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Authors like this one previously also wrote poorly aged hit pieces like "Why not across the oceans", "Why not to the skies" and "Why not to space".
by daneel_w 4y ago
Authors like this one previously also wrote poorly aged hit pieces like "Why not across the oceans", "Why not to the skies" and "Why not to space".
- pnt12 4y agoThat's very dismissive. I don't agree that doing more of the same is good because it worked out before, even if the current goal is harder by many orders of magnitude. Criticism is good! Let the best ideas prevail.
- MicolashKyoka 4y agoExactly, if we were to listen to such tales (or similar ones by penny pinchers), we would still be hitting rocks to make fire in our little caves. Venturing beyond is an amazing way to enrich our knowledge graph.
- palata 4y agoExactly, if we were to listen to such tales we may even still be living in a sustainable world! Luckily, we're steadily destroying life because we can. /s
- ikrenji 4y agospace exploration is not responsible for the poor state of the current environment, nor will forgoing on space exploration fix our planet...
- palata 4y agoNot directly, like most things. What is responsible is essentially the use of fossil fuels, and space exploration would not be possible without them. Now, not only fossil fuels are limited (we have passed peak oil), but we don't remotely have an alternative. So I believe that there is an argument to make that insanely expensive, hard, and pretty much useless engineering projects (w.r.t. solving the biodiversity problem, which is actually about survival on Earth) could possibly be questioned. Some will say that "if you don't spend all that money into inhabited space exploration, you won't necessarily spend it wisely. But I would disagree there: we should really start spending money (and fossil fuels) wisely because we are running out of time.
- jacquesm 4y agoThis is exactly the kind of dismissal that the guidelines explicitly ask you not to make.
- daneel_w 4y agoThe entire article is a snarky dismissal of humanity's possibly grandest venture so far. Let us at least allow ourselves room for some "bilateralism".
- jacquesm 4y agoDifferent rules for articles, which happen on the person's website vs the comments here. Obviously the guidelines do not apply to other sites than this one. And one man's snark is another man's sense of humor, humanity's grandest venture so far would be to learn to live in peace and to evenly spread our wealth, not to manage to hop to another planet and die there. And as dismissals come this one is anything but shallow, in fact, it's deeper than it needed to be.
- ikrenji 4y agowhy? he has a point. humanity is going to be around for a very long time and I don't think we will accept being limited to earth forever
- jacquesm 4y agoAs soon as you shift the context to 'forever' any discussion is really meaningless, you will want to limit forever to something shorter than the heat death of the universe anyway. Forever is just a cop-out. The question is: is this relevant in the present or not and in the present + a good couple of hundred years at a minimum this planet is all we've got no matter what SpaceX is up to.
- ikrenji 4y ago200 years? that’s a very very long time. NASA is going back to moon by 2025. i think there will be humans on mars by 2035... 2055 LATEST