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There's actually a third intractable reality up against star travel: A significant portion of the human species doesn't have adequate food or housing, much les

• Vecr 3y ago
  It's not a crime against humanity. "Crimes against humanity" are actually very specific things, if you consider them real at all and not made up and enforced post hoc. General considerations of property rights let you go to mars using your resources if you want to.
• RetroTechie 3y ago
  True, humanity has big problems. But those aren't caused by resources diverted to space exploration. And more importantly: diverting those resources elsewhere would do little to solve those problems. History, politics, dictators, colonialism, economic inequality, greed, ethnic/religious conflict, etc etc. Nothing that eg. NASA or a bag of $$ would fix.
  • jwells89 3y ago
    Particularly when considering how small the amount going towards space is, which in the US, Congress is all too eager to pare down even further. Funding would be better sourced from cuts to things like military spending, which is well known for being egregiously wasteful and inefficient with its problems with pork barrel projects, fractal spiral subcontracting, and how practically anything it asks for gets rubberstamped with little question.
    • luqtas 3y ago
      fundings for it is low now, how about when we have thousands on the Moon/Mars? will Earth poverty be eradicated etc.? the point the op raised is relevant from a historical perspective, as probably the firsts who will populate the moon and Mars will think they are living the future; meawhile people die of dehydration this night also we barely can't grow lettuce at space and that's missions at millions of USD... i think a society which is well stablished and care for everyone's welfare is more likely to collaborate and build technology to get away from the solar system than our shit greed of today, despite the great amount of good and intelligent people who sometimes can't even do stuff because academia conflict etc.
      • jwells89 3y ago
        Settlements on the Moon, Mars, or anywhere else beyond Earth’s orbit are going to be brutal for decades to come, no matter how much money gets poured into them. The first settlers are going to be spending every waking moment securing their existence and making it more sustainable. These places won’t be joyride destinations. Perhaps it’s pessimistic, but I have little faith that even a single country will eradicate suffering within its own borders, let alone all countries coming together to cooperate and eliminate it globally. If we wait until all earthly problems are solved before going into space, we’ll simply never go to space. At some point something will happen that will stop launches entirely, we’ll lose our institutional knowledge of rocketry and spaceflight, and putting things in orbit (let alone people on the moon) will become an impossibility again.
        • luqtas 3y ago
          won't be a joyride but won't be living close or in starvation and in an overly cold/hot house... settlement on Mars/Moon is a multi-disciplinary act! figuring out efficient and safe geothermal or nuclear or whatever technology to improve Earth's life, definitely translates to future settlements... so why not do it here? it isn't about eradicating suffering, as it's part of the existence (probably) but it's about providing a decent life for everyone
  • pyrale 3y ago
    > But those aren't caused by resources diverted to space exploration. Going to space IS politics. It is, essentially, a vanity goal for a whole society. The resources diverted are, essentially, mindshare and political. It is only fair then that people ask why we as a society look to space when we have so many problems here, just as it was fair to ask why so much attention was given to the race to the moon rather than, say, civil rights [1]. [1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=goh2x_G0ct4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=goh2x_G0ct4
• ptdn 3y ago
  The last century has involved the fastest reduction in severe poverty ever seen in human history, and it's not stopping anytime soon. We're allowed to also do other things.
• zer00eyz 3y ago
  Wow. 1. There are people who live the way they do by choice. Folks who got that education and opportunity and rejected it. Your perspective of "mud huts bad" is very centric to how you were raised. It's one step removed from handing the natives a bible and having them build a church to civilize them. 2. No matter how we organize the word, there's always gonna be a line, and someone will be at the back. Sending that line in a new direction might be the next evolution of the species. Your iPhone is magic to someone 200 years ago, should we wait till everyone has a iPhone till we make any more advancement. 3. Warfare? Eco destruction? Unless your very old, its likely primate warfare at scale was well before your lifetime. As for the eco side of things, well you should take some comfort in the rate of change for the positive that your seeing.
  • johnea 3y ago
    You can't really be arguing that people live in mud huts by choice? Or that they squandered their copious opportunities? "More than 80 percent of Indians (about 700 million) live on less than $1.25 a day" Saying that we shouldn't spend money to send humans into inter-stellar space is not the same as saying we should stop all technical advancement. But really, we'd be better off without iPhone or Android as well. A more democratized technological advancement would benefit many more people, to a much greater degree. Do you really think if Steve Jobs hadn't been born that smart phone would not have been invented? But they'd almost certainly be a more accessible s/w development platform...
    • zer00eyz 3y ago
      >>> You can't really be arguing that people live in mud huts by choice? You should go look at the indigenous protection efforts in the amazon. You should look at what much of Africa has done. There are plenty of people living in their areas version of mud huts, with cell phones and solar panels. "Mud huts" are in some places very much the local, renewable building material. https://thisisafrica.me/lifestyle/wisdom-african-hut/ https://thisisafrica.me/lifestyle/wisdom-african-hut/
      • margalabargala 3y ago
• 123yawaworht456 3y ago
  ah yes, good old "whitey on the moon" rhetoric. god forbids we do anything to advance the humanity until we achieve total outcome equality first.
  • tehjoker 3y ago
    I don't think anyone is arguing we need it to be perfect, which is impossible, but certainly the extreme situation we find ourselves in right now is ridiculous and much could be done. I love space, I want us to spend on space, but the price tag does matter. If we can take the money out of the military, that would be a great step.
