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It is our duty because life is programmed to spread. It’s in the biology of any living thing, ranging from animals to plants to microorganisms. Our planet’s lif
by yrgulation 4y ago
It is our duty because life is programmed to spread. It’s in the biology of any living thing, ranging from animals to plants to microorganisms. Our planet’s lifespan and size are finite so we have to seek out new venues.
You are right re being good to each other.
Scarcity of resources leads to a lot of bad things. People and all life are programmed to compete for resources in order to survive. Most wars are caused by the struggle to control these resources. And that causes misery to those on the losing side.
Near space has endless amounts of everything we need so that competition can be more relaxed.
If anything, expanding to space will make life better here on earth, by keeping our planet cleaner and safer, and will give us the time we need to learn how to move beyond our basic instincts. We progressed a lot but we need to do more.
Mars shouldn't even be the immediate goal. We should harness the energy of our star at its full potential and extract nearby resources as first steps. Mars will be a byproduct of these two.
Else we are stuck arguing over -isms and tribal wars at scale over who owns what part of the planet.
The very fact that we push electrons writing here shows that we humans have moved beyond the natural, so simply stating that “that's nature and no real value is lost” is not in our … nature.
- seti0Cha 4y agoI don't know, it seems as though one of the basic instincts we've progressed past is our instinct to spread. When given the freedom to choose, people reproduce at less than a replacement rate. World population is still rising, but birth rates are falling nearly everywhere as different regions become more prosperous. Assuming this continues, where will we find the people to spread across the universe? Japan can't find people to spread outside of Tokyo.
- yrgulation 4y agoI am not convinced many people are free to chose, particularly in the west. When your life depends on a mortgage, ever increasing bills and being in an office at least eight hours a day you dont have much of a choice. Thats just fancy poverty. People with actual freedom seem to reproduce beyond replacement rates: https://www.statista.com/statistics/299077/billionaires-children/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/299077/billionaires-chil... https://qz.com/1125805/the-reason-the-richest-women-in-the-us-are-the-ones-having-the-most-kids/ https://qz.com/1125805/the-reason-the-richest-women-in-the-u...
- seti0Cha 4y agoBillionaires are not a good model for what people will do if they don't have to worry about mortgages and bills, they're a model of what people will do when they have virtually no resource constraints whatsoever. If people don't have to cook, clean, give up vacations, sacrifice their hobbies and career goals, and can pay an army of servants to do any unpleasant childcare tasks, then yeah, I suppose they'll have more kids. From what I've read a certain number of people do say that financial constraints cause them to have fewer children than they'd like, but stated preferences are not far enough above revealed preferences for that to change the result. In Hungary Orban is virtually throwing money at people to have more kids but the population is still declining. Countries with robust social safety nets are doing no better than those without. The only exception I'm aware of is Israel, primarily due to the Orthodox community.