I think that, before colonizing other planets, we should start by realizing that Earth can easily sustain human kind for the foreseeable future, given some pretty modest tweaks to our way of life (compared to "going multi-planetary" that is). If we start valuing quality over novelty, stop eating animal-based foods and re-organize to live closer to where we work, we can stop the consumption and that is taxing our ecosystem and cut energy use to manageable levels. If we re-distribute our wealth, population growth will subside. If we put pressure on our rulers, they will work to eliminate the nuclear stockpiles. There are simple solutions to most of our issues. Once we have solved them, maybe we can start thinking about spreading our species to other places.
Yes let's stop all scientific and technological progress which isn't directly related to achieving utopia on earth, until a hypothetical point in the future that will never come.
Is everything you do and find important in life directly related to improving our ecosystem and eliminating nuclear stockpiles? Do you think it's ok to be interested, for example, in web development, but not in space colonization? Maybe instead of attempting to force artificial goals on human society, you should acknowledge the fact that people care about more things than your notion of "quality". Denying them those things in the name of some artificial pragmatism is exactly the opposite of pragmatism - it ignores the realities of human society, ignores the actual wishes of people, and replaces them with an artificial ideology.
I would much rather live in a world where some people care about clean energy and sustainability, others about colonizing space, others about mathematics, and others about art, etc., than in a world where the majority of those things are shunned because of arguments such as yours. The latter world is a far more miserable one, and a miserable reality isn't a solution to anything.
I think that the pursuit of knowledge is a really good way to spend your time, but I do not like when simple solutions to real problems are sidelined in favor of the latest buzzword-oriented technology fetish. In times when the president-elect has announced that he is shutting down NASA's climate change research, ostensibly to fund space exploration, I think we need to remind ourselves that any work we chose to pursue has an opportunity cost. I really believe that we can address the main issues facing our society with pretty simple means, but that will not happen if everyone is too busy looking for problems to solve using their favorite tool. In the terminology of Hacker News, I guess what I am arguing is that colonization is bike-shedding for the reforms that I have mentioned in my first comment.
The problem is that your notion of "real problems" is artificial. If our society prioritizes space colonization above eliminating nuclear stockpiles, and people are willing to accept the risk posed by the existence of those stockpiles, then there is no sense in continuing to refer to it as a "main issue facing our society". Maybe you consider it to be a main issue, but society doesn't. Or maybe society does consider it an important issue, but not so important that everybody should stop working on everything else until it is solved (and as if Earth won't have new, seemingly equally important problems, when that happens). At least the people who are excited about space colonization don't propose to start dealing with environmental problems only after we've colonized Titan. You can't pretend to care about society when you are willing to ignore the actual things people find important.
Your fallacy is the same as claiming that we should care more about car accidents than about terrorism, because car accidents kill more people, instead of realizing that the number of dead simply isn't the only thing people care about when considering threats of this kind.
It's also unclear to me why you choose to single out space colonization when the vast majority of what most people do on Earth has nothing to do with solving the problems you mention. If anything, working on enabling space colonization is far more beneficial to life on this planet than almost every other subject on HN.
> The problem is that your notion of "real problems" is artificial. If our society prioritizes space colonization above eliminating nuclear stockpiles,
Nuclear stockpiles serve as a deterrent to aggression; the fact that the US and Soviet Union did not have a conventional WWIII between 1945 and 1990 is because both sides (and England and France) had nuclear weapons that made conventional invasions untenable.
Getting rid of "nuclear stockpiles" is a terrible idea.
Reducing the world's nuclear weapons to the much lower level would still leave enough of the deterrent, while it would prevent the ultimately cathaclysmic develompents which are very probable now.
Unless you're a Dr. Strangelove hoping to eventually end up in the bunker with a lot of pre-selected women (or simply falsly believing that the accidents are totally impossible) I don't understand why you'd be against the reduction.
Given the real probabilities that something can go wrong, if we don't do something to prevent it, something will seriously do go wrong, relatively soon, it's a question of time, and there's not too much of it. Only with the intentionally limited amount of the nuclear weapons the humanity can survive such an event.
I'm not sure I agree with that reasoning. This works until a future date when someone presses the trigger regardless, and then the nuclear winter arrives. I'm fairly certain you'll agree that past history isn't an indicator of how the world will look like in 20, 30, 50 years and so on.
Thinking of weapons of mass destruction, that HAVE been used in the past, as some forms of keepers of the peace just doesn't sit right with me.
Nuclear weapons have only been used without the deterrent of retaliation.
While there is an inherent danger in having weapons capable of leaving the Earth largely uninhabitable for humans there's also a very real danger that without them the last 70 years of unprecedented levels of peace ends.
I don't like to recommend books in these situations, but in this case you might find "Command and Control" interesting.
It describes a huge number of near-disasters that I, for one, had never heard about (e.g. armed thermonuclear weapons accidentally dropping out of bombers in populated areas). Mind you, I am not even suggesting getting rid of the stockpiles, merely limiting them to the level required to constitute a reasonable deterrent. What we have today is far too great of a risk for the safety they are supposedly buying us.
It is a matter of fact that a huge number of people are excited about space colonization. So it is obviously important to them. How about letting them do what excites them, instead of telling them that their problem isn't "real" enough according to your personal definitions?
You couch your arguments in the language of logic, but are in fact utterly incoherent. Your references to "people" (even if supplemented by "a huge number") mask the fact that your only available real reference is to yourself and perhaps your friends. If you would reflect for a moment you would have to acknowledge that the "huge number" of people excited about space colonization pales into insignificance compared to the number of people who have an interest in the environment of this planet and its continual degradation. These are not personal definitions. For what it's worth, my - personal - imagination is fired by the notion of space exploration and colonization, but given that to harness collective wills and energies to pursue even one project on a large scale is a supremely difficult task, one has to pick and choose. Far from the OP's post being utopian, it is in fact your own picture of the world, in which groups are free to pursue large-scale projects at whim, which is a luxurious utopia bearing no relationship to the status quo.
What you are describing is inverse vandalism. If we ignore the problems of here and now, the realization of a future where we colonize the stars may never occur. Obligatory quote:
Yeah, yeah, but your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could that they didn't stop to think if they should. - Dr. Ian Malcolm.
Our focus should not be on whether we can do something. We should carefully consider why we are doing something and ensure we aren't acting in a self-destructive way.
As odd as it may seem, the human race is fully capable of accomplishing both space-expansion efforts and cleaning things up here on Earth. More than that, space opens the door to a wealth of possibilities for ameliorating or even solving many of the major problems we face today. That includes environmental efforts and energy production.
Even if we were to pursue a massive space race, it'd only consume a relatively small fraction of humanity's industrial capability and resources as they exist today. In the context of a long-term terraforming effort, after a significant space-borne industry has been created, these sorts of binary comparisons become all the more laughable.
You act like there is some master-judge who will tell us what we should do that will give different results from our own introspective desire to do exactly what we want. We should do what we want to do, and there is no such thing as vandalism outside of human created law.
Those "solutions" are only simple in theory, not in practice. Enacting that change would actually be exponentially harder than getting humans to Titan, IMHO. One requires massive social and economic change. The other requires sending a limited number of people to another part of the solar system. We roughly know how to do the latter but the former is on decidedly a longer timescale if it achievable at all.
