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"Nowadays, this idea has a dramatic name: Spaceship Earth. And the idea there is that outside the spaceship, the universe is implacably hostile, and inside is a
by mudlus 6y ago
"Nowadays, this idea has a dramatic name: Spaceship Earth. And the idea there is that outside the spaceship, the universe is implacably hostile, and inside is all we have, all we depend on, and we only get the one chance: if we mess up our spaceship, we've got nowhere else to go. Now, the second thing that everyone already knows is that, contrary to what was believed for most of human history, human beings are not, in fact, the hub of existence. As Stephen Hawking famously said, we're just a chemical scum on the surface of a typical planet that's in orbit around a typical star, which is on the outskirts of a typical galaxy, and so on.
Now, the first of those two things that everyone knows is kind of saying that we're at a very untypical place, uniquely suited and so on. And the second one is saying that we're at a typical place. And, especially if you regard these two as deep truths to live by and to inform your life decisions, then they seem a little bit to conflict with each other. But that doesn't prevent them from both being completely false. "
https://www.ted.com/talks/david_deutsch_chemical_scum_that_dream_of_distant_quasars https://www.ted.com/talks/david_deutsch_chemical_scum_that_d...
- jaza 6y agoThey don't conflict with each other, if you accept a third conjecture, which is that all the other "typical" human-habitable planets are so far away from Earth, and that our resource limits + our intelligence limits + the laws of physics so tightly constrain our space travel abilities, such that we'll never get to any of those planets. Based on that, then for all intents and purposes, the point stands, we've got nowhere else to go.
- ThomPete 6y agoWe don't need a place to go, we just need to keep getting better at controlling nature and reconfigure it to our needs.
- XorNot 6y agoI think it's meant to be closer to "we're not special to the universe, which would not notice our passing at all".
- Robotbeat 6y agoThere are no “space travel and settlement is necessarily and always too hard to ever be sufficient for humans or their descendants to live beyond the Earth” physical laws. From what we can tell, no physics law prevents it. And our history of Spaceflight, both robotic and human, confirm that space, while a challenge, is not fundamentally unable to sustain humanity.
- forgotmypw17 6y agoSpace is much more suited for our robots, and it shows, with them doing most of the exploring. Humans can survive in space, but it is quite hostile, and astronauts come home wrecked after extended stays.
- Robotbeat 6y agoThis isn't really accurate. Astronauts travel longer in a couple days than a robot rover will in years. Human survival in microgravity and largely unshielded seems fine even up to a year at a time or more (and "wrecked" is pretty arguable...). On a planet with gravity and ability to provide cheap shielding, indefinite habitation is feasible.
- skybrian 6y agoOne reason Mars rovers travel so slowly is because they can. Being able to take all the time you need is an advantage, since it reduces power consumption and risk. It's a dead planet (as far as we know) so everything they're studying will still be there. If there were an important reason to move faster, they would have built something different.
- vimacs2 6y agoAnother far larger reason why they travels so slowly is because of power constraints. It takes a lot of rocket fuel to deliver a significant payload to any interplanetary destination and both batteries and RTG's are prohibitively heavy at the kinds of wattage required for a pace that goes beyond that of a snail. It is difficult to overstate what a limitation this has been for research there. Even without the benefit of a vehicle, a human walking at a natural pace would over a year be able to cover a larger region than all of the previous rovers sent combined across their entire lifetimes.
- simonh 6y agoAnd yet Deutsch finished his talk by advocating passionately for absolutely trying to develop a sustainable economy and ecosystem. At least in the written form of his talk, it’s not convenient for me to watch the video at the moment. He’s putting on an impressive intellectual show, but at the end of the day he’s not actually arguing against any of the conclusions we might draw from the spaceship Earth concept. As is often the case merely quoting the opening of a well considered argument and skip the body and conclusion, you’ll end up completely missing the point. He does contradict himself though. He starts saying where we are is different because not everywhere has life and intelligent beings and such. But then points out (not in these words exactly) that wherever you go in the universe it’s all just varying distributions of protons, electrons and photons anyway so its all of a muchness. No matter how you choose to think about the uniqueness or mundanity of our place in the universe though, we’re still right here, right now, with the same problems and constraints whichever perspective you prefer. Hence he finally turns to proposing effective environmental management. His grand perspective doesn’t help him escape the fact our problems are real and need to be urgently addressed, and he makes no attempt to evade that.
- smhost 6y ago> he’s not actually arguing against any of the conclusions we might draw from the spaceship Earth concept he's criticizing the ideological component of spaceship earth. nature worship is a powerful tendency within the cultural imagination, and different political groups have mobilized it in ways that have sometimes been catastrophic. e.g., ecofascism was a significant component of nazi ideology. also, your second paragraph is not valid. you equate "life and intelligent beings" with "varying distributions of protons, electrons, and photons," which Deutsch never did.
- simonh 6y agoThe said all you need is matter, energy and information, and intergalactic space has all three. You just need to know how to put it all together the right way, and that intergalactic space isn’t so different from here after all.