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I think the dialogue quoted here demonstrates the underlying issue that is lost in futurist thought. No one "pioneered the west". Various groups of people with

I think the dialogue quoted here demonstrates the underlying issue that is lost in futurist thought. No one "pioneered the west". Various groups of people with powerful technology traveled west and stole land from other groups of people. They also traveled south and east and used that technical and economic power to enslave other humans and forced them to develop the west. Development and progress for progress' sake alone leaves a lot to be desired, namely, ethics. Also, It's clear that much like economics, technology doesn't inherently trickle down. It certainly has the potential to have positive downstream effects, but without having a priority of pushing those positive impacts downstream I would argue that we're left with a larger gulf between the marvels of modern science and technology and those and the bottom. That is to say, without prioritizing equalizing the gains of science and exploration and those gains actively stratify society further. There are many, many people in the world who don't know that we went to the moon, there are people who don't have access to electricity and plumbing. I'm not arguing here for not exploring other planets, but I am trying to make a case for focusing out scientific efforts of improving the lives of everyone on the planet. Without spreading the achievements of science and technology to everyone on the planet, humanity is doomed.

aeternus 8y ago
Technology is actually one of the few things that definitely does trickle down. Refrigeration, washing machines, cellular technology, farming tech, medicine & vaccines, all of these have had extreme impact on those at the bottom. I'd recommend reading Enlightenment Now, an excellent book that really nails the positive effects that general scientific 'progress' has had on society as a whole.
- _emacsomancer_ 8y ago
  > Technology is actually one of the few things that definitely does trickle down. Yes, both in both good and bad ways, of course. Lots of people in the world have cheap mobile phones, which enables all sorts of possibilities. But we also all suffer the negative effects of industrialisation (the poor more than the rich, of course) on our environment. > I'd recommend reading Enlightenment Now, an excellent book that really nails the positive effects that general scientific 'progress' has had on society as a whole. I'm very dubious of Pinker's Whig-like claims about 'everything getting better'. I'm not convinced that we've become less violent, only better at killing, and from greater distances (so it seems less brutal).
civilitty 8y ago
It's very tough to explain to someone who hasn't worked on large multidisciplinary projects with mandates to push some sort of boundaries like in exploration, science, and technology. This isn't some theoretical discussion by futurists, there is ample evidence that these kinds of ventures have systemic effects that touch literally every person, socioeconomic class, and daily activity. Academia and private industry have pathological problems with compartmentalization that have a real impact on the exchange of ideas and progress - entire companies like Toyota have risen to the "top of the world" based solely on their ability to open up communication between line workers, robotics engineers, and designers under a common vision. To Toyota that vision is their emphasis on quality control, for NASA and Apollo it was the mandate to beat the Soviet Union to space and to the Moon. Just the act of bringing so many different engineering, scientists, and other people together to work on a single problem like going to the moon allows them to tackle issues that were intractable to each of them individually. Many problems, especially as technology develops, require a solution that is novel across several different fields. These mandates are powerful. The mandate to defend the nation led to radar and telecommunications, transistors, and many other technologies in use by almost everyone. The mandate to make it to the moon led to a revolution in material science that is now part of every car and phone, it allowed us to map the world and put it in half the world's pocket, and even created a whole new field, systems engineering, that is dedicated to the science of managing gigantic projects spanning thousands of engineers, scientists, manufacturers, and so on. The Human Genome Project, another massive multibillion dollar venture unlocked the human genome to the world for the first time and is directly responsible for much of the biotech boom in the last few decades. As for "many people don't know that we went to the moon", I'm not so sure that's actually true. Carl Sagan wrote in the Pale Blue Dot in the 90s: A scientific colleague tells me about a recent trip to the New Guinea highlands where she visited a stone age culture hardly contacted by Western civilization. They were ignorant of wristwatches, soft drinks, and frozen food. But they knew about Apollo 11. They knew that humans had walked on the Moon. They knew the names of Armstrong and Aldrin and Collins. They wanted to know who was visiting the Moon these days. You're underestimating the biological human desire for exploration - it is a basic evolutionary survival mechanism.
- omegaworks 8y ago
  We need a mandate to solve the climate issue and create a sustainable economy on this planet. We humans have a biological human desire to remain alive and eat food. I would argue that that is a stronger innate, biological human desire needed for basic evolutionary survival then that for exploration.
thaumaturgy 8y ago
