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Good to know that Bill Gates shares this viewpoint. It's not that space travel is wrong or doesn't have great potential. It's just that, in my view (and I guess

Good to know that Bill Gates shares this viewpoint. It's not that space travel is wrong or doesn't have great potential. It's just that, in my view (and I guess it's also BG's judging from his short quote only), it cannot not alone bring humanity into the bright future. Look at how we are (mis)treating the environment. Look at all the greed, corruption and anger around us. Anyone seriously thinks going to new worlds will change these human tendencies? Of course not. I see only one truly worthy alternative - education, with strong emphasis on sustainability and care about the environment, as well as some sort of moral principles that would help prevent spending trillions on new ways to kill each other (aka defence) in future generations.

ebbv 9y ago
Forget about human beings. As far as we know, Earth is the only source of life in the galaxy or even universe. There is no guarantee it exists anywhere else, or that it will continue to exist here. In fact it is certain one day life will cease to exist on Earth. As the only life form capable of spreading it off planet, I feel like we have a moral obligation to do so before it is snuffed out.
- wavesandwind 9y ago
  Good point. Still, chances of spreading it will be higher if we don't kill ourselves first or drown in our own garbage - that's where things are going so far sadly. I don't believe that fixing self-destruction and pollution is that much harder than finding a way to travel to distant stars. Why are people assuming that that's the case and putting all their hopes on space travel?
  - wooter 9y ago
    > Why are people assuming that that's the case and putting all their hopes on space travel? is anyone doing that? the relative market values/investment in tesla (solar/electric sustainability) vs spacex strongly suggests otherwise. where is your straw man? i say we let the few astrophysicists out there do astrophysics if they've attracted the capital rather than reprioritize based on your subjective unquantifiable morality.
    - wavesandwind 9y ago
      > is anyone doing that? the relative market values/investment in tesla (solar/electric sustainability) vs spacex strongly suggests otherwise. where is your straw man? You're bending my words a bit. Tesla's function isn't to stop self-destruction or clean up pollution. At best it will not add more to the pollution. That's just the tip of the iceberg and there's a lot of damage already done that should to be undone. But hey, there's no money in that so why bother, right? This kind of one-dimensional judgement further contributes to humanities pile of problems. >reprioritize based on your subjective unquantifiable morality. It maybe "unquantifiable", but it definitely exists and plays a vital role. Just look at Mr Gates' activities. I don't believe you can fix everything by putting capital in the right place. That will always give human greed an advantage over good will.
      - wooter 9y ago
        > But hey, there's no money in that so why bother, right? What are you talking about? Waste Management is a phenomenally successful ($15B) company. I invest in several companies in water treatment. You're just getting worked up without researching or even acknowledging the people on the ground, moving these fields. > It maybe "unquantifiable", but it definitely exists and plays a vital role. Just look at Mr Gates' activities. I don't believe you can fix everything by putting capital in the right place. That will always give human greed an advantage over good will. This is just a nonsensical platitude. What about Mr. Gates' activities wasn't enabled by the business Microsoft? All that "good will" is enabled by the "human greed" you demonize. Not the other way around.
  - ebbv 9y ago
    Why is it an either or scenario? We should do both. We have a duty to do both. Life on earth will one day end regardless, though. While we have the chance we should be doing everything we can to distribute it as widely as we can.
mobilefriendly 9y ago
Moving resource extraction off-planet (metals from asteroids, nuclear and solar energy creation) and moving manufacturing off-planet will truly save the environment.
- wavesandwind 9y ago
  So, polluting 2 worlds instead of one? Nobody will stop exploiting Earth even once new worlds become accessible.
  - ekianjo 9y ago
    > polluting 2 worlds How are you polluting another world if there is no life there in the first place?
    - wavesandwind 9y ago
      Good question. Perhaps. However, my point still remains that it will not stop the pollution on Earth - which will remain much cheaper to do.
  - WalterBright 9y ago
    I'd much rather pollute Mars, a dead rock, than the Earth.
    - wavesandwind 9y ago
      Agree, yet it's not an either Mars or Earth question. Judging by priorities of corporations (making money, of course) it will certainly be both Mars and Earth.
      - WalterBright 9y ago
        In fact, the whole concept of "pollution" on Mars makes little sense. We could convert it to radioactive slag and plaster it with "Eat at Joe's" billboards, and it wouldn't hurt anyone or anything. What we ought to be doing with Mars is terraforming it. I'd start by collecting extremophile bacteria from Earth and letting it loose on Mars and see if any of it takes hold.
throwanem 9y ago
Why "change these human tendencies"? They're part of what's made us what we are today, and I don't think that undisputed mastery of an entire planet is such a bad place for a species to be. And even if you don't feel the same way, it's hard to see how undisputed mastery of only one planet gives humanity a better chance to eventually engineer itself into something more what you'd like it to be than does undisputed mastery of several.
- f_allwein 9y ago
  except the undisputed mastery of a planet is worth nothing if it leads to the destruction of said planet.
  - throwanem 9y ago
