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All the critics lobbing cynicism against Bezos, Branson, and Musk saying, in essence, that their money is better spent here at home reminds me of a wonderful sc

All the critics lobbing cynicism against Bezos, Branson, and Musk saying, in essence, that their money is better spent here at home reminds me of a wonderful scene from The West Wing when one character asks why we have to go to Mars: "'Cause it's next. For we came out of the cave, and we looked over the hill, and we saw fire. And we crossed the ocean, and we pioneered the West, and we took to the sky. The history of man is hung on the timeline of exploration, and this is what's next." I personally don't care that these billionaires are spending their money on vacations to orbit. It's how we get to the moon and Mars and how we survive as a species. It's what's next.

UncleMeat 5y ago
An alternative viewpoint: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=goh2x_G0ct4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=goh2x_G0ct4 I'm not convinced that exploration is such a self-justifying good that we should look past the very real and very urgent problems that are aggravated precisely by the people "leading the way" here.
deleted 5y ago
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acituan 5y ago
> It's how we get to the moon and Mars and how we survive as a species. It's what's next. The core fallacy is to assume whatever made Earth less than ideal will not follow us to the new destination. To assume our survivability as species only depends on the locale, not what we will eventually turn that locale into. This happened with every new frontier. The romanticism of "it will be better in the new place" is baked into our genes probably because of the explore/exploit mechanism; it is natural for any animal to want to wander off when resource/danger ratio in a place isn't ideal. What we omit is that the most important layer of our habitat is the anthroposphere; us and our artifacts. We will drag the best resources and worst dangers with us anywhere we go. > that their money is better spent here at home reminds me... What that money represents is an agreement on commanding other humans' goods and services. As such, how much can that be "theirs" if we are taking a plant scale perspective? Don't get me wrong, I am not trying to inject a purely collectivist perspective here; money works great at certain scales, but for entire-humanity-scale issues it is a rather useless construct to think with. To me a more accurate perspective is "smart but ultimately single person, thus bounded in their rationality, somewhat exploits the imperfections of our value representation/abstraction layer to redirect tons of goods and services of humanity into what is ultimately a useless vanity gesture that will generate no insight into humanity's perennial problems".
- sigstoat 5y ago
  > The core fallacy is to assume whatever made Earth less than ideal will not follow us to the new destination. there are plenty of existential risks which can't "follow" anything, or happen to more than one planet simultaneously. does living on two planets eliminate all existential risks? no, and nobody has claimed that.
  - maverick-iceman 5y ago
    You see earthly stuff as a risk because all the positives are grandfathered in and you only see the negatives. Bats and pagolins, now are public enemy #1. In general animal reservoirs for viruses and species jumps can't possibly happen on Mars because there are no animals and no other specie. So we have eliminated that risk right? But....that also means no food, no ecosystem, no biosphere, basically absence of everything. So the benefits provided by bats , poultry, bovines etc. outweigh the negatives of a pandemic every 100 years or so Even an Earth ruined by supervolcanoes, mega asteroid, nuclear war and climate change all at the same time..is better than Mars. The only cases in which Mars comes out on top are a huge comet impact and a Gamma Ray burst which strikes the Earth but somehow misses Mars. Bezos is right saying that we have to go to space to save the Earth, then we can talk sci-fi type things such as mind uploading ourselves in silica, and once that process is complete than Mars and the Earth will be equally valid to host us. But that ship won't set sail for a long while.
    - xvilka 5y ago
      > But that ship won't set sail for a long while. Right. But you have to start to be able to reach that point. And sooner you start - the sooner you will arrive to it.
  - acituan 5y ago
    > there are plenty of existential risks which can't "follow" anything, or happen to more than one planet simultaneously. If the most salient risk was a large meteor striking Earth, you would be right, changing locale would have solved that. But almost all of our current existential risks are anthropogenic, and specifically risks based on our current lack of ability in being do multi-agent coordination at scale. Without solving the game theory of the entire class of those problems, they will follow us to any planet we go just fine. > does living on two planets eliminate all existential risks? no, and nobody has claimed that. Your implication of a strawman is a strawman itself. I am not arguing on the basis of a two-planet-solution's non-exhaustivity. I am arguing that assuming a change of locale as the principal solution to our inherent perennial problems is not a risk-free position. In fact I find it actively harmful as it distracts us from proper root cause analysis and makes us chase after old men's peter pan dreams instead of our need for growing up.
nohr 5y ago
It's not though, it was only for us if the technology is returned to public space. That's why NASA is cool.
minikites 5y ago
>I personally don't care that these billionaires are spending their money on vacations to orbit. It's how we get to the moon and Mars and how we survive as a species. Really? Which billionaires personally funded the Apollo program? The progress of our species shouldn't have to rely on the fickle preferences of one person, their enormous wealth should be taxed and the money should be used for programs like NASA and its benefits which help all of us.
- awillen 5y ago
  Guess what? The government has decided that NASA isn't important. If they're taxed more, that doesn't magically send money to NASA. The government has had first dibs on space for a very long time, and they've done nothing with it. Talk about taxing billionaires until you're blue in the face - whether you do or not has no effect on NASA. There's plenty of money to put towards it now, and it's not a priority. I'm glad that billionaires are taking up an important cause for the future of our species when our government is failing to do so.
- alfalfasprout 5y ago
  But the reality is that competition really does drive innovation. In the past few years we've seen SpaceX get reusable boosters working, a mission to the ISS, etc. Though people like to diminish blue origin's accomplishments due to not hitting orbit they were able to land their reusable booster on the first try too. In a short amount of time we've seen tremendous progress in bringing down the costs of launching. It's frankly inconceivable NASA would do the same. I have a few friends that have spent years at JPL and the amount of bureaucracy, waste, and red tape they had to deal with all went away when they started working at SpaceX and then Blue Origin.
  - minikites 5y ago
    >It's frankly inconceivable NASA would do the same. It's only inconceivable because we refuse to fully fund NASA.
    - edmundsauto 5y ago
courtf 5y ago
Getting to the moon and Mars won't save the human race, Earth is where life can be sustained. Humans cannot reproduce in space, on the moon or on Mars because gravity has a strong and vital role in gestation in mammals. Beyond that, these other locations are quite inhospitable (radiation, temperature, pressure, etc), more inhospitable than pretty much anywhere on Earth. If we can't make it work here and end up destroying the ecology of Earth, upon which we depend, there's no reason to think we'll survive on the moon or Mars.
- krallja 5y ago
  FYI, there’s actually gravity on the Moon and Mars. We haven’t done studies to determine if it’s enough G for successful propagation of the species.
  - courtf 5y ago
    Yeah of course there's gravity, there's gravity in space too. I'm saying it won't be enough.
    - edmundsauto 5y ago
      Have we done studies to show this conclusively? If not, I would think that getting to the moon would be important in order to perform those studies.
- criddell 5y ago
  I don't believe the moon and Mars are end goals, just steps along the way.
kmnc 5y ago
I mean, when you take your inspiration from television and sci-fi movies it does seem like rich people doing vanity ego projects is the best way for us to survive as a species. Assuming you mean mean the "rich" when you say species, because unless you are watching different movies then me the non rich don't survive or are turned into a slave class. The Earth...well its prospects are even grimmer. It is stupid to be cynical of rich people spending money on productive ventures, yet I don't buy the idea that spending on getting the hell off of Earth is the best way to save the species. It might be...which is pretty damned depressing in my opinion.
- Zelphyr 5y ago
  I just finished The Calculating Stars by Mary Robinette Kowal. It is a fantastic piece of alternate history science fiction that I highly recommend. I mention it because the premise is that a meteorite hits the earth off the east coast of the United States and what the after-effects of such an event would be. It's horrific. A slow death at first that rapidly increases over a period of 50 years. It would be paradoxical because the immediate effects would be cold but the long-term effects would be a planet so hot that it couldn't sustain life. Our global response to COVID has proven that we wouldn't be able to handle such a thing. How would you convince people that, sure, it's cold now but it's going to get hotter in 3-4 years? A LOT hotter. We can't even get these people to not freak out over having to wear a tiny piece of fabric in Costco! We know something like this is going to happen. It's just a matter of when. Spending money to get off the earth could very well be the best way to save the species.
- tdfx 5y ago
  > I don't buy the idea that spending on getting the hell off of Earth is the best way to save the species What are the alternatives? On a long enough timeline, it won't be possible for life to survive here. And even on shorter timelines, trusting in untested asteroid deflection plans seems pretty risky, as well. Seems that diversifying ourselves in multiple locations as soon as possible is the best way to guarantee survival of the species (or whatever derivative species we become).
  - 5y ago
weare138 5y ago
>It's how we get to the moon We already did that. Why not just support NASA?
- jhgb 5y ago
  Sadly NASA didn't do what people in the Age of Exploration did, namely settling there.
- fighterpilot 5y ago
  Because something like VTOL rockets can only be innovated by a private company focused on unit economics and scale economies. Government is good when the public externalities are large, the private benefit is small and there's an extremely large capital requirements. This is not the case any longer for rocket tech, and so it makes zero sense to have the government do it. It'd be like asking the government to make smartphones, which is an obviously ridiculous proposition.
  - dane-pgp 5y ago
    > Because something like VTOL rockets can only be innovated by a private company focused on unit economics and scale economies. I don't think anyone is proposing that government employees (or politicians) actually design the rockets themselves. The question is, can governments oversee and fund the development of innovations like VTOL rockets? And the answer to that question is "yes"[0]. As for why innovation in that field stopped, and had to be picked up again by private companies, I think it's worth asking whether large companies have undue influence over the sorts of projects that governments choose to pursue. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McDonnell_Douglas_DC-X https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McDonnell_Douglas_DC-X