Do you really think that adopting a sustainable way of life is unfeasible, while establishing a self-sustaining colony on another planet is? Many of the changes I am talking about are already taking place. For example,
renewables have recently become a viable alternative (http://www.sciencealert.com/india-says-the-cost-of-solar-pow...) and population growth is projected to taper off after 2050 (http://abcnews.go.com/Technology/story?id=98371).
The only thing that can hold these solutions back is strong opposition from the beneficiaries of the current system. They will fight back, but I think that the odds are stacked against them.
Yes, I do. Ultimately there is no such thing as a sustainable way of life, thanks to the second law of thermodynamics. It's not that long until the sun burns out - by which time we'll have to have figured out how to settle not only on other planets but in other solar systems.
I don't think we know how to do the latter, in terms of colonization. Our experience locally is that living in hazardous environments is not something human beings can endure long term. We'd be asking people to live in a place that combines the worst elements of submarine and Antarctic living, with no real way of responding to any difficulty at all, even through communication.
Lot of people assume magical science fairies will solve this via "terraforming" or some other science fiction only idea, but more likely space exploration will remain unmanned probes if just because we aren't going to send a generation of explorers to their deaths or eventual madness.
I don't believe parent was suggesting that current problems be the sole focus of our attention to the exclusion of all else. However there is a valid point to be made with respect to people's ability (or lack thereof) to line up behind even the most moderate of global proposals. For example, in the grand scheme of things we (human race) can't even accept a slight change to our lifestyle and moderate economic imposition in order to avoid significant climate change that will have far greater human and economic costs. On what possible basis then is it reasonable to expect that people would be willing to make an even greater investment in a far more marginal venture?
I get the feeling that some people view space colonisation as a kind of Deus ex machina that will magically give us a fresh start, unbound by the mistakes of the past. They don't realise that the mistakes of the past are carried with us wherever we go since they live between our ears.
I'm all for basic science and reaching for frontiers, but as a species we are proving incapable of making the mental and social leaps that the next evolutionary steps require of us. Would love to be proven wrong. :-(
Yeah but some of us think the social problems we currently inflict on our selves aren't going anywhere soon. So let's see what we can find out in space while everyone is still trying to find a way to play nice back on earth. It's not going to fix anything back here but man it would be kick ass. That's enough reason for me.
"I would much rather live in a world where some people care about clean energy and sustainability, others about colonizing space, others about mathematics, and others about art, etc."
Right, if someone cares about something, they tend to talk about it. If they think it's important, they think it should be given priority over other things.
But then this is exactly what you're replying to and exactly what you're disagreeing with. As if somehow by saying, "I think other things are more important than colonizing space" stops anybody doing anything. The tyranny of someone with an opinion different from yours, voicing it.
I'm not sure the efficiency of the whole of humanity on earth and the efficiency of a comparably tiny colonial group is related in any way. There's a ton of momentum to overcome here on earth, and any change will need to occur across vast swaths of the population to be effective. That's an extremely tall order and it's extremely unlikely, as humans tend to ignore impending danger if there's no immediate consequence involved. Significant change will be seen at a generational pace at best.
Colonists, on the other hand, must be efficient if they wish to exist for longer than a few weeks, and they're a small and smart enough of a group that maintaining efficiency isn't an issue. Efficiency is a way of life for them. If anything, extremely low waste yet modern lifestyles will get their start in planetary colonies and make their way back to earth, not vice versa.
I think he means in the long run. His claim is that eventually you have a large group of average intelligence humans on our new planet and we decided to pursue colonization tech instead of sustainable energy and environment tech.
Of course, my bet is that we will reach the point where we can sustain a planet before we run out of planets (assuming we colonize a planet).
Well, if the Earth really gets that bad (e.g. the entire surface is all water, no land; or extremely destructive weather events; or too dark because sunlight can't reach our surface), it might actually be easier to set up self-contained (bubble) cities on another planet than on earth itself.
But if you're talking about terraforming, then if we could terraform another planet we could probably re-terraform earth itself.
We'd still have protection from cosmic radiation. Antarctica is far more livable than anywhere else off earth, but I don't see us living there in a self-sustained fashion.
Space exploration and colonisation is important, but it's not an answer for the Earth's problems. It may lead to new technologies that will help on earth though - not least the requirement for sustainability.
Even if all glaciers on Earth melted and went into the ocean, sea level would "only" grow by about 65 meters.
The issue with climate change is that higher temperature means more energy and thus more extreme climate. Plus there's desertification but that is, to some extent, a different issue.
Yes let's stop all scientific and technological progress which isn't directly related to achieving utopia on earth, until a hypothetical point in the future that will never come.
Slapstick arguments don't help. The whole point is that none of the proposals offered in the comment above yours are even remotely "utopian". They're all pretty much common sense (or should be by now), actually.
Do you seriously think that any of the following global political challenges:
- convince everyone on Earth to implement changes that are bad for them, like not eating animal-based foods, with only the promise of "maybe in 200 years your descendants, should your line not be extinct by then, will benefit" as compensation
- reorganise every single human settlement and/or social structure on Earth to put people closer to their workplaces
- implement a global wealth redistribution scheme that doesn't start with North Korea conquering the planet through nuclear war
- successfully convince every NWS to destroy their nukes and institute a worldwide ban on nuclear weaponry
Are easier than the engineering challenge of building a colony on Titan? If yes, please let me into whatever politics-free, single world government utopia you're living in.
Even if everybody eats twice as many animals as they do now and moves further away from their workplaces, Earth will remain a more livable place than Titan. Maybe that isn't true if we kick off a nuclear war, but it probably still is.
Global warming? Titan's atmosphere is literally not breathable, and the outside temperature is colder than any place on Earth.
Food scarcity? Nothing grows on Titan. If you're growing it indoors you might as well grow it in your underground bunker on Earth.
The only way in which a colony on Titan could be less dangerous than Earth is from other humans trying to kill you -- the argument basically turns into "Let's escape the assholes trying to kill us." Even then, it'd be easier to make an Atlantis underwater (or any number of less far-fetched ideas) than to get to Titan.
Never mind how elitist and utopian and short-sighted the "get to Titan to escape stupid people" argument is...
> You are only focusing on the drawbacks of titan, and not on its significant benefits.
I only talked about the (meagre) utility of Titan as a life-raft in the foreseeable future because that's what this thread is about. I didn't argue against visiting or colonising it because that would have been off-topic.
> Even if everybody eats twice as many animals as they do now and moves further away from their workplaces, Earth will remain a more livable place than Titan. Maybe that isn't true if we kick off a nuclear war, but it probably still is.
Sure, but colonizing Titan will ensure that we develop the technologies we need to sustain the species under those conditions, rather than having to "do it live" when a nuclear war / asteroid impact / what have you happens.
Of course they are the easier to solve, however your comparison is unfair. One one hand we're trying to solve for the entire human race, on the other hand we're solving for a handful of colonists. Now try expanding your colony for a significant proportion of the planet's population.