    I don't see any reason to imagine that lies within our power to do. If we exerted all the singular, concerted effort of which our entire species is capable, we might at most annihilate ourselves and make a mess that the biosphere will need as much as a million years to evolve beyond. But a million years is nothing on a planetary scale. And if you are worried about that - all the more reason to favor expansion into space, I should think! The thermonuclear genie will never go back into the bottle. Nor will any other. Better, don't you think, to ensure we have at least some part of our species beyond the reach of at least some of those genies, should they turn on us?
    - cftm 9y ago
      A million years? I think you over-estimate how insignificant we are to this planet. I'm not advocating we destroy the environment, but we really can't do a whole darn lot to it. Can we set off every nuclear weapon at once? Sure, but even that will likely just ruin the surface for 50,000 - 100,000 years. Life will continue, just not humans and most likely nothing of any size. If we manage to throw the planet into a run-away greenhouse cycle like Venus, yeah, life's done here but that seems like a tall order (though I am not well read or well versed on this subject matter so I could be wrong on this count. Ok, off the soap-box, you were making the same point as me :)
amelius 9y ago
We need more Nobel prize winners in politics. They seem to be more honest, more caring for the greater good, etc., and thus more fit for the job (I know, right now it seems the opposite is true). And in case they lack all these characteristics, at least they pushed the boundary of knowledge. Perhaps this is unrealistic, but we could increase the admission requirements of politicians. First show that you care about more than just yourself for at least a decade or so, and then you may decide about the fate of millions of citizens, their offspring and planet Earth.
- wl 9y ago
  Nobel Prize winners are notoriously kooky when operating out of their narrow areas of expertise, Cf. Linus Pauling, Kary Mullis, Luc Montagnier.
  - amelius 9y ago
    We could still have elections, of course ;)
- chriskanan 9y ago
  Not sure why you think we need Nobel prize winners, but we do need more scientists in politics. I think that would greatly help scientific discoveries to shape policy and legislation. Since the last election, there have been some efforts to recruit scientists: https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2017/01/thanks-to-trump-scientists-are-planning-to-run-for-office/514229/ https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2017/01/thanks-t... http://whowhatwhy.org/2017/04/22/imagine-congress-filled-scientists-instead-lawyers/ http://whowhatwhy.org/2017/04/22/imagine-congress-filled-sci...
ekianjo 9y ago
> it cannot not alone bring humanity into the bright future and > Look at how we are (mis)treating the environment It took the realization that we are living on something that's not flat, and actually sharing the same sphere, to make people conscious that we are at risk when damaging the environment. This is linked to everything we have learnt through our exploration of space and the fact that we could NOT find find life so far on any other planet in the solar system. Not sure why you think it's no so important. Actually, it's the other way around. In order to better protect our environment, we need to do more research to better understand the climate models of other worlds and make correct assumptions on ours in the end. If we only study a system with n=1, we can never be sure about our predictions.
- wavesandwind 9y ago
  Space exploration and protecting the environment are not mutually exclusive. In fact, like you mentioned, they complement each other nicely. What I'm pointing at is that space exploration is not as big of an achievement as fixing "bad human tendencies", however, strangely almost nobody is talking about that. Instead space travel for many people is becoming some kind of silver bullet for humanity's future.
  - jamesrcole 9y ago
    Actually there's a reason to think that space exploration may be one of the most important means for fixing "bad human tenancies". Populating new places can enable a new start and experimentation with new forms of social organisation. Escape from the momentum of tradition. But that's just speculation, right? It's actually not, because we've already seen demonstrations of this, like the founding of the United States and the democratic system they put in place there. (I heard this viewpoint from reading Robert Zubrin's "The Case For Mars" https://www.amazon.com/Case-Mars-Plan-Settle-Planet/dp/145160811X https://www.amazon.com/Case-Mars-Plan-Settle-Planet/dp/14516...)
WalterBright 9y ago
But not doing space travel does not fix the environment. Fixing the environment is an orthogonal issue.
- wavesandwind 9y ago
  Absolutely. One helps and complements the other quite nicely. Yet currently it feels the focus is very much shifted towards space travel. Sure, it's much more glamorous to fly through space sci-fi style than dig around in the garbage dump. Oh well...
- RandomOpinion 9y ago
  > Fixing the environment is an orthogonal issue. Not at all. If we, as a species, don't fix the environment, we aren't going to be around long enough for space exploration to become technologically and economically practical.
  - WalterBright 9y ago
    Space travel neither takes away from nor impedes fixing the environment. Heck, the annual NASA budget is half what Seattle is blowing on a transit tunnel that goes a few miles.
    - greeneggs 9y ago
      NASA's 2017 budget is $19.5 billion. The Alaskan Way Viaduct is estimated to cost $4.25 billion. Trump's proposed EPA budget is $5.7 billion. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Budget_of_NASA https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Budget_of_NASA https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alaskan_Way_Viaduct_replacement_tunnel https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alaskan_Way_Viaduct_replacemen...
      - cftm 9y ago
        I think the general point holds as $19.5B is a rounding error in the US's budget. There are issues with the lack of funding to EPA but with respect to this discussion it's a straw-man.
petra 9y ago
