Is it really necessary to send humans to those places just to get the knock-on benefits? Couldn’t we do those things directly, without going there?
It seems to me that, today, those who have the money to spend on these endeavors would only do so if there were perceived short-term benefits to themselves. That means they plan to exploit the resources, or increase their own power somehow.
I know the good engineers that make this happen are doing it for the challenge and in the pursuit of knowledge, and I know that’s why we poors support it, but that doesn’t “pay the bills.” What is the motivation behind the money? Why are they really doing this?
Give Musk and Bezos all the money and free NASA civil servant engineers. That’s why all the contractors are being hired by the gov. These two boneheads have ao much money, they bought NASA.
“The Earth is just too small and fragile a basket for the human race to keep all its eggs in.” - Robert A. Heinlein
Brb finding something preposterous from Starship Troopers
We must terraform Mars and live like kings!
How about you start by terraforming the Sahara desert or shut the fuck up, Elon.
No. The deserts are not an empty void just waiting to be filled with more corn fields. There are species that are adapted to there, can only survive there, and would be driven to extinction if we eliminated all of Earth’s deserts. The total biosphere per acre is not high in deserts, but the species that do live there have just as much right to live as any other.
This really gets to the whole point of space colonization. The Earth is a jewel. Every inch of it is covered in life of a wondrous variety of forms. And every time we as humans shape a biome to our will, we degrade or destroy whatever species was there before.
The great thing about space is that it truly is empty real estate. Maybe Mars has some bacteria living miles beneath the surface, maybe. But it is for all intents and purposes a dead rock. We can colonize it to our heart’s content. We’re not stealing any land from any natives by colonizing there. We’re not wiping out native species by setting up vast agricultural plantations. It’s a place that we can let our technology loose to the limits of its abilities, and we can do so without destroying a biosphere so complex that you probably have to scour a thousand galaxies before you find its equal.
In the very long term, I hope humanity greatly decreases its impact on the Earth. My dream would be for Earth to return to a mostly wild state. Most people would live in space. The only people living on Earth would be either:
a) Living in very dense towering cities built to be incredibly environmentally efficient and sustainable. b) People practicing extremely low-impact lifestyles like the Amish or people who willingly choose to live as neo-hunter gatherers.
The vast majority of the human species, and all of our industry, would move off of Earth. Earth would essentially become one big nature preserve.
Bro. The Sahara desert is over 9 million square kilometers. Let’s say our wildest dreams could be realized and we managed to re-green half of the Sahara, it would still leave an area larger than all of India (~3.5 Mkm2) for your highly specialized mice and lizards. They’d be fine.
Now, let’s talk space. My point is - if you think that you could use the “empty real estate” on Mars, then why don’t you try it out on fucking Earth first, where you have shorter supply lines and access to manpower? A little demonstration of your incredible powers!
You know - if you think you can fly, don’t jump out of a window. Try taking off from the ground first. Test your wings in a safe environment.
Oh, what’s that, YOU FUCKING CAN’T? Okay then don’t talk shit.
Frankly, there’s no point. We already know how to green the Sahara. That fact is not in any doubt. You don’t actually prove anything or accomplish anything by doing so. We have all the technology; there’s just no economic reason to do so. Spam solar panels, desalination plants, and water pipelines. Technologically, it’s quite simple. Performing such a thing would prove nothing about our ability to settle Mars. The technical challenges are completely different. Whether we can actually settle Mars is a different question entirely. Settling somewhere on Earth does not provide any useful information on whether we can do so on Mars.
And ultimately, the point of expanding off Earth is so we don’t have all our eggs in one basket. You’re just proposing that we more heavily exploit our current basket, rather than expanding out to another one.
And terraforming is hardly the first step here. You don’t jump directly into something like that. You figure out how to build a city first. Once you have a billion people living on Mars, then you can consider something as grand as terraforming.
While I would very much like to save the environment on Earth, people are not going to stop consuming the planet’s resources and allow that to happen. Equally as important, we don’t know how to save our environment. Do you know how to terraform the Sahara? I don’t. In fact, there are dozens of scientists with dozens of different ideas of things we can try that could help mitigate global warming and help restore natural environments. But doing so would amount to performing experiments on the Earth’s biosphere and we only have one biosphere to work with. If the experiments goes wrong, which any researcher can tell you is very likely, then we could do even more damage and maybe have no biosphere left at all.