  - weare138 5y ago
    > Because something like VTOL rockets can only be innovated by a private company focused on unit economics and scale economies. What? That makes no sense. We already had a reusable vehicle for space flight. We've had it for decades now. It's called the Space Shuttle. NASA developed it in 1981. Just support NASA and science for the public good. Do you really want a handful of billionaires in control of space exploration? They do it for their own benefit not ours.
lefrenchy 5y ago
We literally got to the moon before any billionaires bought joy rides to lower orbit, so what you’re saying is proven false already by history? It’s so insane to me that people honestly believe that we need billionaires to fund all their hedonic desires in order to achieve anything good and useful as a society. It’s provably false and frankly an absolutely pessimistic view of society and humanity.
- throwaway0a5e 5y ago
  >We literally got to the moon before any billionaires bought joy rides to lower orbit, Once upon a time you needed nation state sponsorship in order to sail across the ocean. It's absolutely insane to me that people don't see that a billionaire can do as a vanity project something that was ~50yr ago only the purview of superpowers as an obvious sign of societal progress.
  - rgbrgb 5y ago
    I think you're articulating exactly what the other commenters find appalling: a single man with the power of a state.
    - avarun 5y ago
      You, a single human being, can send messages from your home to the other end of the planet within a second today. This is greater power than any state had even 100 years ago. Why compare this "single man's power" to a state from 50 years ago? It's disingenuous.
      - deleted 5y ago
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    - BHSPitMonkey 5y ago
      There's some truth to this but for the most part you're drawing the wrong conclusion here; Things like aviation and rocketry have become well-understood and "cheap" enough that they're now within reach of the private sector (same goes for the development/construction of satellites which facilitates commercial demand for access to orbit). Just because I can use my smartphone to perform tasks which could only be rivaled by global superpowers 300 years ago doesn't mean I wield the power of a state.
peakaboo 5y ago
I don't know how to put this in a polite way... Let's just say your brain seems to have gotten too much TV entertainment. These billionaires made many billions on covid, while you got a 1400 dollar check so you could survive. These billionaires pay their workers minimum wage every day. People can't get toilet breaks at amazon warehouse without being harassed. This guy is a world class parasite. There is nothing "we" about what he is doing. We are not with him. He doesn't care about any of us.
- whymauri 5y ago
  I felt like I entered a wormhole in the GP comment where the ocean wasn't on fire, the Amazon wasn't burning down, a heat wave didn't sweep through the Northwest, and the polar caps aren't melting at an irreversible rate. The largest redistribution of wealth in history is happening right now while the global environment collapses and somehow there are cheerleaders egging it on so rich guys can play around in sub-orbit.
  - edmundsauto 5y ago
    Is wealth being redistributed, or are the Bezos’ simply slurping up the new money that have been so abundant? It matters, I think. Because if people are only getting relatively poorer when compared to the top 1%, it’s not as bad as if they are losing their standard of living. There are other issues about how excessively rich people can distort our society, but that’s not so much about the redistribution but the distribution, which is an ancient story.
    - ljm 5y ago
      It's fair to say there is redistribution at play when wages have stayed stagnant for over 10 years (at least since the 2008 crash) while executive salaries and payouts have skyrocketed at an unbelievably disproportionate level. It's effectively a global aristocracy as a handful of people amass an amount of wealth that would be impossible to conceive of not even 50 years ago. They can't soak it all up from new money, they depend on keeping their wage bills and other costs low to keep their profits up. And the standard of living is being lost when the people with stagnating wages are being priced out of the housing market, with renting or sharing being the only reasonable alternatives. Renting itself is a redistribution of wealth from poor to rich in many a case. Not to mention that tax policies (like Trump's tax cuts for example) tend to disproportionately benefit the wealthy far more than the middle class, and the poor. I can't think of a more clear cut example of redistribution there. The typical HN user is likely to be on the higher end of the scale and less exposed to issues like this (after all, many of us software engineers get a yearly payrise by switching job), but I find it hard to dismiss things like this when looking at my own country's politics.
tspike 5y ago
That quote is referring to the history of Europeans, not humanity.
- theandrewbailey 5y ago
  Many non-europeans have been pro-expansionist.
hemloc_io 5y ago
I don't think it's really fair to lump Bezos, Branson, and Musk into the same bucket. Musk, for all his flaws, started an actual rocket company with new and frankly insane tech. Bezos and especially Branson's ventures feel much more like personal vanity projects than something that will actually push space exploration. I mean Blue Origin has been running for 20 years and the best we have from them is flights that were accomplished in the Cold War? SpaceX has been around for two years less and has accomplished orbital missions. Lumping them all together feels like we're giving out participation trophies.
- boringg 5y ago
  Just a minor correction here- SpaceX has been around for 20 years as well.
  - LukeShu 5y ago
    Unless it's been edited, the comment says that SpaceX has been around "for two years less"; as in 2 fewer years than Blue Origin, which is essentially true (Sept 2000 vs May 2002; so really more like "a year and a half less").
- nyokodo 5y ago
  > Lumping them all together feels like we're giving out participation trophies. In defense of Branson his other space company Virgin Orbit now does orbital launches also, and has cool capabilities that genuinely differentiate it from other providers. We'll see if Bezos catches up, he's personally focusing on it more now and may make faster progress on New Glenn etc.
  - jimkleiber 5y ago
    I agree, I have a friend who worked on early designs for Virgin Galactic and he talks about many of the differences (and benefits) of the Virgin design over Blue Origin and SpaceX.
- aeternum 5y ago
  Did we have fully reusable rockets during the Cold War? Even though it's suborbital, Blue Origin's re-use is still a pretty impressive achievement. Spaceplanes are also interesting tech. Maybe not the best choice for earth but could prove useful on other planets with different atmospheres.
sweetheart 5y ago
This is total fallacy, I'm sorry. "We do this thing because we have always done this thing" isn't actual any justification whatsoever. It's whats leftover when realizing you're having a hard time actually justifying why it needs to be done. "It's the way things are" are perhaps in all seriousness the 5 most dangerous words in the English language.
- IfOnlyYouKnew 5y ago
  It’s maybe a bit silly to argue about inspirational slogans from TV presidents, but constructing “we have always been exploring and we will continue to explore” as a defense of the status quo is… quite impressive, actually? To rephrase it: “we need to shake things up! I propose we do so by stopping to change”.
- aeternum 5y ago
  We need to go to space because if we don't, all of humanity will go extinct. The earth won't last forever and also tends not to fare well when it goes 1:1 with asteroids or nukes.
  - coliveira 5y ago
    The earth can last for billions of years. That is, if we don't destroy it... The problem is not to get out of earth, it is not to destroy whatever planet we happen to inhabit.
    - louloulou 5y ago
      Those two things are not mutually exclusive.
    - lend000 5y ago
      This is blatantly wrong. The Earth's climate will naturally enter a significantly higher temperature climate attractor within 50 million years and will be completely inhospitable to known life in less than a billion years. The oceans will have completely boiled away, even from the poles, within 1.1 billion years, as the sun continues to increase in luminosity [1]. And this is the most optimistic scenario, assuming no gamma ray bursts, bolides, or super-volcanoes strike first. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Future_of_Earth https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Future_of_Earth
bagacrap 5y ago
"we pioneered the west" --- ouch. I guess "pioneer" is one way to say "rape and pillage".
- deleted 5y ago
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sofixa 5y ago
> It's how we get to the moon and Mars and how we survive as a species. It's what's next. I find it extremely weird that people are banking on a (almost literal) moonshot for the survival of our species. Isn't trying to stop/lessen the damage we're doing to the place we currently live and which can sustain us better and more optimistic proposition than hoping a metric shitton of things go perfectly after probably millions of man-hours and trillions of dollars in order for a privileged few to go live on Mars in underground settlements with artificial everything to sustain life there? Ffs, all the rocket tests create enormous amounts of CO2 emissions, among other things, actively helping to make the Earth less habitable.
- X6S1x6Okd1st 5y ago
  I don't think people that think about this as their day job consider climate change to be the existential threat we are fixing by going to mars. It's generally: nuclear war, asteroid strike, super volcano bioweapon/plauge and possibly malicious AI.
  - 8note 5y ago
    Super volcanoes, nuclear wars, asteroid strikes and bioweapons makes earth about equal to living on Mars or the moon. You could build all the same things on earth instead, for a fair bit cheaper. Malicious AI would almost certainly affect the moon or mars more heavily than earth, since on earth you can survive without high tech solutions
    - dumpsterdiver 5y ago
      > Malicious AI would almost certainly affect the moon or mars more heavily than earth, since on earth you can survive without high tech solutions They do have the benefit of being air gapped, though.
- robotastronaut 5y ago
  I personally don’t think many people are banking on colonizing another planet, but rather the technologies created as byproducts of that effort. Between energy creation, energy storage, thermal regulation, extraction and refinement of products necessary for life (oxygen, water, etc), and transformation of atmospheric gases, there’s plenty that can help keep our current planet healthy and suitable for human life.
void_mint 5y ago
As an aside, The West Wing was an incredible show that just became too hard to rewatch. The things the fought and cared about on the show all turned out for the worst. In S1 or S2, they're shouting about cyber warfare and privacy, and here we are 20(?) years later constantly observing cyber warfare and having lost the war on privacy.
coliveira 5y ago
> It's how we get to the moon and Mars and how we survive as a species. No, it's not we. It's them: billionaires and their friends. Other people will never go to the moon and mars because billionaires are using their money to lobby politicians in order avoid taxes and get more subsidies at our expense.
