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For the current military budget we could probably build O'Neill cylinders in Lunar orbit and start a terraforming project on Mars. (Of course don't get me star

by api 7y ago

For the current military budget we could probably build O'Neill cylinders in Lunar orbit and start a terraforming project on Mars. (Of course don't get me started about what we could do on Earth for this money.) We are just very clever tool using animals, not yet a truly intelligent species. I don't think we'll truly be "intelligent" until our intelligence is able to overcome both our evolutionary legacy and game theoretic effects that emerge in our economies and societies. A true intelligence would be the master of these things. We are slaves to them.

magduf 7y ago
If we had the technology to build O'Neill cylinders, I can't imagine why we'd want to bother terraforming Mars. Mars is pretty crappy by comparison: the gravity is too low, it's cold and kinda far from the Sun (and from Earth, compared to Lunar orbit), and it's questionable what kind of resources are there which we don't have easier access to on the Moon or nearby asteroids. Most of the interest in it just seems to be nothing more than nostalgia for planet-based living. Also, I think you'd want to build your O'Neill cylinders in one of the Langrangian positions between Earth and Moon, not Lunar orbit. A truly intelligent species would actually be working substantively on these projects, instead of merely talking about them.
- vkou 7y ago
  A truly intelligent species would be working on not killing its own planet, instead of figuring out space habitation. The ROI on the former is many orders of magnitude better.
  - elsonrodriguez 7y ago
    A truly intelligent species would be doing both. Also an extinction level event happening on this planet is a certainty, so it's actually an infinite order of magnitude better to figure out how to live in space than to only focus on saving the earth. But again, a truly intelligent species would do both.
    - magduf 7y ago
      Exactly. A truly intelligent species doesn't put all its eggs in one basket. Plus, a truly intelligent species knows that expansion (in population) is good for the survival of the species and civilization, and the way to get more resources and space is to go to space and acquire resources there and also learn to live there. The dinosaurs are a good example of a group of species that weren't far-sighted enough to invest in a serious space exploration and settlement program.
      - vkou 7y ago
        > The dinosaurs are a good example of a group of species that weren't far-sighted enough to invest in a serious space exploration and settlement program. If we knew that a cretaceous extinction event will happen five, fifty, or five hundred years from now, it'll be orders of magnitude easier for civilization to survive on Earth, then it will be for it to survive in space. If dinosaurs had opposable thumbs, and technology, they would have been better off bunkering down. No matter how uninhabitable some freak civilization-ending event would leave the Earth, it would still be more habitable then anywhere else in the Solar system.
        magduf 7y ago
        With the correct technology, that's not true: it's perfectly possible to build very nice habitats in space with O'Neill cylinders, but you need a lot of technology and space-based infrastructure to make that happen. A truly intelligent species would be working hard on that problem, because the technologies needed to make big O'Neill cylinders would also have many, many other uses. A stupid species, on the other hand, would dedicate its most intelligent members to figuring out how to advertise to each other more effectively and sell each other useless crap. It's also quite possible to do multiple things at once when you have a civilization with many members. So as I said before, a truly intelligent species would not put all its eggs in one basket. They'd work on figuring out how to colonize space at the same time as figuring out how to deflect asteroids and also handle asteroid impacts if they did happen.
    - vkou 7y ago

by api 7y ago

magduf 7y ago

If we had the technology to build O'Neill cylinders, I can't imagine why we'd want to bother terraforming Mars. Mars is pretty crappy by comparison: the gravity is too low, it's cold and kinda far from the Sun (and from Earth, compared to Lunar orbit), and it's questionable what kind of resources are there which we don't have easier access to on the Moon or nearby asteroids. Most of the interest in it just seems to be nothing more than nostalgia for planet-based living. Also, I think you'd want to build your O'Neill cylinders in one of the Langrangian positions between Earth and Moon, not Lunar orbit. A truly intelligent species would actually be working substantively on these projects, instead of merely talking about them.

vkou 7y ago
A truly intelligent species would be working on not killing its own planet, instead of figuring out space habitation. The ROI on the former is many orders of magnitude better.
- elsonrodriguez 7y ago
  A truly intelligent species would be doing both. Also an extinction level event happening on this planet is a certainty, so it's actually an infinite order of magnitude better to figure out how to live in space than to only focus on saving the earth. But again, a truly intelligent species would do both.
  - magduf 7y ago
    Exactly. A truly intelligent species doesn't put all its eggs in one basket. Plus, a truly intelligent species knows that expansion (in population) is good for the survival of the species and civilization, and the way to get more resources and space is to go to space and acquire resources there and also learn to live there. The dinosaurs are a good example of a group of species that weren't far-sighted enough to invest in a serious space exploration and settlement program.
    - vkou 7y ago
      > The dinosaurs are a good example of a group of species that weren't far-sighted enough to invest in a serious space exploration and settlement program. If we knew that a cretaceous extinction event will happen five, fifty, or five hundred years from now, it'll be orders of magnitude easier for civilization to survive on Earth, then it will be for it to survive in space. If dinosaurs had opposable thumbs, and technology, they would have been better off bunkering down. No matter how uninhabitable some freak civilization-ending event would leave the Earth, it would still be more habitable then anywhere else in the Solar system.
      - magduf 7y ago
        With the correct technology, that's not true: it's perfectly possible to build very nice habitats in space with O'Neill cylinders, but you need a lot of technology and space-based infrastructure to make that happen. A truly intelligent species would be working hard on that problem, because the technologies needed to make big O'Neill cylinders would also have many, many other uses. A stupid species, on the other hand, would dedicate its most intelligent members to figuring out how to advertise to each other more effectively and sell each other useless crap. It's also quite possible to do multiple things at once when you have a civilization with many members. So as I said before, a truly intelligent species would not put all its eggs in one basket. They'd work on figuring out how to colonize space at the same time as figuring out how to deflect asteroids and also handle asteroid impacts if they did happen.
  - vkou 7y ago