9 ms·

It's not that great advancements have cost. The argument is that focusing on space exploration deflects from facing the realities of climate change on our plan

It's not that great advancements have cost. The argument is that focusing on space exploration deflects from facing the realities of climate change on our planet. If people start to think that space exploration could yield a solution to an increasingly uninhabitable climate on Earth, it could create a scenario where we spend even more on space exploration and less on addressing Earth's climate.

arcticbull 6y ago
IMO there's 8 billion of us, we can do both.
- samvher 6y ago
  Then let's do both, and not just space exploration.
  - dantheman 6y ago
    Do you honestly think people are focusing more on exploration than other things? We already do both.
    - samvher 6y ago
      Globally, no. In certain spheres (some influential), yes. And while I realize that my comment is (intentionally) pushing it a bit, I do think that when you look at the urgency of space exploration and climate issues that, per unit of urgency, space exploration is getting far more attention than climate issues.
- bryanlarsen 6y ago
  Not only can we do both, but there is significant overlap. To give two examples among many: SpaceX's next major goal after making Starship capable of flying to Mars is to develop the infrastructure to refuel Starship on Mars. They plan to manufacture their fuel using the Sabatier process, which is also a form of carbon sequestration. Research and development into Martian food production pushes the envelope in many agricultural research areas like vertical farming, high efficiency production with few inputs, et cetera.
johnmorrison 6y ago
If it weren't for what we already spent on space exploration, we wouldn't have nearly as much understanding of climate change, and we wouldn't have the variety of satellites we rely on to address the climate. Both is more than one.
MereInterest 6y ago
I've posted this before, but I see terraforming other planets as a necessary step to learn how to take care of the Earth. Large-scale geoengineering will be necessary sooner or later on Earth. However, it almost certainly has failure modes that we don't know about, and won't know about until we can experiment with it. Testing the effects on Earth, with nearly 8 billion people, is wildly reckless. Testing the effects on Mars or Venus, though costlier to implement, has the advantage of not risking those 8 billion lives.
- intuitionist 6y ago
  You’ve got it exactly backwards IMO. Terraforming Mars or Venus will take millennia at least, millennia that we don’t currently have the luxury of waiting around for. We need to terraform Earth first — restore some of the damage we’ve done over just the last century or two — before we can think about the much more difficult project of terraforming other planets.
  - peteradio 6y ago
    I understand we are at risk of large populations being displaced. But you seem to be under the impression we are facing a human extinction event, is that something backed up by science?
    - intuitionist 6y ago
      I think that’s a risk on the right tail, although not a very likely one. But even the modal outcomes — 2 or 3 K of warming relative to the preindustrial baseline — will likely kill hundreds of millions of humans and lead to the extinction of countless nonhuman plant and animal species. I’m comfortable saying that we should do whatever possible to mitigate that outcome instead of focusing on creating Martian bunkers for the 1% of the 1%.
      - dane-pgp 6y ago
        > even the modal outcomes ... will likely kill hundreds of millions of humans Once we are dealing with scenarios where hundreds of millions of humans are dying, it becomes harder to rule out the possibility of some desperate political or military leader resorting to using nuclear weapons. From there it is a small step to full nuclear war and the deaths of billions of humans. Perhaps the "optimistic" scenarios are ones in which the hundreds of millions of humans that die are located far away from any nuclear armed countries, or at least those countries aren't destabilised by the economic and migration consequences of those deaths. I can, unfortunately, imagine militaries being routinely used this century for wiping out the remaining civilian populations of failed states.
dqpb 6y ago
The opposite is true. Investing in space exploration improves our ability to face climate change on our planet.
- save_ferris 6y ago
  I think investing in space exploration improves some people's ability to face climate change on our planet. It's hard to see a scenario where everyone in the world would benefit from it, given the incredible advancement of private space flight. Don't get me wrong, it's amazing what those companies have been able to accomplish. But we can't pretend like the entirety of humanity benefits from it when access to that kind of technology is restricted to those with obscene amounts of wealth.
  - dqpb 6y ago
    You could make that argument about any new technology over the last couple hundred years, and it would prove to be a vacuous argument. A rising tide lifts all boats.
peteradio 6y ago
Perhaps the intense focus is the only thing that drives the price. By focusing instead on a greater ambition you might deprive the "real problem" of the cancerous solutions that the political lime light brings.
res0nat0r 6y ago
If Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk (while Elon isn't posting moronic nonsense on Twitter) would take all the money they've invested in their pet projects trying to colonize Mars and the like and directly invested it in local programs to get some of the worst areas in the USA affected by homelessness fixed, it would likely have a greater impact on more peoples lives than what they're doing now IMO.
- bryanlarsen 6y ago
  I'd take the other side of that bet if it was possible. Just one of the many things that the money has enabled is 100Mbps internet to the entire globe.
  - dmix 6y ago
    SpaceX can also be highly profitable which generates tons of tax revenue and jobs (which were otherwise going to Russia or simply not launching into space at all due to cost). It also offers cheaper ways for all governments to launch satellites and other research/national defense, freeing up capital for other social things. And as you've mentioned it helps create new technology opportunities which also generate efficiency/value/taxes like space internet and in the longer term mining without destroying our planet. There are plenty of benefits to society. Although there will always be a contingent who thinks everything not an altruistic social giveout = bad use of excess capital.
- Dig1t 6y ago
  The goal is not to impact the lives of individuals. The goal is to preserve intelligence in the event of a catastrophe. As far as we know, we are the only part of the universe that is capable of consciousness. The argument is that it is worth going to great lengths to insure against species-wide disasters (e.g. runaway global warming, giant meteor, World War 3) Its macro-level thinking versus micro-level.
  - res0nat0r 6y ago