Some modern thinking has confused self-loathing and careful introspection. There were a great many things that could have, or arguably should have, been done differently in the past, but many of those things were done in the context and to the standards of the day. The transgressions of the past resulted in a technologically advanced society. Introspection considers this and asks, "what should we do differently in the future?" Self loathing says, "we shouldn't exist and should spend our future doing nothing." > There are many, many people in the world who don't know that we went to the moon, there are people who don't have access to electricity and plumbing. I'm not arguing here for not exploring other planets, but I am trying to make a case for focusing out scientific efforts of improving the lives of everyone on the planet. Your second statement contradicts your first. Either you want to ensure that everyone has access to electricity and plumbing before science spends any effort on exploration, or you don't. The natural conclusion of this argument is that no money should be spent on exploration, and all money should be redistributed evenly to everyone so that everyone maintains an identical standard of living. I don't want to assume that's what you meant, but if it isn't, I can't figure out what your ideal world looks like.
- omegaworks 8y ago
  You're presenting an either/or scenario where none was proposed by the poster you were responding to. The thread began begging the wealthiest countries on the planet to contribute a significant amount of that wealth toward space exploration. No one here is making the argument that we should spend no money on space exploration. People are simply arguing against spending significantly more on it when we have more pressing issues to contend with.
  - thaumaturgy 8y ago
    The person I responded to, in the part that I quoted, brought up people without electricity and plumbing as a contrast to spending efforts on exploration. It looks like an either/or to me. > People are simply arguing against spending more on it when we have more pressing issues to contend with. But this argument happens every time the issue of funding space exploration comes up. Every single time. Without fail. Not a single time is there a proposed NASA budget without part of the discussion devolving into, "why don't we just hand the money out to the poor instead?" Not a single time do the risks and costs of SpaceX, or a new satellite, or the rovers, or the ISS, or other efforts get discussed without someone saying, "but cancer..." This is a line of thinking which scrutinizes every single dollar spent on exploration. Left unchallenged, it would eventually halt all spending on exploration altogether. I, and a lot of other people -- like the person at the top of this thread -- believe that exploring Mars is not just worthwhile, it's necessary, in spite of the many other people on Earth who have more immediate needs. Dr. Robert Zubrin argued that case far more eloquently than I could: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j2Mu8qfVb5I https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j2Mu8qfVb5I
ratacat 8y ago
This is the wisest comment here.
- pc86 8y ago
  I promise it's not.
AnthonyMouse 8y ago
> Also, It's clear that much like economics, technology doesn't inherently trickle down. The problem you're identifying is completely independent of exploration. If we spent more on cancer and nothing on space then we would have more medicine-related technologies and fewer of these: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NASA_spinoff_technologies https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NASA_spinoff_technologies But that doesn't have anything to do with what you're objecting to. Look at the HIV drugs the west has access to and Africa doesn't. And even if the benefit goes 90% to western countries and only 10% to poorer countries, how is that not still better for everyone than using the money to build military drones or ad tracking systems or something equally useless if not actively harmful?
- 01100011 8y ago
  Does modern space exploration still produce the same kinds of spin-off benefits as the old school 'big space' programs did(say, up until the 80s)? Could we get the same kinds of spin-off technologies if we reallocated NASA's budget to prioritize technology development over, say, planetary exploration? I'm not anti-space... and I think it's important for us, as a society, to reach for the heavens. I also think, however, that it would not hold humanity back much in the grand scheme of things if we stopped exploring planets for, say, the next 50-100 years.
  - aeternus 8y ago
    Human effort, passion, and drive are highly dependent on belief in a shared vision and end goal. You're likely to get much more effort out of a team if the end goal is to find a thermal material that can survive Mars re-entry vs. a thermal material that can make some industrial process 5% more efficient. Effort isn't necessarily a zero-sum game, and necessity as the mother of invention has some truth to it.
  - AnthonyMouse 8y ago
    > Could we get the same kinds of spin-off technologies if we reallocated NASA's budget to prioritize technology development over, say, planetary exploration? Not really. The private sector is really good at technology development, i.e. take an idea and figure out how to mass produce it at low cost. What you want government funding for is fundamental research. Which space is good at because of the constraints. Normally if you can't fit your payload on the truck, you send a second truck. That costs another $100, so it's not worth it to you to spend ten million dollars to figure out how to make it work with one truck, even if you figuring out will save a hundred million other people a hundred dollars each. With space, you can't just send another ten billion dollar rocket, so you do the ten million in research and actually solve the problem, and we get the piece of new technology that everybody can also use for other things. "Necessity is the mother of invention." It's hot, it's cold, it's far away, adding a kilo costs nine kilos of rocket fuel, oxygen is scarce, gravity is different, etc. You need the constraints to force an invention instead of just suffering the status quo and covering for the inefficiency with brute force.
