus would have had had to make his way back with no fresh water or food, and a high risk of scurvy.

0: https://pwg.gsfc.nasa.gov/stargaze/Scolumb.htm

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

#79
I would argue that only when society is expanding does life get better for most people. When societies start to contract, people start trying to get control of as much of the shrinking pie as possible, and the people least able or with the least power struggle the most. If you want an equitable society, and you don't want an authoritarian state forcing equity on everyone, then you need society to expand to space.

Edit: fixed some typos that messed up the meaning.

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

#80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

If Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk (while Elon isn't posting moronic nonsense on Twitter) would take all the money they've invested in their pet projects trying to colonize Mars and the like and directly invested it in local programs to get some of the worst areas in the USA affected by homelessness fixed, it would likely have a greater impact on more peoples lives than what they're doing now IMO.

The goal is not to impact the lives of individuals. The goal is to preserve intelligence in the event of a catastrophe.

As far as we know, we are the only part of the universe that is capable of consciousness. The argument is that it is worth going to great lengths to insure against species-wide disasters (e.g. runaway global warming, giant meteor, World War 3)

Its macro-level thinking versus micro-level.

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