- xvilka 5y ago
  > Other people will never go to the moon and mars Oh, they will. Someone should build the colony. Someone should do the work to maintain and grow the colony, etc.
mustafa_pasi 5y ago
The quote is wrong. Antarctica is next. Then the moon. Then the bottom of the ocean. But all these places are desolate of life and not even resource rich, so there is little point to go there. Mars is like this as well. It's not like you are colonizing a rich continent like America.
- m4rtink 5y ago
  For in space infrastructure (that has the potential to bring immeasurable energy and resources long term) anyways available outside the Earth gravity well is a valuable resource, even just for stuff like radiation shielding.
TaylorAlexander 5y ago
Sounds like “manifest destiny” where we destroyed thousands of indigenous civilizations in the country because “it was next”. I’m starting to come around to the idea that this kind of thinking is exactly why we have poverty and hunger in the USA. We allow individuals to accumulate endless wealth even when that money could be used to help those who need a helping hand. I’m not saying we necessarily have the government tax them, as I’m more in favor of workers collectives and union power where more of the profit accrues widely across all workers instead of narrowly to the top. But the problem with billionaires thinking they can solve the worlds problems is they want to create more and more tech to solve our problems, even though we already have great solutions. We could design our cities around trains and bicycles but instead every person drives a car. That takes vastly more resources to produce and operate than a bunch of bicycles. I spent 15 years in Silicon Valley and the whole place is pretty hostile to bicycles even though it’s all flat! I think when you have $100B your mind comes up with big industrialized solutions to problems when the real solution in my mind is to reduce our resource utilization (which we can do without reducing quality of life). Bezos built Amazon along with the help from thousands of workers. It is only a trick of our legal system that he was able to hold on to all the wealth that the company created. And it should be noted that Amazon draws a lot of profit (presumably) from millions of cheap plastic objects from overseas which will break and end up in landfills in some poor country. Or think of the millions of overseas workers caught up in abusive labor arrangements [1], paid pennies per day, who helped create the goods that are sold on Amazon. I really don’t see Bezos as a hero, but as a complex figure who got more than he deserves. America is chock full of poverty and Bezos is directly opposed to the growth of worker unions which I think could help ease a lot of that poverty. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PxFwA-jw3X4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PxFwA-jw3X4
- fesago90 5y ago
  Exactly. "we pioneered the west" lmao. "how we survive as a species" wtf lmao op is heavily romanticizing technology and throwing humanity under the bus without even realizing it.
- dane-pgp 5y ago
  > Amazon draws a lot of profit (presumably) from millions of cheap plastic objects from overseas which will break and end up in landfills in some poor country. So you're saying he's found a way to make carbon sequestration profitable at scale? Maybe he is a hero.
lumberingjack 5y ago
That money doesn't go to space.lol
riantogo 5y ago
That is the romanticized version. The history of man is exploration, expansion and exploitation. Destroying everything nice in its path. We destroyed other species, our own species if they looked different, and finally we have all but destroyed the planet. Rather than staying on that path maybe a better approach for humanity is compassion, kindness and helping each other out. Having said that, I'm totally okay with billionaires spending money on such activities as it puts money back in the economy. The more the better.
- WalterBright 5y ago
  > as it puts money back in the economy That's the rich people hoarding cash theory. They don't hoard any cash. All of it is invested in the economy. Even "cash" deposits in the bank are, as the bank loans out a multiple of those deposits.
  - rcMgD2BwE72F 5y ago
    Rich people hoard bitcoins, now.
    - WalterBright 5y ago
      The money they paid for the bitcoin went into the economy.
      - rcMgD2BwE72F 5y ago
        Or into stocks. Or into existing real estate. Or into existing "NFT" arts. Or into any other bubble. When you print money, rich people can get price to inflate without any trickling down.
  - dane-pgp 5y ago
    > They don't hoard any cash. Instead they spend it on lobbying politicians (or becoming politicians) to pass laws that make it easier for them to make money at the expense of everyone else.
vernie 5y ago
https://twitter.com/meganamram/status/1087143660389466112?lang=en https://twitter.com/meganamram/status/1087143660389466112?la...
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onion2k 5y ago
It's how we get to the moon and Mars and how we survive as a species. This is unbelievably pessimistic. You're literally saying that Earth is beyond repair and the only way for humans to survive is to move to a rock in orbit that we've spent a total of 3 days on in the past 70 years, or to a planet no one has visited that has radiation that makes life essentially impossible for us. Assuming that's true, let's run some numbers. Assuming we can get to 3 launches per day (weather, launch sites, Mars being in the wrong place, etc are limiting factors), and we get 100 years of launches before everyone dies, and we can fire 100 people in to space at a time, that means the future of the human race rests on slightly more than 10 million people. The other 6,990,000,000 of us will perish with the rest of life on Earth. Damn. If you're right then humans are going extinct.
- dheera 5y ago
  I don't think it's pessimistic at all. The Earth is fucked. Not by humans, just by itself. It will be fucked within a few hundred million years simply because the sun is going to get bright enough to boil away the oceans. If we want any hope of our legacy to carry on in the universe, we need to begin exploring the possibilities now, because we have the scientific knowledge and technological capabilities to begin that exploration process.
  - onion2k 5y ago
    Mars and the Moon will be unusable long before Earth in that scenario. Our atmosphere is a really good shield.
- teawrecks 5y ago
  That's not what they're saying at all. Imagine if at some point in the history of the human species we just stopped exploring, stopped adapting, and just focused on preserving what we had and nothing more. We wouldn't be who we are today. Not just in the technological sense but in the human sense. The drive to explore the unknown is fundamentally human. The challenge of space and mars is the "final frontier". The real criticism I have is that it's a false dichotomy. We need BOTH exploration and exploitation. Both greed and fear. Both mutation and rote replication. A species can't survive without a balance of both.
misiti3780 5y ago
I agree, I think another way to put it is would you rather have your tax dollars spent on advancing rocket technologies (via NASA or equivalent) or would you rather have Bezos spend his after-tax dollars on it. Put like that, it's not a tough decision
- verdverm 5y ago
  Except that both companies are competing for govt money. SpaceX is already serving NASA
  - misiti3780 5y ago
    blue origin was funded with 0 tax payer dollars as far i can tell.
    - verdverm 5y ago
      Guess you didn't hear how they sued the govt because they lost the NASA contract? https://www.theverge.com/2021/4/26/22404528/nasa-bezo-blue-origin-protest-spacex-contract https://www.theverge.com/2021/4/26/22404528/nasa-bezo-blue-o... and they have already taken tax payer dollars https://www.nasa.gov/press-release/nasa-awards-launch-services-contract-to-blue-origin-for-new-glenn-launch-services https://www.nasa.gov/press-release/nasa-awards-launch-servic...
- hellomyguys 5y ago
  Hasn't there been many years where Bezos paid no taxes?
  - misiti3780 5y ago
    I'm not a Bezos defender, but he pays taxes -- his effective tax rate is lower because most of his money is tied up in stock that has appreciated but he has not sold yet. When he needs cash (to fund Blue Origin, for example), he sells stock, and pays long term capital gains like everyone else. He probably owns multiple houses etc, and pays property and school taxes like everyone else also.
8note 5y ago
Being on the moon or mars isn't helpful if you still need all your supplies to come from the earth. The survival of our species depends on us being able to keep ecosystems running, and we can do that on earth.
tmp_anon_22 5y ago
I love the West Wing but "pioneered the West" is a really interesting way to frame Columbus and Spain and France and Britain and ultimately the US doing what they did in the 17th-20th centuries.
soperj 5y ago
>and we pioneered the West The west was already fully populated.
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KerrickStaley 5y ago
Getting to Mars won't help us survive as a species. Mars is a barren rock that is less desirable for human inhabitation than even the most remote land regions on Earth (such as the middle of the Sahara desert and the middle of Antarctica). Mars has no atmosphere, its mean surface temperature [1] is about the same as the average daily low temperature in winter at the south pole [2], its surface gravity is about 38% of Earth's [3] which can lead to muscle and bone atrophy, and it receives about 44% as much sunlight as Earth [4] which makes it harder to grow crops and can cause seasonal affective disorder. In other words, if it were desirable to live on Mars, people would already be living in the middle of Antarctica. What about mining resources from Mars? The problem with that is that it's prohibitively expensive due to the fundamental laws of physics. Getting stuff (e.g. equipment) to Mars requires escaping the gravity well of the Earth ([5] is a nice visual), which requires 225 kilograms of fuel per kilogram launched [6]. Sending things back is cheaper, and things like fusion engines would help, but it still takes a lot of energy and it's always going to be cheaper to mine on Earth. Computers have gotten exponentially better over the past few decades because we've learned to make them smaller and more energy-efficient. Space travel hasn't because there are immutable requirements in terms of how much energy you need to do it. Planet Earth is by far the best place in the universe for the human species, and I don't see that changing in the next millennium. It's really tailor-made for us (or rather, we are tailor-made for it). The best use of resources right now is towards making life on Earth more sustainable. [1] https://www.space.com/16907-what-is-the-temperature-of-mars.html https://www.space.com/16907-what-is-the-temperature-of-mars.... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/South_Pole#Climate_and_day_and_night https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/South_Pole#Climate_and_day_and... [3] https://phys.org/news/2016-12-strong-gravity-mars.html https://phys.org/news/2016-12-strong-gravity-mars.html [4] http://tomatosphere.letstalkscience.ca/Resources/library/ArticleId/5421/is-there-enough-light-on-mars-to-grow-plants.aspx http://tomatosphere.letstalkscience.ca/Resources/library/Art... [5] https://xkcd.com/681_large/ https://xkcd.com/681_large/ [6] https://www.extremetech.com/extreme/279947-nasa-wants-to-make-rocket-fuel-from-martian-soil https://www.extremetech.com/extreme/279947-nasa-wants-to-mak...
gorwell 5y ago
And it's worth noting that they have overtaken a wildly expensive, ineffective government program and built a competitive industry, driving down the cost of getting a kilogram into Low Earth Orbit by 44-fold already.
blondie9x 5y ago