CydeWeys 8y ago
There aren't native inhabitants on Mars, though. It will be true exploration in every sense, not just displacing existing residents.
RaceWon 8y ago
Of course predatory mammals pioneered the West. Like all predatory mammals; we went in search of better hunting, better hunting grounds and better mates. We still do that today. Imo we will still do that 10,000 years from now... because deep down we are what we are. Edit: We're even "worse" than I gave us credit for. "https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-34011026" https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-34011026"
- Jaruzel 8y ago
  Off-topic, but that link was really worth reading, thanks!
- harrumph 8y ago
  >We still do that today. Imo we will still do that 10,000 years from now... If we continue to glibly shrug our shoulders at the premise that mass destruction is just what we do, and if we keep pretending we have no choice in the matter, then the chance of us lasting 10,000 more years is somewhere near zero.
  - RaceWon 8y ago
    I believe that we can solve our problems, but only if we deal in reality. Once I hear people advancing agendas that rely on humanity pulling together as a world group to help each other for no more reason than "it's nice to do that"; well let's just say I remain skeptical. I have the same reaction when I hear talk of Socialism. It is simply Not dealing with reality to expect people to; start a business, spend every waking hour thinking and working on that business for some years, and then give Most of the profits away to benefit unknown strangers. Who will do that? (And yes I know Gates and Buffet and others are giving most of their money away, but that's after they have already lived a life of their choosing.) Glib, sure after a fashion, but much more than that it is a factual reply based on reality.
    - deanCommie 8y ago
      > give Most of the profits away to benefit unknown strangers. Who will do that? The majority people of the developed western world already do this. Their taxes are higher than 50%. And they're happy with it. The US is an exception. The reason why they're happy with it is because they get benefits too. Transit systems and park systems that they benefit from. Healthcare coverage so broad they do not have to worry about their health. OK, your house is smaller. OK, your back yard (if any) is smaller. OK, you buy less random disposable garbage on Prime Day to fill your smaller house. But the people in these countries are happier. Because happiness is reality - expectations. And expectations are subjective and controllable.
mighty_atomic_c 8y ago
> No one "pioneered the west". Various groups of people with powerful technology traveled west and stole land from other groups of people. The people crossing the land bridge to North America from Asia pioneered the west. Or perhaps they considered it East since that's the direction they took to get here. Anyway, I think the point is that humans have an insatiable desire to explore. We have adapted to so many adverse climates here on Earth. And we got around quick with just a lot of bravery, teamwork, and cleverness. I've read that early peoples coming out of Africa swam from the eastern portion towards modern-day Yemen, and then there are the incredibly skilled Polynesian sailors of the Pacific. > ... without prioritizing equalizing the gains of science and exploration and those gains actively stratify society further. Technology is all about tools. Science is a process by which we build knowledge. They are not good or evil on their own, that is ultimately a reflection of whomever leverages these tools. I agree that equitability is not a default; privileged few can use their advantages to gain influence, and then repeat until monopoly or oligarchy come to pass. > I am trying to make a case for focusing out scientific efforts of improving the lives of everyone on the planet. Without spreading the achievements of science and technology to everyone on the planet, humanity is doomed. Sure, that's a reasonable thing to argue for and I broadly agree. Not all technology benefits humanity; making better bombs with science and technology does harm. Better surveillance measures undermines privacy, and these abuses of science and technology can stalk and kill just as readily as they can benefit us all. It all depends on how it is used. But space exploration is something that really benefits humanity! There was a boon of technology that benefitted everyone in the wake of the hubbub of the space race. I don't know how it rates with all the other things we could possibly spend money on improving society, maybe below feeding the desperately hungry and below ecological restoration of course. But space has been a great, diverse source of technology, an infinite fount of curiosities, and I believe that if many more people gaze at the Earth from orbit, that a more global perspective will emerge, and this in turn could help direct funds to better causes.
jnevelson 8y ago
> Without spreading the achievements of science and technology to everyone on the planet, humanity is doomed. Forget ethics/morals for a second - this is just patently _false_. It depends on your definition of "doomed", but humanity as a whole needs only a few people to survive in order to not be doomed (defined as extinct). It'd be easier to argue your case without hyperbole.

