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Yes there is a better way to develop tech without knowingly sending a group of people to their deaths. We could throw 100s of billions of dollars into it. But
by dartos 2y ago
Yes there is a better way to develop tech without knowingly sending a group of people to their deaths.
We could throw 100s of billions of dollars into it.
But it’s harder to sell to investors than language models
- ericd 2y agoWays that have no realistic way of happening aren’t better ways. Obviously we don’t send a group without making it not certain death first. But the person I was responding to said that it would be reliant on Earth, which, yeah, you can’t realistically develop a fully self reliant economy without making a reliant economy first.
- BriggyDwiggs42 2y agoI have two important questions. My first question is: would you be enthusiastic about the concept of a lunar colony? My second question is: what kinds of things do you think are viable for a colony made within the next 50 years?
- ericd 2y agoLunar seems more convenient for debugging colony creation than Martian, since the shipping time from Earth will be a whole lot shorter. Projects are a lot harder when trips to the hardware store take months rather than days. I think Starship makes colonies a whole lot more viable, once they iron out the issues, but I generally don't know enough to answer your second question.
- dartos 2y ago> Projects are a lot harder when trips to the hardware store take months rather than days How long do you think it takes to plan a trip to the moon? > I think Starship makes colonies a whole lot more viable Why?
- ericd 2y agoPresumably there’d be regular missions, so there’d be relatively little additional planning for a given moon trip, similar to how there’s a lot less planning/paperwork that goes into a Falcon 9 launch these days than there was for any rocket before Falcon 9. Starship’s goal is to drop cost of mass to orbit by a couple of orders of magnitude, if they pull that off, it would drop the cost of supporting a colony by quite a bit.
- BriggyDwiggs42 2y agoI’m glad you are into the lunar colony. My biggest issue with the mars colony crowd is their disinterest in a much more practical lunar colony for us to cut our teeth on. Overall I feel like a lot of people are into colonies for aesthetic reasons. If it’s gonna 100-200 years before a colony could be self sustaining, then why are we treating multiplanetaryness as some kind of practical solution to current-day issues that appeared within the last century?