>Do you seriously think that any of the following global political challenges:
>
> - convince everyone on Earth to implement changes that are bad for them, like not eating animal-based foods, with only the promise of "maybe in 200 years your descendants, should your line not be extinct by then, will benefit" as compensation
Even if we assume that people are as self-centered as you portray them, eating meat is not necessarily good for you:
> - successfully convince every NWS to destroy their nukes and institute a worldwide ban on nuclear weaponry
If we elect politicians who are more interested in cooperation than in sabre-rattling, and more interested in the problems of the people they represent than in the needs of the military-industrial complex, they will have few incentives for maintaining anything even remotely the size of the current stockpile. Great though it may be, we do not need an all-out ban on nuclear weapons to ensure our continued survival, only a (large) reduction in the size of the stockpiles. That not only makes sense from a survival perspective, but also economically.
> Are easier than the engineering challenge of building a colony on Titan? If yes, please let me into whatever politics-free, single world government utopia you're living in.
My lack of cynicism may be due to the fact that I live in Europe, where I can see more progress than stagnation in all of the areas you mention above. Given how close it was that a politician who advocated all of the above policies was elected as president of the USA, I think there is reason to be optimistic there as well.
I'm european and while I share your attitudes your policy prescriptions come off as shallow and naive. It'd be hard to find a forum where people are more aware of things like the upsides of renewable energy than they are on HN, for example. You think the answers are simple, we think your answers are well-intentioned but simplistic.
One of the main issues with the current societal debate is that simple issues are being presented as complex. This makes us incorrectly expect complex solutions to our issues.
Getting millions of people to change their utility calculus is in fact a complex problem. You remind me of a beauty contestant mentioning support for world peace, an abolition of hunger and so on....goals which virtually everyone agrees to be worthy, and yet which have proved strangely difficult to implement despite their apparent 'simplicity.'
The Marshall Plan was not a global wealth redistribution scheme. It was one government forcing its citizens to subsidise other countries. Not only is getting all governments to adopt this policy impractical, even id were practical it would be highly problematic because it has major human rights implications. Forcible redistribution violates people's privacy and private property rights.
Maybe the best argument for creating an off world colony is to give people somewhere to escape to from authoritarian ideologies like yours.
> convince everyone on Earth to implement changes that are bad for them, like not eating animal-based foods, with only the promise of "maybe in 200 years your descendants, should your line not be extinct by then, will benefit" as compensation
There are millions of people who chose not to eat animals for different reasons (ethical, health, environmental). And this number is growing faster than ever before, as people become more educated about the issues with animal agriculture.
I don't know why you would classify it as "bad for you". It looks like you are projecting your opinions.
On a purely democratic basis, most humans believe meat it good for them, and will eat it when given the choice. The vegetarian movements are small, and outside religious communities, miniscule.
In absolute numbers we are talking about 500 million people[1]. A minority, yes, but hardy miniscule. And with higher percentages in the richer countries, so lack of access to meat doesn't seem to be the reason.
Finding solution is not a problem, human nature is a problem.
> stop eating animal-based foods
Good luck with that. Sad true is that people don't want to change their life style. If you ask them for solution they will tell you exactly the same thing as you wrote, but most of them will not implement any of this solutions in their life. They want to eat meat, they want to consume, look at global warming, everyone know what is happening and what do they do on their own to stop that? Looking at my friends, people around me I see everyone recognize the problems, talk about solutions but no one is really doing anything.
I would add that there is poor, and inconsequential information directed at people on how to mitigate the causes of climate change.
For instance, I've seen in my surroundings a disproportionate emphasis on recycling. Whatever happened to reducing and re-using? While recycling reduces our need to extract more resources, it still requires energy to transport to processing facilities and process.
The real issue is not cutting your shower time by 30 seconds, or turning off the tap when you brush your teeth (although both these waste resources). It's the rise of sprawl and the dependence on cars that makes our society unsustainable.
Driving a single mile releases roughly 1 pound of CO2 (assuming ~20mpg). Now multiply that by the 25.4 minute commute time [0] and the rising number of cars per household [1] to accommodate our poor suburban designs, and that equals a lot of carbon emissions.
But if the American responds to climate change by recycling, they'll be mislead that their efforts are actually helping. They are not. Recycling a Starbucks coffee cup will not cancel out the effect of driving an SUV 5 miles round-trip that you used to get there.
What we truly need is effective altruism, and a public service campaign that goes after the top 3 or so most destructive behaviors of Americans. Not whether we can design water bottles that have a "slim cap" design.
> Huge quantities of fossil fuels are burned daily just so hundreds of millions of Americans can go back and forth between two points 5 times a week. It doesn't make sense; cars can be useful for certain things, but regular and predictable commutes are best done with public transit. (http://www.treehugger.com/cars/average-commute-times-usa-int...)
My commute is 12-15 minutes by car and 55 minutes to an hour and a half by bus (assuming the buses were actually on time, which is unrealistic here). Plus either time to make and pack a lunch, or the time to walk to a fast food restaurant near work for lunch. Plus a similar commute time back. It's somewhat faster (but more dangerous) to ride a bicycle. If my goal is a fast, safe commute, I don't have a realistic option besides a car.
It's not insurmountable (I'm sure that a better public transportation system could be implemented for more money), but almost everyone will make the same choice that I have until a more practical alternative comes along....but they won't want to pay for that alternative because they aren't using it.
Get a moped. Safer than your pushie if your lacking the infrastructure, the only reason riding a bike is so dangerous anyway is the amount of cars on the road. Notice that basically all the cars on the road have 1 person and 4 empty seats every morning? You're burning all the fuel to basically move an empty car around, a 50cc moped is burning 36 times less fuel per power stroke than my corolla (ignoring combustion efficiency, I'm sure the car is better but you lose basically all in moving the damn thing).
Without the thing being electric it isn't the perfect solution (also can't do highway travel), but I feel like it's something not a lot of people consider for short, city/suburban commuting.
I'm currently trying to transition to a Honda CT110 with a 140cc conversion as my commute vehicle, it was in sorry shape when I got it and I've been slowly getting it back together, so I guess that tells you how I feel about home repairs. The only reason I recommended the 50cc (49 technically?) is because under 50 here in AUS you don't need a motorbike licence to ride one.
Can't argue with the gear part though, probably going to cost me as much as the bike did pre-repairs.
50-60 mph on a non-enclosed vehicle violates my requirement for safety. I'm not going to use something that can't be hit by another vehicle without killing me. There's an aggressive attitude toward driving here, and it disproportionately impacts small vehicles like scooters, bikes, mopeds, motorcycles, etc.
Highway speeds here are more like 65-80mph. 50-60 are the streets that I'd be driving on during my commute. Almost my entire commute is made of thoroughfares going between suburbs and commercial areas. I suppose that's why I don't see many mopeds around here.
Woah, that is crazy to me. here in AUS you get 110 km/h max on the highway, everything else is 60, 50 in unmarked suburban streets. My whole world is like half as fast as yours!
110 is closer to what the actual highway speed limits are. Usually 105-112. But that's different than the speed of traffic on that highway, which may range between 40 and 125, depending on traffic levels, time of day, and such.
