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> Some of us hear "It's Mars," and that's all the justification needed. Nothing else matters. Not the cost, not the danger, not the practicalities. You sound

• angersock 9y ago
  Most of the important things in life worth doing are irrational.
  • nmeofthestate 9y ago
    Most of the important things in life worth doing are rational.
  • mattnewport 9y ago
    More like arational. Rationality is a tool to efficiently accomplish goals, what ultimate goals you choose to pursue is not a question that rationality is designed to answer.
• baq 9y ago
  If rationality was the only thing that mattered in life, we'd all be dead.
• sillysaurus3 9y ago
  Certainly. Our irrationality is why we're here. Launching a ship toward America was irrational. The scientists of the time could tell you with absolute certainty you'd die if your goal was to get to Asia by sailing west. We won't be discovering any new land, nor will we be surprised by anything. But that energy -- the fact that people want to go there, and want to colonize it -- that's rare. That's why the Sahara isn't the frontier. Love, in many ways, is completely irrational. There are countless advantages to spending your life alone. You'd conserve resources, you'd avoid heartbreak. If you want children, you can adopt. You could probably find someone to live with you, if you just want companionship. But the irrationality makes the experience.
  • zajd 9y ago
    > Launching a ship toward America was irrational. uhh.. no it wasn't?
    • zamalek 9y ago
      The earth was flat according to many people.
      • zajd 9y ago
        It still is!
      • pvg 9y ago
        Not really, certainly not those who sailed ships. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Myth_of_the_flat_Earth https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Myth_of_the_flat_Earth
      • eropple 9y ago
        This isn't true. It was well-understood from antiquity that Earth was round--had to be, otherwise stuff like Eratosthenes's measuring of Earth wouldn't...well...work. It's a trivial thing to observe, too: if you're high enough over the ground, you can see horizon curvature. That knowledge was not, contrary to popular thought, widely lost during the Middle Ages even in Europe and definitely not in the Eastern Roman Empire or places east. Serious flat-Earth thought was ideologically motivated in the late 19th and early 20th century and bears some interesting parallels to climate change denialism.
        • simonh 9y ago
          >This isn't true. It was well-understood from antiquity that Earth was round... Among educated people able to afford and read a copy of Eratosthenes yes, but there were probably a lot of ordinary people that were not literate and were never exposed to any actual evidence to the contrary，who believed it was flat. Flat earthers in the modern world really do have no excuse, education in the basic geometry and simple tools they need to prove it themselves is near universal in the Western world, but back then it was perhaps more understandable
• Sangermaine 9y ago
  No, that's missing the point. People have differing values and goals, and as a result will have different assessments of whether this project is worthwhile. Given their different values, goals, and priorities, it's a rational decision.
• justinpombrio 9y ago
  > You sound like you know this is irrational, but you don't care. It sounds to me like this person simply cares more about the prospect of living on Mars than about being wealthy, or being safe. There's no rule that says that a rational person must care about their own health, wealth, and safety above all else.
• Symmetry 9y ago
  There's no "rational" or "irrational" in wanting things, only in how you go about getting what you want.
• sqeaky 9y ago
  "Rational" is overrated, I think a better goal is something like "avoid stupidity". There are plenty of things that seem irrational because people don't calibrate their risk/reward calculations correctly. Anything can be made irrational with the wrong set of presumptions. History is strewn with wrong "rational" arguments, like phlogiston which started with things we all knew were true and reached the only rational answer. People make mistake in deciding what to include their "rational" calculations. I am not saying rational logic is a bad tool, but it certainly shouldn't be the only tool. Clearly we need some way to filter out seemingly irrational but beneficial activities like exploration from actually irrational and detrimental activities, like sub-prime lending without losing all control. For rational logic to work you need to be able to fill in all (or at least most) of the blanks, and it you can't always do that.
• reitanqild 9y ago
  You sound like you know this is irrational, but you don't care. I have often wondered if rationality isn't in the eye of the beholder.
• api 9y ago
  Most of what we do is irrational. Entertainment is irrational. Music is irrational. Sex for pleasure is irrational. Climbing Mt. Everest is doubly irrational, since lots of people have already done it so it's nothing all that special. So just call manned space exploration and settlement an extreme sport. We spend far more money on existing sports and sport-related media than we do on space.
  • dragonwriter 9y ago
    > Most of what we do is irrational. Entertainment is irrational. Music is irrational. Sex for pleasure is irrational. None of those things are inherently irrational; they produce utility (subjective enjoyment is the definition of utility), and insofar as they are chosen against other alternatives to maximize realized utility, it's exactly rational. Now, the absence of perfect knowledge and the fact that even with knowledge people don't always optimize total expected utility does mean that people are irrational, but the particular activities you point to are not inherently examples of irrationality any more than, say, investing in the stock market or wage labor are.
• yellowapple 9y ago
  Humans tend to have an irrational desire to explore and wander beyond the safety and comfort of home.