9 ms·

The funny/stupid/ironic thing is, the reasons people think humanity should just "go extinct" are all the reasons we should move to space instead. There's no sto

by jerf 8y ago

The funny/stupid/ironic thing is, the reasons people think humanity should just "go extinct" are all the reasons we should move to space instead. There's no story of "ecosystem damage" where there is no ecosystem in the first place. Though based on my experiences on HN, even some people here need this really bashed into their heads, that we can't hurt ecosystems that don't exist. ("What if some do?" Then by all means worry about them, but by resources, they are a fraction of a fraction of a percent of what the universe has.) There is a major unexamined assumption that people have that life exists everywhere, and therefore we can't put a toe outside our planet without stomping on something, simply because that's our Earth-based experience. Once brought to the conscious level it's obvious that it's false, but it's hard to get it up to that level for some people.

philwelch 8y ago
Yeah, the great thing about an O'Neill Cylinder is that the sooner people can move there, the sooner they can leave the Earth well enough alone. (Although in reality, I think the real challenge is going to be responsible stewardship of the Earth, not just "leaving it alone". Even the Amazon rainforest is likely an artifact of human culture.)
- justaaron 8y ago
  vastly underestimating the resources required to lift each kilogram into orbit, let alone the development cycle to get there. and shall we start all this now here on earth just adding to the plight I outlined just before? again, no sense of proportion of the actual issue here. we are DESTROYING the earth, not mildly scratching it etc. establishing a space society is a hugely intensive operation that dwarfs the hundreds of millions required to put a few folks and some trinkets into a space station etc.
  - justaaron 8y ago
    What is astounding to me, both in O'Neills plan and Bezos offerings (and Silicon Valley Solutions in general, LOL) is the level of social and historical ignorance on display, as if we don't currently contend for control of resources, as if we are currently managing anything responsibly, and as if the political and social implications of such a project are occurring in the literal vacuum of space, rather than in the highly politically charged landscape of human endeavors. These folks appear to avoid current events like the plague. Jeff Bezos is still highly involved in assisting the US government and it's various military and intelligence entities in seeking advantage versus other nations. Taking nationalist ignorant policies and mentalities with us into space seems... retrograde, stupid, and doomed to failure. Inelegant. There is a reason that all seriously futuristic sci-fi puts us WELL beyond this petty nationalist nonsense currently causing people to re-re-visit the 1980's yet again...
  - justaaron 8y ago
    Even given lunar materials etc, if we are incapable of altering our current industrial trajectory from the top down (lack of political will), what on earth makes one think we could direct any space activities from the top down? It's currently sufficient for human leadership to favor selfish and group-harming goals, and there is no indication that this would change in orbit, lol One currently sees the opposite of top-down coordination of space activities, after an initial cold-war-inspired display of bravado etc. (private ventures contracted to life public sector payloads into orbit) and you can be assured that plenty of both consumption of earths resources and pollution of earths atmosphere and water occur as byproducts. Private enterprise would seem to offer a "willy nilly" approach to anything, as such.
    - philwelch 8y ago
      > Even given lunar materials etc, if we are incapable of altering our current industrial trajectory from the top down (lack of political will), what on earth makes one think we could direct any space activities from the top down? I don't think the lack of a dictator--especially the sort of dictator you would support--is one of our problems!
  - jerf 8y ago
    "we are DESTROYING the earth, not mildly scratching it etc." Only for very, very particular definitions of "Earth". There are numerous events in Earth's past that by any objective standard are more destructive than even the worst possible interpretations of man's efforts to date and worst plausible projections of man's efforts in the future. To pick one that probably doesn't even come to your mind, nothing we've done is even within two factors of magnitude of the disaster of the Great Oxygenation Crisis. Probably three, maybe even four. That one was bad. Well, bad at the time, anyhow; certainly none of us would today prefer that it had never happened. That we're doing various dangerous and bad things is undeniable. That we're "DESTROYING" the Earth is a memetic weapon that has been crafted and fired at you by people who want you to give them lots of power to fix the DESTRUCTION of Earth, and to ensure that you stay in their control by ensure that anyone who disagrees with that assessment has the human instinctual "religious heretic" template applied to them, so you don't apply rational thought. Things are bad, but not so bad that you need that much despair. That said, I don't expect us to lift industry into space. I expect us to lift an industrial seed into space that grows there, and that ultimately not all that many people will necessarily leave Earth. I also expect that the current situation will not persist indefinitely. If we have clean energy, and look at how that is developing lately, lifting things into space isn't necessarily that big a deal. A "environmentally neutral" launch platform isn't even remotely inconceivable; it's not terribly out of reach today. The question isn't about the technology of 2019; the question is about the technology of 2069.