I live in southern California, which has its own particular brand of insanity, when it comes to the roads.
It's only 37% worse, when measured by vehicle-km (I say in an optimistic tone, trying to hide my displeasure at the number).
I lived in Germany for a few years. I was too young to drive at the time, but I remember that my parents were impressed by some of the behaviors taught there, and I've always wished that American driver education was less half-assed than it is.
On specific, incredibly well maintained highways. I think they also have an age limit for the cars that can use them? I'm less clear on that one, that may have been lost in translation speaking to my Dutch friend.
I have a Kawasaki KLR 650 and a Toyota Prius. My Toyota uses less fuel than my motorcycle. A lot more energy went into making the Toyota, so maybe over the lifetime of the vehicles the motorcycle is still better. On the other hand, I can carry four people in the Toyota along with quite a bit of cargo in the trunk and the fuel consumption doesn't change all that much.
I think we can all agree that comparing a Prius is not the same as comparing a non hybrid car, not to mention 650 is rather large compared to the bikes I'm suggesting but still cool to hear that out of the Prius. Just out of curiosity, how much fuel are we talking here for the Kawasaki?
The Kawasaki gets 40-45 mpg to produce a stunning 38 HP. I don't know the torque number, but it's pretty good in that department.
It's fuel economy and power production sucks in large part because the motor uses a carburetor rather than fuel injection. At first I thought that was a benefit, in practice I can understand why every other bike maker uses fuel injection.
But hey, you can usually buy a brand new one for $5500. That's one benefit of them selling pretty much the same bike since 1987. Plus there's a huge aftermarket parts market.
The Prius gives me a pretty reliable 45 mpg (I drive the same road every day). If I really baby it, I can get closer to 50.
My mate is looking at getting one of these, interesting bike. It's a single huge cylinder which is probably part of the problem as well as the carby, at least until you hit the highway. The carby is just a relic I think, these things stay in production a long time, the CT110 for instance only had it's first major redesign a couple years ago which moved to fuel injection, before that it was pretty much unchanged since 1980 (and even then it's pretty much identical to the old C90's that preceded it).
Sorry for the rambling, I've been really getting in to bikes since starting this project, hahah. I'll abstain from asking any more questions about the bike or Prius, thanks for taking the time to reply!
Even with the best VR set-up that would be feasible at home, I'd need somewhere to go where my 2 year old isn't screaming, and somewhere better than my bed to sit and work all day. And to go in to the office when any of the machines lose connectivity.
I'd still have to go somewhere besides my home every day (hoping for a remote VR work office in walking distance), and some days I'd need to commute anyhow.
Just doing some simple estimates on those number, just driving for ~5m will produce more CO2 than those eating a rich-meat diet vs vegetarian diet. 25m commuting vegetarian is several houses worth of meat eaters that take the bike to work.
If we were to list what changes one can do in order to save the planet: 1) work at home, 2) bike everywhere that is human possible, 3) take the train in all other situation where possible, 4) eating/recycling/short shower/other minor aspects.
> regular and predictable commutes are best done with public transit.
In places where public transit has dense enough coverage to make commute times reasonable, yes. But that's not most places where Americans are commuting.
He's not saying the public transit solutions are implemented yet. For that to happen, people would need to re-allocate their funds from buying expensive private cars to a new public transit system.
That's only half the problem; you also need to reallocate housing from the diffuse suburban homes suitable for car-life to the concentrated cores of housing around the local stops in your mass transit system.
Which is not to say it shouldn't be done, but bootstrapping a mass transit system is a long, slow process that involves throwing away a lot more than our existing cars & highways.
> you also need to reallocate housing from the diffuse suburban homes suitable for car-life to the concentrated cores of housing around the local stops in your mass transit system
What if a significant fraction of the population doesn't want to live in such a concentrated environment?
People want to live a comfortable life and they'll give up with natural meat if they'll be given good artifical alternative (especially, with genetically identical alternative). Green energy, effective water recycling, disposable packing materials and automatic sorting and processing of garbage are the things that, given the adequate technology, can make the sustainable life style smooth and easy. We don't need to change ourselves and consume less - we need to be innovative enough, so that our consumer life style will not harm the nature.
The effort to make existing life sustainable could be spent making life more comfortable, slapping an excuse for caring the environment on the way. Meat can be improved by giving them more land and organic food sources, car transportation can be improved by a better designed electric cars, and that's what we are getting, instead of research into artificial meats(which do exist in an inferior state) or improvements to public transportation (public transport in many cities is neglected).
One could always go back to a life of eating meat once a week, riding bicycle to and from work, living in a developing country with broadband internet, electricity and clean water and thereby remove almost completely their carbon footprint, but who is in the mood for that, let's make life more innovative and even more comfortable than before, while telling ourselves these innovations are for the environment also! We eat organic and drive electric and pay $1000 a month for health insurance! Go us!
I have actually seen a surprising trend to the contrary among my friends. These are people with very different backgrounds (anything from the hardly-ever-employed working class to researchers), but over the past year I can count at least five people who have started eating vegetarian most days of the week. Just like tattoos and beards, these things can become trendy, and then peer pressure takes care of the rest.
The individuals one chooses to involve in one's own life are, without question, a misleading barometer for understanding much of greater humanity. We surround ourselves with the qualities that we seek within, and it is often tempting to overlook that in pursuit of broader conclusions.
Not that I'm advocating this as viable but you could just ban the raising of livestock, and have a DEA type agency that infiltrates illegal animal farming operations
I consider the pursuit of nutritional sufficiency to be an inalienable human right. Attacking my ability to produce my own food, in whatever form I find desirable or convenient, is a sure way to undermine my consent to be governed.
Apart from sudden extinction events like a Giant Meteor™ hitting earth - isn't earth still going to be vastly more friendly than an outer solar system body, even if we ruin it?
I mean after a new ice age, a complete runaway greenhouse process, an episode waterworld, a complete thermonuclear mayhem, etc. etc. the ruined earth will still be easier to "re-colonize" than Titan or Mars.
If we need space suits to go outside on Earth because its +100 or -100 degrees C or there is radiation everywhere etc - we are still likely to have an environment that is friendlier than Mars/Titan. It's like he says in the article - if we are going to live in caves we might as well do it on Earth. Now - if we worry about our survival as a species then colonizing makes perfect sense. If we worry about destroying the planet, then I don't get it. We can't possibly destroy Earth to a point where it is less hospitable than Titan?
While everything you say is important whether we go to space or not, it does not save the mankind from catastrophic events originating from space, which may seem like having low probability, but still are not impossible. If there's even a tiny chance that a big enough celestial body somewhere from Oort cloud will meet Earth in next 100-500 years, it's time to go to other planets right now to be prepared.
I agree, as long as colonization is not seen as an alternative to securing our continued survival here on Earth, bar the kind of catastrophic events you mention.
We should think of colonization as life insurance; societal reform as a healthy lifestyle, health insurance and pension.
Exactly. And the earlier we start paying, the more we'll get if something eventually happens. We'll need a lot of time to build as good new home as we have now, that will preserve our culture, our history and our diversity. It's hundreds of years of hard work and at some point it will not be a focused project able to achieve results quickly, but rather more like regular economic development of 2-7% per year with very slow population growth (if the Earth will be green and beautiful, who will want to give birth to their child on Mars?).