>> I see only one truly worthy alternative - education I strongly agree - but education in regular sense - schools, etc probably won't do. We maybe need something closer to the training Buddhists monks get in a monastery, a training that deeply changes the structure of their mind, and instill them with deep compassion and caring for others, eclipsing at enlightenment. But: 1. Buddhist monasteries aren't scalable - they fit only a rare few, they take too long, and are very hard. And it seems that with science/tech we can create something better. 2. Once we have the tech - it isn't trivial to use it. People fear messing with their brain. How do we prevent abuse. Making people too relaxed and compassionate may make them less fit for the 21 century. How do we integrate this. How do we convince everybody .etc. I feel like this is THE biggest question of our current century, because once this can be offered mass scale, human nature changes deeply - and everything changes with it.
- wavesandwind 9y ago
  Yes! I strongly agree and your definition of education if very close to what I had in mind. I also see Buddhist ideas as one of very few hopes of real change in the world. Yet, as far as science goes, the best it can do is help spread these ideas (internet, which we already have). Personally, I don't believe in brain-changing tech for the near future at least. It will be always up to the individual so go sit in the corner and do some meditation/self-improvement. That's not scalable indeed.
  - KellhusSmellhus 9y ago
    There is already brain-changing tech, drugs.
- kilroy123 9y ago
  Being Buddhist doesn't magically strip away anger, hate, pain, and violence. I get what you're saying though. I do think education on these philosophies would help. http://world.time.com/2013/06/20/extremist-buddhist-monks-fight-oppression-with-violence/ http://world.time.com/2013/06/20/extremist-buddhist-monks-fi...
- jansho 9y ago
Kattywumpus 9y ago
> sustainability and care about the environment The reason we have a solar power industry at all is because satellites needed robust long term power sources, not because someone cared about the environment. The first solar cells were invented in the 1880s, and were so inefficient -- less than .5%! -- they were little more than a scientific novelty. They stayed this way for 70 long years, until Bell Labs began researching them as a source of power for satellites in the 1950s. Space is an extremely demanding environment, and it's precisely those demands that actually drive the development of technologies that enable us to radically reduce our environment impact on the Earth. Human beings living on the Moon or on Mars will need to reuse and recycle everything imaginable, for instance, creating closed-loop systems where there is little to no waste. They will have to grow food in ways that recycle nutrients instead of destroying topsoil. They will have to be able to make extremely reliable products, and they'll have to be able to reuse and repair these items in ways we will never have the incentive to do in a disposable consumer economy. It's simply not economically efficient to develop those kind of technologies terrestrially. It's cheaper to dump obsolete electronics and ship them to some impoverished part of the world, like rural China, where they contaminate the ground water and poison the air and the residents.( http://tinyurl.com/toxic-e-waste http://tinyurl.com/toxic-e-waste ) The planet is big and human labor and human life is cheap here. Recycling is optional here. Up there, it's not. It's only the extreme demands of manned space that will drive these sorts of advances. It ain't just about shootin' rockets up into the sky.
- wavesandwind 9y ago
  Completely agree on the point that putting hard constraints like living in space is a good driver for reusability and sustainability - tech that can be put in use on Earth later. But let's look a little deeper why pollution is happening in the first place. Don't you think that people's greed and desires of having more and more things contributes to this at least a little? Overconsumption? Short-term profits? But what if we can fix _that_ at least a bit? Now that's a question I'm much more interested, since I believe it can have real effect and stop the runaway consumption culture.
  - cftm 9y ago
tiatia 9y ago
"Look at all the greed, corruption and anger around us." "Erst kommt das Fressen, dann die Moral" (first we gorge ourselves, then the morality.) These are interesting thoughts. But lets not forget what unsound good old Billy used (and MS still used) to establish his former OS monopoly.
dforrestwilson 9y ago
The original opinion came from a billionaire monopolist. Even the very best humans can have bad traits. Should we really wait/expect that to change and should space exploration wait? We're still floating around on a single planet in a single solar system in a universe we know almost nothing about. Like a fly crossing a highway, it seems dangerous to me.
wellboy 9y ago
Seems like a false equivalence to me. Your statement is: Space travel cannot fix humanity polluting the environment, therefore we should not do space travel. space travel is not there to fix humanities issues, it is there to provide an option for survival if humanity faces an (self-induced) extinction event.
remir 9y ago
A cultural change is also necessary. Our civilization is divided and weak, because we still have a tribal mentality that prevent us from looking at the bigger picture. We still think in terms of "us" and "them" and who will get the upper hand, who will get this territory, this resource, who will "win", who will look "stronger", etc... The economy also have to change. We must rethink our definition of wealth. What is wealth? Vitality, time, resources and intelligence. Money only helps creating a movement, but the accumulation of vast sums of money is problematic as we're seeing now. Money needs to circulate. Women will also play an important part, here. Humanity can't progress if 50% of its population can't develop to its full potential. We need more women in position of leadership, in science, but also in position of religious leaders, because yes, a huge percentage of the world is religious and women can contribute in lots of ways there. We need more cooperation, more responsibility. Instead of thinking in terms of nations, we'll eventually have to think in terms of civilization if we want a future that is desirable.