• lemiant 3y ago
  This is analogous to arguing against exploring the Americas because Europe had poverty. It seems to me that over a couple hundred year time horizon the new land, resources, technologies and economies of scale added by the new world were clearly a net benefit to europeans as a whole and paid back the initial investment many times over.
  • johnea 3y ago
    If Europe had ended poverty before enslaving the rest of the world, it would be a much better world now. How could anyone argue against that? A people that were interested in raising others around them out of poverty, before setting off to devastate and enslave other continents, would probably have treated the people they found on those continents much more humanly. If the european colonial diaspora had set out to advance other places, as opposed to exploiting them, we probably wouldn't have global poverty today. The "return on investment" of colonizing north america was made by exporting tobacco to europe, clear cutting the north american continent, near extincting major mega-fauna and replacing them with invasive species, and shipping africans to the americas for slave labor. Considering that a net positive is a dubious conclusion. But of course we have to ask: net positive for whom? And of course, misses the point of the original comment: that there are no resources to be exploited 40 light years from earth! It's a one way trip...
    • mistrial9 3y ago
      > before enslaving the rest of the world try a broad History of Slavery before asserting that the Age of Exploration was just one big slave-fest, please. Its a bigoted statement to meld them together without the actions of other civilizations taken into account.
    • lo_zamoyski 3y ago
      This is such a silly take. Europe enslaved the world? Sorry, but slavery was an institution long before some Europeans took part in it (emphasis on "took part" as it was cooperative, involving African, Arab, etc. slave traders), and continues to be practiced long after those European empires abolished it within their own empires. The abolitionist movement was also European, and certainly Western. And how can you know if the world would have been better? That's a counterfactual you either cannot know, or one that fails to account for all the good that was also transmitted through colonialism, or absorbed by the colonial powers. It wasn't black and white. And even where the bad is concerned, while there is not argument for chattel slavery, good can come out of bad things. Furthermore, you are reducing European influence to one aspect of one aspect, not even just colonialism, which is not even uniquely European, but slavery per se. This is ridiculous. Your argument w.r.t. poverty is also the same boring reductive fallacy that people who argue against beautiful architecture and art make ("You could have fed so many people with that money!"). Guess what: you can do both. You don't "solve poverty" by spending a sum of money on food over art. Those people will be hungry soon. That's one. Two, Man does not live by bread alone. Beauty matters. We don't live to eat. We eat to live. And yes, we can both care for the starving and invest in things other than helping the poor. The idea that Europe is responsible for global poverty is also obtuse, historically illiterate, and devoid of common sense. There was plenty of poverty in the world before the evil European showed up. If anything, Western commerce, whatever its flaws, has lifted many out of poverty. Yes, capitalism, whatever its flaws, has lifted many, especially the West, out of poverty and into a good deal of material comfort. Look at the 20th century alone. It's better to be poor today than poor a century or a few centuries ago. The average man today is far better off today materially than he has ever been, than even the materially better off in previous centuries were. Our ancestors weren't perfect, and we should not repeat their errors, but it takes a certain kind of ingratitude and blindness to fail to appreciate the cumulative good they did leave us, an ingratitude and blindness seemingly particular to snarky, ideologically infected oikophobes in the West. Believe me: Africans aren't generally seething with hatred at the good of the West the way people in the West do. If anything, they are more likely to despise the malaise and decadence they see in the West today, that the West is trying to force down the throats of everyone else. They are looking to replicate what is actually good in the West in their own countries.
• galdosdi 3y ago
  > There's actually a third intractable reality up against star travel: How is this intractable? This is a moral argument. It won't stop anyone from doing it. I am not sure you are using the word intractable correctly. It implies impossible, or unrealistic to be solved even if hypothetically possible, etc. Whereas from what you say it seems it's possible, you just think it should not be done (due to being in your view immoral). Very different things.
• mistermann 3y ago
  > is just so outrageously wasteful, not to mention self-centered and selfish, that's it's literally a crime against humanity. You're "not wrong", but you're taking a rather negatively biased view on the matter...it is also hilarious, simultaneously.
• fellowmartian 3y ago
  You’re assuming the resources can be distributed better, if only they weren’t “wasted” on space travel. I suspect the problems you’re describing exist _because_ we can’t distribute better - we don’t know how. We’ve reached the limits of social organization at this stage of civilization and those problems won’t ever be solved unless we innovate our way out of it. You might counter my argument with a plethora of “obvious” solutions, but I suspect most of them will be top-down ones, that, unfortunately, that don’t seem to ever work. You might also enumerate instances where top-down initiatives have worked successfully, but I’d argue that in each of the cases there was something about the environment that made it stick - the soil was already fertile. The amount of money spent on “lofty” pursuits like space exploration is almost orthogonal to the issue at hand, within reason, obviously - it’s definitely possible to bankrupt yourself like the Soviet Union did. I put “lofty” in quotes because these pursuits are obviously very practical in the long run. I don’t want to repeat the argument you’ve probably heard a million times, but it’s obviously true that if everyone thought like this back when we living in caves - we’d never even get huts. And we were much poorer back then.
• M95D 3y ago
  1) There will always be some people who will live in mud huts. Do I need to explain why? 2) Probably the biggest improvements in quality of life on Earth came because of America (North, mostly). Those countries exists today because extremely big resources were invested by the kings in Europe to cross the ocean at a time when standards of living there were unimaginably bad. They could have given the money to the poor instead.