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I think this sort of view is quite myopic. In general space has practically infinite everything - land, resources, energy, and more. It has the potential to ena

• dfgknionio 28d ago
  Even if you think a space industry is useful in general, there is no reason for humans to be involved. Robots are superior to humans for this application today and will only become more superior in the future.
  • fodkodrasz 28d ago
    Why pursue space exploration if all we can do is send robots there? The only meaningful thing for humanity is sending Humans to places. Gathering more resources so the overlords can have more humans enslaved with shinier golden handcuffs, who can consume more so number line goes up is not a meaningful goal to pursuit, and robotic-only commercially rationalized spaceflight has only this to offer. Scientific discovery, so we can have better simulations about things of no use or effect on us? Why? Taking people to places and utilizing the resources there, and building a more resilient humanity is a worthy endeavor, and while robots are useful for that, ultimately human spaceflight (or interplanetary/interstellar travel) is he goal, not having only a space industry.
    • m4rtink 27d ago
      Would not surprise me if people & robots did end up merging together in the long term for easier living in space.
    • dfgknionio 28d ago
      What is the point in having a colony of maybe dozens of people completely dependent on shipments from Earth? Building a self-sustaining colony is so far outside the realm of possibility that it isn't worth thinking about, and building a symbolic outpost serves no practical purpose.
      • WalterBright 28d ago
        > What is the point in having a colony of maybe dozens of people completely dependent on shipments from Earth? The Jamestown colony relied on shipments from England. > Building a self-sustaining colony is so far outside the realm of possibility that it isn't worth thinking about And look at what America became.
        • bluGill 28d ago
          Jamestown went to a place where humans had lived for thousands of years. They used shipments from England, but they didn't need them at any time.
          • WalterBright 28d ago
            The colony would have failed without those shipments. They desperately needed them.
            • verzali 27d ago
              And yet other people were managing to live there just fine without shipments from Europe.
          • m4rtink 27d ago
• wavemode 28d ago
  > space has practically infinite everything - land, resources, energy The Earth has more land than mankind will ever need. The Earth has effectively infinite energy from the Sun. And most of the resources we need are derived from biological matter, which Space lacks.
  • bdamm 28d ago
    Ah, but humanity is an expansive and consuming force, as is natural since most forces in the universe are entropy increasing ones. And since amino acids have been discovered on asteroids and tardigrades and fungus have been shown to survive space travel, we can't even say that Space provably lacks biological matter. Expanding (back?) into space is our manifest destiny, and good for the price of real estate too since all of earth becomes a luxury destination.
    • wavemode 28d ago
      Population growth has been slowing for a long time, and is actually already below replacement level in most parts of the world outside Africa. It's unlikely that we will ever reach a global human population of even 11 billion. Some estimates put the peak at under 9 billion.
      • somenameforme 27d ago
        Unless humanity goes extinct in the near future this is certainly inaccurate. People don't realize how rapidly fertility affects populations. Take a place with a fertility rate of 1. That means each successive generation (which tends to be about 20 years, or the the window of fertility for a gen - from age ~20 to ~40) will decrease in size by half, in a compounding fashion. So over 1 century, that's a 97% decline (0.5^5) in generational size. Extinction comes shockingly fast. But the opposite is also true. So what's going to happen is that low fertility populations are simply going to go extinct. That's going to be just lovely for humanity as it also corresponds with higher income, higher education, higher liberalism, higher secularism, and so on. And the current high fertility groups will come to quickly dominate the world. So it's kind of amusing in a way that Biblical texts will indeed come to pass - you'll have groups like Amish or Haredi, the meek - who happen to have high fertility rates, indeed inheriting the Earth. This is part of the reason fertility is, by far, the biggest crisis facing humanity today. All love to the Amish and Haredi, but I don't want the Earth to turn into a planet of overalls and sidelocks. Even that would probably be just liminal, but we need some sort of high tech, high intelligence, high fertility sect to emerge. It's probably going to require something to akin to a modern religion, though presumably without a deity. Or maybe the Mormons had it right all along.
• thrance 28d ago
  Radioactive, toxic, dry, low-gravity and anoxic land isn't exactly prime real estate. Even the North Pole is a better environment for humans to live in than the Moon or Mars are.
• bayindirh 28d ago
  > In general space has practically infinite everything - land, resources, energy, and more. It has the potential to enable, in turn, infinite expansion of humanity. Love the (sorry, but greedy) take. Maybe we shouldn't expand infinitely. I don't see our species as that special. Maybe we should stay a bit modest, and errm, down to the earth in our ambitions. Both humans and resources can't be in infinite number at the same time. Something can be infinite relative to other, and I like the current balance, thanks.
  • WalterBright 28d ago
    The solar system has effectively infinite resources.
