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It's the last part I agree with more: if I wanted to advance, in a serious way, the cause of enviromental and ecological science, then the tasks of building and
by XorNot 3y ago
It's the last part I agree with more: if I wanted to advance, in a serious way, the cause of enviromental and ecological science, then the tasks of building and establishing off-world biospheres will do both those things in environments which (1) we can actually kind of afford to fail in and (2) which will drive home the absolute point that this biosphere is incredibly valuable.
Give those ideas a run, and then you've made a compelling case for subsidizing and bootstrapping the move of dirty heavy industry and mining off-world: metals from the asteroid belt, manufacturing in high orbit - the ecological science to make it more sustainable.
You then also get some economic benefits once you're up and running: off-world industry would find the products of the biosphere very valuable - more so then anything so simple as oil, metal or refined chemicals. Putting a distinct price on keeping the Earth's biodiversity alive and protected because people want to be able to buy "live soil" - to borrow from the expanse - would put us in a much better long term position as a species.
- timschmidt 3y agoMost folks discount potential negative future outcomes - especially those which can't be controlled. It's called optimism bias. But something tells me that space rocks don't care and behave much more in line with natural distributions. Climactic history of Earth is nuts. WAY more extreme than our little 12,000 year slice of history would suggest. Which means we're in for surprises if we can avoid killing ourselves for long enough.