Everyone knows that if Earth climate destabilizes then life on Mars or the Moon is science fiction. We need the Earth's climate to stabilize and that requires lowering consumption and population.
andrepd 5y ago
So much about your comments strikes me the wrong way. The meaningingless faux-inspirational second paragraph first of all. The empty platitudes about "exploration". You say "It's how we survive as a species. It's what's next.". No!! We are facing massive problems due to overindustrialisation, overproduction, misalignment of incentives basically. We should focus on the (comparatively easy, but still very hard) task of keeping our planet habitable, and to find ways to conduct our affairs in a sustainable manner, rather than dream of idiotic outlandish ideas of Mars colonization... And you say: >I personally don't care that these billionaires are spending their money on vacations to orbit. See, that's where the whole problem lies. The problem is precisely that our current economic system allocates massive amounts of power to these people, and therefore allocates massive amounts of labour and resources to their vanity projects. The problem is that it concentrates power in a disastrous way. Like it allocates talented engineers to ad-tech and yacht-buliding rather than water purification projects or renewables. Like it allocates thousands of people to staff 5-star hotels to serve the whims of 10 or 20 billionaires and saudi princes, which could be serving 10000 children at daycares or 10000 seniors at nursing homes. Etc etc. I guess what I mean to say is this, and I apologise for the off-topic tone that my comment took: the insane thing to me is how you simply take this very arbitrary, very non-natural way of organizing economic activity and production, and accept it as completely inevitable, in fact you don't even stop to be critical or skeptical of it, hiding it beneath the simple phrase "I don't care how they spend their money". The true triumph of neoliberal capitalism seems to be making itself look as natural and inevitable as the air we breathe.
- brobdingnagians 5y ago
  Government protected monopolies and intervention to centralise corporations has created these megacorporations ruled by some of the most ruthless in our society. What we really need is de-centralisation, artisan ingenuity, and more free-spirited independent-thinkers who make decisions based on their ethics. Large corporations can make decisions where no one really feels responsible for the negative results. Small corporations would make people feel more invested in he end results, community, ecological results, etc.
dcolkitt 5y ago
Wouldn’t it make sense that Antarctica and the open seas are “next in line” before Mars? The point is we have a huge, open continent. At the present moment there’s absolutely zero demand to colonize it. Why? Because it’s inhospitable and hard to get to. But it’s a hell of a lot more hospitable and accessible than Mars. So, honest question why would we expect anyone to move to Mars if they can’t even be bothered to move to Trinity Peninsula?
- m4rtink 5y ago
  At least for Antarctica this is largely prevented by international agreements. I'm sure there are companies who would go there for the resources alone otherwise.
sidlls 5y ago
No offense, but this is a tad outlandish and completely ignores the people who are actually working to get us there. It's not Bezos or Musk, though the latter exploits his PR acumen incredibly to make it seem like he invented modern space travel himself. We won't get to Mars with a bunch of private-money capitalists competing. Much like in the 50s and 60s, it's going to take a concerted effort of government sponsored and driven research.
dmz73 5y ago
The problem is not that billionaires are spending their money on space exploration. The problem is that we have many billionaires and millions (billions world wide) are barely surviving. Do you want our species to expand to other planets with this kind of society? We will all end up being slaves if this keeps going on, not in 19th century sense but modern kind - forced to work endless hours just to scrape enough money for food. Elysium style society but without happy ending.
- thundergolfer 5y ago
  Kim Stanley Robison's Red Mars explores exactly this problem of colonising a new world whilst the old world is brokenly unequal and has ecological disasters tearing it apart. Really good book. I won't spoil it too much, but think it offers a powerful challenge to the techno-utopianism of Mars Colony obsessives. The Martians cannot escape their terrestrial ideologies, because those ideologies are still rooted in the old world that they rely on for survival, and because they carried over those ideologies in their own minds.
- ehsankia 5y ago
  How is this situation any different from past cases where people decided to spend money and time discovering new worlds instead of trying to improve the living conditions of their own people? Endless money and effort has gone into trying to solve world hunger and misery, yet they still exist. Yet inventions like GPS and other technology that came out of the space race has probably had more impact worldwide.
- mdorazio 5y ago
  The issue with this line of reasoning is that money is generally not going to solve the problem of people barely surviving. In the vast majority of cases, sociopolitical issues are the root cause and throwing money at things doesn't really help. If you don't believe me, look at the history of aid to sub-saharan Africa. So there's no reason we can't both spend billionaires' money on space development and fix terrestrial problems with social and political reform. And if you want to argue that billionaires only became so wealthy by exploiting people... well, yes, and? Their wealth already exists so the options are 1) they spend it on stupid stuff like more yachts and mansions, 2) they spend it on humanity-advancing things like space exploration (Musk/Bezos) and philanthropy (Gates), or 3) we have bloody revolutions to claw it back and hope for the best.
denkmoon 5y ago
They can do whatever the hell they want after they've paid their taxes. That is the consternation, not that going to space is somehow bad.
- robertoandred 5y ago
  They have paid their taxes. Increasing stock prices is not income.
michaelpb 5y ago
I think you answered yourself with your choice of West Wing quotes: > And we crossed the ocean, and we pioneered the West You really, REALLY aren't selling this the way you think you are by calling it the natural continuation to Europeans "pioneering" the Native Americans, especially given current events [1]. Let me put it this way, selling Mars exploration as a repeat of one of the world's most famous genocides (a blueprint for the holocaust no less [2][3]), really doesn't resonate with me lmao [1] https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-57592243 https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-57592243 [2] https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2017/03/nazi-germanys-american-dream-hitler-modeled-his-concept-of-racial-struggle-and-global-campaign-after-americas-conquest-of-native-americans.html https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2017/03/nazi-germanys-am... [3] https://time.com/4703586/nazis-america-race-law/ https://time.com/4703586/nazis-america-race-law/
snarf21 5y ago
I'm sorry but no one has yet to explain to me how humans are going to treat Mars so much better than we have the Earth. Earth has near unlimited resources and Mars doesn't. The human species will only ever live on Earth on a permanent basis and we will absolutely survive as a species. The Earth will just be a much worse and very inhospitable place for a very very very long time.
baby 5y ago
Good old HN. Every crazy advance (the other day it was github copilot) is met with negativity and cynicism.
goatse-4-this 5y ago
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cyanydeez 5y ago
they arnt government entities, their ventures arnt built by multitudes of government workers sharing technokogy. this is like saying a book store on every corner should replace libraries. shitty equivelence,
johnrgrace 5y ago
The thing is "we" won't get to mars with billionaires trying to go to there it will be their kids and the people they pick.
wanda 5y ago
I don't think anyone here would dispute the importance of always reaching beyond as a species. Ultimately, however, these billionaires are not contributing to reaching beyond. We've been to space before -- in fact, the first space pioneers went further into space than any of these billionaires. Over half a century ago. Their money would have been better spent on putting together new space telescopes or probes to look further afield, actually reaching for what's next, rather than reaching for familiar ground and taking themselves to the edge of the Earth's atmosphere -- to say nothing of the fact that it was largely for the sake of PR/spectacle. Musk less so -- as another poster has said, SpaceX seems well-intended and useful.
DubiousPusher 5y ago
Ok but, "I have a sweeping romantic idea in my head that connects a bunch of human activity into a chain and I have decided that this is the next thing in that chain" isn't that good of an argument IMO.
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brokenmachine 5y ago
>It's how we get to the moon and Mars and how we survive as a species. It's what's next. The moon and mars are both ridiculously unsuitable for human life. Why on earth would that possibly be an option rather than making even a cursory attempt to slow or stop the destruction of our perfect planet? It's a ridiculous idea. How could anyone think this was a worthwhile endeavor?
aporetics 5y ago
They’re not exploring, they’re creating private, for profit, ventures. Your comparison doesn’t hold.
raffraffraff 5y ago
I keep seeing people make this wild assumption that we're going to somehow terraform Mars and make it habitable. If Earth becomes so uninhabitable that we literally need to find another planet to live in, the question I'd ask is, "why couldn't we save an already perfect planet where we and everything we rely upon evolved?". At what point does earth become so fucked up that we look at Mars and think "Hmm, that looks like an option"
birdyrooster 5y ago
What if ending poverty was next, that would be cool, and then Mars?
ladyattis 5y ago
Aiming high is all well and good when you got problems at home settled. For too long we've been avoiding fixing those problems which aren't intractable such as homelessness and poverty. If we can supposedly do both like the article mentions then why aren't we?
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jjj123 5y ago
There are two main disagreements I have with this point. They’re values based, so I don’t expect to change your mind, but to give you some perspective on why people roll their eyes at these stunts: 1. I don’t think we should be looking towards “what’s next” when we have plenty of more pressing issues to solve here and now. I’d rather we more equitably distribute resources so everyone has food, healthcare, and housing before we start trying to colonize mars. 2. I would rather the money be spent in a more democratic way. I don’t want to let a few people decide “what’s next” for me, let’s redistribute that wealth and let the public decide what’s most pressing.
birksherty 5y ago
This is different than humans polluting and crushing the whole ecosystem for it's greed. It will be better for other species if it try to reverse at least what it can instead as we are the cause. Humans are the literally the worst thing in universe. It will also be better for all species if humans die out asap.
50 5y ago
"What can we gain by sailing to the moon if we are not able to cross the abyss that separates us from ourselves? This is the most important of all voyages of discovery, and without it all the rest are not only useless but disastrous."
lwhi 5y ago
We ruin what we have and move on. The problem with the West Wing, was that it added a pompulus romantic sheen to subjects that arguably didn't deserve it.

