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It boggles my mind, with the understanding and technology we have, that we have not leveraged our entire world economy to the single goal of establishing human
by Rhapso 11y ago
It boggles my mind, with the understanding and technology we have, that we have not leveraged our entire world economy to the single goal of establishing human colonies off world and sending generation ships to nearby stars.
It is the single most beneficial act to the survival likelihood of the human species that seems available to us.
- cryptoz 11y agoOops. I accidentally downvoted you by mistake, there's no way to undo that. I mostly agree with you actually! Except we shouldn't devote all our resources to it. Actually about 1-2% of our resources would be enough. Currently we expend less than 0.1% or so of global resources to space exploration (not just Mars). A tenfold or twentyfold increase would make a really big improvement there, enough to establish a foothold and grow.
- base 11y agoIt boggles my mind, with the understanding and technology we have, that we have not leveraged our entire world economy to the single goal of eradicating poverty of the world.
- soperj 11y agoReally it seems like just a distribution problem at this point.
- thescriptkiddie 11y agoThere goes the "but we have so many problems down here" argument again. Starting a Mars colony would require the efforts of a few thousand people and cost a few percent of world GDP. Eradicating poverty would require the cooperation of millions of people, many of whom would sooner murder each other, and more than half of world GDP. So not only are the two projects not mutually exclusive, a Mars colony is actually much less difficult.
- sjcsjc 11y ago"the efforts of a few thousand people" Good point. And arguably that's actually happening.
- __jal 11y agoDepends on what the goal is. If your Mars colony is just a PR^H^H national pride game - you've got a handful of people, some high-school kids' plant experiment and the Little Box with the Antenna some TLA agency asked you to leave behind - then sure, it would be no more expensive than the SDI, the Libyan war or any other stupid boondoggle we can apparently afford. If you want an actual self-sufficient colony, you've got a much bigger project. I don't think we know what is actually required to create a self-sustaining technical culture in space, because we've only really done it by accident and not in space. But this: http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2010/07/insufficient-data.html http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2010/07/insuffic... is as decent a hand-wavey starting point as any. And it is quite a bit more resource-intensive than a few kilopeople/few percent of organized human output.
- thescriptkiddie 11y agoThe comparison to those stupid boondoggles doesn't really do the scale we're talking about justice. A few percent of gross world product is 4 trillion dollars per year. That's more expensive than the entire Second World War. That's enough money to fund NASA for two centuries. That's enough money to launch the mass of the empire state building into LEO twice using current disposable rockets.
- Rhapso 11y agoAs horrible as it sounds, from the perspective of species survival, poverty is not a big issue. The globalization of culture and ideology that such a movement would impose to eradicate poverty would itself be a bigger threat to survival than poverty. Diversity of thought and culture is a huge survival benefit, and to fulfill the western fantasy of poverty eradication we would have to impose a new set of values and thoughts upon all those affected. It would have to be built on the destruction of diversity that is of higher utility than those people's welbeing. But this is admittedly, from a perspective that would be cruel to a great many people. I can see strong arguments for modifying cultures worldwide to lower poverty, but only in ways that promote that they find their own varied and unique solutions to the problems, rather than imposing a single solution.
- finishingmove 11y agoYou talk about ensuring the survival of the species, yet you downplay the suffering of fellow humans. What would there be left to save if everyone thought this way?
- Rhapso 11y agoNot much. I'm not evangelistic about my ideals. Variety of thought, values and philosophy is a survival boon. We just need enough people to think this way, all of us would not be good. I don't want to save my ideology, i want to save the existence of any ideology.
- finishingmove 11y agoDo ideologies of destruction and self-destruction get the same treatment as any other? Preserving them for the sake of preservation and diversity perhaps?
- Rhapso 11y agoYes. I hope people get the chance to re-invent slavery, racism, genocide and every other horrible thing over and over. I have strong ideas about all of those things, but they are part of what humanity is. Maybe humanity will change, maybe it wont. I want to save it either way.
- cbhl 11y agoMaybe we could "solve" both problems at the same time, similar to how the Europeans sent people to settle in North America once upon a time.
- excalibur 11y agoIt boggles my mind that the phrase "Get your ass to Mars" took this long to appear in this thread.
- harperlee 11y agoBased on actual behaviour of the people, the survival of the human species does not score very high in the Values scale. We don't even really care about most of the current population - save if by chance of a crude documentary we feel they are closer to us than where they really are.
- jacobush 11y agoThere is a big difference between survival of the species and survival of the majority. We were at one time fewer than 10k people (give or take) and we came through fine.
- explorer666 11y agoEven if we build a spaceship that can accelerate up to the speed of light and send it to the nearest star, we won't even know what happened to it in our lifetime. Doesn't seem like something the world could agree to donate all its money for.
