4 ms·

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

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
    - Traster 5y ago
      This is still orders of magnitude longer than our distance to the Roman Empire. We've gone from no flight to space travel in 150 years and you're worried about 50 million years.
      - lend000 5y ago
        I'm not worried at all, because the jealous, anti-progressive, pessimistic commenters littering this thread are not the dominant force in society (even if they did have a numbers advantage, which I don't believe they do, they would lose by the inherent virtue of the weakness in their personalities), and people like Musk, Bezos, and the thousands of engineers executing their visions will ensure humanity has self-sustaining off world colonies in just a few centuries.
        andrepd 5y ago
        You drank the kook-aid bud, that's all I can say to that.
      - michaelpb 5y ago
        Right all these comments are just baffling me. This is premature optimization on steroids. For a random analogy, I really hope these people aren't in meetings arguing about how to design a DB schema to last for 50000000 years, when the meeting topic was how to fix slow queries on an unindexed field. The US life expectancy dropped one of the largest drops ever (1.5 years) and instead of facing the actual real-life disasters happening, "science enthusiasts" are quoting TV shows about science fiction disasters that might happen in 50000000 years... while the scene outside the window literally looks like this: https://abc7news.com/why-is-the-sky-orange-sf-yellow-california/6415705/ https://abc7news.com/why-is-the-sky-orange-sf-yellow-califor...
        dboreham 5y ago
        I think I have been in that meeting.
        5y ago
- mustafa_pasi 5y ago
  Humanity won't go extinct any time soon, and at this point in time focusing resources on fighting problems like climate change is infinitely more rewarding than any stupid dicking around on the moon or mars. Mars won't ever be even as habitable as a thoroughly fucked up earth. It is a huge waste of time and resources that could be better employed on more immediate problems.
  - theodric 5y ago
    It's possible to care about more than one thing at once. Some people simply cannot be motivated to work on climate change, but there are 7.5 billion people on the planet, and they don't all need to work on the same thing. We just need a critical mass, the same as for any other problem.
  - ThomPete 5y ago
    Climate change isn't en existential risk, the way we deal with it is developing new knowledge which as a by product allow us to go to the moon or mars. Furthermore there is a whole other perspective on space which is military and includes china who is not going to hold back.
  - aeternum 5y ago
    Even if we manage to get human carbon output under control, we know that historically the earth has gone through very extreme natural climate changes. If we want to keep the earth habitable by humans over long time-scale then we absolutely need to learn how to do minor terraforming. Much better to experiment on the moon or mars than the earth.
- ModernMech 5y ago
  We're talking a timescale of millions of years before that happens, right? Have you you thought this all the way through? All the possible scenarios? If we send humans out to the stars, our civilizations will diverge. First there's a hop to Mars, then Titan, then then next solar system over, then a galaxy or two. Soon enough you've seeded the universe with human civilizations that have no concept of what Earth was like. Maybe they've heard stories, seen videos or pictures, but what will they really know about Earth in 100k years? It's not like we're going to be one happy galactic human family. We can't even do that here on Earth, how are we going to maintain peaceful relationships across the universe? So now all you've done is seed the entire universe with a race of petty, greedy, selfish, war-prone primates; living on barren planets, underground or in habitats; who have stories about a mythical homeland filled with a breathable atmosphere, rivers of drinkable water, abundant lifeforms that roam the surface freely, where no one has to live like hamsters (what even are hamsters?) in a habitat. What if they start talking about a better future for themselves on another planet, and they come right back here to conquer it? I guess what I'm saying is, if all we're doing here is using science fiction to project out millions of years into the future, why are we only projecting positive scenarios where humanity heads to the stars and saves the human race from obliteration? What if instead of inventing the United Federation of Planets, all we do is invent the Reavers from Firefly, and we end up the authors of our own demise?
- wilsonnb3 5y ago
  That’s okay. Nothing lasts forever.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
snowwrestler 5y ago
They’re not saying “let’s do things the way we’ve always done them,” they are observing that people seem to have a huge intrinsic drive to explore. It’s cousin to the famous phrase, “why do we climb the mountain? Because it is there.” It’s not a rational thing but it is a very real part of being human nonetheless.