UncleMeat 5y ago

An alternative viewpoint: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=goh2x_G0ct4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=goh2x_G0ct4 I'm not convinced that exploration is such a self-justifying good that we should look past the very real and very urgent problems that are aggravated precisely by the people "leading the way" here.

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acituan 5y ago

> It's how we get to the moon and Mars and how we survive as a species. It's what's next. The core fallacy is to assume whatever made Earth less than ideal will not follow us to the new destination. To assume our survivability as species only depends on the locale, not what we will eventually turn that locale into. This happened with every new frontier. The romanticism of "it will be better in the new place" is baked into our genes probably because of the explore/exploit mechanism; it is natural for any animal to want to wander off when resource/danger ratio in a place isn't ideal. What we omit is that the most important layer of our habitat is the anthroposphere; us and our artifacts. We will drag the best resources and worst dangers with us anywhere we go. > that their money is better spent here at home reminds me... What that money represents is an agreement on commanding other humans' goods and services. As such, how much can that be "theirs" if we are taking a plant scale perspective? Don't get me wrong, I am not trying to inject a purely collectivist perspective here; money works great at certain scales, but for entire-humanity-scale issues it is a rather useless construct to think with. To me a more accurate perspective is "smart but ultimately single person, thus bounded in their rationality, somewhat exploits the imperfections of our value representation/abstraction layer to redirect tons of goods and services of humanity into what is ultimately a useless vanity gesture that will generate no insight into humanity's perennial problems".

sigstoat 5y ago
> The core fallacy is to assume whatever made Earth less than ideal will not follow us to the new destination. there are plenty of existential risks which can't "follow" anything, or happen to more than one planet simultaneously. does living on two planets eliminate all existential risks? no, and nobody has claimed that.
- maverick-iceman 5y ago
  You see earthly stuff as a risk because all the positives are grandfathered in and you only see the negatives. Bats and pagolins, now are public enemy #1. In general animal reservoirs for viruses and species jumps can't possibly happen on Mars because there are no animals and no other specie. So we have eliminated that risk right? But....that also means no food, no ecosystem, no biosphere, basically absence of everything. So the benefits provided by bats , poultry, bovines etc. outweigh the negatives of a pandemic every 100 years or so Even an Earth ruined by supervolcanoes, mega asteroid, nuclear war and climate change all at the same time..is better than Mars. The only cases in which Mars comes out on top are a huge comet impact and a Gamma Ray burst which strikes the Earth but somehow misses Mars. Bezos is right saying that we have to go to space to save the Earth, then we can talk sci-fi type things such as mind uploading ourselves in silica, and once that process is complete than Mars and the Earth will be equally valid to host us. But that ship won't set sail for a long while.
  - xvilka 5y ago
    > But that ship won't set sail for a long while. Right. But you have to start to be able to reach that point. And sooner you start - the sooner you will arrive to it.
- acituan 5y ago
  > there are plenty of existential risks which can't "follow" anything, or happen to more than one planet simultaneously. If the most salient risk was a large meteor striking Earth, you would be right, changing locale would have solved that. But almost all of our current existential risks are anthropogenic, and specifically risks based on our current lack of ability in being do multi-agent coordination at scale. Without solving the game theory of the entire class of those problems, they will follow us to any planet we go just fine. > does living on two planets eliminate all existential risks? no, and nobody has claimed that. Your implication of a strawman is a strawman itself. I am not arguing on the basis of a two-planet-solution's non-exhaustivity. I am arguing that assuming a change of locale as the principal solution to our inherent perennial problems is not a risk-free position. In fact I find it actively harmful as it distracts us from proper root cause analysis and makes us chase after old men's peter pan dreams instead of our need for growing up.

nohr 5y ago

It's not though, it was only for us if the technology is returned to public space. That's why NASA is cool.

minikites 5y ago

>I personally don't care that these billionaires are spending their money on vacations to orbit. It's how we get to the moon and Mars and how we survive as a species. Really? Which billionaires personally funded the Apollo program? The progress of our species shouldn't have to rely on the fickle preferences of one person, their enormous wealth should be taxed and the money should be used for programs like NASA and its benefits which help all of us.

awillen 5y ago
Guess what? The government has decided that NASA isn't important. If they're taxed more, that doesn't magically send money to NASA. The government has had first dibs on space for a very long time, and they've done nothing with it. Talk about taxing billionaires until you're blue in the face - whether you do or not has no effect on NASA. There's plenty of money to put towards it now, and it's not a priority. I'm glad that billionaires are taking up an important cause for the future of our species when our government is failing to do so.
alfalfasprout 5y ago
But the reality is that competition really does drive innovation. In the past few years we've seen SpaceX get reusable boosters working, a mission to the ISS, etc. Though people like to diminish blue origin's accomplishments due to not hitting orbit they were able to land their reusable booster on the first try too. In a short amount of time we've seen tremendous progress in bringing down the costs of launching. It's frankly inconceivable NASA would do the same. I have a few friends that have spent years at JPL and the amount of bureaucracy, waste, and red tape they had to deal with all went away when they started working at SpaceX and then Blue Origin.
- minikites 5y ago
  >It's frankly inconceivable NASA would do the same. It's only inconceivable because we refuse to fully fund NASA.
  - edmundsauto 5y ago

courtf 5y ago

Getting to the moon and Mars won't save the human race, Earth is where life can be sustained. Humans cannot reproduce in space, on the moon or on Mars because gravity has a strong and vital role in gestation in mammals. Beyond that, these other locations are quite inhospitable (radiation, temperature, pressure, etc), more inhospitable than pretty much anywhere on Earth. If we can't make it work here and end up destroying the ecology of Earth, upon which we depend, there's no reason to think we'll survive on the moon or Mars.

krallja 5y ago
FYI, there’s actually gravity on the Moon and Mars. We haven’t done studies to determine if it’s enough G for successful propagation of the species.
- courtf 5y ago
  Yeah of course there's gravity, there's gravity in space too. I'm saying it won't be enough.
  - edmundsauto 5y ago
    Have we done studies to show this conclusively? If not, I would think that getting to the moon would be important in order to perform those studies.
criddell 5y ago
I don't believe the moon and Mars are end goals, just steps along the way.

kmnc 5y ago

I mean, when you take your inspiration from television and sci-fi movies it does seem like rich people doing vanity ego projects is the best way for us to survive as a species. Assuming you mean mean the "rich" when you say species, because unless you are watching different movies then me the non rich don't survive or are turned into a slave class. The Earth...well its prospects are even grimmer. It is stupid to be cynical of rich people spending money on productive ventures, yet I don't buy the idea that spending on getting the hell off of Earth is the best way to save the species. It might be...which is pretty damned depressing in my opinion.

Zelphyr 5y ago
I just finished The Calculating Stars by Mary Robinette Kowal. It is a fantastic piece of alternate history science fiction that I highly recommend. I mention it because the premise is that a meteorite hits the earth off the east coast of the United States and what the after-effects of such an event would be. It's horrific. A slow death at first that rapidly increases over a period of 50 years. It would be paradoxical because the immediate effects would be cold but the long-term effects would be a planet so hot that it couldn't sustain life. Our global response to COVID has proven that we wouldn't be able to handle such a thing. How would you convince people that, sure, it's cold now but it's going to get hotter in 3-4 years? A LOT hotter. We can't even get these people to not freak out over having to wear a tiny piece of fabric in Costco! We know something like this is going to happen. It's just a matter of when. Spending money to get off the earth could very well be the best way to save the species.
tdfx 5y ago
> I don't buy the idea that spending on getting the hell off of Earth is the best way to save the species What are the alternatives? On a long enough timeline, it won't be possible for life to survive here. And even on shorter timelines, trusting in untested asteroid deflection plans seems pretty risky, as well. Seems that diversifying ourselves in multiple locations as soon as possible is the best way to guarantee survival of the species (or whatever derivative species we become).
- 5y ago

weare138 5y ago

>It's how we get to the moon We already did that. Why not just support NASA?

jhgb 5y ago
Sadly NASA didn't do what people in the Age of Exploration did, namely settling there.
fighterpilot 5y ago
Because something like VTOL rockets can only be innovated by a private company focused on unit economics and scale economies. Government is good when the public externalities are large, the private benefit is small and there's an extremely large capital requirements. This is not the case any longer for rocket tech, and so it makes zero sense to have the government do it. It'd be like asking the government to make smartphones, which is an obviously ridiculous proposition.
- dane-pgp 5y ago
  > Because something like VTOL rockets can only be innovated by a private company focused on unit economics and scale economies. I don't think anyone is proposing that government employees (or politicians) actually design the rockets themselves. The question is, can governments oversee and fund the development of innovations like VTOL rockets? And the answer to that question is "yes"[0]. As for why innovation in that field stopped, and had to be picked up again by private companies, I think it's worth asking whether large companies have undue influence over the sorts of projects that governments choose to pursue. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McDonnell_Douglas_DC-X https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McDonnell_Douglas_DC-X
- weare138 5y ago
  > Because something like VTOL rockets can only be innovated by a private company focused on unit economics and scale economies. What? That makes no sense. We already had a reusable vehicle for space flight. We've had it for decades now. It's called the Space Shuttle. NASA developed it in 1981. Just support NASA and science for the public good. Do you really want a handful of billionaires in control of space exploration? They do it for their own benefit not ours.