    • bayindirh 27d ago
      For a certain population smaller than n, Earth also has effectively infinite resources. So again, it's a relativity, not a certainty.
  • KylerAce 28d ago
    Why should we not expand into space? To make sure that all the lifeless rocks in it stay lifeless? If earth were twice as large would you say that logically we should only inhabit half of that earth or do you believe that human beings have a natural claim to everything that can be reached via boats and legs but not via rockets? Personally, I would like a future where I can see other planets with my own eyes and dislike a future where the entire species is dependent on one planet being habitable.
• rf15 28d ago
  > space has practically infinite everything - land, resources, energy ...of a density so low that it is 0 on average. space has practically infinite nothing. I know the pretty pictures always show the planets all nice together, but in reality there's this huge, irradiated, projectile-infested nothing that you and I cannot deal with, even with current tech.
  • m4rtink 27d ago
    Well, the nothing part is an often forgotten selling point - that makes it possible to go really far, to send signals long distances & for the light of the sun to reach quite a large distance unobstructed. You don't get any benefits under a few km of water for example.
• bluGill 28d ago
  You fail to comprehend just how large space is. Almost all of space is well out of reach. There is zero reason to think we will ever be able to overcome the laws of relativity, which in turn mean we will never be able to reach the stars. I know, this negative comment makes you mad, but there is every reason to think it is the case. A SciFi generation ship could maybe do that to the closest stars before it fails completely - but we have reason to think those stars will have any planet we can terraform. (ignoring the ethics if life exists - we don't have the technology to detect life on other planets) Mars is the only planet that could potentially support human life. Even then the best parts are about as nice as Antarctica - not very nice. Which is to say a catastrophic failure of life support gives you seconds to get the backup [scuba type gear?] working as opposed to guaranteed death. Mars is a lot smaller than earth and has much less energy (less sun). Thus there isn't much potential there. Everything else we can reasonably reach is much harder to work with than Mars. Face it, earth is all we get: make it last.
  • jiggawatts 27d ago
    I just made a comment in another thread that Cape York, a huge chunk of northern Queensland has a mere 18,000 inhabitants. It's more sparsely occupied than northern Alaska by nearly a factor of two. Why? Because it is low-value land due to monsoons turning the dirt into mud, and that dirt doesn't have enough minerals in it so agriculture is too difficult to bother with. It has free oxygen. It has 1g gravity. You can fly there for about a thousand dollars instead of a thousand billion. The radiation might give you skin cancer, but won't kill you immediately. There's too much water. It has animals you can hunt and eat. Etc, etc... Practically nobody wants to live there that wasn't already there for generations. If the human race can't be bothered occupying land like that, then colonising Mars is so, so far down the list it isn't even on the same page, book, or library shelf.
    • avmich 27d ago
      The desire to fly to space can be compared with such for going to Everest, the place less hospitable than Cape York, yet having quite an interest from all sides. However, exploration of space could be way more practical than conquering the highest point on Earth - it serves scientific goals, and after science often come applications. There are many useful technologies which grew from space exploration and particularly from manned space programs, and we can expect those benefits to follow those who keeps studying space and learning to live close to the object of study. We're just starting an energetic space exploration with appearance of better tools in the recent years. Getting to the Moon is relatively easy, and could be barely done with much more modest technology; now we plan a bigger scale program. Getting people to Mars is undoubtedly more complex, but still within reach of the existing - or almost existing - technology. Getting furter from Earth, while not immediately in the plans, may get just as possible and useful with time, and we shouldn't claim to know what could be our reasons tomorrow to visit, say, Ceres or Venus. There is no scientific impossibility for flying almist anywhere in Solar system - the matter is only in needs and economic costs. Our predecessors could be confused with our habits of flying between continents and islands the way we can and do today - similarly some of us may not see the immediate reason to leave Earth - that can pass, as past habits got changed to our current ones.
• dhosek 28d ago
  Infinite distance and travel cost too!
• no_multitudes 28d ago
  We'd be much better off building colonies on the bottom of the ocean than on the moon or mars (or a cylinder floating at a lagrange point.) After we run out of space on the ocean I suppose it will make sense to consider space colonies, but I think you are really underestimating the technical challenges.
  • m4rtink 27d ago
    Why not both ?
• citizenpaul 26d ago
  I personally think it's a form of tunnel vision to think that any sort of extensive space travel is anything other than a complete fantasy.The very laws of physics as we know them, say that it is essentially impossible. We don't even know if it's possible for actual life just simply life itself, to exist anywhere except on Earth for any length of time. We have exactly one example. Earth. All tests to the contrary in space show that life dies for all kinds of non-obvious reasons when removed from Earth for any extended period of time. I personally hope it's not true and I do enthusiastically watch the progress. However, math is really, really bad.