A better plan is to go someplace like Mars and experiment there. Learn how to create and manipulate a biosphere someplace where a failed experiment won’t potentially wreck the biosphere we need live in.
Edit to add: Do you really want to let the Elon Musks of the world spread reflective dust in the ionosphere, or launch a giant sun-shade into orbit to block some of the sun’s light from hitting the planet? Wouldn’t it be better to do the experiments somewhere else?
For the most part, the resources that we need to survive are renewable if we use them responsibly. And the things that aren’t renewable we can be quite economical about using and should last centuries if not millennia into the future, when hopefully we have better technology to give us alternatives.
We do not need to terraform the Sahara to save Earth. The point is that if you’re so gung-ho about terraforming things, how about you start with a smaller challenge that’s closer to supply lines and labor?
Going to Mars is just a bad plan, period. There’s nothing on Mars for us. Going to the Moon, fine, the low gravity and the Helium-3 and the short distance I can definitely see an argument being made for it. But Mars? There’s no reason whatsoever to go there.
Equally as important, we don’t know how to save our environment.
Absolutely bizzarre logic.
We definitely know how to DESTROY the environment, and we can’t even stop doing that.
If you having trouble finding a comfortable sitting position, it could because the shoulder of an Exxon marketing executive is constantly in the way.
Do you know how to terraform the Sahara?
it’s on earth, it doesn’t need terraforming, it’s already tera-form.
the rest of your ideas sound like musk fanboy fantasies.
Apparently if you terraform the Sahara, it’s bye-bye rainforest in South America. The Amazon rainforest needs the dust that lands over there from the Sahara.
Bye-bye is probably a bit of an overstatement. Yes plants need phosphorous, and some more than others, but I don’t think the Amazon would disappear without the phosphorous influx from the Sahara. Change - sure, probably - but there’s still plenty of nutrients and water for vast forests to continue existing there.
We could use Brawndo, it has electrolytes.
Change - sure, probably - but there’s still plenty of nutrients and water for vast forests to continue existing there.
The soil itself is pretty barren in the Amazon. The vast majority of the nutrients and minerals in that biome are in the trees and plants themselves. Without the continual topping-up from the Sahara, the Amazon is on a ticking clock.
Gaze upon the Amazon River:
Consider its breadth and depth. A titanic quantity of water, enough to drain a continent, emptying in endless torrent into the abyss of the sea. Except it’s not just water. Look at the color of it. It’s not blue; it’s brown. Consider the amount of water in that river. Then think of how much soil and dead plant matter must be flowing with it in order to turn it to such a rich chocolate brown.
That is where the Amazon’s phosphorous ultimately ends up. Nothing lives forever. Every plant and animal eventually dies. When it does, much of what it was gets recycled back into the plants and animals of the Amazon, but some doesn’t. A lot doesn’t.
Without the Sahara, the Amazon is on borrowed time.
Let’s say that if the nutrients of the Sahara were consumed by plants and animals in the Sahara, then the Amazon would be deprived. Let’s say the Amazon would disappear.
In turn, we’d get a forest in the Sahara that would be about 30% bigger than the Amazon. So a net win I guess?
Anyway, it’s not the point. I’m just saying it’s moronic to belive that we can terraform fucking Mars.
I would say that you should have more faith in your fellow human beings. We would have never accomplished anything if our ancestors had your poor misanthropic attitude.
Haven’t read all the responses, but in case nobody’s said it: the moon will never be easily terraformed into a stable environment, so the primary reason for moon habitation, aside from telescopes which require no fuel for orbital maintenance (and have no atmosphere with which to contend), is that the moon is a significantly easier place both to construct and launch rockets, so if we can get asteroid mining going, a moon base would allow significantly increased accessibility for rocketry for other missions.
For Mars, I figure it’s twofold:
- don’t have all your eggs in one basket. If earth becomes uninhabitable for some reason, having a self-sustaining population on Mars could be the only hope for continuation of the human race.
- direct study of Martian soils and other samples to determine if life has ever existed, or even currently exists, elsewhere in the solar system.