ebbv 9y ago

Forget about human beings. As far as we know, Earth is the only source of life in the galaxy or even universe. There is no guarantee it exists anywhere else, or that it will continue to exist here. In fact it is certain one day life will cease to exist on Earth. As the only life form capable of spreading it off planet, I feel like we have a moral obligation to do so before it is snuffed out.

wavesandwind 9y ago
Good point. Still, chances of spreading it will be higher if we don't kill ourselves first or drown in our own garbage - that's where things are going so far sadly. I don't believe that fixing self-destruction and pollution is that much harder than finding a way to travel to distant stars. Why are people assuming that that's the case and putting all their hopes on space travel?
- wooter 9y ago
  > Why are people assuming that that's the case and putting all their hopes on space travel? is anyone doing that? the relative market values/investment in tesla (solar/electric sustainability) vs spacex strongly suggests otherwise. where is your straw man? i say we let the few astrophysicists out there do astrophysics if they've attracted the capital rather than reprioritize based on your subjective unquantifiable morality.
  - wavesandwind 9y ago
    > is anyone doing that? the relative market values/investment in tesla (solar/electric sustainability) vs spacex strongly suggests otherwise. where is your straw man? You're bending my words a bit. Tesla's function isn't to stop self-destruction or clean up pollution. At best it will not add more to the pollution. That's just the tip of the iceberg and there's a lot of damage already done that should to be undone. But hey, there's no money in that so why bother, right? This kind of one-dimensional judgement further contributes to humanities pile of problems. >reprioritize based on your subjective unquantifiable morality. It maybe "unquantifiable", but it definitely exists and plays a vital role. Just look at Mr Gates' activities. I don't believe you can fix everything by putting capital in the right place. That will always give human greed an advantage over good will.
    - wooter 9y ago
      > But hey, there's no money in that so why bother, right? What are you talking about? Waste Management is a phenomenally successful ($15B) company. I invest in several companies in water treatment. You're just getting worked up without researching or even acknowledging the people on the ground, moving these fields. > It maybe "unquantifiable", but it definitely exists and plays a vital role. Just look at Mr Gates' activities. I don't believe you can fix everything by putting capital in the right place. That will always give human greed an advantage over good will. This is just a nonsensical platitude. What about Mr. Gates' activities wasn't enabled by the business Microsoft? All that "good will" is enabled by the "human greed" you demonize. Not the other way around.
- ebbv 9y ago
  Why is it an either or scenario? We should do both. We have a duty to do both. Life on earth will one day end regardless, though. While we have the chance we should be doing everything we can to distribute it as widely as we can.