    The earth becoming uninhabitable due to climate change is going to happen way sooner than any pipe dream of folks trying to live on Mars, if they were really concerned about preserving the human species they would be putting billions of dollars into that instead.
reader_mode 6y ago
> it could create a scenario where we spend even more on space exploration and less on addressing Earth's climate And what exactly is "addressing Earth's climate" ? This naive hope that green parties keep pushing "if we cut carbon emissions it's all going to go back to the way it was" ? Carbon levels have already risen and climate change is already happening - nobody can realistically predict the specifics or the time scale. All existing predictions I've seen have been way out of error margins - and stuff like thawing ice and releasing trapped methane etc. can have huge non-linear contributions. Saying that X% cut in emissions is going to reduce temperature increase by Y on Z timescale is just wishful thinking, and we don't even have mechanisms to enforce X% cut across the world. Investing in technology that could help settle Mars is a way to protect from the inescapable negative climate effects we will have to live with, the sooner we start to deal with those the better (eg. start building for hurricanes/floods/large temperature differences, etc.)
nobody9999 6y ago
>The argument is that focusing on space exploration deflects from facing the realities of climate change on our planet. Does it? It's not an either/or proposition. Researching and developing technologies to allow humans to live in space in a sustainable way seems like it would almost certainly also create applications of such technology that can benefit us on Earth. Whether that's methods to scrub the atmosphere of a space-based habitat of toxins/pollutants, utilize waste in productive ways and a raft of other stuff would be incredibly useful on Earth. As an aside, I'd point out that even if we start colonizing space habitats, other planets and/or even planets around other stars, there are no technologies available or imagined that could transport colonists from the Earth faster than birth rates would replace them and continue population growth.
- m4rtink 6y ago
  >As an aside, I'd point out that even if we start colonizing space habitats, other planets and/or even planets around other stars, there are no technologies available or imagined that could transport colonists from the Earth faster than birth rates would replace them and continue population growth. Yeah, you should avoid needing that but it is certainly not impossible given high enough tech level & in-space infrastructure. Launch loops and orbital elevators should have more than enough capacity to enable that. For a science-fiction-backed-by-real-science account of it might go, see this Orions Arm article: https://www.orionsarm.com/eg-article/49b46fd2198ed https://www.orionsarm.com/eg-article/49b46fd2198ed Much bigger problem actually is where to put those billions once you have to move them in a hurry off a planet.
  - nobody9999 6y ago
    >Yeah, you should avoid needing that but it is certainly not impossible given high enough tech level & in-space infrastructure. Launch loops and orbital elevators should have more than enough capacity to enable that. I think you're underestimating the effort, resources and logistics something like this would require. In 2016, there were ~256 live births per minute[0]. That works out to ~369,000/day. Even multiple space elevators couldn't hope to come anywhere close to that, but perhaps with launch loops as well we might be able to approach that. But even if we could, how much of global production of, well everything, would need to be dedicated to getting even 350,000 people and the stuff they need off the earth every single day? >Much bigger problem actually is where to put those billions once you have to move them in a hurry off a planet. An excellent point. Even if you didn't need to hurry, the resources required just to stage such a migration are staggering and would likely exceed the production capabilities of the planet. But as you point out, we don't really have any place to send all those "colonists" so the point is moot. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Birth_rate https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Birth_rate
travisoneill1 6y ago
Addressing global warming is not a cost in the long run, but the opposite. Technology that doesn't consume fossil fuel is inherently superior to what we have now and will generate enormous profits once the engineering is there. Don't believe me? Just look at Tesla's stock price. Furthermore, cheap space travel does solve global warming because it makes the solution of orbital sun blocking feasible, which unlike currently available geoengineering tech, is instantly reversible.
pjmorris 6y ago
Why do you see climate change and space exploration as orthogonal? It would seem to me that moving energy-intensive processes off the planet surface might ease the climate burden. In the early 70's, physicist Gerard K. O'Neil asked the question "Is the surface of a planet really the right place for an expanding technological civilization?" [0] You would seem to answer this question with 'Yes.' Why? [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gerard_K._O%27Neill https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gerard_K._O%27Neill
ogre_codes 6y ago
> The argument is that focusing on space exploration deflects from facing the realities of climate change on our planet. In order to make this argument, you have to first figure out what percentage of NASA's budget is spent on space exploration versus things like GPS systems, weather satellites, climate monitoring, solar monitoring, physics experiments, etc etc, which have direct or indirect benefits to things happening here on earth. NASA's budget for entire actual space exploration would be more-or-less a rounding error on our defense budget which routinely has $5b projects which benefits very few people and arguably makes the quality of life worse on our planet.
- frank2 6y ago
  Maybe the US should spend less on defense and should refrain from sending humans to Mars.
  - ogre_codes 6y ago
    As far as I'm concerned, this is akin to suggesting you shouldn't back up the data on your computer because it distracts from protecting your working installation. You can do both—invest in a back-up strategy, while investing more money and vigilance in protecting the primary source. Space exploration is more though, because not only is space exploration an investment in a back-up plan, it brings very real benefits home to earth. The whole point of exploration is that you don't know what you are going to find or what the repercussions of what you find will be.
- Rebelgecko 6y ago
  Not that this negates any of your other points, but GPS comes from the US defense budget, the Space Force is spending a few billion per year on it
goatlover 6y ago
The world and the US are hardly focusing on space travel. It’s a fraction of government budgets and resources. Militaries have a far larger focus, as do various economic activities.

