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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 o

by banach 10y ago

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.

acchow 10y ago
I think we should colonize other planets because we can. Not as a solution to any problem. I will defer to The West Wing to explain: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9yUHnERJ0zs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9yUHnERJ0zs
- banach 10y ago
  OK, you had me at "because we can" :)
- samstave 10y ago
  So she was basically trolling him to get to see him all puffed up :-)
- mrec 10y ago
  I think The West Wing has better explanations than that. I was sure your link was going to be to https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-s92lsTMcZQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-s92lsTMcZQ EDIT: this one has a bit more context: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R2HzHSeV9v8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R2HzHSeV9v8
- kilpela 10y ago
  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.
  - Bluestrike2 10y ago
    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.
  - Retra 10y ago
    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.
- akwaryo 10y ago
  Just because we can, but we can't.
incongruity 10y ago
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.
- banach 10y ago
  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-power-is-now-cheaper-than-coal 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 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.
  - lmm 10y ago
    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.
    - banach 10y ago
      Nice one. I will make sure to bring out entropy next time someone accuses me of not thinking of the long run.
- Noos 10y ago
  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.
TheSpiceIsLife 10y ago
To play devils advocate for a minute: with or without climate change research the results are the same: non-action.
pavelrub 10y ago
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.
- samstave 10y ago
  What body on the globe is the seat of identifying and listing out "real problems" as canonical list of them?
  - pavelrub 10y ago
    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?
    - vanderreeah 10y ago
      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.
trey-jones 10y ago
No solution that involves mobilizing seven billion people for a cause can be considered "simple".
- shawabawa3 10y ago
  Honestly, starting a colony on mars is a much, much easier task than getting 7 billion people to stop eating meat.

by banach 10y ago

acchow 10y ago

I think we should colonize other planets because we can. Not as a solution to any problem. I will defer to The West Wing to explain: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9yUHnERJ0zs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9yUHnERJ0zs

banach 10y ago
OK, you had me at "because we can" :)
samstave 10y ago
So she was basically trolling him to get to see him all puffed up :-)
mrec 10y ago
I think The West Wing has better explanations than that. I was sure your link was going to be to https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-s92lsTMcZQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-s92lsTMcZQ EDIT: this one has a bit more context: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R2HzHSeV9v8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R2HzHSeV9v8
kilpela 10y ago
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.
- Bluestrike2 10y ago
  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.
- Retra 10y ago
  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.
akwaryo 10y ago
Just because we can, but we can't.

incongruity 10y ago

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.

banach 10y ago
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-power-is-now-cheaper-than-coal 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 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.
- lmm 10y ago
  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.
  - banach 10y ago
    Nice one. I will make sure to bring out entropy next time someone accuses me of not thinking of the long run.
Noos 10y ago
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.

TheSpiceIsLife 10y ago

To play devils advocate for a minute: with or without climate change research the results are the same: non-action.

pavelrub 10y ago

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.

samstave 10y ago
What body on the globe is the seat of identifying and listing out "real problems" as canonical list of them?
- pavelrub 10y ago
  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?
  - vanderreeah 10y ago
    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.

trey-jones 10y ago

No solution that involves mobilizing seven billion people for a cause can be considered "simple".

shawabawa3 10y ago
Honestly, starting a colony on mars is a much, much easier task than getting 7 billion people to stop eating meat.