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The New World was a bleak dystopia for a few hundred years. Preserving the Earth is a better option than colonising other planets, although less sexy.
by rozab 7y ago
The New World was a bleak dystopia for a few hundred years. Preserving the Earth is a better option than colonising other planets, although less sexy.
- kiba 7y agoWe can do both.
- TimTheTinker 7y ago> The New World was a bleak dystopia for a few hundred years That's a bit of an overstatement. I expect if that were true, people wouldn't have kept on coming.
- fnord77 7y ago> That's a bit of an overstatement. After reading few books from the period and later ones by Nathaniel Hawthorne, I don't think so. > I expect if that were true, people wouldn't have kept on coming. The people coming could have incomplete or incorrect information. Communication was slow back then. Separating fact from falsehoods about the New World would have been a crapshoot at best. Even an entirely country got it wrong. Scotland bankrupted itself on the Darien scheme.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- readarticle 7y agoThe bulk of immigration to the New World happened after the first 2-3 centuries, before that, the plurality were chattel slaves. That’s of course ignoring the post apocalyptic lives of the natives that survived successive waves of disease and collapse radiating out from points of contact, but it’s habit at this point.
- TheCoelacanth 7y agoYou're disregarding the extremely large number of people who were more or less forced to travel to the new world. Add up the slaves taken there, people sentenced to be sent there for crimes, people who had to leave their home country or starve and people who had to leave their home country or be murdered and you start to get a pretty large number.
- freehunter 7y agoExactly. A large chunk of the population was forced to American against their will, and a large chunk of the people who chose to go to America only survived because of the labor of the people who were forced to be there. Claiming success on the back of slave labor isn’t something that’s super popular these days.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- larnmar 7y agoColonising other planets is a lousy idea; at the very best you could at massive expense colonise Mars, but it would be (a) almost certainly worse than Earth and (b) only s doubling of our resources. Orbital habitats, formed by disassembling the moon, on the other hand, can give us vastly more habitable area than available on Earth, and the environment can be engineered to be better than Earth ever was. Recently I’ve become convo bed that other planets don’t have much of a role to play in our future except as a source of raw materials.
- freehunter 7y agoThat exact argument could be made against disaster recovery data centers. Why bother building a new data center and buying two servers when you could just have one and save tons of money?
- tprice7 7y agoThe argument isn't that we shouldn't colonize other planets because it's expensive, it's that we shouldn't colonize other planets because it's Pareto inferior to making orbital habitats.
- microtherion 7y agoThere's no place in the solar system that's remotely as habitable as Earth, even if the latter suffers a massive disaster. Space exploration is more like Amazon spending $100B to build a hut with 10 Arduinos on the summit of Mt. Everest.