lefrenchy 5y ago

We literally got to the moon before any billionaires bought joy rides to lower orbit, so what you’re saying is proven false already by history? It’s so insane to me that people honestly believe that we need billionaires to fund all their hedonic desires in order to achieve anything good and useful as a society. It’s provably false and frankly an absolutely pessimistic view of society and humanity.

throwaway0a5e 5y ago
>We literally got to the moon before any billionaires bought joy rides to lower orbit, Once upon a time you needed nation state sponsorship in order to sail across the ocean. It's absolutely insane to me that people don't see that a billionaire can do as a vanity project something that was ~50yr ago only the purview of superpowers as an obvious sign of societal progress.
- rgbrgb 5y ago
  I think you're articulating exactly what the other commenters find appalling: a single man with the power of a state.
  - avarun 5y ago
    You, a single human being, can send messages from your home to the other end of the planet within a second today. This is greater power than any state had even 100 years ago. Why compare this "single man's power" to a state from 50 years ago? It's disingenuous.
    - deleted 5y ago
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  - BHSPitMonkey 5y ago
    There's some truth to this but for the most part you're drawing the wrong conclusion here; Things like aviation and rocketry have become well-understood and "cheap" enough that they're now within reach of the private sector (same goes for the development/construction of satellites which facilitates commercial demand for access to orbit). Just because I can use my smartphone to perform tasks which could only be rivaled by global superpowers 300 years ago doesn't mean I wield the power of a state.

peakaboo 5y ago

I don't know how to put this in a polite way... Let's just say your brain seems to have gotten too much TV entertainment. These billionaires made many billions on covid, while you got a 1400 dollar check so you could survive. These billionaires pay their workers minimum wage every day. People can't get toilet breaks at amazon warehouse without being harassed. This guy is a world class parasite. There is nothing "we" about what he is doing. We are not with him. He doesn't care about any of us.

whymauri 5y ago
I felt like I entered a wormhole in the GP comment where the ocean wasn't on fire, the Amazon wasn't burning down, a heat wave didn't sweep through the Northwest, and the polar caps aren't melting at an irreversible rate. The largest redistribution of wealth in history is happening right now while the global environment collapses and somehow there are cheerleaders egging it on so rich guys can play around in sub-orbit.
- edmundsauto 5y ago
  Is wealth being redistributed, or are the Bezos’ simply slurping up the new money that have been so abundant? It matters, I think. Because if people are only getting relatively poorer when compared to the top 1%, it’s not as bad as if they are losing their standard of living. There are other issues about how excessively rich people can distort our society, but that’s not so much about the redistribution but the distribution, which is an ancient story.
  - ljm 5y ago
    It's fair to say there is redistribution at play when wages have stayed stagnant for over 10 years (at least since the 2008 crash) while executive salaries and payouts have skyrocketed at an unbelievably disproportionate level. It's effectively a global aristocracy as a handful of people amass an amount of wealth that would be impossible to conceive of not even 50 years ago. They can't soak it all up from new money, they depend on keeping their wage bills and other costs low to keep their profits up. And the standard of living is being lost when the people with stagnating wages are being priced out of the housing market, with renting or sharing being the only reasonable alternatives. Renting itself is a redistribution of wealth from poor to rich in many a case. Not to mention that tax policies (like Trump's tax cuts for example) tend to disproportionately benefit the wealthy far more than the middle class, and the poor. I can't think of a more clear cut example of redistribution there. The typical HN user is likely to be on the higher end of the scale and less exposed to issues like this (after all, many of us software engineers get a yearly payrise by switching job), but I find it hard to dismiss things like this when looking at my own country's politics.

tspike 5y ago

That quote is referring to the history of Europeans, not humanity.

theandrewbailey 5y ago
Many non-europeans have been pro-expansionist.

hemloc_io 5y ago

I don't think it's really fair to lump Bezos, Branson, and Musk into the same bucket. Musk, for all his flaws, started an actual rocket company with new and frankly insane tech. Bezos and especially Branson's ventures feel much more like personal vanity projects than something that will actually push space exploration. I mean Blue Origin has been running for 20 years and the best we have from them is flights that were accomplished in the Cold War? SpaceX has been around for two years less and has accomplished orbital missions. Lumping them all together feels like we're giving out participation trophies.

boringg 5y ago
Just a minor correction here- SpaceX has been around for 20 years as well.
- LukeShu 5y ago
  Unless it's been edited, the comment says that SpaceX has been around "for two years less"; as in 2 fewer years than Blue Origin, which is essentially true (Sept 2000 vs May 2002; so really more like "a year and a half less").
nyokodo 5y ago
> Lumping them all together feels like we're giving out participation trophies. In defense of Branson his other space company Virgin Orbit now does orbital launches also, and has cool capabilities that genuinely differentiate it from other providers. We'll see if Bezos catches up, he's personally focusing on it more now and may make faster progress on New Glenn etc.
- jimkleiber 5y ago
  I agree, I have a friend who worked on early designs for Virgin Galactic and he talks about many of the differences (and benefits) of the Virgin design over Blue Origin and SpaceX.
aeternum 5y ago
Did we have fully reusable rockets during the Cold War? Even though it's suborbital, Blue Origin's re-use is still a pretty impressive achievement. Spaceplanes are also interesting tech. Maybe not the best choice for earth but could prove useful on other planets with different atmospheres.

sweetheart 5y ago

This is total fallacy, I'm sorry. "We do this thing because we have always done this thing" isn't actual any justification whatsoever. It's whats leftover when realizing you're having a hard time actually justifying why it needs to be done. "It's the way things are" are perhaps in all seriousness the 5 most dangerous words in the English language.

IfOnlyYouKnew 5y ago
It’s maybe a bit silly to argue about inspirational slogans from TV presidents, but constructing “we have always been exploring and we will continue to explore” as a defense of the status quo is… quite impressive, actually? To rephrase it: “we need to shake things up! I propose we do so by stopping to change”.
aeternum 5y ago
We need to go to space because if we don't, all of humanity will go extinct. The earth won't last forever and also tends not to fare well when it goes 1:1 with asteroids or nukes.
- coliveira 5y ago
  The earth can last for billions of years. That is, if we don't destroy it... The problem is not to get out of earth, it is not to destroy whatever planet we happen to inhabit.
  - louloulou 5y ago
    Those two things are not mutually exclusive.
  - lend000 5y ago
    This is blatantly wrong. The Earth's climate will naturally enter a significantly higher temperature climate attractor within 50 million years and will be completely inhospitable to known life in less than a billion years. The oceans will have completely boiled away, even from the poles, within 1.1 billion years, as the sun continues to increase in luminosity [1]. And this is the most optimistic scenario, assuming no gamma ray bursts, bolides, or super-volcanoes strike first. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Future_of_Earth https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Future_of_Earth

bagacrap 5y ago

"we pioneered the west" --- ouch. I guess "pioneer" is one way to say "rape and pillage".

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sofixa 5y ago

> It's how we get to the moon and Mars and how we survive as a species. It's what's next. I find it extremely weird that people are banking on a (almost literal) moonshot for the survival of our species. Isn't trying to stop/lessen the damage we're doing to the place we currently live and which can sustain us better and more optimistic proposition than hoping a metric shitton of things go perfectly after probably millions of man-hours and trillions of dollars in order for a privileged few to go live on Mars in underground settlements with artificial everything to sustain life there? Ffs, all the rocket tests create enormous amounts of CO2 emissions, among other things, actively helping to make the Earth less habitable.

X6S1x6Okd1st 5y ago
I don't think people that think about this as their day job consider climate change to be the existential threat we are fixing by going to mars. It's generally: nuclear war, asteroid strike, super volcano bioweapon/plauge and possibly malicious AI.
- 8note 5y ago
  Super volcanoes, nuclear wars, asteroid strikes and bioweapons makes earth about equal to living on Mars or the moon. You could build all the same things on earth instead, for a fair bit cheaper. Malicious AI would almost certainly affect the moon or mars more heavily than earth, since on earth you can survive without high tech solutions
  - dumpsterdiver 5y ago
    > Malicious AI would almost certainly affect the moon or mars more heavily than earth, since on earth you can survive without high tech solutions They do have the benefit of being air gapped, though.
robotastronaut 5y ago
I personally don’t think many people are banking on colonizing another planet, but rather the technologies created as byproducts of that effort. Between energy creation, energy storage, thermal regulation, extraction and refinement of products necessary for life (oxygen, water, etc), and transformation of atmospheric gases, there’s plenty that can help keep our current planet healthy and suitable for human life.

void_mint 5y ago

As an aside, The West Wing was an incredible show that just became too hard to rewatch. The things the fought and cared about on the show all turned out for the worst. In S1 or S2, they're shouting about cyber warfare and privacy, and here we are 20(?) years later constantly observing cyber warfare and having lost the war on privacy.

coliveira 5y ago

> It's how we get to the moon and Mars and how we survive as a species. No, it's not we. It's them: billionaires and their friends. Other people will never go to the moon and mars because billionaires are using their money to lobby politicians in order avoid taxes and get more subsidies at our expense.

xvilka 5y ago
> Other people will never go to the moon and mars Oh, they will. Someone should build the colony. Someone should do the work to maintain and grow the colony, etc.

mustafa_pasi 5y ago

The quote is wrong. Antarctica is next. Then the moon. Then the bottom of the ocean. But all these places are desolate of life and not even resource rich, so there is little point to go there. Mars is like this as well. It's not like you are colonizing a rich continent like America.

m4rtink 5y ago
For in space infrastructure (that has the potential to bring immeasurable energy and resources long term) anyways available outside the Earth gravity well is a valuable resource, even just for stuff like radiation shielding.