aeternus 8y ago

Technology is actually one of the few things that definitely does trickle down. Refrigeration, washing machines, cellular technology, farming tech, medicine & vaccines, all of these have had extreme impact on those at the bottom. I'd recommend reading Enlightenment Now, an excellent book that really nails the positive effects that general scientific 'progress' has had on society as a whole.

_emacsomancer_ 8y ago
> Technology is actually one of the few things that definitely does trickle down. Yes, both in both good and bad ways, of course. Lots of people in the world have cheap mobile phones, which enables all sorts of possibilities. But we also all suffer the negative effects of industrialisation (the poor more than the rich, of course) on our environment. > I'd recommend reading Enlightenment Now, an excellent book that really nails the positive effects that general scientific 'progress' has had on society as a whole. I'm very dubious of Pinker's Whig-like claims about 'everything getting better'. I'm not convinced that we've become less violent, only better at killing, and from greater distances (so it seems less brutal).

civilitty 8y ago

It's very tough to explain to someone who hasn't worked on large multidisciplinary projects with mandates to push some sort of boundaries like in exploration, science, and technology. This isn't some theoretical discussion by futurists, there is ample evidence that these kinds of ventures have systemic effects that touch literally every person, socioeconomic class, and daily activity. Academia and private industry have pathological problems with compartmentalization that have a real impact on the exchange of ideas and progress - entire companies like Toyota have risen to the "top of the world" based solely on their ability to open up communication between line workers, robotics engineers, and designers under a common vision. To Toyota that vision is their emphasis on quality control, for NASA and Apollo it was the mandate to beat the Soviet Union to space and to the Moon. Just the act of bringing so many different engineering, scientists, and other people together to work on a single problem like going to the moon allows them to tackle issues that were intractable to each of them individually. Many problems, especially as technology develops, require a solution that is novel across several different fields. These mandates are powerful. The mandate to defend the nation led to radar and telecommunications, transistors, and many other technologies in use by almost everyone. The mandate to make it to the moon led to a revolution in material science that is now part of every car and phone, it allowed us to map the world and put it in half the world's pocket, and even created a whole new field, systems engineering, that is dedicated to the science of managing gigantic projects spanning thousands of engineers, scientists, manufacturers, and so on. The Human Genome Project, another massive multibillion dollar venture unlocked the human genome to the world for the first time and is directly responsible for much of the biotech boom in the last few decades. As for "many people don't know that we went to the moon", I'm not so sure that's actually true. Carl Sagan wrote in the Pale Blue Dot in the 90s: A scientific colleague tells me about a recent trip to the New Guinea highlands where she visited a stone age culture hardly contacted by Western civilization. They were ignorant of wristwatches, soft drinks, and frozen food. But they knew about Apollo 11. They knew that humans had walked on the Moon. They knew the names of Armstrong and Aldrin and Collins. They wanted to know who was visiting the Moon these days. You're underestimating the biological human desire for exploration - it is a basic evolutionary survival mechanism.

omegaworks 8y ago
We need a mandate to solve the climate issue and create a sustainable economy on this planet. We humans have a biological human desire to remain alive and eat food. I would argue that that is a stronger innate, biological human desire needed for basic evolutionary survival then that for exploration.

