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I grew up loving space. I still do. I think it’s in humanity’s nature to explore, experiment, expand. But if we can’t fix the home we have, what reason is ther

I grew up loving space. I still do. I think it’s in humanity’s nature to explore, experiment, expand. But if we can’t fix the home we have, what reason is there that humanity expand into space? How do we know we won’t f that up too? Our current home needs our collective imagination and creativity more than the moon, or space. Once we solve this problem we can move on, but until we do, space exploration is narcissistic manifest destiny escapism at a species wide level.

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
themaninthedark 3y ago
Your question has been answered, see below. And perhaps you would be glad to hear that the "narcissistic exploration of space" has actually lead to greater care and concern for the planet than we had before we started the endeavor. https://lettersofnote.com/2012/08/06/why-explore-space/ https://lettersofnote.com/2012/08/06/why-explore-space/ >However, I believe, like many of my friends, that travelling to the Moon and eventually to Mars and to other planets is a venture which we should undertake now, and I even believe that this project, in the long run, will contribute more to the solution of these grave problems we are facing here on Earth than many other potential projects of help which are debated and discussed year after year, and which are so extremely slow in yielding tangible results. >Besides the need for new technologies, there is a continuing great need for new basic knowledge in the sciences if we wish to improve the conditions of human life on Earth. We need more knowledge in physics and chemistry, in biology and physiology, and very particularly in medicine to cope with all these problems which threaten man’s life: hunger, disease, contamination of food and water, pollution of the environment. >Of all the many wonderful results of the space program so far, this picture may be the most important one. It opened our eyes to the fact that our Earth is a beautiful and most precious island in an unlimited void, and that there is no other place for us to live but the thin surface layer of our planet, bordered by the bleak nothingness of space. Never before did so many people recognize how limited our Earth really is, and how perilous it would be to tamper with its ecological balance. Ever since this picture was first published, voices have become louder and louder warning of the grave problems that confront man in our times: pollution, hunger, poverty, urban living, food production, water control, overpopulation. It is certainly not by accident that we begin to see the tremendous tasks waiting for us at a time when the young space age has provided us the first good look at our own planet.
- pizza234 3y ago
  > great need for new basic knowledge in the sciences if we wish to improve the conditions of human life on Earth. We need more knowledge in physics and chemistry, in biology and physiology, and very particularly in medicine to cope with all these problems which threaten man’s life: hunger, disease, contamination of food and water, pollution of the environment. This take is strikingly similar to the movie "Don't Look Up": > And when these treasures from heaven [asteroid fragments] are claimed, poverty as we know it, social injustice, lose of biodiversity, all these multitudes of problems will become relics of the past and humanity will stride through the pillars of Boaz and Jachin, naked into the glory of a golden age which... is a satire. We need to stop (over) polluting the environment, not to find better ways to clean the environment. Finding better ways to clean the environment will only lead humanity to pollute more. Ernst Stuhlinger obviously never took a stroll nearby a chemical plant.
  - themaninthedark 3y ago
    I am sure that the associate director of science at NASA never visited a chemical plant. /s We pollute the environment by just living. After you eat a meal and digest it, you take a crap. After you drink some water you take a piss. That is pollution, but it is low level. You get 100 people all taking craps and pissing in one area, that causes huge problems for the local area. Also breeds disease. Your solution in this case would be what? Because you say not to find a way to clean, just stop over polluting. What you and the writer's of "Don't Look Up" don't seem to get is that, by pressing humanity into space and solving challenging problems we get new tools to deal with existing problems. Not that "All the problems will cease to exist once we do the thing." You get a new tool, how you use that tool is up to you and those around you. In 1920, someone developed a pesticide that was great for killing louse, fumigating ships and warehouses. This was great and saved many people. Then in 1942, someone decided to use it to systematically murder a race of people. This does not mean that we should never make or use pesticides again, it means that we need to bring people closer together and get them to stop trying to kill each other over slight differences.
    - pizza234 3y ago
MattPalmer1086 3y ago
Maybe learning to live with scarce resources and recycling everything could be useful technologies to develop for both space and Earth. Should we also stop making entertainment and games until we fix this little planet of ours? Don't do anything else that isn't "fix the earth" related? If not, why is space singled out as the one thing we're not allowed to do?
- superultra 3y ago
  It's funny to me how as Hacker News commentors, we tend to approach coding in a mostly pragmatic, efficient way. As engineers. Yet when it comes to space, we fall for the romance. I love that idea, but the problem is that it's not realistic. There is very little that happens in space with regards to scarce resources that could not also be solved here on earth, for cheaper. I am not suggesting humanity should be banned from space. But to borrow a line from another great scifi show - what has humanity done to earn our place in the stars? How have we treated what we have already been given? What have we done with this? Is there any - and I ask, any, - indication here on this planet that says we will treat what we find out there with any more or less respect than how we treat this planet? This isn't about fixing earth. It's about fixing ourselves. The problem isn't the earth. And if the problem is us, then our problems go with us wherever we go. We have to fix the way we treat the universe around us first.
  - MattPalmer1086 3y ago
    It's funny to me that you talk about pragmatism and efficiency, but you ultimately make a moral and emotive argument that we should fix ourselves before we go anywhere else. My question to you is simply why do we need to fix ourselves first? Seems illogical and unlikely. Fundamentally, space doesn't care if we treat it with respect or not.
    - superultra 3y ago
      I realize that it can seem superficially that I am making an emotive or moral argument but that isn't it at all. Ethics aside, we have to acknowledge that the way we interoperate with our environment is fundamental to our survival of the species, which is in turn what makes it therefore ethical and moral. We aren't going to find ourselves out there, any more or less than Europeans did when they crossed the ocean to find what was to them the New World. If we don't fix how we interoperate as a species with our lived environment, we will die. There is no magic solution in space. We either fix ourselves - we change how we interoperate with the environment - or we die. Going into space solves nothing.
tivert 3y ago
> But if we can’t fix the home we have, what reason is there that humanity expand into space? How do we know we won’t f that up too? So we can grow to become the aliens from Independence Day.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