arcticbull 6y ago

IMO there's 8 billion of us, we can do both.

samvher 6y ago
Then let's do both, and not just space exploration.
- dantheman 6y ago
  Do you honestly think people are focusing more on exploration than other things? We already do both.
  - samvher 6y ago
    Globally, no. In certain spheres (some influential), yes. And while I realize that my comment is (intentionally) pushing it a bit, I do think that when you look at the urgency of space exploration and climate issues that, per unit of urgency, space exploration is getting far more attention than climate issues.
bryanlarsen 6y ago
Not only can we do both, but there is significant overlap. To give two examples among many: SpaceX's next major goal after making Starship capable of flying to Mars is to develop the infrastructure to refuel Starship on Mars. They plan to manufacture their fuel using the Sabatier process, which is also a form of carbon sequestration. Research and development into Martian food production pushes the envelope in many agricultural research areas like vertical farming, high efficiency production with few inputs, et cetera.

johnmorrison 6y ago

If it weren't for what we already spent on space exploration, we wouldn't have nearly as much understanding of climate change, and we wouldn't have the variety of satellites we rely on to address the climate. Both is more than one.

MereInterest 6y ago

I've posted this before, but I see terraforming other planets as a necessary step to learn how to take care of the Earth. Large-scale geoengineering will be necessary sooner or later on Earth. However, it almost certainly has failure modes that we don't know about, and won't know about until we can experiment with it. Testing the effects on Earth, with nearly 8 billion people, is wildly reckless. Testing the effects on Mars or Venus, though costlier to implement, has the advantage of not risking those 8 billion lives.