As someone pointed out, however, the current society is so focused on funneling wealth and power to only a few prime exemplars of the Dunning-Kruger effect, that to attempt actual colonisation when they are the ones who’d control the colonies would be violently, unbelievably stupid and be even more likely to lead to total extinction of life on Earth
same thing theyre doing here. exploit the resources til the planet is destroyed
NASA spending has historically created more in return than is spent. It’s somewhat expensive (essentially a rounding error next to military spending though), but the science done gives a good return on investment. This isn’t just like on moon rocks or whatever, but developing technology that the missions need. Things like thermally reflective lightweight fabric, or a ton of other things. The science done on the Moon is worth a lot on its own, but it’s also not the only thing we’re getting out of it.
However, what are billionaires getting out of it? Hopefully it’s just the opportunity to profit from the contracts and not something more nefarious. We all know it is though eventually.
That’s just funding research with extra steps.
Science on the aggregate gives excellent return on investment. Unfortunately politicians want an extravagant excuse for funding it, but it would be much more efficient not to do the gimmicks, just do the science and not allow public sentiment to dictate what’s viable.
I don’t think we need to gatekeep funding research. You shouldn’t have to do it with no goal in mind for it to be good. The fact of the matter is its funding research and making people excited to fund research. That’s a huge win.
I didn’t say we can’t have goals. I just don’t think that going to Mars is a good goal, and I think that the argument that we need a stupid goal to achieve good science is, well, stupid.
Why do you think it’s not a good goal?
Do you think research into the origins of the universe is good (regardless of space technology)? What about the origins of life? what about the origins of Earth, life on Earth, and Humanity?
Do you think it’s good to increase our understanding and capability of supporting life on other planets?
Do you think it’d be a good idea to spread Humanity to multiple places (everyone living in one city or spread out, or everyone on one planet or spread out, are the same circumstances but a different scale)?
Do you think it’s a good idea to increase our capabilities to deal with potential asteroid threats?
If you answered yes to any of these, Mars is a fine goal, or Luna. This isn’t even mentioning stuff like farming technologies without soil that would be needed on Mars/Luna but also very useful on Earth. Also things like electricity generation (solar, wind, nuclear, and others we may not even consider yet) that need to be thought about in different ways that will inevitably lead to advancements.
Constraint is the mother of creativity, or however that saying goes. Creating problems to solve can frequently create solutions that just looking blindly without constraints would never find. Going to another body is a great way to impose these restraints.
The Moon and Mars are not interchangeable. They’re vastly different. The Moon is in Earth’s orbit. That’s why we went to the Moon in 1959 and haven’t even tried to go to Mars in 2026.
All interesting research can be done on Earth, the Moon or space telescopes. Mars is not interesting except for taking samples, and robots can do that.
Mars does not help with developing farming technologies without soil. You’re thinking of low-gravity environments I take it?
You’re describing Mars being a barren wasteland as a good challenge to try to solve. Fuck that. Start by solving the challenges we have on Earth. Show me you can fix a broken arm before insisting that you’re going to do brain surgery. Hence why you should terraform the Sahara before talking about building a civilization on a dusty hellscape that is a six month journey away from everything we need to live.
The Moon and Mars are not interchangeable. They’re vastly different. The Moon is in Earth’s orbit. That’s why we went to the Moon in 1959 and haven’t even tried to go to Mars in 2026.
All interesting research can be done on Earth, the Moon or space telescopes. Mars is not interesting except for taking samples, and robots can do that.
Obviously Luna and Mars aren’t interchangeable! They’re very different. However, you both agree they’re different, but also think there’s nothing that can’t be done exclusively there? What?
Mars does not help with developing farming technologies without soil. You’re thinking of low-gravity environments I take it?
No. I mean growing food without soil. There is no soil on Mars. We either need to make it (which is useful to learn how), or we need to do without, such as with aquaponics and aeroponics. These all would still help life on Earth too (they already do).
You’re describing Mars being a barren wasteland as a good challenge to try to solve. Fuck that. Start by solving the challenges we have on Earth. Show me you can fix a broken arm before insisting that you’re going to do brain surgery. Hence why you should terraform the Sahara before talking about building a civilization on a dusty hellscape that is a six month journey away from everything we need to live.
