4 ms·

> space has practically infinite everything - land, resources, energy The Earth has more land than mankind will ever need. The Earth has effectively infinite e

> 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 11d 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 11d 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 10d 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.
    - bdamm 10d ago
      > high tech, high intelligence, high fertility sect So, SpaceX?
- ehe78qhe 11d ago
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TeMPOraL 11d ago
That's 3/3 complete bullshit, and first two doesn't even take high school level math to disprove completely. I get it though. This is just how naturalism looks like when runs out of arguments in its favor.
- wavemode 11d ago
  Feel free to disprove them completely since you're so confident
  - TeMPOraL 10d ago
    What's to disprove? They are prima facie false, not just formally (because "ever" and "effectively infinite" are obviously exaggerations), but also empirically, here and now - mankind already needs more land than Earth has, and more energy than Earth can spare. "The Earth has more land than mankind will ever need." "The Earth has effectively infinite energy from the Sun.
    - m4rtink 10d ago
      Not to mention that it seems more healthy to have a far off frontier for a human civilization. It makes it possible for people to try something new, something different, brings innovation, etc. Without it, some people might just be too unhappy in the regular society.
    - wavemode 10d ago
      > "ever" and "effectively infinite" are obviously exaggerations I see no exaggeration, obvious or otherwise. Scientific consensus is that mankind's population is going to peak in the next century. > mankind already needs more land than Earth has By what basis? There's no shortage of land. There's a shortage of land close to popular population centers, and that tends to be the land that people want to live on most. But that's an inherent geometric and social problem which outer space definitely doesn't solve, in fact it makes it worse. > more energy than Earth can spare Earth doesn't provide energy, the sun does. Even fossil fuels, biomass and wind power were all originally energy from the sun. The exception is nuclear - Earth does have an unusually high concentration of heavily elements like uranium and plutonium. The bottleneck has always been development and delivery, not availability of energy itself. On just the land the US currently uses to grow corn for ethanol gasoline, we could build enough solar panels to power the entire US. And I certainly don't need to tell you about nuclear - the only reason entire civilizations aren't already powered by it is the time and expense and risk of building the plants. What energy does outer space provide? You have solar, which we have here, and nuclear, which we have here. (You also have a variety of ideas that exist in science fiction but not the real world, like dyson spheres - I surely hope you aren't referring to such as the basis of your arguments.) None of this is new, and none of this solves the problems of development and delivery, in fact it makes both problems significantly worse.
mmooss 11d ago
Yes, especially if you add up the ocean floors, Antarctica, Siberia and northern Canada ... all far, far more hospitable, useful, and cost-effective than anything in space.

bdamm 11d 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 11d 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 10d 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.
  - bdamm 10d ago
    > high tech, high intelligence, high fertility sect So, SpaceX?
ehe78qhe 11d ago
[dead]

TeMPOraL 11d ago

That's 3/3 complete bullshit, and first two doesn't even take high school level math to disprove completely. I get it though. This is just how naturalism looks like when runs out of arguments in its favor.

wavemode 11d ago
Feel free to disprove them completely since you're so confident
- TeMPOraL 10d ago
  What's to disprove? They are prima facie false, not just formally (because "ever" and "effectively infinite" are obviously exaggerations), but also empirically, here and now - mankind already needs more land than Earth has, and more energy than Earth can spare. "The Earth has more land than mankind will ever need." "The Earth has effectively infinite energy from the Sun.
  - m4rtink 10d ago
    Not to mention that it seems more healthy to have a far off frontier for a human civilization. It makes it possible for people to try something new, something different, brings innovation, etc. Without it, some people might just be too unhappy in the regular society.
  - wavemode 10d ago
    > "ever" and "effectively infinite" are obviously exaggerations I see no exaggeration, obvious or otherwise. Scientific consensus is that mankind's population is going to peak in the next century. > mankind already needs more land than Earth has By what basis? There's no shortage of land. There's a shortage of land close to popular population centers, and that tends to be the land that people want to live on most. But that's an inherent geometric and social problem which outer space definitely doesn't solve, in fact it makes it worse. > more energy than Earth can spare Earth doesn't provide energy, the sun does. Even fossil fuels, biomass and wind power were all originally energy from the sun. The exception is nuclear - Earth does have an unusually high concentration of heavily elements like uranium and plutonium. The bottleneck has always been development and delivery, not availability of energy itself. On just the land the US currently uses to grow corn for ethanol gasoline, we could build enough solar panels to power the entire US. And I certainly don't need to tell you about nuclear - the only reason entire civilizations aren't already powered by it is the time and expense and risk of building the plants. What energy does outer space provide? You have solar, which we have here, and nuclear, which we have here. (You also have a variety of ideas that exist in science fiction but not the real world, like dyson spheres - I surely hope you aren't referring to such as the basis of your arguments.) None of this is new, and none of this solves the problems of development and delivery, in fact it makes both problems significantly worse.

mmooss 11d ago

Yes, especially if you add up the ocean floors, Antarctica, Siberia and northern Canada ... all far, far more hospitable, useful, and cost-effective than anything in space.