themaninthedark 3y ago

Your question has been answered, see below. And perhaps you would be glad to hear that the "narcissistic exploration of space" has actually lead to greater care and concern for the planet than we had before we started the endeavor. https://lettersofnote.com/2012/08/06/why-explore-space/ https://lettersofnote.com/2012/08/06/why-explore-space/ >However, I believe, like many of my friends, that travelling to the Moon and eventually to Mars and to other planets is a venture which we should undertake now, and I even believe that this project, in the long run, will contribute more to the solution of these grave problems we are facing here on Earth than many other potential projects of help which are debated and discussed year after year, and which are so extremely slow in yielding tangible results. >Besides the need for new technologies, there is a continuing great need for new basic knowledge in the sciences if we wish to improve the conditions of human life on Earth. We need more knowledge in physics and chemistry, in biology and physiology, and very particularly in medicine to cope with all these problems which threaten man’s life: hunger, disease, contamination of food and water, pollution of the environment. >Of all the many wonderful results of the space program so far, this picture may be the most important one. It opened our eyes to the fact that our Earth is a beautiful and most precious island in an unlimited void, and that there is no other place for us to live but the thin surface layer of our planet, bordered by the bleak nothingness of space. Never before did so many people recognize how limited our Earth really is, and how perilous it would be to tamper with its ecological balance. Ever since this picture was first published, voices have become louder and louder warning of the grave problems that confront man in our times: pollution, hunger, poverty, urban living, food production, water control, overpopulation. It is certainly not by accident that we begin to see the tremendous tasks waiting for us at a time when the young space age has provided us the first good look at our own planet.