Why can’t we do both? I hate the idea we have to only do one thing. That’s not how this works. Developing technology to live on Luna and Mars would help us tackle the issues on Earth. It also doesn’t exclude focusing on Earth. We are currently terraforming the Sahara. Since we are working on that, do you agree we are now fine to work on other things?
You are severely underestimating the effort that it takes to send people to Mars, unless you want them to expire there quickly. So yes, sending people to Mars really does compete with other efforts. Therefore we have to weigh the utility of such an undertaking against its benefits. It is true that sometimes “crazy” projects like this does reveal findings that you weren’t actively looking for. But that is the best argument for this crazy idea - that maybe it will turn up something unexpectedly cool! And I don’t see why we would divert a significant amount of resources to something like that when we have so many other fields that desperately need attention, where we know that we will find good and useful stuff without endangering the lives of people.
You mentioned soil research as one avenue for why going to Mars might help. Why do we need Mars to practice growing food without soil? What is it about Mars that provides a significant advantage for that type of research? None, you say? Then I say, let’s do it on Earth or in orbit.
I am also confused as why you keep referring to Earth’s moon as “Luna”. In my experience that’s mostly practiced when we’re comparing solar systems to each other, and in that context the Earth would be named “Tellus”. Although I think it’s rare to call them anything except “Earth” and “the Moon” in practice, at least it was when I did my physics degree.
it would be much more efficient not to do the gimmicks, just do the science and not allow public sentiment to dictate what’s viable.
Probably, but sometimes having to meet real world challenges leads you down pathways that wouldn’t otherwise have been considered.
Sure. Let those goals be useful and reachable, not some narcissist’s fantasy about colonizing a dead planet.
Musk aside, colonizing Mars is absolutely achievable, and could be very useful. Having one point where humans exist is limiting, and creates a potential for one point of failure. Spreading out gives us many more opportunities for doing interesting things, and it also prevents Earth being wiped out (probably by us, but potentially something else) meaning the end of humanity.
I think you’re letting your hatred of billionaires make you hate everything they’re associated with, which isn’t correct or good. Make an actual argument for it being bad, not just saying billionaires support it.
There are about a hundred things that are more readily achiveable and useful than going to Mars or even the Moon. We have a climate crisis here on Earth, we’re facing severe challenges in agriculture, and almost a billion people live in abject poverty.
On that last point: what do you think unlocks more scientific potential - funneling trillions into research for a colony on the Moon, or making sure hundreds of millions of children get food, water, medicine and an education? My bet is on the latter, by a loooooooong fucking margin. You’ve got your Mozarts and Einsteins wasting away in squalor, and that’s just a bad use of our potential. Morality doesn’t even have to enter the equation.
I’m not hung up on the disgusting billionaires. They’re not the only narcissists around.
That’s a false dichotomy. We could very easily as a species support a space colony AND provide for the welfare of everybody if we collectively wanted to. One does not preclude the other, nor make it any more difficult to accomplish.
Start. By. Feeding. Children.
Then you can have as many space colonies as you want.
There are about a hundred things that are more readily achiveable and useful than going to Mars or even the Moon.
Luckily we’re doing billions of other things. We aren’t doing Luna/Mars missions and nothing else.
not some narcissist’s fantasy about colonizing a dead planet.
Fuck Elon. Humanity’s dream of colonising space existed long before he was even conceived.
It’s still a moronic goal to focus on at this point in our evolution. We’re trying to run before knowing how to walk.
Whoever gets to the moon first gets to throw moon rocks at the others.
Neither place is close enough or has enough resources for more than a research base, and remotely operating robots on Mars would be a lot easier and safer.
There are so many reason we do these things as engineers. For me, it used to be about having all our marbles in one basket on Earth. But, as I get older, I find the science and engineering are just the better parts of humanity. There’s so much nasty stuff happening in the world out there
We launched The Nancy Grace Roman Telescope at the end of August, and I literally cried watching it separate from the rocket. 5 years of my life, and a president who tried to cancel the program, not once, not twice, but three times. All of the work we did at the end of last year under duress of the OMB crap, and NASA cutting 25% of the workforce, trying go defund Goddard.
So, yeah, this stuff isn’t just something I do for money, or the challenge. I do it bcz it’s my life, it’s what makes the bestof humanity, all of the knowledge and hope we have as a species.