thaumaturgy 8y ago

Some modern thinking has confused self-loathing and careful introspection. There were a great many things that could have, or arguably should have, been done differently in the past, but many of those things were done in the context and to the standards of the day. The transgressions of the past resulted in a technologically advanced society. Introspection considers this and asks, "what should we do differently in the future?" Self loathing says, "we shouldn't exist and should spend our future doing nothing." > There are many, many people in the world who don't know that we went to the moon, there are people who don't have access to electricity and plumbing. I'm not arguing here for not exploring other planets, but I am trying to make a case for focusing out scientific efforts of improving the lives of everyone on the planet. Your second statement contradicts your first. Either you want to ensure that everyone has access to electricity and plumbing before science spends any effort on exploration, or you don't. The natural conclusion of this argument is that no money should be spent on exploration, and all money should be redistributed evenly to everyone so that everyone maintains an identical standard of living. I don't want to assume that's what you meant, but if it isn't, I can't figure out what your ideal world looks like.

omegaworks 8y ago
You're presenting an either/or scenario where none was proposed by the poster you were responding to. The thread began begging the wealthiest countries on the planet to contribute a significant amount of that wealth toward space exploration. No one here is making the argument that we should spend no money on space exploration. People are simply arguing against spending significantly more on it when we have more pressing issues to contend with.
- thaumaturgy 8y ago
  The person I responded to, in the part that I quoted, brought up people without electricity and plumbing as a contrast to spending efforts on exploration. It looks like an either/or to me. > People are simply arguing against spending more on it when we have more pressing issues to contend with. But this argument happens every time the issue of funding space exploration comes up. Every single time. Without fail. Not a single time is there a proposed NASA budget without part of the discussion devolving into, "why don't we just hand the money out to the poor instead?" Not a single time do the risks and costs of SpaceX, or a new satellite, or the rovers, or the ISS, or other efforts get discussed without someone saying, "but cancer..." This is a line of thinking which scrutinizes every single dollar spent on exploration. Left unchallenged, it would eventually halt all spending on exploration altogether. I, and a lot of other people -- like the person at the top of this thread -- believe that exploring Mars is not just worthwhile, it's necessary, in spite of the many other people on Earth who have more immediate needs. Dr. Robert Zubrin argued that case far more eloquently than I could: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j2Mu8qfVb5I https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j2Mu8qfVb5I

ratacat 8y ago

This is the wisest comment here.

pc86 8y ago
I promise it's not.

AnthonyMouse 8y ago

> Also, It's clear that much like economics, technology doesn't inherently trickle down. The problem you're identifying is completely independent of exploration. If we spent more on cancer and nothing on space then we would have more medicine-related technologies and fewer of these: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NASA_spinoff_technologies https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NASA_spinoff_technologies But that doesn't have anything to do with what you're objecting to. Look at the HIV drugs the west has access to and Africa doesn't. And even if the benefit goes 90% to western countries and only 10% to poorer countries, how is that not still better for everyone than using the money to build military drones or ad tracking systems or something equally useless if not actively harmful?

01100011 8y ago
Does modern space exploration still produce the same kinds of spin-off benefits as the old school 'big space' programs did(say, up until the 80s)? Could we get the same kinds of spin-off technologies if we reallocated NASA's budget to prioritize technology development over, say, planetary exploration? I'm not anti-space... and I think it's important for us, as a society, to reach for the heavens. I also think, however, that it would not hold humanity back much in the grand scheme of things if we stopped exploring planets for, say, the next 50-100 years.
- aeternus 8y ago
  Human effort, passion, and drive are highly dependent on belief in a shared vision and end goal. You're likely to get much more effort out of a team if the end goal is to find a thermal material that can survive Mars re-entry vs. a thermal material that can make some industrial process 5% more efficient. Effort isn't necessarily a zero-sum game, and necessity as the mother of invention has some truth to it.
- AnthonyMouse 8y ago
  > Could we get the same kinds of spin-off technologies if we reallocated NASA's budget to prioritize technology development over, say, planetary exploration? Not really. The private sector is really good at technology development, i.e. take an idea and figure out how to mass produce it at low cost. What you want government funding for is fundamental research. Which space is good at because of the constraints. Normally if you can't fit your payload on the truck, you send a second truck. That costs another $100, so it's not worth it to you to spend ten million dollars to figure out how to make it work with one truck, even if you figuring out will save a hundred million other people a hundred dollars each. With space, you can't just send another ten billion dollar rocket, so you do the ten million in research and actually solve the problem, and we get the piece of new technology that everybody can also use for other things. "Necessity is the mother of invention." It's hot, it's cold, it's far away, adding a kilo costs nine kilos of rocket fuel, oxygen is scarce, gravity is different, etc. You need the constraints to force an invention instead of just suffering the status quo and covering for the inefficiency with brute force.