TaylorAlexander 5y ago

Sounds like “manifest destiny” where we destroyed thousands of indigenous civilizations in the country because “it was next”. I’m starting to come around to the idea that this kind of thinking is exactly why we have poverty and hunger in the USA. We allow individuals to accumulate endless wealth even when that money could be used to help those who need a helping hand. I’m not saying we necessarily have the government tax them, as I’m more in favor of workers collectives and union power where more of the profit accrues widely across all workers instead of narrowly to the top. But the problem with billionaires thinking they can solve the worlds problems is they want to create more and more tech to solve our problems, even though we already have great solutions. We could design our cities around trains and bicycles but instead every person drives a car. That takes vastly more resources to produce and operate than a bunch of bicycles. I spent 15 years in Silicon Valley and the whole place is pretty hostile to bicycles even though it’s all flat! I think when you have $100B your mind comes up with big industrialized solutions to problems when the real solution in my mind is to reduce our resource utilization (which we can do without reducing quality of life). Bezos built Amazon along with the help from thousands of workers. It is only a trick of our legal system that he was able to hold on to all the wealth that the company created. And it should be noted that Amazon draws a lot of profit (presumably) from millions of cheap plastic objects from overseas which will break and end up in landfills in some poor country. Or think of the millions of overseas workers caught up in abusive labor arrangements [1], paid pennies per day, who helped create the goods that are sold on Amazon. I really don’t see Bezos as a hero, but as a complex figure who got more than he deserves. America is chock full of poverty and Bezos is directly opposed to the growth of worker unions which I think could help ease a lot of that poverty. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PxFwA-jw3X4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PxFwA-jw3X4

fesago90 5y ago
Exactly. "we pioneered the west" lmao. "how we survive as a species" wtf lmao op is heavily romanticizing technology and throwing humanity under the bus without even realizing it.
dane-pgp 5y ago
> Amazon draws a lot of profit (presumably) from millions of cheap plastic objects from overseas which will break and end up in landfills in some poor country. So you're saying he's found a way to make carbon sequestration profitable at scale? Maybe he is a hero.

lumberingjack 5y ago

That money doesn't go to space.lol

riantogo 5y ago

That is the romanticized version. The history of man is exploration, expansion and exploitation. Destroying everything nice in its path. We destroyed other species, our own species if they looked different, and finally we have all but destroyed the planet. Rather than staying on that path maybe a better approach for humanity is compassion, kindness and helping each other out. Having said that, I'm totally okay with billionaires spending money on such activities as it puts money back in the economy. The more the better.

WalterBright 5y ago
> as it puts money back in the economy That's the rich people hoarding cash theory. They don't hoard any cash. All of it is invested in the economy. Even "cash" deposits in the bank are, as the bank loans out a multiple of those deposits.
- rcMgD2BwE72F 5y ago
  Rich people hoard bitcoins, now.
  - WalterBright 5y ago
    The money they paid for the bitcoin went into the economy.
    - rcMgD2BwE72F 5y ago
      Or into stocks. Or into existing real estate. Or into existing "NFT" arts. Or into any other bubble. When you print money, rich people can get price to inflate without any trickling down.
- dane-pgp 5y ago
  > They don't hoard any cash. Instead they spend it on lobbying politicians (or becoming politicians) to pass laws that make it easier for them to make money at the expense of everyone else.

vernie 5y ago

https://twitter.com/meganamram/status/1087143660389466112?lang=en https://twitter.com/meganamram/status/1087143660389466112?la...

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onion2k 5y ago

It's how we get to the moon and Mars and how we survive as a species. This is unbelievably pessimistic. You're literally saying that Earth is beyond repair and the only way for humans to survive is to move to a rock in orbit that we've spent a total of 3 days on in the past 70 years, or to a planet no one has visited that has radiation that makes life essentially impossible for us. Assuming that's true, let's run some numbers. Assuming we can get to 3 launches per day (weather, launch sites, Mars being in the wrong place, etc are limiting factors), and we get 100 years of launches before everyone dies, and we can fire 100 people in to space at a time, that means the future of the human race rests on slightly more than 10 million people. The other 6,990,000,000 of us will perish with the rest of life on Earth. Damn. If you're right then humans are going extinct.

dheera 5y ago
I don't think it's pessimistic at all. The Earth is fucked. Not by humans, just by itself. It will be fucked within a few hundred million years simply because the sun is going to get bright enough to boil away the oceans. If we want any hope of our legacy to carry on in the universe, we need to begin exploring the possibilities now, because we have the scientific knowledge and technological capabilities to begin that exploration process.
- onion2k 5y ago
  Mars and the Moon will be unusable long before Earth in that scenario. Our atmosphere is a really good shield.
teawrecks 5y ago
That's not what they're saying at all. Imagine if at some point in the history of the human species we just stopped exploring, stopped adapting, and just focused on preserving what we had and nothing more. We wouldn't be who we are today. Not just in the technological sense but in the human sense. The drive to explore the unknown is fundamentally human. The challenge of space and mars is the "final frontier". The real criticism I have is that it's a false dichotomy. We need BOTH exploration and exploitation. Both greed and fear. Both mutation and rote replication. A species can't survive without a balance of both.

misiti3780 5y ago

I agree, I think another way to put it is would you rather have your tax dollars spent on advancing rocket technologies (via NASA or equivalent) or would you rather have Bezos spend his after-tax dollars on it. Put like that, it's not a tough decision

verdverm 5y ago
Except that both companies are competing for govt money. SpaceX is already serving NASA
- misiti3780 5y ago
  blue origin was funded with 0 tax payer dollars as far i can tell.
  - verdverm 5y ago
    Guess you didn't hear how they sued the govt because they lost the NASA contract? https://www.theverge.com/2021/4/26/22404528/nasa-bezo-blue-origin-protest-spacex-contract https://www.theverge.com/2021/4/26/22404528/nasa-bezo-blue-o... and they have already taken tax payer dollars https://www.nasa.gov/press-release/nasa-awards-launch-services-contract-to-blue-origin-for-new-glenn-launch-services https://www.nasa.gov/press-release/nasa-awards-launch-servic...
hellomyguys 5y ago
Hasn't there been many years where Bezos paid no taxes?
- misiti3780 5y ago
  I'm not a Bezos defender, but he pays taxes -- his effective tax rate is lower because most of his money is tied up in stock that has appreciated but he has not sold yet. When he needs cash (to fund Blue Origin, for example), he sells stock, and pays long term capital gains like everyone else. He probably owns multiple houses etc, and pays property and school taxes like everyone else also.

8note 5y ago

Being on the moon or mars isn't helpful if you still need all your supplies to come from the earth. The survival of our species depends on us being able to keep ecosystems running, and we can do that on earth.

tmp_anon_22 5y ago

I love the West Wing but "pioneered the West" is a really interesting way to frame Columbus and Spain and France and Britain and ultimately the US doing what they did in the 17th-20th centuries.

soperj 5y ago

>and we pioneered the West The west was already fully populated.

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KerrickStaley 5y ago

Getting to Mars won't help us survive as a species. Mars is a barren rock that is less desirable for human inhabitation than even the most remote land regions on Earth (such as the middle of the Sahara desert and the middle of Antarctica). Mars has no atmosphere, its mean surface temperature [1] is about the same as the average daily low temperature in winter at the south pole [2], its surface gravity is about 38% of Earth's [3] which can lead to muscle and bone atrophy, and it receives about 44% as much sunlight as Earth [4] which makes it harder to grow crops and can cause seasonal affective disorder. In other words, if it were desirable to live on Mars, people would already be living in the middle of Antarctica. What about mining resources from Mars? The problem with that is that it's prohibitively expensive due to the fundamental laws of physics. Getting stuff (e.g. equipment) to Mars requires escaping the gravity well of the Earth ([5] is a nice visual), which requires 225 kilograms of fuel per kilogram launched [6]. Sending things back is cheaper, and things like fusion engines would help, but it still takes a lot of energy and it's always going to be cheaper to mine on Earth. Computers have gotten exponentially better over the past few decades because we've learned to make them smaller and more energy-efficient. Space travel hasn't because there are immutable requirements in terms of how much energy you need to do it. Planet Earth is by far the best place in the universe for the human species, and I don't see that changing in the next millennium. It's really tailor-made for us (or rather, we are tailor-made for it). The best use of resources right now is towards making life on Earth more sustainable. [1] https://www.space.com/16907-what-is-the-temperature-of-mars.html https://www.space.com/16907-what-is-the-temperature-of-mars.... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/South_Pole#Climate_and_day_and_night https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/South_Pole#Climate_and_day_and... [3] https://phys.org/news/2016-12-strong-gravity-mars.html https://phys.org/news/2016-12-strong-gravity-mars.html [4] http://tomatosphere.letstalkscience.ca/Resources/library/ArticleId/5421/is-there-enough-light-on-mars-to-grow-plants.aspx http://tomatosphere.letstalkscience.ca/Resources/library/Art... [5] https://xkcd.com/681_large/ https://xkcd.com/681_large/ [6] https://www.extremetech.com/extreme/279947-nasa-wants-to-make-rocket-fuel-from-martian-soil https://www.extremetech.com/extreme/279947-nasa-wants-to-mak...

gorwell 5y ago

And it's worth noting that they have overtaken a wildly expensive, ineffective government program and built a competitive industry, driving down the cost of getting a kilogram into Low Earth Orbit by 44-fold already.