The rest of creation: we have a perfect blue marble to live on in a void of deadly nothing. Humams: challenge accepted!
It’d be cool as fuck.
The best way I can say it is it’s kind of like exercise. Going to the Moon makes about as much sense as " pick up heavy object, put down heavy object." The Moon itself doesn’t really accomplish a lot in the moment, but the practice of engineering all the little things that it takes to get to the Moon, and learning about the universe along the way, is kind of like exercise for society coming together to solve hard problems.
Now you’re correct that there’s a lot of hard problems right here on earth for us to try and solve, and that’s valid. But I also need you to think about just how little funding actually goes to NASA. Or Space X for that matter. It’s actually a lot less difficult (and expensive) to get to the Moon than say, teach all our children to read properly.
The skills we build and the things we learn along the way however can be turned around and repurposed for lots of other hard problems down the road that are a lot closer to home. It sure as hell beats the other kind of “exercise” we’ve historically done to advance our skills which mainly consists of killing each other by the millions.
Does that make sense?
There are resources on the moon. Like helium which the sources on Earth are slowly depleting because helium that gets released in to the air is basically gone, it floats up to the upper layers of the atmosphere and some atoms will eventually get knocked into space and leave Earth’s gravity. Also some scientific experiments require low gravity. Currently they are doing them on the ISS or in a reduced-gravity aircraft. In a moon base you can do a lot more science with more people.
Also some people that are researching lab grown organs think that in order to grow an entire organ that it has to be done in low gravity. So imagine in the future we could have a moon base that grows organs for thousands of people at a time.
But without all the helium the earth will fall down.
Wake up, sheeple! The government is trying to bring down the moon!
So imagine in the future we could have a moon base that grows organs for thousands of people at a time.
Read: thousands of billionaires at a time
If organs can’t grow in Earth gravity then what the fuck am I
A fleshy fucking marvel, bitch
You didn’t build your full grown adult organs cell by cell in a vat. Like if they ever able to make organs they are more like constructing them cell by cell then growing them naturally. Growing them would be probably too slow anyway. Not everyone can wait 15 years for a new heart.
They were grown cell by cell in a fleshy vat
he extration does nor make sense. He-3 extraction might.
helium which the sources on Earth are slowly depleting because helium that gets released in to the air is basically gone
so we fill kids balloons with it.
The moon could be like an orbital gas station which is much easier to land and launch from compared to Earth (no atmosphere, less gravity). Building a buffer on the moon would make it considerably easier to ship mass to other planets. I don’t really see a way we build a Mars base without having succeeded on the Moon first.
This just pushes the question out one ring. What do we need to do on other planets that we can’t do on Earth?
The sad answer is there isn’t really anything. Go live on Mars and it will suck compared to Earth - no nature to enjoy, instrument limited variety of food, largely cut off from the rest of human culture and experience. After hundreds of years, it might be developed to look like suburban Ohio - you’ll have some iron mines and some Applebee’s and maybe enough people that the martian memes are fire … but you still won’t have a beach, or anything to see outside, or a blue sky.
It will just be Earth, but worse.
It will just be Earth, but worse.
If people had had your attitude, humanity would still be huddled in one tiny corner of Eastern Africa, never having advanced past hunter-gathering. “Why go to that new empty valley over the mountains? First you have to get over the mountains. Then once you get there, there’s nobody there. You’ll be all alone. It will be just like our current home, but worse.”
If that one corner of Eastern Africa was the only habitable place on the planet, and getting to the next valley over required generations to live in suffering while available resources are used to make mountaineering gear, and settling that valley would represent a constant resource drain for centuries at a minimum…
Sure, same thing.
People didn’t leave Africa due to the moral imperative to explore, they did not have the resources to support large scale migration on a whim. They left Africa for food.
There’s no food on Mars, or the Moon.
Human expansion on Earth did require just the kind of investments you’re imagining. You’re just not using your imagination.
You couldn’t just immediately enter a new valley and start eating whatever you found there. Some things might be edible, but many could kill you. You encountered entirely different biomes than what your culture was adapted for, and you encountered new species that may or may not be habitable.