max76 8y ago
> There is a major unexamined assumption that people have that life exists everywhere, and therefore we can't put a toe outside our planet without stomping on something, simply because that's our Earth-based experience. Once brought to the conscious level it's obvious that it's false, but it's hard to get it up to that level for some people. I think it is likely (20% or greater) we will compete for resources against non-terrestrial lifeforms before humans leave the solar system, assuming we leave the solar system. Earth doesn't contain the majority of all water in the solar system. Earth might not even contain all of the liquid water in the solar system. What are the chances that liquid water exists in Ceres' core, or under the icey surface of Europa or Ganymede or another moon? What are the chances that Martian ice, or Europa ice, or Saturn's ice have microbes frozen in them, possibly able to thaw given better environmental conditions? We might even find life in places without water, such as Titan's methane lakes. Titan has a methane cycle very similar to Earth's water cycle. Methane makes a great rocket fuel. Water makes great rocket fuel and is necessary to life support systems. We have a history of taking what we want without regards to the consequences or whom it hurts. If we don't compete with other life when we leave Earth it's because other life isn't out there, not because of our strong morale core.
- garmaine 8y ago
  Why go to the bottom of a gravity well to mine ice?
  - max76 8y ago
    We'll probably (50% or greater chance) want all the water we can get our hands on. Water makes great rocket fuel and is a critical component of life support systems. Water, having mass, tends to collect in gravity wells.
    - DuskStar 8y ago
      Right, but those gravity wells might make that water rather irritating to get to relative to water contained in comets or other Oort Cloud objects.
ridgeguy 8y ago
>There's no story of "ecosystem damage" where there is no ecosystem in the first place. There's also no story of humanity where there is no ecosystem in the first place. I think the hazard isn't in stomping on an exo-Earth ecosystem. I think it's that if we can't avoid damage to multi-billion year evolved, robust ecosystems on our home planet, we might not successfully craft off-planet ecosystems that will sustain us indefinitely.
- philwelch 8y ago
  Even Earth's ecosystem is as much "crafted" by human hands as it is "natural" in the first place, and that's been the case for millennia. It's not merely a question of "avoiding damage". It's a question of how we deliberately choose to craft the Earth's ecosystem in the future.
  - devoply 8y ago
    Just because the natural system has tolerated meddling and abuse does not amount to crafting. In fact the exercises of trying to create an artificial system failed miserably... and will likely again. And that's a great reason to try to go to space, to learn about how incompetent we are with our tech despite being full of ourselves by taking all the things provided freely by the earth for us to abuse and exploit while giving back virtually nothing. I mean humans often don't bury their dead naturally they burn them or embalm them... we give back nothing, we take everything: THIS IS SPARTA!
    - philwelch 8y ago
      The “natural system” has tolerated millennia of “meddling and abuse”, and that “meddling and abuse” has largely served to make the ecosystem more habitable to humanity. We don’t even know what an un-“meddled” nature would even be like. Even the Amazon rainforest is in large part a product of human cultivation starting 11,000 years ago. The transformation of aurochs from a wild megafauna to a technology to transform inedible grass into edible milk and beef is also over 10,000 years old. The artificial evolution of our hunting and working companion, the dog, is millennia older still.
dmitriid 8y ago
If only there was a large spinning habitat in space with a livable environment that our species could use... If only there was a large spinning habitat in space where the megarich could use their money to create a paradise for its inhabitants...
Gravityloss 8y ago
Kenneth Ewart Boulding would like to have a word with you... On an orbital colony, there are life maintaining systems and it's probable that people will have different ideas how much they would require maintenance. Likewise, there will be limited resources and probably again people will have different ideas on what to spend on the short term. Ie a kid would like ice cream but the parents know they could starve before the next harvest so better to spend that energy on some more efficient food.