- Rhapso 11y agoPeople talk about how long space travel takes, I feel like people forget that at 1g of acceleration the entire galaxy is within 22 years of travel.
- marcosdumay 11y agoFor an observer in the ship, obviously. Here, outside, it will be more like 200 thousand years, and constant 1g acceleration is impossible. You are also forgetting how hard it to maintain that 1g of acceleration for a long period.
- shiftpgdn 11y agoJust 1000 years for a stationary observer vs 22 years for a astronaut under 1g constant acceleration. It's not that radical.
- aardvark179 11y agoThe diameter of our galaxy is about 100,000 light years. Unless you've got some way to go faster than light then you're 2 orders of magnitude out on your estimate.
- JoeAltmaier 11y agoThat's ignoring relativity! For the astronaut, travelling at near C, dilation will occur and it will seem to be less time.
- Grishnakh 11y ago
- ksenzee 11y agoWe can't even agree on carbon. There's no way we can agree on something like that. People are too busy surviving individually to worry about survival of the species.
- Rhapso 11y agoHonestly, that is the problem in a nutshell. We have followed the optimization strategy of self-interest to it's optima. We will have to change strategies to break out. So how can we change what people value, without destroying that which we are attempting to preserve?
- 13thLetter 11y ago> We can't even agree on carbon. There's no way we can agree on something like that. Not with that attitude. It's not so much that we "can't agree" but more that the main argumentative mode these days is sneering and insults, occasionally backed up by mob violence. No wonder people get stubborn about sticking to their positions.
- ksenzee 11y agoWhat attitude are you referring to? My conviction that humanity is unable to agree on what is in its best interest?
- 13thLetter 11y agoIf you want everyone in the world to agree it's not going to happen. If you want enough people in the world to agree to move things a little towards what you want, it's possible.
- ksenzee 11y agoThe original premise here was that humanity would "leverag[e] our entire world economy to [a] single goal." You'd need a very significant chunk of humanity to agree in order to change the entire world economy. That's the part I find unlikely, and I think carbon is a decent example of why. (And since you brought up the topic of sneering and insults, frankly, the only time I've felt insulted at at on this site recently was your "Not with that attitude" comment. Perhaps you're assuming some kind of ill will or political motivation on my part that was not in fact there. Regardless, your comment still reads like a sneer to me, three days later.)
- themodelplumber 11y agoOther dangers are more present and tangible. Among the great nations, who will drop their gun first? That might be a good question to start with. Otherwise people will rightly think you are a kook, because there will be no future us anyway, without security considerations here and now.
- mike-cardwell 11y agoI couldn't care less about the long term survival of the human race. I can't think of a lower priority. Explain to me why it should be my highest priority...
- Rhapso 11y agoIt depends on your moral system. If a cause it not apparent to you, than I doubt your moral system would value it. The most universally accepted argument is that one has an obligation to one's own ancestors to maximize their chances of survival. I consider it to be the asymptotic biological imperative. I've decided not to have children, thus I have an obligation to ensure that everybody else's children have better odds of survival.
- maxxxxx 11y agoA lot of people are probably not into this because it won't help with their individual survival. I don't think many people care about the survival of the human species if they themselves are left out.
- AndrewKemendo 11y agoIt boggles my mind that people seriously consider this a real solution. Even if we assume one of the worst case scenarios of a massive asteroid impact, the earth would still be more habitable than decades of development on Mars and without massive resource outlays to get it there.
- Rhapso 11y agoI view the asteroids as a better colonization target than mars because you are right. I think we should be focus on building self-reproducing tin-cans that contain a minimal human-supporting ecosystem (and humans). The problem is not finding better planets, it is about being planet-bound at all.
- AndrewKemendo 11y agoOr maybe we should focus on overcoming biology alltogether.
- Rhapso 11y agoI'm in favor of this idea, but right now utilizing biology seems to be a path of lower resistance and higher likelihood of success.
- aquadrop 11y agoI think more beneficial would be if we focus our force on getting thermonuclear fusion working (or other source of 'free' energy'). Cheap endless energy will superspeed all other endeavors.
- flubert 11y agoIt boggles my mind when people assume that their pet ideas should be everyone's. Patience was a virtue. In a couple hundred years time people will be able to do that without having to "leverage the entire world economy".
- kbenson 11y ago>> It is the single most beneficial act to the survival likelihood of the human species that seems available to us. > people assume that their pet ideas should be everyone's. It's not exactly a pet idea, but it is against the grain of most Human thinking, which is far more geared for tribal thinking than thinking at the species level, which is why it doesn't "boggle my mind". That said, I think is important, and arguing it's not selfish[1] by definition, as it puts one's personal, community, national, continental and/or world interests above the interests of the species, which ultimately is survival. Off-world colonies is procreation at the species level, and is the only way to prevent an extinction level event of the type that we know happen occasionally on earth. 1: I'm not trying to imply your statement is selfish as much as make a general point.