I imagine most expansion on Earth happened a lot like space colonization will happen in the future. When traveling to a new area, it probably started with exploratory expeditions. Small groups would go over the mountains and explore. Maybe they would bring back a few kinds of food to try. Maybe there they would find a few species they were already familiar with. (Similar to how there will be some resources we can use right from the get-go on Mars.) Later more regular expeditions would go, maybe once a year a group from the tribe would cross the mountains to gather some rare food type or animal skin. Over time, as people spent more time in the new biome, they did the hard work of figuring out what was edible. They did that hard painful work. And in time, they learned enough of about the plants and animals in the area to be able to safely gather enough food to sustain a population. It took generations. It was a learning process. A lot of people died in the process.
The thing you need to not forget about Mars is that we are no longer hunter gatherers. It doesn’t matter if we won’t find a garden of food on Mars, waiting for us to eat. We’re an advanced industrial civilization. We don’t gather food; we grow and manufacture it. What matters is not if there is food on Mars, but if there are the raw materials to support our food factories. Sure, settling Mars will require a lot more resources than hunter-gatherers than our ancestors needed when colonizing the next valley. But we also have a hell of a lot more resources and technology at our disposal than those ancestors did.
Say we put in all that effort, expend all those resources - what do we get for it?
Another place to put strip malls and parking lots. With the added benefits of brain swelling, heart atrophy due to the reduce gravity, and shortened lifespans from the increased radiation.
Or we could just, idk, make Earth a better place to live. If we have all these resources, surely it would be easier to make Earth more habitable given the much better starting conditions than to go to dead dust ball months to years away and try to live in an ant farm.
Just a thought
The problem is that you will never reach a point where you feel it’s worth expanding off of Earth. There will never be a point where things are perfect and all our problems here are solved. In fact, if we ever do reach that point, we probably shouldn’t expand out that point, as that means we’ve probably become a species of entirely self-obsessed narcissists that believes we are perfect.
Self-criticism is healthy. But you shouldn’t allow it to hold back your own life or your whole species.
I think you just have far to little faith in your fellow human beings. Thankfully history isn’t moved forward by naysayers. For every inventor that transformed the world, there were a hundred jealous naysayers that said it shouldn’t or couldn’t be done.
Just a thought.
It is only a “problem” if you consider space exploration a moral imperative.
I don’t. There isn’t anything up there that we can’t get easier down here. The resource expenditure is a poor investment. Not to mention how much this would further inequality.
If there will always be problems on Earth, then it sounds like we’ll never be bored staying here.
Because exploration is in the human DNA. We seek to push out further, see and learn about new places, and further our understanding. Your question is like asking “why did explorers sail ships across the Atlantic when they had a perfectly good continent already?” At first, the new world was just “Europe but worse”, or the various islands of the Pacific were just “Asia but worse” - humans have always felt the need to explore and see what’s around every corner.
Sure, the Moon and Mars may be boring compared to all the sights on earth, but space exploration starts somewhere. Just like sailing the ocean, you start with learning how to build a boat that can cross a lake or river; you don’t start by building an ocean liner.
European exploration across the Atlantic was driven by a desire for trade routes with Asia that did not pass through the intervening Islamic civilizations that were often in conflict with the explorers, it was an economic motive. After the European discovery of the American continents, they were, in fact, largely ignored for about a century.
If exploration is so core to the human experience, why did the people of Asia - much more numerous than the Europeans even back then - not undertake any large exploration or colonization efforts? Or those of Africa?
The economic motive for space exploration is rather weak. There are asteroids full of valuable metals, but they are very far away and recovery would be more difficult and expensive than expanding Earth extraction efforts. We evolved to live here, life elsewhere disagrees with our biology - reduced gravity is great for your back and terrible for your heart and brain.
We don’t need the living space, and the population looks set to decline by the end of the century anyway.
While I understand you want to ascribe some kind of moral imperative to exploration, it is a large and completely unnecessary expenditure of resources that could be better deployed to make life here better for far more people.
If exploration is so core to the human experience, why did the people of Asia - much more numerous than the Europeans even back then - not undertake any large exploration or colonization efforts? Or those of Africa?
You have deeply disappointed Admiral Zheng He. This may cost you your head.
And then he got back and they dismantled all the boats and never did it again. Definitely had exploration in the DNA.
