You choose to ignore the externalities and opportunity costs of such resource expenditure. You choose to ignore and actively worsen the suffering of your fellow man in order to indulge yourself in unscientific fantasies of space colonization.
I choose to focus on helping those who need it.
Somehow, your arguments from the supposed moral high ground fall flat.
Stewards of life? That is delusional.
How many species have we extincted? How many are bred in excess to live short and miserable lives purely to be slaughtered for food?
We aren’t stewards or guardians of anything, we’re just animals that seek pleasure and procreation and evolved an asymmetric advantage over the competition.
But there is no convincing a zealot, and this is your religion. A creed that dictates we sacrifice millions of lives to enrich dozens, demanding to be praised all the while.
Grow up
The OP:
Is it really necessary to send humans to those places just to get the knock-on benefits?
… But sure, this is exclusively a thread to circle-jerk about how cool you are for wanting to burn mountains of resources to feel good about something.
Advancement is not unidimensional, and it is not synonymous with space exploration. If you don’t get it, that’s a you problem.
It is only a “problem” if you consider space exploration a moral imperative.
I don’t. There isn’t anything up there that we can’t get easier down here. The resource expenditure is a poor investment. Not to mention how much this would further inequality.
If there will always be problems on Earth, then it sounds like we’ll never be bored staying here.
Wanting to improve the lives of others is ‘obsessing over the bad’ and being a ‘misanthropic troll’?
Go read this chain again, which of us brought out the insults first?
You don’t have arguments, and are upset the platitudes you’ve swallowed don’t stand up to scrutiny.
Even if I concede ‘exploration is in our DNA’ (I do not, but let’s test the argument [btw the Chinese first came to Taiwan in the 17th century at the urging of the Dutch - but I digress]).
Isn’t war also in our DNA? We’ve had a few of those, should we have another? After all, they brought great advancements in technology.
What about genocide? Or whaling?
Doing something ‘because it is in our DNA’ is not noble. It is, in fact, the behavior of beasts and other animals we as a society consider less valuable than ourselves.
Why did the Spaniards and Portuguese colonize the new world? Gold, silver, and cash crops. All economic. The average Iberian peasant wasn’t sitting around pining for a new horizon - the monarchies wanted power and needed funds. It was a top-down effort that tremendously benefited the societal elites for two centuries. The average peasant was no better off until much later, following industrialization.
Why did the English settle North America? In the Caribbean, cash crops plantations. In New England, they were driven from their old life by religious persecution. In the mid Atlantic, the Crown wanted tobacco plantations to finance the State.
Nowhere in here is the story of the Everyman deciding to drop everything and run for the furthest hills. It is economics and the desire of the powerful to enhance their own position.
And here you are, spouting their bullshit, beating on others and airing your superiority like a gilded peacock because you want to hand every bit of what’s up there to the very people making everything worse for those down here.
No thanks.
I cannot comprehend
I believe you find yourself thinking that a lot if you don’t understand why people disagree with you.
Say we put in all that effort, expend all those resources - what do we get for it?
Another place to put strip malls and parking lots. With the added benefits of brain swelling, heart atrophy due to the reduce gravity, and shortened lifespans from the increased radiation.
Or we could just, idk, make Earth a better place to live. If we have all these resources, surely it would be easier to make Earth more habitable given the much better starting conditions than to go to dead dust ball months to years away and try to live in an ant farm.
Just a thought
And then he got back and they dismantled all the boats and never did it again. Definitely had exploration in the DNA.
And meanwhile the peoples of modern-day India, southeast Asia, Korea, Japan, Pakistan, Afghanistan, etc. never did this. Curious.
If that one corner of Eastern Africa was the only habitable place on the planet, and getting to the next valley over required generations to live in suffering while available resources are used to make mountaineering gear, and settling that valley would represent a constant resource drain for centuries at a minimum…
Sure, same thing.
People didn’t leave Africa due to the moral imperative to explore, they did not have the resources to support large scale migration on a whim. They left Africa for food.
There’s no food on Mars, or the Moon.
European exploration across the Atlantic was driven by a desire for trade routes with Asia that did not pass through the intervening Islamic civilizations that were often in conflict with the explorers, it was an economic motive. After the European discovery of the American continents, they were, in fact, largely ignored for about a century.
If exploration is so core to the human experience, why did the people of Asia - much more numerous than the Europeans even back then - not undertake any large exploration or colonization efforts? Or those of Africa?
The economic motive for space exploration is rather weak. There are asteroids full of valuable metals, but they are very far away and recovery would be more difficult and expensive than expanding Earth extraction efforts. We evolved to live here, life elsewhere disagrees with our biology - reduced gravity is great for your back and terrible for your heart and brain.
We don’t need the living space, and the population looks set to decline by the end of the century anyway.
While I understand you want to ascribe some kind of moral imperative to exploration, it is a large and completely unnecessary expenditure of resources that could be better deployed to make life here better for far more people.
They were grown cell by cell in a fleshy vat
This just pushes the question out one ring. What do we need to do on other planets that we can’t do on Earth?
The sad answer is there isn’t really anything. Go live on Mars and it will suck compared to Earth - no nature to enjoy, extremely limited variety of food, largely cut off from the rest of human culture and experience. After hundreds of years, it might be developed to look like suburban Ohio - you’ll have some iron mines and some Applebee’s and maybe enough people that the martian memes are fire … but you still won’t have a beach, or anything to see outside, or a blue sky.
It will just be Earth, but worse.
If organs can’t grow in Earth gravity then what the fuck am I
What I do not support is replacing a democratic, market-based economy with a centrally planned socialist economy and coupling that with an authoritarian communist government.
You’re conflating a capitalism with market commerce. Markets long predate capitalism, markets function in socialist paradigms. Capitalism does not mean democracy, authoritarian regimes coexist just fine with capitalist economics.
Communist government is itself an oxymoron because communism is, by definition, stateless.
I don’t think many people would, in good faith, support a transition to a centrally planned authoritarian state - but also no one would, in good faith, be able to call such an end goal socialism or communism.
When peasants were able to copy ‘intellectual property’ for personal benefit and enjoyment, it was a massive crime. When the oligarchs can steal - everything - for the slight chance of paying less in wages, it is an innovation.
I think it is pretty much certain the model companies escape any penalty for their mass theft of IP. There will be some settlements and token penalties that sound big on paper, but are nothing compared to the market valuations.