blondie9x 5y ago

Everyone knows that if Earth climate destabilizes then life on Mars or the Moon is science fiction. We need the Earth's climate to stabilize and that requires lowering consumption and population.

andrepd 5y ago

So much about your comments strikes me the wrong way. The meaningingless faux-inspirational second paragraph first of all. The empty platitudes about "exploration". You say "It's how we survive as a species. It's what's next.". No!! We are facing massive problems due to overindustrialisation, overproduction, misalignment of incentives basically. We should focus on the (comparatively easy, but still very hard) task of keeping our planet habitable, and to find ways to conduct our affairs in a sustainable manner, rather than dream of idiotic outlandish ideas of Mars colonization... And you say: >I personally don't care that these billionaires are spending their money on vacations to orbit. See, that's where the whole problem lies. The problem is precisely that our current economic system allocates massive amounts of power to these people, and therefore allocates massive amounts of labour and resources to their vanity projects. The problem is that it concentrates power in a disastrous way. Like it allocates talented engineers to ad-tech and yacht-buliding rather than water purification projects or renewables. Like it allocates thousands of people to staff 5-star hotels to serve the whims of 10 or 20 billionaires and saudi princes, which could be serving 10000 children at daycares or 10000 seniors at nursing homes. Etc etc. I guess what I mean to say is this, and I apologise for the off-topic tone that my comment took: the insane thing to me is how you simply take this very arbitrary, very non-natural way of organizing economic activity and production, and accept it as completely inevitable, in fact you don't even stop to be critical or skeptical of it, hiding it beneath the simple phrase "I don't care how they spend their money". The true triumph of neoliberal capitalism seems to be making itself look as natural and inevitable as the air we breathe.

brobdingnagians 5y ago
Government protected monopolies and intervention to centralise corporations has created these megacorporations ruled by some of the most ruthless in our society. What we really need is de-centralisation, artisan ingenuity, and more free-spirited independent-thinkers who make decisions based on their ethics. Large corporations can make decisions where no one really feels responsible for the negative results. Small corporations would make people feel more invested in he end results, community, ecological results, etc.

dcolkitt 5y ago

Wouldn’t it make sense that Antarctica and the open seas are “next in line” before Mars? The point is we have a huge, open continent. At the present moment there’s absolutely zero demand to colonize it. Why? Because it’s inhospitable and hard to get to. But it’s a hell of a lot more hospitable and accessible than Mars. So, honest question why would we expect anyone to move to Mars if they can’t even be bothered to move to Trinity Peninsula?

m4rtink 5y ago
At least for Antarctica this is largely prevented by international agreements. I'm sure there are companies who would go there for the resources alone otherwise.

sidlls 5y ago

No offense, but this is a tad outlandish and completely ignores the people who are actually working to get us there. It's not Bezos or Musk, though the latter exploits his PR acumen incredibly to make it seem like he invented modern space travel himself. We won't get to Mars with a bunch of private-money capitalists competing. Much like in the 50s and 60s, it's going to take a concerted effort of government sponsored and driven research.

dmz73 5y ago

The problem is not that billionaires are spending their money on space exploration. The problem is that we have many billionaires and millions (billions world wide) are barely surviving. Do you want our species to expand to other planets with this kind of society? We will all end up being slaves if this keeps going on, not in 19th century sense but modern kind - forced to work endless hours just to scrape enough money for food. Elysium style society but without happy ending.

thundergolfer 5y ago
Kim Stanley Robison's Red Mars explores exactly this problem of colonising a new world whilst the old world is brokenly unequal and has ecological disasters tearing it apart. Really good book. I won't spoil it too much, but think it offers a powerful challenge to the techno-utopianism of Mars Colony obsessives. The Martians cannot escape their terrestrial ideologies, because those ideologies are still rooted in the old world that they rely on for survival, and because they carried over those ideologies in their own minds.
ehsankia 5y ago
How is this situation any different from past cases where people decided to spend money and time discovering new worlds instead of trying to improve the living conditions of their own people? Endless money and effort has gone into trying to solve world hunger and misery, yet they still exist. Yet inventions like GPS and other technology that came out of the space race has probably had more impact worldwide.
mdorazio 5y ago
The issue with this line of reasoning is that money is generally not going to solve the problem of people barely surviving. In the vast majority of cases, sociopolitical issues are the root cause and throwing money at things doesn't really help. If you don't believe me, look at the history of aid to sub-saharan Africa. So there's no reason we can't both spend billionaires' money on space development and fix terrestrial problems with social and political reform. And if you want to argue that billionaires only became so wealthy by exploiting people... well, yes, and? Their wealth already exists so the options are 1) they spend it on stupid stuff like more yachts and mansions, 2) they spend it on humanity-advancing things like space exploration (Musk/Bezos) and philanthropy (Gates), or 3) we have bloody revolutions to claw it back and hope for the best.

denkmoon 5y ago

They can do whatever the hell they want after they've paid their taxes. That is the consternation, not that going to space is somehow bad.

robertoandred 5y ago
They have paid their taxes. Increasing stock prices is not income.

michaelpb 5y ago

I think you answered yourself with your choice of West Wing quotes: > And we crossed the ocean, and we pioneered the West You really, REALLY aren't selling this the way you think you are by calling it the natural continuation to Europeans "pioneering" the Native Americans, especially given current events [1]. Let me put it this way, selling Mars exploration as a repeat of one of the world's most famous genocides (a blueprint for the holocaust no less [2][3]), really doesn't resonate with me lmao [1] https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-57592243 https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-57592243 [2] https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2017/03/nazi-germanys-american-dream-hitler-modeled-his-concept-of-racial-struggle-and-global-campaign-after-americas-conquest-of-native-americans.html https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2017/03/nazi-germanys-am... [3] https://time.com/4703586/nazis-america-race-law/ https://time.com/4703586/nazis-america-race-law/

snarf21 5y ago

I'm sorry but no one has yet to explain to me how humans are going to treat Mars so much better than we have the Earth. Earth has near unlimited resources and Mars doesn't. The human species will only ever live on Earth on a permanent basis and we will absolutely survive as a species. The Earth will just be a much worse and very inhospitable place for a very very very long time.

baby 5y ago

Good old HN. Every crazy advance (the other day it was github copilot) is met with negativity and cynicism.

goatse-4-this 5y ago

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cyanydeez 5y ago

they arnt government entities, their ventures arnt built by multitudes of government workers sharing technokogy. this is like saying a book store on every corner should replace libraries. shitty equivelence,

johnrgrace 5y ago

The thing is "we" won't get to mars with billionaires trying to go to there it will be their kids and the people they pick.

wanda 5y ago

I don't think anyone here would dispute the importance of always reaching beyond as a species. Ultimately, however, these billionaires are not contributing to reaching beyond. We've been to space before -- in fact, the first space pioneers went further into space than any of these billionaires. Over half a century ago. Their money would have been better spent on putting together new space telescopes or probes to look further afield, actually reaching for what's next, rather than reaching for familiar ground and taking themselves to the edge of the Earth's atmosphere -- to say nothing of the fact that it was largely for the sake of PR/spectacle. Musk less so -- as another poster has said, SpaceX seems well-intended and useful.

DubiousPusher 5y ago

Ok but, "I have a sweeping romantic idea in my head that connects a bunch of human activity into a chain and I have decided that this is the next thing in that chain" isn't that good of an argument IMO.

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brokenmachine 5y ago

>It's how we get to the moon and Mars and how we survive as a species. It's what's next. The moon and mars are both ridiculously unsuitable for human life. Why on earth would that possibly be an option rather than making even a cursory attempt to slow or stop the destruction of our perfect planet? It's a ridiculous idea. How could anyone think this was a worthwhile endeavor?

aporetics 5y ago

They’re not exploring, they’re creating private, for profit, ventures. Your comparison doesn’t hold.

raffraffraff 5y ago

I keep seeing people make this wild assumption that we're going to somehow terraform Mars and make it habitable. If Earth becomes so uninhabitable that we literally need to find another planet to live in, the question I'd ask is, "why couldn't we save an already perfect planet where we and everything we rely upon evolved?". At what point does earth become so fucked up that we look at Mars and think "Hmm, that looks like an option"

birdyrooster 5y ago

What if ending poverty was next, that would be cool, and then Mars?

ladyattis 5y ago

Aiming high is all well and good when you got problems at home settled. For too long we've been avoiding fixing those problems which aren't intractable such as homelessness and poverty. If we can supposedly do both like the article mentions then why aren't we?

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jjj123 5y ago

There are two main disagreements I have with this point. They’re values based, so I don’t expect to change your mind, but to give you some perspective on why people roll their eyes at these stunts: 1. I don’t think we should be looking towards “what’s next” when we have plenty of more pressing issues to solve here and now. I’d rather we more equitably distribute resources so everyone has food, healthcare, and housing before we start trying to colonize mars. 2. I would rather the money be spent in a more democratic way. I don’t want to let a few people decide “what’s next” for me, let’s redistribute that wealth and let the public decide what’s most pressing.

birksherty 5y ago

This is different than humans polluting and crushing the whole ecosystem for it's greed. It will be better for other species if it try to reverse at least what it can instead as we are the cause. Humans are the literally the worst thing in universe. It will also be better for all species if humans die out asap.

50 5y ago

"What can we gain by sailing to the moon if we are not able to cross the abyss that separates us from ourselves? This is the most important of all voyages of discovery, and without it all the rest are not only useless but disastrous."

lwhi 5y ago

We ruin what we have and move on. The problem with the West Wing, was that it added a pompulus romantic sheen to subjects that arguably didn't deserve it.