mobilefriendly 9y ago

Moving resource extraction off-planet (metals from asteroids, nuclear and solar energy creation) and moving manufacturing off-planet will truly save the environment.

wavesandwind 9y ago
So, polluting 2 worlds instead of one? Nobody will stop exploiting Earth even once new worlds become accessible.
- ekianjo 9y ago
  > polluting 2 worlds How are you polluting another world if there is no life there in the first place?
  - wavesandwind 9y ago
    Good question. Perhaps. However, my point still remains that it will not stop the pollution on Earth - which will remain much cheaper to do.
- WalterBright 9y ago
  I'd much rather pollute Mars, a dead rock, than the Earth.
  - wavesandwind 9y ago
    Agree, yet it's not an either Mars or Earth question. Judging by priorities of corporations (making money, of course) it will certainly be both Mars and Earth.
    - WalterBright 9y ago
      In fact, the whole concept of "pollution" on Mars makes little sense. We could convert it to radioactive slag and plaster it with "Eat at Joe's" billboards, and it wouldn't hurt anyone or anything. What we ought to be doing with Mars is terraforming it. I'd start by collecting extremophile bacteria from Earth and letting it loose on Mars and see if any of it takes hold.

throwanem 9y ago

Why "change these human tendencies"? They're part of what's made us what we are today, and I don't think that undisputed mastery of an entire planet is such a bad place for a species to be. And even if you don't feel the same way, it's hard to see how undisputed mastery of only one planet gives humanity a better chance to eventually engineer itself into something more what you'd like it to be than does undisputed mastery of several.

f_allwein 9y ago
except the undisputed mastery of a planet is worth nothing if it leads to the destruction of said planet.
- throwanem 9y ago
  I don't see any reason to imagine that lies within our power to do. If we exerted all the singular, concerted effort of which our entire species is capable, we might at most annihilate ourselves and make a mess that the biosphere will need as much as a million years to evolve beyond. But a million years is nothing on a planetary scale. And if you are worried about that - all the more reason to favor expansion into space, I should think! The thermonuclear genie will never go back into the bottle. Nor will any other. Better, don't you think, to ensure we have at least some part of our species beyond the reach of at least some of those genies, should they turn on us?
  - cftm 9y ago
    A million years? I think you over-estimate how insignificant we are to this planet. I'm not advocating we destroy the environment, but we really can't do a whole darn lot to it. Can we set off every nuclear weapon at once? Sure, but even that will likely just ruin the surface for 50,000 - 100,000 years. Life will continue, just not humans and most likely nothing of any size. If we manage to throw the planet into a run-away greenhouse cycle like Venus, yeah, life's done here but that seems like a tall order (though I am not well read or well versed on this subject matter so I could be wrong on this count. Ok, off the soap-box, you were making the same point as me :)

amelius 9y ago

We need more Nobel prize winners in politics. They seem to be more honest, more caring for the greater good, etc., and thus more fit for the job (I know, right now it seems the opposite is true). And in case they lack all these characteristics, at least they pushed the boundary of knowledge. Perhaps this is unrealistic, but we could increase the admission requirements of politicians. First show that you care about more than just yourself for at least a decade or so, and then you may decide about the fate of millions of citizens, their offspring and planet Earth.

