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Time to expand beyond the planet then? If we don't manage it before we start down a degrowth/de-industrialisation path, we might well have missed the one chanc
by bluescrn 3y ago
Time to expand beyond the planet then?
If we don't manage it before we start down a degrowth/de-industrialisation path, we might well have missed the one chance our species had to go multiplanetary.
- bayindirh 3y agoWhy not get the greed under control first?
- denkmoon 3y agoIt is preferable to deal with tractable problems
- bayindirh 3y agoGreed can be found in many tractable problems. Shall we start with energy companies love for fossil fuels to keep status quo, or Bitcoin's energy use, some Chinese cities' production of CFCs or private jets' emissions, to name a few?
- AnimalMuppet 3y agoWhat is your objective evidence that those problems are tractable? To me, they look like greed making problems intractable.
- dsabanin 3y agoHow do you propose we do that? I'm not asking individually, but on a planetary scale.
- kelnos 3y agoI guess that would give us more time, but why would you expect that we wouldn't do the same thing to any other planet we settle on? Also consider that any other known planet within reach (and I'm really being generous with "within reach") is much, much less habitable than Earth; it would be far easier for such a colony to fail catastrophically.
- jacobsenscott 3y agoIf by "expand beyond planet" you mean bilk investors out of billions of dollars pretending you have a plan to "expand beyond the planet" then yes.
- bluescrn 3y agoForget billions of dollars. Trillions of dollars. And it may fail entirely, but it's probably got a better chance of success than trying to fix the climate while we still fight wars between nations.
- krapp 3y ago> but it's probably got a better chance of success than trying to fix the climate while we still fight wars between nations. No, it won't. It will literally have less chance of success, because you're combining the low probability of the necessary long term political will and all of the financial and technological difficulties with the actual fleeting possibility of interplanetary travel and then the nigh nonexistent possibility of long-term colonization. All while we still fight wars between nations. Just as the time to fix the climate was thirty years ago, the time to start our path towards becoming an interplanetary society was fifty or sixty years ago. I like sci-fi as much as the next nerd but the cold, hard reality is we're stuck here with the consequences of our actions. Aliens aren't going to save us, God isn't going to save us, Elon Musk isn't going to save us. The climate collapse is unavoidable and inevitable, and no solution is going to stop it, but at least we can mitigate the damage (as futile as that might be) and plan for our survival, instead of wasting time imagining the next ten thousand years in a pressurized tube on Mars.
- groby_b 3y agoIf we could solve the problems of colonizing Mars, we'd long be in a position of solving the problems of keeping Earth habitable. I mean, by all means, let's try for multiplanetary, but it's not an answer for "if we miss a sustainable path here". It'll require a function Earth for a long long time.