by jerf 8y ago

philwelch 8y ago

Yeah, the great thing about an O'Neill Cylinder is that the sooner people can move there, the sooner they can leave the Earth well enough alone. (Although in reality, I think the real challenge is going to be responsible stewardship of the Earth, not just "leaving it alone". Even the Amazon rainforest is likely an artifact of human culture.)

justaaron 8y ago
vastly underestimating the resources required to lift each kilogram into orbit, let alone the development cycle to get there. and shall we start all this now here on earth just adding to the plight I outlined just before? again, no sense of proportion of the actual issue here. we are DESTROYING the earth, not mildly scratching it etc. establishing a space society is a hugely intensive operation that dwarfs the hundreds of millions required to put a few folks and some trinkets into a space station etc.
- justaaron 8y ago
  What is astounding to me, both in O'Neills plan and Bezos offerings (and Silicon Valley Solutions in general, LOL) is the level of social and historical ignorance on display, as if we don't currently contend for control of resources, as if we are currently managing anything responsibly, and as if the political and social implications of such a project are occurring in the literal vacuum of space, rather than in the highly politically charged landscape of human endeavors. These folks appear to avoid current events like the plague. Jeff Bezos is still highly involved in assisting the US government and it's various military and intelligence entities in seeking advantage versus other nations. Taking nationalist ignorant policies and mentalities with us into space seems... retrograde, stupid, and doomed to failure. Inelegant. There is a reason that all seriously futuristic sci-fi puts us WELL beyond this petty nationalist nonsense currently causing people to re-re-visit the 1980's yet again...
- justaaron 8y ago
  Even given lunar materials etc, if we are incapable of altering our current industrial trajectory from the top down (lack of political will), what on earth makes one think we could direct any space activities from the top down? It's currently sufficient for human leadership to favor selfish and group-harming goals, and there is no indication that this would change in orbit, lol One currently sees the opposite of top-down coordination of space activities, after an initial cold-war-inspired display of bravado etc. (private ventures contracted to life public sector payloads into orbit) and you can be assured that plenty of both consumption of earths resources and pollution of earths atmosphere and water occur as byproducts. Private enterprise would seem to offer a "willy nilly" approach to anything, as such.
  - philwelch 8y ago
    > Even given lunar materials etc, if we are incapable of altering our current industrial trajectory from the top down (lack of political will), what on earth makes one think we could direct any space activities from the top down? I don't think the lack of a dictator--especially the sort of dictator you would support--is one of our problems!
- jerf 8y ago
  "we are DESTROYING the earth, not mildly scratching it etc." Only for very, very particular definitions of "Earth". There are numerous events in Earth's past that by any objective standard are more destructive than even the worst possible interpretations of man's efforts to date and worst plausible projections of man's efforts in the future. To pick one that probably doesn't even come to your mind, nothing we've done is even within two factors of magnitude of the disaster of the Great Oxygenation Crisis. Probably three, maybe even four. That one was bad. Well, bad at the time, anyhow; certainly none of us would today prefer that it had never happened. That we're doing various dangerous and bad things is undeniable. That we're "DESTROYING" the Earth is a memetic weapon that has been crafted and fired at you by people who want you to give them lots of power to fix the DESTRUCTION of Earth, and to ensure that you stay in their control by ensure that anyone who disagrees with that assessment has the human instinctual "religious heretic" template applied to them, so you don't apply rational thought. Things are bad, but not so bad that you need that much despair. That said, I don't expect us to lift industry into space. I expect us to lift an industrial seed into space that grows there, and that ultimately not all that many people will necessarily leave Earth. I also expect that the current situation will not persist indefinitely. If we have clean energy, and look at how that is developing lately, lifting things into space isn't necessarily that big a deal. A "environmentally neutral" launch platform isn't even remotely inconceivable; it's not terribly out of reach today. The question isn't about the technology of 2019; the question is about the technology of 2069.