I am not being sarcastic. Compared to terraforming, or even colonizing a planet to the point where it becomes a serious alternative to Earth, they are utterly trivial.
I think the issue is more with own human nature, as usual.
Terraforming another planet is an engineering problem (of course, not only an engineering problem), and in the end it's something that in theory can be accomplished as long as we "work it out".
Changing the human nature however, is not trivial by any measure.
It's very hard for individuals to change, and even more so for groups and even more so for societies. There are even those that say change in a person is impossible.
Whereas an engineering problem can (probably) be solved regardless of whether humans change or not.
One could even argue that advancing our technology has helped us change as humans (for the better hopefully), but the other way around doesn't necessarily hold.
Don't get me wrong, I'd love for us to be able to realize the damage we are doing to this planet, whether or not we colonize other ones (ideally I'd like both). However improving our engineering skills seems much more likely than improving our nature does.
Many problems caused by human nature can be classed as engineering problems too and could make human nature moot (within that context). Reducing emissions, reversing climate change, artificial meats, safe nuclear power, efficient transportation.
I don't think the issues that are putting Earth in danger are the result of some immutable, unfortunate human nature. I think they are the result of a system that could be changed as easily as it was put in place. Many of the pathologies of the modern society were consciously manufactured (c.f. "Propaganda" by Edward Bernays), and all we need to do is to realize this, and start changing things. Luckily, the young generation is far less bought into the current system, and I believe we will see a move to a saner way of life over the coming decades.
"Luckily, the young generation is far less bought into the current system, and I believe we will see a move to a saner way of life over the coming decades."
I hope you're right, and don't want to say that we're doomed. But look at the 1960's and '70s: the young people of that time were far more committed to a radically different life than the young people of today -- and were so on a much larger scale, with the sense of the immanent revolutionary overthrow of society being in the air.
While their dedication was not fruitless (bringing us the likes of environmentalism and feminism, both of which are very much in the mainstream today) we still wound up where we are today -- very far from their vision of a radically free, non-hierarchical, loving, and "back to the earth" society.
The changes that young people seek aren't always necessarily positive either. Just because it's different doesn't mean it's good. Witness Pol Pot, China's Cultural Revolution, the Hitler Youth, etc. Radical changes are often very bloody, and result in a system worse than what it replaced.
I only meant to say that the social movements that youth were involved in during the 60's and 70's were far more widespread (and much more radical) than those of today.
Because of that, I really don't hold much hope in today's youth having much more of a transformative aspect on society than the youth of the 60's and 70's did, and even that was quite limited.
My greatest hope for social change is in the legalization of marijuana and the so-called "psychedelic renaissance". As more people are exposed to these substances, their world view and conception of what is possible could radically change. These substances were powerful catalysts of social change in the 60's and 70's (and were one of the main reasons for their violent repression), and could become so again.
> the social movements that youth were involved in during the 60's and 70's were far more widespread (and much more radical) than those of today
I am not sure that is the case. Contrast popular opposition to the Vietnam war, which didn't become widespread until many years into the conflict, with the opposition to the war in Iraq, where protests drew hundreds of thousands of people even before the actual invasion.
As 2016 had shown, we're well past the point where it was possible for a centralized (or even moderately stratified) entity to declare certain behaviors "uncool". Changing human culture without changing human nature introduces huge arbitrage opportunities for malicious actors and demagogues and increases overall existential risk.
>s 2016 had shown, we're well past the point where it was possible for a centralized (or even moderately stratified) entity to declare certain behaviors "uncool".
Which event has shown?
> Changing human culture without changing human nature introduces huge arbitrage opportunitie...
What has "culture" to do with this? Behaviour is not the same as culture. Some one might have a habit of throwing garbage on the roads/public places. That is not his culture, that is behaviour, and is easily changed once he find himself in a place where that behaviour is frowned upon.
That is what I am talking about. It is easy to accomplish, but it is not going to happen. Because that means less consumption, and everything about todays world is about pushing towards more and more consumption. Imagine the impossibility of seeing a billboard that says "Do you really need that new SUV?".
>s 2016 had shown, we're well past the point where it was possible for a centralized (or even moderately stratified) entity to declare certain behaviors "uncool".
Which event has shown?
I imagine they're talking about the recent US election, for one. For pretty much the whole campaign, including primaries, everyone pointed out all the ways in which Trump was a terrible, completely unsuitable candidate, and he won anyway.
I guessed that much. But that does not prove anything. US election cannot be compared to this. That is completely ridiculous.
Electing your leader is a very subjective, personal thing. Throwing your garbage out and driving an SUV is not. People does not actually care about doing any of those things.
They care about fitting in and looking cool. Change that and you can change everything.
> What has "culture" to do with this? Behaviour is not the same as culture.
Correct, but the comment I made about culture applies doubly so to behavior. Yes, you can change behavior. Yes, you can make people ashamed of doing X. That is, until certain Mr. Y comes along and shows them how to feel better about themselves, how to improve their self-esteem and show the world a middle finger---by doing precisely X. You will be completely powerless to stop Mr. Y. Powerless. You will be laughed at, and the fingers you thought would point at them will turn upon you.
> That is what I am talking about. It is easy to accomplish, but it is not going to happen. Because that means less consumption
Oh sweet naive innocent child. You think consumerist capitalism is to blame. You're almost right... Almost.
>That is, until certain Mr. Y comes along and shows them how to feel better about themselves, how to improve their self-esteem and show the world a middle finger---by doing precisely X.
Exactly. Thanks for proving my point.
>Oh sweet naive innocent child. You think consumerist capitalism is to blame. You're almost right... Almost.
I think you give me too much credit. My comment didn't not imply anything that deep.
But establishing a extraplanetary colony would require much much more than just advances in terraforming. All but the smallest colonies would have deal with all the politics they brought from earth, in addition to any differences that develop over there. The tight resource budget of early outposts would probably not allow for much personal freedom and it's not like you can easily make a homestead or something in a place where you can't even breathe without proper infrastructure.
Also, it would require massive resources to get enough people to a colony to make it worthwhile in the first place. Deciding to allocate those resources (and deciding who gets to go) would inherently be a highly politicized process.
Many of the cultural advances commonly associated with civilized society (universal suffrage, free speech, public education, public healthcare, a living wage and a reasonable work week, etc) were all inconceivable just 150 years ago. Today, they are a reality for a large, growing part of the world's population. These changes all took a concerted effort from the population to realize, but did not require pie-in-the-sky level advances in technology. Moreover, unless we want to reproduce our current quagmire on whatever planet we colonize, we'll need these reforms to happen anyway.
People are not going to abandon the Earth, so we have to protect it in all ways possible. But it's still not a reason for abandoning our advancement to space. We do have resources to move in both directions.
I'd say the opposite. Terraforming is a massive engineering challenge. People rise to engineering challenges and create amazing technologies. They don't do so well at changing human nature.
Colonizing other planets is _way_ easier than doing any of the things you listed. The hardest thing is getting people to cooperate, especially against their individual self interest, as they themselves see it.
