In the greater scheme of things, spaceflight isn't that different from early ocean explorers, right?
Build a vessel that suits the environment it'll travel in, stock it with equipment & supplies, head off into the unknown. Hope that supplies last long enough to set foot on the other side, and/or 'live off the land'.
Viewed like that, asteroids are kinda like islands, where some fresh fruit, timber etc may be found. Adventurers may like it & hang there while the ship sails on.
I mean, we're not biologically adapted for the open ocean or winters above the arctic circle either. If all you're living in is your skin, then a Siberian winter will kill you in under 15 minutes. It takes a crazy amount of technology -- in terms of habitat-building and wearables -- to be able to survive in that environment. Yet humans were doing it 47,000 years ago.
So these kind of biological arguments really don't hold. We're not constrained by our biology. That ship has sailed, literal aeons ago. We're constrained by our technology, and in technological terms, relative to our evolutionary cradle, Inuit garb is about 80% of the way towards being a space suit. Doesn't mean that space is "easy". Just that "easy" isn't what we do.
It’s apples and oranges. Many, many human cultures live close to the water but none live on or in it exclusively, we are no longer an aquatic species. I think the arctic comparison might be more apt, but even so, it is such a staggering difference of degree. The amount of technology required to learn how to hunt arctic wildlife, preserve food, and turn animal skins into clothing and shelter is not trivial. But it is nothing compared to having to replicate our entire habitat in space. Food, water and air are the minimum in terms of long term survival; there are so many other heath considerations in the micro-gravitational radioactive vacuum of space.
Edit: also Inuit garb being 80% space suit is just… what(?!?). How do you quantify that? The main features they share is that insulates from extreme cold temperatures and can protect against glare, but our space suits also insulate from high temperatures and provide life support and are air tight and radiation resistant and… this assertion is just nonsense.
"Build a vessel that suits the environment" is a big difference. One person can build boat that can sail across the ocean. A team can build a ship that will do it safely. People sail across the ocean on canoes.
Space ships are a whole other level of technology that we don't have but have ideas on how to build.
Starships are level where we don't know if can be built. We have ideas, but those ideas aren't possible with achievable technology. It is quite possible that not possible with any technology.
Space kinds of looks like sea ( danger being always present and you're alone to face it) but it's also very different for the following reason:
> Viewed like that, asteroids are kinda like islands, where some fresh fruit, timber etc may be found. Adventurers may like it & hang there while the ship sails on.
They are very much unlike islands: on an island humans get back to there land-dweller lifestyle, they can get food, fresh, water materials and they are safe from the danger of the sea. An asteroid offers none of that, you cannot just get spare parts on the asteroid, nor food and it's as dangerous as before (void, radiations). In fact, except for dedicated machines designed to mine them, it's very unlikely anyone ever lands on an asteroid because it gives you practically no benefit over floating in space and is very costly in terms of propulsion (both to land and to leave, because you need to get to the speed of the asteroid and then leave it).
You're dramatically underestimating how dangerous sea travel was. Millions of people lost their lives at sea, up to and including during the Age of Sail where we had been doing it for millennia. For instance Vasco de Gamma was the first person to discover a route from Europe to India. And that's relatively easy since you can get there by simply following the coast from Africa onward to India.
He set out with 170 men and 4 ships. 55 men and 2 ships returned. And that was not particularly remarkable - scurvy, inclement weather, rogue waves, supplies going bad, and countless other issues meant death at sea was a regular part of traveling at sea. Magellan is another one. We all learn in school that he was the first man to cross the globe. What we don't necessarily learn is that he didn't survive the voyage. He set out with 5 ships and 270 men - 18 men, not including Magellan, and 1 ship returned.
Exploration and ultimately colonization has never been something for those unwilling to risk it all, and it may very likely never be. The entire point of such things is that you're setting out to do and discover what has not been done, and what has not been discovered. In this context it's essentially impossible to have any assurance of safety.
To be fair, many of them were killed while engaged in colonialist island warfare rather than the voyage itself so even setting foot on an island to replenish had its dangers, same for Cook. I'd say space travel has many more dangers in the voyage than warrior aliens.