pizza234 3y ago
> great need for new basic knowledge in the sciences if we wish to improve the conditions of human life on Earth. We need more knowledge in physics and chemistry, in biology and physiology, and very particularly in medicine to cope with all these problems which threaten man’s life: hunger, disease, contamination of food and water, pollution of the environment. This take is strikingly similar to the movie "Don't Look Up": > And when these treasures from heaven [asteroid fragments] are claimed, poverty as we know it, social injustice, lose of biodiversity, all these multitudes of problems will become relics of the past and humanity will stride through the pillars of Boaz and Jachin, naked into the glory of a golden age which... is a satire. We need to stop (over) polluting the environment, not to find better ways to clean the environment. Finding better ways to clean the environment will only lead humanity to pollute more. Ernst Stuhlinger obviously never took a stroll nearby a chemical plant.
- themaninthedark 3y ago
  I am sure that the associate director of science at NASA never visited a chemical plant. /s We pollute the environment by just living. After you eat a meal and digest it, you take a crap. After you drink some water you take a piss. That is pollution, but it is low level. You get 100 people all taking craps and pissing in one area, that causes huge problems for the local area. Also breeds disease. Your solution in this case would be what? Because you say not to find a way to clean, just stop over polluting. What you and the writer's of "Don't Look Up" don't seem to get is that, by pressing humanity into space and solving challenging problems we get new tools to deal with existing problems. Not that "All the problems will cease to exist once we do the thing." You get a new tool, how you use that tool is up to you and those around you. In 1920, someone developed a pesticide that was great for killing louse, fumigating ships and warehouses. This was great and saved many people. Then in 1942, someone decided to use it to systematically murder a race of people. This does not mean that we should never make or use pesticides again, it means that we need to bring people closer together and get them to stop trying to kill each other over slight differences.
  - pizza234 3y ago

MattPalmer1086 3y ago

Maybe learning to live with scarce resources and recycling everything could be useful technologies to develop for both space and Earth. Should we also stop making entertainment and games until we fix this little planet of ours? Don't do anything else that isn't "fix the earth" related? If not, why is space singled out as the one thing we're not allowed to do?

superultra 3y ago
It's funny to me how as Hacker News commentors, we tend to approach coding in a mostly pragmatic, efficient way. As engineers. Yet when it comes to space, we fall for the romance. I love that idea, but the problem is that it's not realistic. There is very little that happens in space with regards to scarce resources that could not also be solved here on earth, for cheaper. I am not suggesting humanity should be banned from space. But to borrow a line from another great scifi show - what has humanity done to earn our place in the stars? How have we treated what we have already been given? What have we done with this? Is there any - and I ask, any, - indication here on this planet that says we will treat what we find out there with any more or less respect than how we treat this planet? This isn't about fixing earth. It's about fixing ourselves. The problem isn't the earth. And if the problem is us, then our problems go with us wherever we go. We have to fix the way we treat the universe around us first.
- MattPalmer1086 3y ago
  It's funny to me that you talk about pragmatism and efficiency, but you ultimately make a moral and emotive argument that we should fix ourselves before we go anywhere else. My question to you is simply why do we need to fix ourselves first? Seems illogical and unlikely. Fundamentally, space doesn't care if we treat it with respect or not.
  - superultra 3y ago
    I realize that it can seem superficially that I am making an emotive or moral argument but that isn't it at all. Ethics aside, we have to acknowledge that the way we interoperate with our environment is fundamental to our survival of the species, which is in turn what makes it therefore ethical and moral. We aren't going to find ourselves out there, any more or less than Europeans did when they crossed the ocean to find what was to them the New World. If we don't fix how we interoperate as a species with our lived environment, we will die. There is no magic solution in space. We either fix ourselves - we change how we interoperate with the environment - or we die. Going into space solves nothing.

tivert 3y ago

> But if we can’t fix the home we have, what reason is there that humanity expand into space? How do we know we won’t f that up too? So we can grow to become the aliens from Independence Day.