Colonizing other planets requires getting a much smaller group of people to cooperate, and it will be in their individual self interest to do so.
> especially against their individual self interest, as they themselves see it.
I'm curious how other people view this, which one of the following most accurately depicts reality:
a) There will always be opportunists who take advantage of self-interested opportunities despite there being a larger group whom will not be willing to grab these opportunities for conceivably moral/ethical reasons
a.Example) Plumpy'Nut - Economists and doctors work together to develop an affordable nutritional product to combat malnutrition. Academic research is invested in the endeavour. Company comes along and patents the product to seek profit at the cost of humans suffering malnutrition
b) All people will always grab whatever self-interest is available to them despite harm to their group, unless social structures are in place to align their incentives with those of the group.
c) Most people inherently are motivated to work together due to social nature of our species, only a minority wishes to be truly self-interested despite the welfare of their group.
Also, people are more prone to be selfish in some environments than in others. One relevant example is that people that were taken advantage of are more prone to it than people that weren't.
And you'll have to add policing efficiency to the equation. We are pretty great in forcing people to cooperate.
Nuclear stockpiles (and MAD) arguably reduce the number and likelihood of military conflicts. If it wasn't for nuclear weapons, we would've had third world war, possibly dwarfing the second in terms of casualties and destruction similarly as the second dwarfed the first.
The rise of nuclear weapons have also certainly coincided with an overall reduction of worldwide conflicts, yes.
That said, nuclear weapon stockpiles have enshrined a certain risk that if/when these weapons are eventually used in anger, the consequences will likely be far more horrific than any previous conflict in human history.
> If we re-distribute our wealth, population growth will subside.
I don't get this argument. People want to fuck and reproduce, and the next generation will contain the genes of precisely the people who most want to, and so on. Something needs to check this other than wishful thinking.
There is a ton of evidence that as extremely poor people get richer they have less kids. People who earn less than $1 per day have more than 5 times as many children on average as people in first world countries
It's fine if pursuing these things is a higher priority for you than colonizing other planets, but I reject your argument for two reasons.
One, the whole notion that we shouldn't being working on something until someone else's preferred goals have been achieved first is arrogant tot he point of absurdity. I could just as well argue that she shouldn't waste any more funds on what might be a lost cause before we establish an emergency beachhead on another planet for backup purposes.
Two, this position has been expressed so often as to be a cliche. It's not helpful to trot out really timeworn arguments as if they were original, without considering the existing best arguments on both sides.
There are simple solutions to most of our issues.
Just because they're simple doesn't mean they're right. If things were really so simple we'd have arguably taken care of it already. As a general rule, any system that depends on everyone behaving a certain way is doomed to failure because there's abundant evidence in history that people frequently choose to put their individual interest above that of others. You can't just legislate that people will behave unselfishly; past attempts to do so seem to invariably end in totalitarianism. Likewise while I'm all in favor of reducing nuclear stockpiles the probability of a world with no nuclear weapons is close to zero because it's impossible to forget the knowledge that enables the construction of such a weapon, and the impact of nuclear force on an asymmetrical military conflict are simply too large of an incentive to overlook. In a world of billions of people clustered into hundreds of countries (which are semi-conscious aggregate entities imho), it's statistically almost inevitable that you'll have some actors that are militant, relatively weak, and give in easily to temptation.
All it takes is one large-ish asteroid to wipe out everything except maybe a few lucky smaller organisms/viruses that get ejected into the open space. AFAIK, a 300-mile diameter asteroid would sterilize the planet.
That's why we should become multiplanetary species sooner, rather than later.
But what is the probabilistic timeline on a large asteroid hitting us vs. rendering the planet uninhabitable by our own devices? We aren't currently looking like a great bet to last thousands of years longer, forget the million-year intervals on which large asteroids are a serious threat.
The planet is not even close to uninhabitable. Humans are resilient, and can solve problems when they become real.
Take the global warming. We actually know how to solve it - we just don't, because it's not a real problem yet (not on a large scale at least), and it costs money to solve. We can put mirrors in space or on the surface of the planet to cool it. Yes, it's expensive, but it's doable.
Pretty much no scenario makes ALL of our planet uninhabitable to humans. Except a big f*ng asteroid.
"Sustainable", if you conveniently forget about the extinction of the Woolly Mammoth, Woolly Rhino, Giant Sloths, Sabre Tooth Cats, Glyptodonts, Elephant Birds, Giant Lemurs, Giant Otters, Cave Lion, Cave Bear, Cave Hyena, Irish Elk, American horses, Diprotodons, Neanderthals, Denisovans etc.
It wasn't until we finished extirpating the majority of the non-African megafauna and apex predators and the totallity of all other human species that we could even be bothered to settle down and invent agriculture and civilization, et cetera.
All the indigenous people who we have any evidence of from historical times (eg. the last 5,000 years) are already living in a post-ecocidal world, where every species that could be rendered extinct with relatively simple technology already had been.
Those large creatures added up to a tiny fraction of the ecosystem - almost a negligible portion. They're visible and interesting - fuzzy and dangerous etc - but of no significance to most of life on earth. Like insects, birds, worms, bacteria etc. Not to mention grasses, flowering plants and algae. No, most of life on earth never noticed the extinction of apex predators ( nor their invention either ).
This played out in the Pleistocene extinctions to a very significant degree, having tremendous effect on ecosystems everywhere. Here's an entire conference worth of the subject:
Creating an off-earth self-sustaining civilization is also a way to insure ourselves against a non-human-caused catastrophe that could near-wipe-out humanity. A sequential approach -- solving our most pressing issues first before even thinking about becoming a space-faring civilization -- seems near-sighted and inefficient, especially given the other advantages (technology advances and perspective that might make issues like climate change and income inequality less partisan) from a full-throttle effort toward becoming a multi-planetary species.
You're creating a false choice here. There's no reason we can't colonize other planets and also change local lifestyles. They're totally separate issues. Even if we treated the earth perfectly there's all sort of natural ways the planet could do us in or set civilization back a huge degree (asteroids, super volcanoes, etc.). Colonizing planets makes sense for the exact same reason insurance makes sense - shit happens.
I agree with you that we need to change the way were living before we screw up Earth, but that's a process that can be run in parallel with space exploration. In theory many of the technologies used for colonizing other worlds could be useful for making our existence down here more sustainable, and vice versa. It's not like there is a finite amount of science points and we can allocate them all to one thing anyway.
The very concept of colonization flies in the face of Utopian dreams. This isn't about sending our poor and huddled masses to colonize a new land. This is about investing gargantuan resources into a tiny band of elites. We are talking literally billions of dollars per person to get there, followed by maintenance costs on the order of millions of dollars per person-day.
A Titan colony wouldn't be self-sustaining for years, probably decades. That means we many investing massively in the maintenance of the elites on Titan. That isn't Utopia. That's elitism. (See every non-trek sci-fi ever written.)
Vacations once upon a time were just for the elites. A trip from England to Greece was for the very upper crust. Now millions of people can easily make the journey thanks to modern technology. The whole idea is to develop something for the few and as it scales up, it becomes more widely available.