intuitionist 6y ago
You’ve got it exactly backwards IMO. Terraforming Mars or Venus will take millennia at least, millennia that we don’t currently have the luxury of waiting around for. We need to terraform Earth first — restore some of the damage we’ve done over just the last century or two — before we can think about the much more difficult project of terraforming other planets.
- peteradio 6y ago
  I understand we are at risk of large populations being displaced. But you seem to be under the impression we are facing a human extinction event, is that something backed up by science?
  - intuitionist 6y ago
    I think that’s a risk on the right tail, although not a very likely one. But even the modal outcomes — 2 or 3 K of warming relative to the preindustrial baseline — will likely kill hundreds of millions of humans and lead to the extinction of countless nonhuman plant and animal species. I’m comfortable saying that we should do whatever possible to mitigate that outcome instead of focusing on creating Martian bunkers for the 1% of the 1%.
    - dane-pgp 6y ago
      > even the modal outcomes ... will likely kill hundreds of millions of humans Once we are dealing with scenarios where hundreds of millions of humans are dying, it becomes harder to rule out the possibility of some desperate political or military leader resorting to using nuclear weapons. From there it is a small step to full nuclear war and the deaths of billions of humans. Perhaps the "optimistic" scenarios are ones in which the hundreds of millions of humans that die are located far away from any nuclear armed countries, or at least those countries aren't destabilised by the economic and migration consequences of those deaths. I can, unfortunately, imagine militaries being routinely used this century for wiping out the remaining civilian populations of failed states.

dqpb 6y ago

The opposite is true. Investing in space exploration improves our ability to face climate change on our planet.

save_ferris 6y ago
I think investing in space exploration improves some people's ability to face climate change on our planet. It's hard to see a scenario where everyone in the world would benefit from it, given the incredible advancement of private space flight. Don't get me wrong, it's amazing what those companies have been able to accomplish. But we can't pretend like the entirety of humanity benefits from it when access to that kind of technology is restricted to those with obscene amounts of wealth.
- dqpb 6y ago
  You could make that argument about any new technology over the last couple hundred years, and it would prove to be a vacuous argument. A rising tide lifts all boats.

peteradio 6y ago

Perhaps the intense focus is the only thing that drives the price. By focusing instead on a greater ambition you might deprive the "real problem" of the cancerous solutions that the political lime light brings.

res0nat0r 6y ago

If Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk (while Elon isn't posting moronic nonsense on Twitter) would take all the money they've invested in their pet projects trying to colonize Mars and the like and directly invested it in local programs to get some of the worst areas in the USA affected by homelessness fixed, it would likely have a greater impact on more peoples lives than what they're doing now IMO.

bryanlarsen 6y ago
I'd take the other side of that bet if it was possible. Just one of the many things that the money has enabled is 100Mbps internet to the entire globe.
- dmix 6y ago
  SpaceX can also be highly profitable which generates tons of tax revenue and jobs (which were otherwise going to Russia or simply not launching into space at all due to cost). It also offers cheaper ways for all governments to launch satellites and other research/national defense, freeing up capital for other social things. And as you've mentioned it helps create new technology opportunities which also generate efficiency/value/taxes like space internet and in the longer term mining without destroying our planet. There are plenty of benefits to society. Although there will always be a contingent who thinks everything not an altruistic social giveout = bad use of excess capital.
Dig1t 6y ago
The goal is not to impact the lives of individuals. The goal is to preserve intelligence in the event of a catastrophe. As far as we know, we are the only part of the universe that is capable of consciousness. The argument is that it is worth going to great lengths to insure against species-wide disasters (e.g. runaway global warming, giant meteor, World War 3) Its macro-level thinking versus micro-level.
- res0nat0r 6y ago
  The earth becoming uninhabitable due to climate change is going to happen way sooner than any pipe dream of folks trying to live on Mars, if they were really concerned about preserving the human species they would be putting billions of dollars into that instead.

reader_mode 6y ago

> it could create a scenario where we spend even more on space exploration and less on addressing Earth's climate And what exactly is "addressing Earth's climate" ? This naive hope that green parties keep pushing "if we cut carbon emissions it's all going to go back to the way it was" ? Carbon levels have already risen and climate change is already happening - nobody can realistically predict the specifics or the time scale. All existing predictions I've seen have been way out of error margins - and stuff like thawing ice and releasing trapped methane etc. can have huge non-linear contributions. Saying that X% cut in emissions is going to reduce temperature increase by Y on Z timescale is just wishful thinking, and we don't even have mechanisms to enforce X% cut across the world. Investing in technology that could help settle Mars is a way to protect from the inescapable negative climate effects we will have to live with, the sooner we start to deal with those the better (eg. start building for hurricanes/floods/large temperature differences, etc.)