And meanwhile the peoples of modern-day India, southeast Asia, Korea, Japan, Pakistan, Afghanistan, etc. never did this. Curious.
You’re a member of a species that owes its entire existence to exploration and expansion. We expanded from one biome in a tiny corner of Africa to a species of billions dominating an entire planet. We explored every corner of it and adapted to every possible biome. We learned how to live everywhere from isolate islands to endless deserts to polar wastes. We’re the ultimate explorer and colonizing species.
I cannot comprehend how a human being can look at that and then respond with the most bone-headed take imaginable, “we don’t have exploration in our genes.”
China engaged in all sorts of colonization. How do you think they ended up with Taiwan? India engaged in colonization in Sri Lanka and other areas. You’re just ignorant of history.
I cannot comprehend
I believe you find yourself thinking that a lot if you don’t understand why people disagree with you.
Exon Mobile on the moon. As long as they have some snacks I think it would do well!
Having a permanent human presence on other worlds is the whole idea. If you don’t think that’s a good reason, I can’t help you.
Why do you think it’s a good idea? Like getting some gold or other minerals from some asteroids would be pretty helpful. But like why should humans have a permanent presence on another world?
Again, if you don’t get it, you don’t get it. I don’t know how to explain to you why it’s a good thing for humanity to make something greater of itself, to spread life beyond Earth.
If you don’t get it, that’s fine. You simply won’t be part of that future. Space exploration is something that will be done by people that care about space exploration. You can stay home and play video games while others go out and explore the universe.
Some things are their own motivation, an end unto themselves. Stop looking for economic justifications. Not everything in life is about money.
This is not really a whole response to the question. I’m all for space exploration but responsible space exploration. At the current moment, humans haven’t even proven themselves capable of taking care of their blue marble in the void. The last thing I think humans should do is expand our irresponsible behavior to other worlds - until we have shown ourselves capable of the great responsibility that comes with that great power.
That will never not be true. There will always be room for improvement. In fact, the moment we don’t have anything to improve on Earth is the time we shouldn’t expand outward, as by that point we’ve probably become a society of narcissists that thinks we’re perfect and can do no wrong.
And moreover, expanding outward helps us protect Earth. We should be trying to move as much of our industry offworld as possible. Most of the universe is not a place we can “ruin.” There is no way to irresponsibly use a dead asteroid. There’s nothing to “take care of.” The only biosphere in need of protection that we know of is Earth’s. That’s half the point of space colonization - giving us space to do a lot of the things that really shouldn’t be done on a place as delicate as Earth. You can’t pollute the Moon to be more lethal than it already is. It’s already a barren, airless, radiation blasted hell hole.
Humans aren’t Captain Planet villains. No one pollutes for the sake of pollution. Pollution is always the negative byproduct of something else. And a lot of those industrial processes would best be moved off Earth in the long term.
I don’t think we’ll ever be perfectly responsible. If we turn Mars into a paradise and later wipe it out through our idiocy, well at least it had a brief time as a living world. But that’s fine. We can expand outward and turn a million dead worlds into a million living worlds. Will some of those new Edens later be driven to ruin by our own flaws? Certainly. But even if half die off, I’ll take 500,000 new Edens over a 500,000 barren rocks.
Those who wait for the perfect time to act die of old age before they ever accomplish anything.
This is a much-discussed topic and you can easily find tons of information on it. For one thing, not trying to expand into new places goes against our nature - not just as humans but as living things. Every species we know of collectively tries to find and adapt to new habitats. A long-term practical reason is that inhabiting more than one planet ensures that our species will survive planetary disasters, like the asteroid collisions we know have repeatedly caused massive extinctions on Earth. Or the volcanic upheavals 250 million years ago that wiped out most life on Earth. We know these things happen again and again, and if this is humanity’s only home when the next one hits, game over.
Unless you’ve written blog posts on this before then no I can’t do research on it, because I want to know specifically why you want this. From your answer should I assume the reason you want humans to colonialize other planets is genetic redundancy?
Sure but not before we ensure our continued existence on Earth
Exploration and discovery for humanitarian goals, different abundance of resources and lack of other resources usually gives opportunities for mining, production/refining/fabrication, and trade. And further, more metal resource rich regions like the asteroid belt will require developing the same tech needed to establish outposts, bases, and fueling stations far from earth.