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
  - Traster 5y ago
    This is still orders of magnitude longer than our distance to the Roman Empire. We've gone from no flight to space travel in 150 years and you're worried about 50 million years.
    - lend000 5y ago
      I'm not worried at all, because the jealous, anti-progressive, pessimistic commenters littering this thread are not the dominant force in society (even if they did have a numbers advantage, which I don't believe they do, they would lose by the inherent virtue of the weakness in their personalities), and people like Musk, Bezos, and the thousands of engineers executing their visions will ensure humanity has self-sustaining off world colonies in just a few centuries.
      - andrepd 5y ago
        You drank the kook-aid bud, that's all I can say to that.
    - michaelpb 5y ago
      Right all these comments are just baffling me. This is premature optimization on steroids. For a random analogy, I really hope these people aren't in meetings arguing about how to design a DB schema to last for 50000000 years, when the meeting topic was how to fix slow queries on an unindexed field. The US life expectancy dropped one of the largest drops ever (1.5 years) and instead of facing the actual real-life disasters happening, "science enthusiasts" are quoting TV shows about science fiction disasters that might happen in 50000000 years... while the scene outside the window literally looks like this: https://abc7news.com/why-is-the-sky-orange-sf-yellow-california/6415705/ https://abc7news.com/why-is-the-sky-orange-sf-yellow-califor...
      - dboreham 5y ago
        I think I have been in that meeting.
      - 5y ago
mustafa_pasi 5y ago
Humanity won't go extinct any time soon, and at this point in time focusing resources on fighting problems like climate change is infinitely more rewarding than any stupid dicking around on the moon or mars. Mars won't ever be even as habitable as a thoroughly fucked up earth. It is a huge waste of time and resources that could be better employed on more immediate problems.
- theodric 5y ago
  It's possible to care about more than one thing at once. Some people simply cannot be motivated to work on climate change, but there are 7.5 billion people on the planet, and they don't all need to work on the same thing. We just need a critical mass, the same as for any other problem.
- ThomPete 5y ago
  Climate change isn't en existential risk, the way we deal with it is developing new knowledge which as a by product allow us to go to the moon or mars. Furthermore there is a whole other perspective on space which is military and includes china who is not going to hold back.
- aeternum 5y ago
  Even if we manage to get human carbon output under control, we know that historically the earth has gone through very extreme natural climate changes. If we want to keep the earth habitable by humans over long time-scale then we absolutely need to learn how to do minor terraforming. Much better to experiment on the moon or mars than the earth.
ModernMech 5y ago
We're talking a timescale of millions of years before that happens, right? Have you you thought this all the way through? All the possible scenarios? If we send humans out to the stars, our civilizations will diverge. First there's a hop to Mars, then Titan, then then next solar system over, then a galaxy or two. Soon enough you've seeded the universe with human civilizations that have no concept of what Earth was like. Maybe they've heard stories, seen videos or pictures, but what will they really know about Earth in 100k years? It's not like we're going to be one happy galactic human family. We can't even do that here on Earth, how are we going to maintain peaceful relationships across the universe? So now all you've done is seed the entire universe with a race of petty, greedy, selfish, war-prone primates; living on barren planets, underground or in habitats; who have stories about a mythical homeland filled with a breathable atmosphere, rivers of drinkable water, abundant lifeforms that roam the surface freely, where no one has to live like hamsters (what even are hamsters?) in a habitat. What if they start talking about a better future for themselves on another planet, and they come right back here to conquer it? I guess what I'm saying is, if all we're doing here is using science fiction to project out millions of years into the future, why are we only projecting positive scenarios where humanity heads to the stars and saves the human race from obliteration? What if instead of inventing the United Federation of Planets, all we do is invent the Reavers from Firefly, and we end up the authors of our own demise?
wilsonnb3 5y ago
That’s okay. Nothing lasts forever.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

snowwrestler 5y ago

They’re not saying “let’s do things the way we’ve always done them,” they are observing that people seem to have a huge intrinsic drive to explore. It’s cousin to the famous phrase, “why do we climb the mountain? Because it is there.” It’s not a rational thing but it is a very real part of being human nonetheless.