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Won't dreams stay dreams? There's literally nothing there, why go all that way? The distances are so incredibly vast. It seems like we ought to be content with

Won't dreams stay dreams? There's literally nothing there, why go all that way? The distances are so incredibly vast. It seems like we ought to be content with staying put.

cryptoz 1y ago
All life on Earth is going die. Humanity has never been content with staying put, why would we start now? And what do you mean "literally nothing there"? The universe has a loooooot of stuff in it.
- bregma 1y ago
  > The universe has a loooooot of stuff in it. In fact, technically, there's nothing here. It's all out there.
  - jvm___ 1y ago
    The Sun: 99.86% of the solar system's total mass. Jupiter: ~0.095% of the total mass, and ~71% of the non-solar mass. Saturn: ~0.03% of the total mass, and ~19% of the non-solar mass. Uranus and Neptune: Contribute a small percentage to the remaining non-solar mass. All other objects: (inner planets, dwarf planets, moons, asteroids, comets, etc.) account for less than 0.002% of the solar system's total mass. Your brain mass is about 3 disposable water bottles in weight and we can debate what parts of that are thinking and actually "you". You are insignificant on the scale of the solar system let alone the universe.
    - pcrh 1y ago
      >Tragula's wife used to complain to him about the utterly inordinate amount of time he spent staring out into space, or mulling over the mechanics of safety pins, or doing spectrographic analyses of pieces of fairy cake. She would often tell her husband to have some sense of proportion, sometimes as often as thirty-eight times in one day. In response to her pleas for him to find some perspective, he built the Total Perspective Vortex. >Into one end he plugged the whole of reality as extrapolated from a piece of fairy cake, and into the other end he plugged his wife: so that when he turned it on she would see in one instant the whole infinity of creation and herself in relation to it. To Trin Tragula’s horror, the shock completely annihilated her brain... ~Douglas Adams, The Restaurant at the End of the Universe
    - kbelder 1y ago
      insignificant to whom?
      - jvm___ 1y ago
        That'a a very philosophical question. Insignificant to the universe's total mass I guess. Are we the chemicals or just the electrical signals, that makes the mass that makes up "you" even less of an thing.
- NoMoreNicksLeft 1y ago
  >Humanity has never been content with staying put, why would we start now? For whatever reason, humanity's attitude in this regard has changed drastically in the last century. We can't even bother to make the next generations, and a shrinking population eventually (quite quickly, really) shrinks to zero. Not only do they want to "stay put", they want to lay down and die.
  - kibwen 1y ago
    The steelman counterargument is that focusing resources on extraplanetary colonies at the expense of the one habitable planet within reach will hasten humanity's destruction. How are you going to make an Eden on Mars if we can't even make an Eden on Earth? The only large-scale planetary engineering in humanity's history is Veniforming its home world.
    - NoMoreNicksLeft 1y ago
      >The steelman counterargument is that focusing resources on extraplanetary colonies at the expense of the one habitable planet within reach will hasten humanity's destruction. That doesn't seem like a strong argument to me. It seems like a distraction from the crowd that would save the planet by extinguishing humanity if that's what it took. Though what value the planet might have with all of us gone I leave as an exercise for the reader. The first priority of any society that wants to continue to exist into the future must always be to make the next generation. If you do not do this, or if you just leave the task to others hoping that someone else will do it, then you are behaving in a way that will in all probability lead towards there being no next generation sooner or later. The "global warming is the apocalypse" movement constantly talks about how the best way to reduce your carbon footprint is to have no children. >The only large-scale planetary engineering in humanity's history is Veniforming its home world. So it is claimed, but from my point of view it looks very much as if it's intent on making itself extinct through fertility decline. But at least carbon dioxide levels will return to normal, eh?
