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I find the "colonize other planets" dream of the secular/scientific community to be most like the "you'll go to heaven when you die" idea in religious paradoxy.
by tehchromic 10y ago
I find the "colonize other planets" dream of the secular/scientific community to be most like the "you'll go to heaven when you die" idea in religious paradoxy. You would think we might have experimented with teraforming uninhabitable place here on earth - the bottom of the Mariana, or Death Valley. If that was a snap, then we might contemplate Moon or Mars or Titan.
But in fact we are systematically rendering our own planet uninhabitable. Our planet is the product of billions of years of biological teraformation that has created the narrow and extremely specialized spectrum of environmental factors in which we live comfortably. It is far easier to eat that up than it is to replicate it.
The answer is to drop our extreme hubris and misguided religious style escapism and instead develop some respect for planet e, and proceed with extreme caution moving forward, or we will find our own planet unfit for living on.
Not saying interplanetary travel isn't possible, however I strongly disagree with the statement in the article that 'humanity will remain the same' and adapt our environment to suit us. If we make it to other planets we will be so altered we will not recognize ourselves. IMO that's a long loooong way off and requires that we don't extinct ourselves in the meantime.
- overgard 10y agoThis is such a weird argument. You're basically saying "our political wisdom has not caught up to our technological prowess, so we should avoid undertaking this great technological challenge." It just doesn't follow. If the 20th century taught us anything it's that technology doesn't wait for politics to catch up. If anything technology tends to drive political change (for better and worse), and so the notion that great projects should wait for some political utopia before proceeding is disconnected from reality.
- tehchromic 10y agoI actually agree with you. I think that chasing dreams and visions, ie "the afterlife" is a better motivator than scolding and regulating ourselves. Even so, I think at the level of intellect and organizational administration, it's important to have the line between reality and fiction extremely clear, so I don't mind saying so.
- azernik 10y agoThe point of colonizing other planets isn't the opening up of now-uninhabitable areas. It's creating a human society in a place that won't be affected if/when some catastrophic event alters the environment on Earth. Sure, preferable to preserve Earth's environment, but there's nothing that says we can't do both, and the work that's going into interplanetary transport isn't appreciably detracting from environmental efforts here.
- gambiting 10y agoI'd argue that a self-sufficient colony on the bottom of the ocean would be unaffected by 99% of natural disasters that can happen to this planet - maybe short of direct meteor or nuclear hit. Even in an event of nuclear war, water is absolutely amazing at blocking radiation, so a colony couple miles below the ocean surface should be completely safe. And it would give us loads of experience on how to build self-sufficient colonies in extremely difficult environments, which would eventually be useful for colonizing space.
- lmm 10y agoUp to a point. It's very hard to get energy underwater, and the pressure constraints are quite different. Some of the experience will generalize, but I'm not sure how much.