wl 9y ago
Nobel Prize winners are notoriously kooky when operating out of their narrow areas of expertise, Cf. Linus Pauling, Kary Mullis, Luc Montagnier.
- amelius 9y ago
  We could still have elections, of course ;)
chriskanan 9y ago
Not sure why you think we need Nobel prize winners, but we do need more scientists in politics. I think that would greatly help scientific discoveries to shape policy and legislation. Since the last election, there have been some efforts to recruit scientists: https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2017/01/thanks-to-trump-scientists-are-planning-to-run-for-office/514229/ https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2017/01/thanks-t... http://whowhatwhy.org/2017/04/22/imagine-congress-filled-scientists-instead-lawyers/ http://whowhatwhy.org/2017/04/22/imagine-congress-filled-sci...

ekianjo 9y ago

> it cannot not alone bring humanity into the bright future and > Look at how we are (mis)treating the environment It took the realization that we are living on something that's not flat, and actually sharing the same sphere, to make people conscious that we are at risk when damaging the environment. This is linked to everything we have learnt through our exploration of space and the fact that we could NOT find find life so far on any other planet in the solar system. Not sure why you think it's no so important. Actually, it's the other way around. In order to better protect our environment, we need to do more research to better understand the climate models of other worlds and make correct assumptions on ours in the end. If we only study a system with n=1, we can never be sure about our predictions.

wavesandwind 9y ago
Space exploration and protecting the environment are not mutually exclusive. In fact, like you mentioned, they complement each other nicely. What I'm pointing at is that space exploration is not as big of an achievement as fixing "bad human tendencies", however, strangely almost nobody is talking about that. Instead space travel for many people is becoming some kind of silver bullet for humanity's future.
- jamesrcole 9y ago
  Actually there's a reason to think that space exploration may be one of the most important means for fixing "bad human tenancies". Populating new places can enable a new start and experimentation with new forms of social organisation. Escape from the momentum of tradition. But that's just speculation, right? It's actually not, because we've already seen demonstrations of this, like the founding of the United States and the democratic system they put in place there. (I heard this viewpoint from reading Robert Zubrin's "The Case For Mars" https://www.amazon.com/Case-Mars-Plan-Settle-Planet/dp/145160811X https://www.amazon.com/Case-Mars-Plan-Settle-Planet/dp/14516...)

WalterBright 9y ago

But not doing space travel does not fix the environment. Fixing the environment is an orthogonal issue.

wavesandwind 9y ago
Absolutely. One helps and complements the other quite nicely. Yet currently it feels the focus is very much shifted towards space travel. Sure, it's much more glamorous to fly through space sci-fi style than dig around in the garbage dump. Oh well...
RandomOpinion 9y ago
> Fixing the environment is an orthogonal issue. Not at all. If we, as a species, don't fix the environment, we aren't going to be around long enough for space exploration to become technologically and economically practical.
- WalterBright 9y ago
  Space travel neither takes away from nor impedes fixing the environment. Heck, the annual NASA budget is half what Seattle is blowing on a transit tunnel that goes a few miles.
  - greeneggs 9y ago
    NASA's 2017 budget is $19.5 billion. The Alaskan Way Viaduct is estimated to cost $4.25 billion. Trump's proposed EPA budget is $5.7 billion. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Budget_of_NASA https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Budget_of_NASA https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alaskan_Way_Viaduct_replacement_tunnel https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alaskan_Way_Viaduct_replacemen...
    - cftm 9y ago
      I think the general point holds as $19.5B is a rounding error in the US's budget. There are issues with the lack of funding to EPA but with respect to this discussion it's a straw-man.

petra 9y ago

>> I see only one truly worthy alternative - education I strongly agree - but education in regular sense - schools, etc probably won't do. We maybe need something closer to the training Buddhists monks get in a monastery, a training that deeply changes the structure of their mind, and instill them with deep compassion and caring for others, eclipsing at enlightenment. But: 1. Buddhist monasteries aren't scalable - they fit only a rare few, they take too long, and are very hard. And it seems that with science/tech we can create something better. 2. Once we have the tech - it isn't trivial to use it. People fear messing with their brain. How do we prevent abuse. Making people too relaxed and compassionate may make them less fit for the 21 century. How do we integrate this. How do we convince everybody .etc. I feel like this is THE biggest question of our current century, because once this can be offered mass scale, human nature changes deeply - and everything changes with it.