- agentultra 1y ago
  It's mostly empty, isn't it? By "literally nothing there," I mean there's literally nothing for us. Three stars and a few Earth-sized planets in the habitable zone that are, more than likely, uninhabitable by humans. There's nothing there worth going all that way for. I like sci-fi as much as the next person but the reality of the situation, it seems to me, is that the universe is mostly empty, vast, and inhospitable to human life.
  - JumpCrisscross 1y ago
    > It's mostly empty, isn't it? So is the Pacific Ocean for practical definitions of emptiness. You don't got to the empty places.
  - rbanffy 1y ago
    The difference between a multi-generational interstellar ship and a self-sustaining space colony is the engine. They wouldn’t need inhabitable planets - they would need raw materials to build more ships and habitats. I’m not sure that after spending a lifetime in an ample space colony its inhabitants would feel nostalgic of the time we spent sitting on round rocks cooking around a star.
- ta1243 1y ago
  To quote Babylon 5 Ask ten different scientists about the environment, population control, genetics, and you'll get ten different answers, but there's one thing every scientist on the planet agrees on. Whether it happens in a hundred years or a thousand years or a million years, eventually our Sun will grow cold and go out. When that happens, it won't just take us. It'll take Marilyn Monroe, and Lao-Tzu, and Einstein, and Morobuto, and Buddy Holly, and Aristophanes, and - all of this - all of this - was for nothing. Unless we go to the stars
  - ninetyninenine 1y ago
    The odds are against us. We will never go to the stars. But it doesn’t matter for us as we will likely die before any of this happpens.
  - zppln 1y ago
    And those stars will go out as well.
    - bilbo0s 1y ago
      Well true. That's the fallacy in the given argument.
      - deleted 1y ago
        [deleted]
      - rbanffy 1y ago
        By then we’d better understand how to implement a “Let there be light” procedure. Might very well be the last question we need to ask ourselves.
        andrewflnr 1y ago
        "Implement Fiat Lux" is a hell of a title for a sci-fi story, if nothing else.
mr_toad 1y ago
> There's literally nothing there “Literally everything is in space.”
AnimalMuppet 1y ago
There was a time when there was nothing (European) in the entire New World. There was a time when there was nothing known (to the US) about what was in most of the Louisiana Purchase. There was a time when there was nothing (European) in, say, Ohio. And then Nebraska. And so on. There was literally nothing there? Why go all that way? To see what was there. And then to make something there. [Edit, because I'm rate limited: No, interstellar space is something to cross, to get to stellar space. You think the New World was rich? How about a whole solar system of untapped resources? That's why people will try to go.]
- ta1243 1y ago
  > There was literally nothing there No there wasn't. There was a whole continent of untapped resources. You can argue that the solar system is a lot of untapped resources too. Harder to extract than sailing a piece of wood across an ocean growing some food, and killing the people who are already there. Harder than colonising Antarctica or the surface of the sea too, but there are resources - not just minerals but solar energy too. But interstellar space? Beyond the Oort Cloud? There's no evidence of anything other than perhaps some very sparse dust. That is nothing, and (jokes aside) completely incomparable to Ohio.
- sorcerer-mar 1y ago
  They didn't believe there was literally nothing there. They went all that way to find unclaimed riches. The hypothetical riches were quite obvious: same stuff we have over here, but not owned by someone yet. What are they hypothetical riches of outer space? This is a question we should think about clearly and logically without resorting to stuff like "oh tally-ho the adventure!" type nonsense.
  - rbanffy 1y ago
    There is many times more water in gas giant moons than on Earth. If we develop the technology needed to make a multi-generation ship we also have the technology to make deep space habitats - enough for trillions or quadrillions of people. Just imagine the economic output of a civilisation a million times the size of ours.