nobody9999 6y ago

>The argument is that focusing on space exploration deflects from facing the realities of climate change on our planet. Does it? It's not an either/or proposition. Researching and developing technologies to allow humans to live in space in a sustainable way seems like it would almost certainly also create applications of such technology that can benefit us on Earth. Whether that's methods to scrub the atmosphere of a space-based habitat of toxins/pollutants, utilize waste in productive ways and a raft of other stuff would be incredibly useful on Earth. As an aside, I'd point out that even if we start colonizing space habitats, other planets and/or even planets around other stars, there are no technologies available or imagined that could transport colonists from the Earth faster than birth rates would replace them and continue population growth.

m4rtink 6y ago
>As an aside, I'd point out that even if we start colonizing space habitats, other planets and/or even planets around other stars, there are no technologies available or imagined that could transport colonists from the Earth faster than birth rates would replace them and continue population growth. Yeah, you should avoid needing that but it is certainly not impossible given high enough tech level & in-space infrastructure. Launch loops and orbital elevators should have more than enough capacity to enable that. For a science-fiction-backed-by-real-science account of it might go, see this Orions Arm article: https://www.orionsarm.com/eg-article/49b46fd2198ed https://www.orionsarm.com/eg-article/49b46fd2198ed Much bigger problem actually is where to put those billions once you have to move them in a hurry off a planet.
- nobody9999 6y ago
  >Yeah, you should avoid needing that but it is certainly not impossible given high enough tech level & in-space infrastructure. Launch loops and orbital elevators should have more than enough capacity to enable that. I think you're underestimating the effort, resources and logistics something like this would require. In 2016, there were ~256 live births per minute[0]. That works out to ~369,000/day. Even multiple space elevators couldn't hope to come anywhere close to that, but perhaps with launch loops as well we might be able to approach that. But even if we could, how much of global production of, well everything, would need to be dedicated to getting even 350,000 people and the stuff they need off the earth every single day? >Much bigger problem actually is where to put those billions once you have to move them in a hurry off a planet. An excellent point. Even if you didn't need to hurry, the resources required just to stage such a migration are staggering and would likely exceed the production capabilities of the planet. But as you point out, we don't really have any place to send all those "colonists" so the point is moot. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Birth_rate https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Birth_rate

travisoneill1 6y ago

Addressing global warming is not a cost in the long run, but the opposite. Technology that doesn't consume fossil fuel is inherently superior to what we have now and will generate enormous profits once the engineering is there. Don't believe me? Just look at Tesla's stock price. Furthermore, cheap space travel does solve global warming because it makes the solution of orbital sun blocking feasible, which unlike currently available geoengineering tech, is instantly reversible.

pjmorris 6y ago

Why do you see climate change and space exploration as orthogonal? It would seem to me that moving energy-intensive processes off the planet surface might ease the climate burden. In the early 70's, physicist Gerard K. O'Neil asked the question "Is the surface of a planet really the right place for an expanding technological civilization?" [0] You would seem to answer this question with 'Yes.' Why? [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gerard_K._O%27Neill https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gerard_K._O%27Neill

ogre_codes 6y ago

> The argument is that focusing on space exploration deflects from facing the realities of climate change on our planet. In order to make this argument, you have to first figure out what percentage of NASA's budget is spent on space exploration versus things like GPS systems, weather satellites, climate monitoring, solar monitoring, physics experiments, etc etc, which have direct or indirect benefits to things happening here on earth. NASA's budget for entire actual space exploration would be more-or-less a rounding error on our defense budget which routinely has $5b projects which benefits very few people and arguably makes the quality of life worse on our planet.

frank2 6y ago
Maybe the US should spend less on defense and should refrain from sending humans to Mars.
- ogre_codes 6y ago
  As far as I'm concerned, this is akin to suggesting you shouldn't back up the data on your computer because it distracts from protecting your working installation. You can do both—invest in a back-up strategy, while investing more money and vigilance in protecting the primary source. Space exploration is more though, because not only is space exploration an investment in a back-up plan, it brings very real benefits home to earth. The whole point of exploration is that you don't know what you are going to find or what the repercussions of what you find will be.
Rebelgecko 6y ago
Not that this negates any of your other points, but GPS comes from the US defense budget, the Space Force is spending a few billion per year on it

goatlover 6y ago

The world and the US are hardly focusing on space travel. It’s a fraction of government budgets and resources. Militaries have a far larger focus, as do various economic activities.