max76 8y ago

> There is a major unexamined assumption that people have that life exists everywhere, and therefore we can't put a toe outside our planet without stomping on something, simply because that's our Earth-based experience. Once brought to the conscious level it's obvious that it's false, but it's hard to get it up to that level for some people. I think it is likely (20% or greater) we will compete for resources against non-terrestrial lifeforms before humans leave the solar system, assuming we leave the solar system. Earth doesn't contain the majority of all water in the solar system. Earth might not even contain all of the liquid water in the solar system. What are the chances that liquid water exists in Ceres' core, or under the icey surface of Europa or Ganymede or another moon? What are the chances that Martian ice, or Europa ice, or Saturn's ice have microbes frozen in them, possibly able to thaw given better environmental conditions? We might even find life in places without water, such as Titan's methane lakes. Titan has a methane cycle very similar to Earth's water cycle. Methane makes a great rocket fuel. Water makes great rocket fuel and is necessary to life support systems. We have a history of taking what we want without regards to the consequences or whom it hurts. If we don't compete with other life when we leave Earth it's because other life isn't out there, not because of our strong morale core.

garmaine 8y ago
Why go to the bottom of a gravity well to mine ice?
- max76 8y ago
  We'll probably (50% or greater chance) want all the water we can get our hands on. Water makes great rocket fuel and is a critical component of life support systems. Water, having mass, tends to collect in gravity wells.
  - DuskStar 8y ago
    Right, but those gravity wells might make that water rather irritating to get to relative to water contained in comets or other Oort Cloud objects.

ridgeguy 8y ago

>There's no story of "ecosystem damage" where there is no ecosystem in the first place. There's also no story of humanity where there is no ecosystem in the first place. I think the hazard isn't in stomping on an exo-Earth ecosystem. I think it's that if we can't avoid damage to multi-billion year evolved, robust ecosystems on our home planet, we might not successfully craft off-planet ecosystems that will sustain us indefinitely.

philwelch 8y ago
Even Earth's ecosystem is as much "crafted" by human hands as it is "natural" in the first place, and that's been the case for millennia. It's not merely a question of "avoiding damage". It's a question of how we deliberately choose to craft the Earth's ecosystem in the future.
- devoply 8y ago
  Just because the natural system has tolerated meddling and abuse does not amount to crafting. In fact the exercises of trying to create an artificial system failed miserably... and will likely again. And that's a great reason to try to go to space, to learn about how incompetent we are with our tech despite being full of ourselves by taking all the things provided freely by the earth for us to abuse and exploit while giving back virtually nothing. I mean humans often don't bury their dead naturally they burn them or embalm them... we give back nothing, we take everything: THIS IS SPARTA!
  - philwelch 8y ago
    The “natural system” has tolerated millennia of “meddling and abuse”, and that “meddling and abuse” has largely served to make the ecosystem more habitable to humanity. We don’t even know what an un-“meddled” nature would even be like. Even the Amazon rainforest is in large part a product of human cultivation starting 11,000 years ago. The transformation of aurochs from a wild megafauna to a technology to transform inedible grass into edible milk and beef is also over 10,000 years old. The artificial evolution of our hunting and working companion, the dog, is millennia older still.

dmitriid 8y ago

If only there was a large spinning habitat in space with a livable environment that our species could use... If only there was a large spinning habitat in space where the megarich could use their money to create a paradise for its inhabitants...

Gravityloss 8y ago

Kenneth Ewart Boulding would like to have a word with you... On an orbital colony, there are life maintaining systems and it's probable that people will have different ideas how much they would require maintenance. Likewise, there will be limited resources and probably again people will have different ideas on what to spend on the short term. Ie a kid would like ice cream but the parents know they could starve before the next harvest so better to spend that energy on some more efficient food.