Won't dreams stay dreams? There's literally nothing there, why go all that way? The distances are so incredibly vast. It seems like we ought to be content with staying put.

cryptoz 1y ago

All life on Earth is going die. Humanity has never been content with staying put, why would we start now? And what do you mean "literally nothing there"? The universe has a loooooot of stuff in it.

bregma 1y ago
> The universe has a loooooot of stuff in it. In fact, technically, there's nothing here. It's all out there.
- jvm___ 1y ago
  The Sun: 99.86% of the solar system's total mass. Jupiter: ~0.095% of the total mass, and ~71% of the non-solar mass. Saturn: ~0.03% of the total mass, and ~19% of the non-solar mass. Uranus and Neptune: Contribute a small percentage to the remaining non-solar mass. All other objects: (inner planets, dwarf planets, moons, asteroids, comets, etc.) account for less than 0.002% of the solar system's total mass. Your brain mass is about 3 disposable water bottles in weight and we can debate what parts of that are thinking and actually "you". You are insignificant on the scale of the solar system let alone the universe.
  - pcrh 1y ago
    >Tragula's wife used to complain to him about the utterly inordinate amount of time he spent staring out into space, or mulling over the mechanics of safety pins, or doing spectrographic analyses of pieces of fairy cake. She would often tell her husband to have some sense of proportion, sometimes as often as thirty-eight times in one day. In response to her pleas for him to find some perspective, he built the Total Perspective Vortex. >Into one end he plugged the whole of reality as extrapolated from a piece of fairy cake, and into the other end he plugged his wife: so that when he turned it on she would see in one instant the whole infinity of creation and herself in relation to it. To Trin Tragula’s horror, the shock completely annihilated her brain... ~Douglas Adams, The Restaurant at the End of the Universe
  - kbelder 1y ago
    insignificant to whom?
    - jvm___ 1y ago
      That'a a very philosophical question. Insignificant to the universe's total mass I guess. Are we the chemicals or just the electrical signals, that makes the mass that makes up "you" even less of an thing.
NoMoreNicksLeft 1y ago
>Humanity has never been content with staying put, why would we start now? For whatever reason, humanity's attitude in this regard has changed drastically in the last century. We can't even bother to make the next generations, and a shrinking population eventually (quite quickly, really) shrinks to zero. Not only do they want to "stay put", they want to lay down and die.
- kibwen 1y ago
  The steelman counterargument is that focusing resources on extraplanetary colonies at the expense of the one habitable planet within reach will hasten humanity's destruction. How are you going to make an Eden on Mars if we can't even make an Eden on Earth? The only large-scale planetary engineering in humanity's history is Veniforming its home world.
  - NoMoreNicksLeft 1y ago
    >The steelman counterargument is that focusing resources on extraplanetary colonies at the expense of the one habitable planet within reach will hasten humanity's destruction. That doesn't seem like a strong argument to me. It seems like a distraction from the crowd that would save the planet by extinguishing humanity if that's what it took. Though what value the planet might have with all of us gone I leave as an exercise for the reader. The first priority of any society that wants to continue to exist into the future must always be to make the next generation. If you do not do this, or if you just leave the task to others hoping that someone else will do it, then you are behaving in a way that will in all probability lead towards there being no next generation sooner or later. The "global warming is the apocalypse" movement constantly talks about how the best way to reduce your carbon footprint is to have no children. >The only large-scale planetary engineering in humanity's history is Veniforming its home world. So it is claimed, but from my point of view it looks very much as if it's intent on making itself extinct through fertility decline. But at least carbon dioxide levels will return to normal, eh?
agentultra 1y ago
It's mostly empty, isn't it? By "literally nothing there," I mean there's literally nothing for us. Three stars and a few Earth-sized planets in the habitable zone that are, more than likely, uninhabitable by humans. There's nothing there worth going all that way for. I like sci-fi as much as the next person but the reality of the situation, it seems to me, is that the universe is mostly empty, vast, and inhospitable to human life.
- JumpCrisscross 1y ago
  > It's mostly empty, isn't it? So is the Pacific Ocean for practical definitions of emptiness. You don't got to the empty places.
- rbanffy 1y ago
  The difference between a multi-generational interstellar ship and a self-sustaining space colony is the engine. They wouldn’t need inhabitable planets - they would need raw materials to build more ships and habitats. I’m not sure that after spending a lifetime in an ample space colony its inhabitants would feel nostalgic of the time we spent sitting on round rocks cooking around a star.
ta1243 1y ago
To quote Babylon 5 Ask ten different scientists about the environment, population control, genetics, and you'll get ten different answers, but there's one thing every scientist on the planet agrees on. Whether it happens in a hundred years or a thousand years or a million years, eventually our Sun will grow cold and go out. When that happens, it won't just take us. It'll take Marilyn Monroe, and Lao-Tzu, and Einstein, and Morobuto, and Buddy Holly, and Aristophanes, and - all of this - all of this - was for nothing. Unless we go to the stars
- ninetyninenine 1y ago
  The odds are against us. We will never go to the stars. But it doesn’t matter for us as we will likely die before any of this happpens.
- zppln 1y ago
  And those stars will go out as well.
  - bilbo0s 1y ago
    Well true. That's the fallacy in the given argument.
    - deleted 1y ago
      [deleted]
    - rbanffy 1y ago
      By then we’d better understand how to implement a “Let there be light” procedure. Might very well be the last question we need to ask ourselves.
      - andrewflnr 1y ago
        "Implement Fiat Lux" is a hell of a title for a sci-fi story, if nothing else.

mr_toad 1y ago

> There's literally nothing there “Literally everything is in space.”

AnimalMuppet 1y ago

There was a time when there was nothing (European) in the entire New World. There was a time when there was nothing known (to the US) about what was in most of the Louisiana Purchase. There was a time when there was nothing (European) in, say, Ohio. And then Nebraska. And so on. There was literally nothing there? Why go all that way? To see what was there. And then to make something there. [Edit, because I'm rate limited: No, interstellar space is something to cross, to get to stellar space. You think the New World was rich? How about a whole solar system of untapped resources? That's why people will try to go.]

ta1243 1y ago
> There was literally nothing there No there wasn't. There was a whole continent of untapped resources. You can argue that the solar system is a lot of untapped resources too. Harder to extract than sailing a piece of wood across an ocean growing some food, and killing the people who are already there. Harder than colonising Antarctica or the surface of the sea too, but there are resources - not just minerals but solar energy too. But interstellar space? Beyond the Oort Cloud? There's no evidence of anything other than perhaps some very sparse dust. That is nothing, and (jokes aside) completely incomparable to Ohio.
sorcerer-mar 1y ago
They didn't believe there was literally nothing there. They went all that way to find unclaimed riches. The hypothetical riches were quite obvious: same stuff we have over here, but not owned by someone yet. What are they hypothetical riches of outer space? This is a question we should think about clearly and logically without resorting to stuff like "oh tally-ho the adventure!" type nonsense.
- rbanffy 1y ago
  There is many times more water in gas giant moons than on Earth. If we develop the technology needed to make a multi-generation ship we also have the technology to make deep space habitats - enough for trillions or quadrillions of people. Just imagine the economic output of a civilisation a million times the size of ours.