- actionwords 11y agolet me guess eugenics is good too
- pc86 11y ago> Off-world colonies is procreation at the species level, and is the only way to prevent an extinction level event of the type that we know happen occasionally on earth. To be fair it doesn't prevent an ELE at all, it just means that one would destroy 99.9%+ of the human species instead of 100%. Shotgunning even a few tens of thousands of people in all directions would not meaningfully change the end result of an ELE on Earth unless you wound up with 100-200 of them on the same hospitable rock.[0] [0] https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn1936-magic-number-for-space-pioneers-calculated/ https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn1936-magic-number-for...
- Rhapso 11y ago
- anexprogrammer 11y agoWe went to the moon to show military might, and beat the USSR. Having done so, no interest in more? We've never been back since. A moonbase is the obvious place to experiment, develop and benefit from 1/6th gravity as a staging post to Mars. We should have been there for the last 40 years. It saddens me we're so short sighted. No votes in it? Could we even organise a global effort? The governments would spend decades arguing over who got to make which bit. I'm much more hopeful of the private efforts to be truthful.
- danielweber 11y agoThere is no need to use the Moon as a "staging post" for Mars. There are things that make the Moon interesting, but none of them are Mars.
- anexprogrammer 11y agoLast thing I remember reading from NASA about manned mars exploration was via a space station in lunar orbit and associated moonbase. It wasn't that long ago but maybe they found preferred methods.
- tjl 11y agoA space station at one of the Lagrange points is likely. If one wanted to do a space station near the moon, L1 and L2 would work. L1 is on the Earth side while L2 is on the dark side of the moon. L4 and L5 have long been proposed for long-term space stations.
- danielweber 11y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mars_Design_Reference_Mission#Design_Reference_Architecture_5.0 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mars_Design_Reference_Mission#... Mars DRM 5.0 is still for direct launch, but they keep on talking about side projects as being essential to Mars because mumble.
- yolesaber 11y agoBecause the world isn't a game of Civilization? It's not as if establishing an off-world colony will solve any of our actual, serious challenges (mankind's aggression, our lack of empathy, our disregard for environments around us). If anything, it will only further spread the disease known as the human condition. It's an escapist nerd fantasy and I say this as someone who sleeps next to a copy of Dune.
- barkingcat 11y agoThe only thing humanity has "leveraged the world economy" to do is to destroy the environment.
- 1812Overture 11y agoEven in pretty much the worst case scenario Earth will still be more habitable than Mars. Much easier to build a bunker here.
- kirykl 11y agoSurvival but only in the extremely long term sense of the word. The sun will rise tomorrow and the next day, there's no pressuring impending need to jump planets. This plus the expense is why its slow going. But the important part is there are some people working on it.
- grondilu 11y agoNobody really cares about the long term-survival of the human species. Also : we're all going to die. We learn to live with this idea. Why the perspective of our end as individuals could not be extended to our end as a whole? Also : if you want to ensure humanity's long term survival, spending hundreds of billions to go live on a desert, rusty planet with an oxygen-less, tenuous atmosphere is a weird idea. If you're afraid of asteroids, build a shelter and store food.
- manachar 11y agoNobody is a strong word. The person above does, I do, and many other intelligent people do. Maybe you could argue that they're just worried about their own particular genes (i.e. the Selfish Gene), but some people certainly care about ensuring that humanity survives.
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- mhurron 11y agoWe as a species still can't agree on whether or not skin colour or the location of the planet you were born in make you more or less of a person. What single 'world economy' is there?
- logfromblammo 11y agoSo far, Homo sapiens barely even merits a footnote in the history of Earth life. What we could be doing is manufacturing and launching panspermia spores. K-strategy is fine. We can launch generation ships as well. But in the absence of any conclusive evidence that a life-like complex of self-propagating chemical reactions exists anywhere else in the universe, r-strategy seems best. Assemble the minimum viable package for propagation of Earth-style life, and manufacture copies until you run out of mass. We don't actually know whether all life in the universe could be exterminated by sterilizing just one planet. Using a similar amount of resources, we could create about 140k reasonably stable human colonies, or we could send 5 kilograms of spores towards every star in the galaxy, instructing the probe controller to shoot off a few any time it can detect liquid water. That way, if humanity fizzles out anyway after an eon or so, there will eventually be other species to try their grasping appendages at space colonization.
- rayiner 11y agoBecause with our technology, both would be pointless.