wavesandwind 9y ago
Yes! I strongly agree and your definition of education if very close to what I had in mind. I also see Buddhist ideas as one of very few hopes of real change in the world. Yet, as far as science goes, the best it can do is help spread these ideas (internet, which we already have). Personally, I don't believe in brain-changing tech for the near future at least. It will be always up to the individual so go sit in the corner and do some meditation/self-improvement. That's not scalable indeed.
- KellhusSmellhus 9y ago
  There is already brain-changing tech, drugs.
kilroy123 9y ago
Being Buddhist doesn't magically strip away anger, hate, pain, and violence. I get what you're saying though. I do think education on these philosophies would help. http://world.time.com/2013/06/20/extremist-buddhist-monks-fight-oppression-with-violence/ http://world.time.com/2013/06/20/extremist-buddhist-monks-fi...
jansho 9y ago

Kattywumpus 9y ago

> sustainability and care about the environment The reason we have a solar power industry at all is because satellites needed robust long term power sources, not because someone cared about the environment. The first solar cells were invented in the 1880s, and were so inefficient -- less than .5%! -- they were little more than a scientific novelty. They stayed this way for 70 long years, until Bell Labs began researching them as a source of power for satellites in the 1950s. Space is an extremely demanding environment, and it's precisely those demands that actually drive the development of technologies that enable us to radically reduce our environment impact on the Earth. Human beings living on the Moon or on Mars will need to reuse and recycle everything imaginable, for instance, creating closed-loop systems where there is little to no waste. They will have to grow food in ways that recycle nutrients instead of destroying topsoil. They will have to be able to make extremely reliable products, and they'll have to be able to reuse and repair these items in ways we will never have the incentive to do in a disposable consumer economy. It's simply not economically efficient to develop those kind of technologies terrestrially. It's cheaper to dump obsolete electronics and ship them to some impoverished part of the world, like rural China, where they contaminate the ground water and poison the air and the residents.( http://tinyurl.com/toxic-e-waste http://tinyurl.com/toxic-e-waste ) The planet is big and human labor and human life is cheap here. Recycling is optional here. Up there, it's not. It's only the extreme demands of manned space that will drive these sorts of advances. It ain't just about shootin' rockets up into the sky.

wavesandwind 9y ago
Completely agree on the point that putting hard constraints like living in space is a good driver for reusability and sustainability - tech that can be put in use on Earth later. But let's look a little deeper why pollution is happening in the first place. Don't you think that people's greed and desires of having more and more things contributes to this at least a little? Overconsumption? Short-term profits? But what if we can fix _that_ at least a bit? Now that's a question I'm much more interested, since I believe it can have real effect and stop the runaway consumption culture.
- cftm 9y ago

tiatia 9y ago

"Look at all the greed, corruption and anger around us." "Erst kommt das Fressen, dann die Moral" (first we gorge ourselves, then the morality.) These are interesting thoughts. But lets not forget what unsound good old Billy used (and MS still used) to establish his former OS monopoly.

dforrestwilson 9y ago

The original opinion came from a billionaire monopolist. Even the very best humans can have bad traits. Should we really wait/expect that to change and should space exploration wait? We're still floating around on a single planet in a single solar system in a universe we know almost nothing about. Like a fly crossing a highway, it seems dangerous to me.

wellboy 9y ago

Seems like a false equivalence to me. Your statement is: Space travel cannot fix humanity polluting the environment, therefore we should not do space travel. space travel is not there to fix humanities issues, it is there to provide an option for survival if humanity faces an (self-induced) extinction event.

remir 9y ago

A cultural change is also necessary. Our civilization is divided and weak, because we still have a tribal mentality that prevent us from looking at the bigger picture. We still think in terms of "us" and "them" and who will get the upper hand, who will get this territory, this resource, who will "win", who will look "stronger", etc... The economy also have to change. We must rethink our definition of wealth. What is wealth? Vitality, time, resources and intelligence. Money only helps creating a movement, but the accumulation of vast sums of money is problematic as we're seeing now. Money needs to circulate. Women will also play an important part, here. Humanity can't progress if 50% of its population can't develop to its full potential. We need more women in position of leadership, in science, but also in position of religious leaders, because yes, a huge percentage of the world is religious and women can contribute in lots of ways there. We need more cooperation, more responsibility. Instead of thinking in terms of nations, we'll eventually have to think in terms of civilization if we want a future that is desirable.