These are orthogonal issues. You are right that avoiding these kinds of catastrophic events will require technology (many solutions other than colonization have been proposed https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asteroid_impact_avoidance).
My point is that there are issues that are more imminent, and thus deserve far more attention.
Such an object heading for earth could be detected tomorrow, and there may not be enough time for an effective response. We have to prepare in advance.
"My point is that there are issues that are more imminent, and thus deserve far more attention."
Far more attention?
You said yourself that 10% of your country is already vegan and growing, that's a good piece of attention to me.
How many of your friends are actively trying to get you into a starship?
Come on, that's just a blog entry, no need to take it personnal :)
It's not just about survival economics and technologies.
We need to establish societies independent of an earth which might become dominated by unshakable planet wide tyranny at some point. Physical distances and gravity well energy requirements inside the solar system may be as adequate a protection for independent cultural survival as oceans were in the past centuries.
While this is obviously a long term result, it really should not be delayed unnecessarily.
I don't think anyone is suggesting we stop taking care of the planet and just find a new home to exploit once the Earth is used up. All we're saying is that we want to explore, colonize and seek out new places. It's what human's do, and it's good for our survival as a species to become an interplanetary species. I'm sure we can do that and take are of Earth at the same time.
I think both are highly valuable. But I agree that it is remarkable that we appear to be putting in little effort into trying to resolve our societal issues.
I think a new system is required. https://opensocialism.com is my very alpha initial version that I'm trying to iterate on. Are you interested in helping? :O
1. Capitalism is poor at providing value to the majority (eg. globally the top 1% have more wealth than the bottom 99%) and ensuring the long term survival of the species (eg. protecting the environment).
2. However, until there is actually a viable alternative it is a moot point. People who criticize capitalism tend to be caught up in marxism which in reality is an old, overly simplistic and unstable system.
3. Use the open source model to build a compelling alternative to capitalism which can then be promoted.
I've completed a very alpha version which details the system reasonably well but I guess the current goal is to get help, which I have found difficult.
I think that it would sooner be the rukers putting pressure on the populace (through various propaganda campaigns) that will make this a reality.
Still, there is a nonzero chance of civilization being destroyed by external forces, like a proper supervolcano or a massive asteroid. We should pursue both making the earth better AND colonizing different worlds.
This explanation goes well with the proponents as well. The problem we are dealing with is a society that creates artificial restrictions to solve those simple problems and will never want to do away with these artificial restrictions. It seems simpler to solve the problems where artificial restrictions does not exist (yet).
Assuming a severe shortage of animal-based sustenance I could see that particular bullet point happening, maybe.
As for wealth redistribution, I may be pessimistic, but how likely are you to give up 3/4 of your salary post taxation to someone you aren't related to and don't know through some kind of redistribution plan?
Not likely at all. If anyone wants wealth redistribution they are free to go to Norh Korea and live there, see how it really works. Or bootstrap an utopian underground Mars colony for that matter.
This is a distracting, thread-jacking non-sequitur that is nothing to do with the topic at hand.
We do need to live sustainably on Earth in the long term, but colonising the solar system isn't going to prevent it or meaningfully slow us down in doing so. Maybe we should do both? It's not an either-or situation.
Going interplanetary is not so much because of Earth not being sustainable but more about survival of the species: extinction level events on Earth (and not talking about us making it a wasteland, but rather non-anthropogenic in origin ones) will be less likely to terminate our species.
This is a pretty neat idea. However as we know mankind is showing some pretty interesting features that can be found only in viruses.
"I'd like to share a revelation that I've had during my time here. It came to me when I tried to classify your species. I realized that you're not actually mammals. Every mammal on this planet instinctively develops a natural equilibrium with the surrounding environment, but you humans do not. You move to an area, and you multiply, and multiply, until every natural resource is consumed. The only way you can survive is to spread to another area. There is another organism on this planet that follows the same pattern. A virus. Human beings are a disease, a cancer of this planet, you are a plague, and we are the cure. --The Matrix"
It's not an either/or proposition. We can become more sustainable and take care of earth better, while shooting for the stars and increasing our scientific knowledge.
I can assure you that I am not trolling. I am simply convinced that most of our problems are well within our control. Unfortunately, fatalism seems to be very chic today.
I see a lot of people really casually slip in that we need to go full vegan to save the planet. Why don't people advocate something reasonable like giving up red meat?
some similar thoughts here on Michiu Kaku's blog: we must establish 'ecological planetary balance' and develop fast enough as a civilization to be able to deal with recurring catastrophes, like asteroids hitting the Earth: http://mkaku.org/home/articles/the-physics-of-extraterrestri...
It's disappointing that space efforts have struggled against "spend the money here instead" obstructionism from almost the very beginning. Even back in the mid-60s—arguably during NASA's heyday—Congress looked at NASA as a bag of money they could raid to pay for other projects with little loss of political capital. And they (plus Nixon) did just that at their first opportunity. It's an easy target, even more so than most federal science funding, precisely because many of the benefits are sufficiently long-term that the politicians who first voted for space projects will be long retired by the point where they're obvious. People love looking what NASA accomplishes, but they don’t really give much of a damn beyond a general sense of pride in their accomplishments.
Wanting to make the world a better place is nothing new. It’s an obviously desirable goal, but can we at least pretend to be realistic about it? Just going by the list of desired outcomes you’ve provided, you’re proposing a radical realignment almost every significant aspect of our economic, political, and social systems as a species. These might not be difficult engineering problems (well, not directly, at least), but they are by no means simple things. And for all the problems that free markets might have, they’re also very good at solving many others.
Literally no one is proposing that we go and terraform Mars, Titan, or any other planetary body anytime soon. These are all significant, long-term efforts that won’t be possible for well into the future, and they presuppose the existence of significant space-based industry that hasn’t been built yet.
Any terraforming proposals are for well into the future, and presuppose the existence of significant space-based industry that hasn’t been built yet. By the time that comes around, our industrial capacity will be—by necessity—far greater.
Even today, the opportunity cost associated with space exploration is a tiny expenditure at only 0.5% of the US federal budget. For decades, NASA has worked on a shoestring budget, with their hands tied by the demands of congress, revolving presidential administrations, intelligence agencies (look at how their hypothetical mission requirements dictated major design changes for the Space Shuttle), and an apathetic public.
Space exploration isn’t just for the enjoyment of space-groupies and science-fiction fans. There are real-world benefits, and access to a growing space-based industry gives us a host of new options for dealing with global challenges.
No matter how charitably you look at efforts to curb greenhouse gases, it’s very likely that we’re going to need to look at large-scale climate engineering efforts to deal with the consequences. And if we’re hoping to industrialize underdeveloped nations, thereby helping counteract some of the global wealth disparity you’ve mentioned, we’re going to need climate engineering because those efforts won’t all be clean ones. Space-based solar power could help deliver even cheaper, more efficient renewable energy that sidesteps many of the problems faced with terrestrial solar receptors. The efficiency demands of any space colonies would spur continued research on genetically modified food crops, even beyond what would be economically viable for purely Earth-based farming. Plus, we’d likely see further development of crops similar to golden rice in an effort to simplify a colony’s food production needs. Despite the hysterical overreaction to golden rice on the part of certain activists, such improved crops could have a significantly outsized effect on the health of peoples in impoverished nations. Better yields, and hardier crops able to be grown in a wider variety of conditions can also help local farmers overcome some of the logistical difficulties they currently face.