CydeWeys 8y ago

There aren't native inhabitants on Mars, though. It will be true exploration in every sense, not just displacing existing residents.

RaceWon 8y ago

Of course predatory mammals pioneered the West. Like all predatory mammals; we went in search of better hunting, better hunting grounds and better mates. We still do that today. Imo we will still do that 10,000 years from now... because deep down we are what we are. Edit: We're even "worse" than I gave us credit for. "https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-34011026" https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-34011026"

Jaruzel 8y ago
Off-topic, but that link was really worth reading, thanks!
harrumph 8y ago
>We still do that today. Imo we will still do that 10,000 years from now... If we continue to glibly shrug our shoulders at the premise that mass destruction is just what we do, and if we keep pretending we have no choice in the matter, then the chance of us lasting 10,000 more years is somewhere near zero.
- RaceWon 8y ago
  I believe that we can solve our problems, but only if we deal in reality. Once I hear people advancing agendas that rely on humanity pulling together as a world group to help each other for no more reason than "it's nice to do that"; well let's just say I remain skeptical. I have the same reaction when I hear talk of Socialism. It is simply Not dealing with reality to expect people to; start a business, spend every waking hour thinking and working on that business for some years, and then give Most of the profits away to benefit unknown strangers. Who will do that? (And yes I know Gates and Buffet and others are giving most of their money away, but that's after they have already lived a life of their choosing.) Glib, sure after a fashion, but much more than that it is a factual reply based on reality.
  - deanCommie 8y ago
    > give Most of the profits away to benefit unknown strangers. Who will do that? The majority people of the developed western world already do this. Their taxes are higher than 50%. And they're happy with it. The US is an exception. The reason why they're happy with it is because they get benefits too. Transit systems and park systems that they benefit from. Healthcare coverage so broad they do not have to worry about their health. OK, your house is smaller. OK, your back yard (if any) is smaller. OK, you buy less random disposable garbage on Prime Day to fill your smaller house. But the people in these countries are happier. Because happiness is reality - expectations. And expectations are subjective and controllable.

mighty_atomic_c 8y ago

> No one "pioneered the west". Various groups of people with powerful technology traveled west and stole land from other groups of people. The people crossing the land bridge to North America from Asia pioneered the west. Or perhaps they considered it East since that's the direction they took to get here. Anyway, I think the point is that humans have an insatiable desire to explore. We have adapted to so many adverse climates here on Earth. And we got around quick with just a lot of bravery, teamwork, and cleverness. I've read that early peoples coming out of Africa swam from the eastern portion towards modern-day Yemen, and then there are the incredibly skilled Polynesian sailors of the Pacific. > ... without prioritizing equalizing the gains of science and exploration and those gains actively stratify society further. Technology is all about tools. Science is a process by which we build knowledge. They are not good or evil on their own, that is ultimately a reflection of whomever leverages these tools. I agree that equitability is not a default; privileged few can use their advantages to gain influence, and then repeat until monopoly or oligarchy come to pass. > I am trying to make a case for focusing out scientific efforts of improving the lives of everyone on the planet. Without spreading the achievements of science and technology to everyone on the planet, humanity is doomed. Sure, that's a reasonable thing to argue for and I broadly agree. Not all technology benefits humanity; making better bombs with science and technology does harm. Better surveillance measures undermines privacy, and these abuses of science and technology can stalk and kill just as readily as they can benefit us all. It all depends on how it is used. But space exploration is something that really benefits humanity! There was a boon of technology that benefitted everyone in the wake of the hubbub of the space race. I don't know how it rates with all the other things we could possibly spend money on improving society, maybe below feeding the desperately hungry and below ecological restoration of course. But space has been a great, diverse source of technology, an infinite fount of curiosities, and I believe that if many more people gaze at the Earth from orbit, that a more global perspective will emerge, and this in turn could help direct funds to better causes.

jnevelson 8y ago

> Without spreading the achievements of science and technology to everyone on the planet, humanity is doomed. Forget ethics/morals for a second - this is just patently _false_. It depends on your definition of "doomed", but humanity as a whole needs only a few people to survive in order to not be doomed (defined as extinct). It'd be easier to argue your case without hyperbole.