And that’s completely ignoring the very real threat of impact events. As it stands right now, we do not have the capability to deflect an asteroid that’s on a collision course. While the overall risk of a major impact event might be low, the potential consequences are pretty scary. No matter how you look at it, we’ll eventually experience another impact event. It’d be nice to avoid losing a city or two, or worse, when that happens.
I guess my point is this: even if we pushed for a major increase in space spending, it’s still a tiny, tiny fraction of the 2014 gross world product (GWP) of approximately $107.5 trillion (PPP). It’s as close to a rounding error as you can get when you’re talking in terms of billions. And while there’s always an opportunity cost, that money doesn’t exist as a separate lump sum that can just be redirected towards another project that you find socially acceptable. Nor does investing in space mean leaving Earth behind and repeating the mistakes of the past elsewhere.
It means giving humanity more options, increased industrial capacity, and technological advances that can be applied to other problems. There is literally no reason why humanity can’t continue to work towards more sustainable (however you want to define it) practices, while simultaneously expanding its space presence beyond LEO. It’s the very definition of a false choice.
>If we re-distribute our wealth, population growth will subside.
I don't see how redistributing wealth will reduce population growth. Natural selection ensures the population will grow and wealth redistribution will ensure it doesn't grow at a rate that's proportional to the growth in resource production.
Moreover, I don't see how you can get 300 million people in the US, let alone 7 billion people on Earth, to all agree to redistribute their personal assets.
>Developed countries have lower population growth due to better access to sex education, contraceptives and healthcare.
High income that mostly constitutes personal earnings is different than high income that mostly constitutes guaranteed government transfers. The personal responsibility required to maintain the former creates an incentive to avoid having children one is not financially capable of support. The lack of any such requirement in the latter creates the opposite incentives.
Moreover, the correlation between high resource availability and low population growth is a historical anomaly. For most of history the opposite has been the case. There is no guarantee there won't be a return to the historical norm. Natural selection will favor the growth of population groups that respond to high resource availability with larger families, so this is what we logically expect to predominate.
Finally, you never answered how you would get 300 million people in the US, let alone 7 billion people worldwide, to agree to redistribute their personal assets.
They're not mutually exclusive nor does pursuing one hinder the other. They're not even the same type of problem. The "scarcity problem" on earth, as economists of late called it, is pretty close to being solved. Solving our problems on earth is a political problem. Colonizing other planets is a scientific and technological one.
> I think that, before colonizing other planets, we should start by realizing that Earth can easily sustain human kind for the foreseeable future, given some pretty modest tweaks to our way of life (compared to "going multi-planetary" that is).
What a horrible lie to spread. What you said is hardly the case at all. Scientists have known for many decades that Earth is already beyond its carrying capacity. Multiply that by the fact that our natural ecosystem is collapsing way faster than any estimates, and you get the fact that humanity has NO CHOICE but to establish a self-sufficient colony off Earth as soon as we possibly can. You're in denial about the severity of our situation, but without realizing it you're also not aware of the reality of the problem. CO2 is not the real main cause of global warming; and global warming is just the first step in a series of steps that will result in the destruction of human civilization. I've already got verification of this through lots of research and collaboration with peers and we'll be publishing a paper soon. But completely aside from whether this supposed cataclysm is going to happen in 1 year or 200 years, and given that technology continues to develop and be used, why on Earth wouldn't we ensure our survival by distributing ourselves?
I would apologize for my tone but to be honest it's imperative that you and the the people around you open your eyes to the reality. If not, you will also perish. Would you rather live forever or perish forever? And if someone appears in front of you and says "here is your way to live forever", would you turn away from them or would you try to verify their proof?
If we're able to survive on a planet with inhospitable temperatures and no ecosystem, why would climate change and ecosystem destruction be a problem? It's almost impossible to make our planet as inhospitable as Titan, where coming into brief contact with the air would leave grievous and permanent injury due to freezing, sunlight is so weak that it's basically incapable of supporting either solar power or agriculture, and there's no oxygen at all.
What cataclysm could kill life on earth if we have the ability to survive in a place like that?
The problem I'm talking about originates in the gravity field of Earth. Human activities have formed an obstruction in its circulation which according to models can lead, rather quickly, to a big explosion of energy from the core. But it's pretty tough to find people who I can converse properly with about gravity because even the majority of specialists today lack (a) the basic knowledge about how gravity is generated, how it maintains itself, and what circumstance would cause an already-formed gravity field to lose itself, and (b) the basic willingness to question the knowledge they piled up in their heads.
Whenever/wherever science and technology develop, humans will tend to use it for bad results because it's easier, more comfortable, and more convenient for people to be ignorant. Combine that with the fact that any habitable planet's ecosystem is homeostatic and you get the result that humans destroying their environment is pre-determined to occur. I can't speak to what would happen if humans were actually able to make it off Earth but I could say that I have a much stronger case to show that humans destroying their environment has happened before multiple times in the past than the argument to show that humans just developed agriculture within the last 10,000 years. However, that's somewhat besides the point. The only real answer to your question is that humans are going to do it again no matter what planet they're on, it's just that we are very much out of time on Earth right now. If we are for some reason actually able to establish other self-sufficient colonies then the only way they can maintain their stability is for a majority consensus of individuals in the society to be correctly taught, correctly understand, and accept the fundamental principle of what kind of causes in what problems lead to what kind of effect so that the society doesn't lose justice. But it's sort of an idealist situation because we can barely do that kind of thing in small groups.
Before we can have a conversation about this we have to establish how gravity is generated. If we don't, it'll be a bit of a waste of time. For the moment I can tell you that the circulation of gravity requires the ability the maintain a certain balance, and that balance has been broken.
> Scientists have known for many decades that Earth is already beyond its carrying capacity.
People were saying this before the Enlightenment. There is no evidence that this is true.
Our population is probably not sustainable with the way that we currently treat the environment, but that doesn't mean we can't evolve our sophistication. This has been the same forever.
Alternatively, a population on earth of 50 people is arguably not sustainable if they spend their efforts trying to kill each other with the world's stockpile of nuclear weapons.
There's no such thing as an inherent carrying capacity of people irrespective of technology or total biomass.
Of course. When I find people who are truthful enough to be able to pursue the line of questions that could lead them to having to abandon their existing knowledge, I can guide them to see the world by making their questions concrete enough, and then helping them to confirm them. But those people are the exception. When you observe me doing this on the internet, most people can't understand what I say, much less have the spirit to confirm it. In nature, it's much easier to fall down a mountain than it is to climb up it. In philosophy and psychology, people who have falsehood in their consciousness plus a weak will feel sick and overburdened when they hear the explanations and processes which make them open their eyes to the reality. When you want to confirm something specific, let me know. Then I can give you a specific answer.
What could I do aside from showing you more equations and more examples? Can you understand them even if I tell you? While you demand that I show you proof, you don't realize the proof is right in front of your eyes, all around you, in any field or sector.