Magellan notwithstanding, relatively few of his crew were lost to natives. Most of it came from starvation and scurvy. The latter of which, alone, took millions of lives. Both were greatly compounded because of how unpredictable the seas can be. For instance when crossing the Indian Ocean the first time, Vasco da Gamma initially took about 3 weeks. On his way back he ran into foul weather, and the exact same journey ended up taking more than 4 months. He ended up losing about half his crew just during that crossing.
We're almost certainly much more technically prepared for space flight than the early explorers were for these great sea voyages. And we're certainly vastly more economically prepared. The only difference is the risk tolerance and funding. Those sailors and captains setting out always understood there was a very real chance that they would never return, and that was simply accepted. And funding was never easy back in the day, but the costs were also much greater relatively speaking. The fantasy this article speaks of about multi-century ships setting out into the stars is something we could achieve for a tiny fraction of what we spend on random wars, yet we don't.
Notwithstanding battles, a napoleonic era British Royal Navy Man-o-war with ~750 sailors would expect to lose something like 1 man a fortnight to accidents and disease for the duration of the voyage. To make up the numbers they would press-gang fishermen wherever they happened to be around the globe. As a result the Royal Navy was surprisingly multi racial in that era.
The BBC had a series called ‘who do you think you are’ where they analysed people’s DNA and some of the best episodes were right wing figures finding out they were 25% polynesian or whatever, I always wondered if this was partly due to the press-gang on-the-hoof practices of the Navy.
Well actually it’s more likely that Enrique of Malacca was the first person to circumnavigate the globe.
(He had been enslaved by Magellan 10 years earlier on a voyage which had reached Malacca going east, and then returned on the later more famous voyage of Magellan which had gone west.)
No, I don't believe I am. If you have any mind, I do love discussing these topics. In particular I'd posit that the great sea explorers were setting out with far less information, far less knowledge of the dangers that awaited them, and with far less capability for reconciling those dangers. Something like scurvy, whose cure/cause wouldn't be completely understood until the early 20th century (!!!), was just an absolutely devastating issue. It could kill within months and nobody had any clue of what or why it was happening. It's just that you go to sea, your body starts rotting in some of the most painful ways imaginable, and you die relatively shortly thereafter. And that was just a part of life at sea!
Space is mostly vacuum, the sea is mostly water and wind, with some dangerous shoals/rocks thrown in for good measure.
Sailing from Britain to Australia on a wooden ship took approximately the same time as flying from the Earth to Mars. I bet that the sailors met a lot more dangerous weather conditions on the way to Australia than the spacecraft on their way to Mars.
"Hull losses" due to cosmic dust are basically zero, the only recorded instances are on low Earth orbit due to space debris.
"Hull losses" due to storms or navigational mistakes were absolutely normal during the Age of Exploration, and long after.
> "Hull losses" due to cosmic dust are basically zero, the only recorded instances are on low Earth orbit due to space debris.
You're not wrong about that, but…
> with some dangerous shoals/rocks thrown in for good measure.
Pretty much describes the landing phase and why so many mars and moon probes failed, while
> mostly water and wind
describes many launch failures, and also the initial failures to land on Venus (modulo that the Venusian atmosphere at ground level is past the critical point and no longer distinguishably either liquid or gas, but it's CO2 not H2O).
It's weird that you seem to believe these analogies you're making with zero examples of the latter. Of course when you're imagining the whole thing and willing to fudge the details in favor of the conclusion you want, it's really easy to make the argument that it's feasible and worthwhile
This is a very personal attack-like reply (weird, imagining, fudging etc.), and I believe it has no place on Hacker News.
Anyway, no vessel that ever left the low Earth orbit was ever lost to cosmic dust. How am I expected to provide examples of something that never happened?
As for losses of old wooden ships en route to Australia, there were plenty. Being a sailor was the most dangerous profession in the Age of Sail, and the very reason why sailors got tattos was a chance to be recognized as a drowned corpse.
I'm not personally attacking you, I'm saying your argument makes no sense, because you're trying to draw equivalences between recorded accounts of history and things that have never happened
Like how long it takes to fly humans to mars. It hasn't happened yet, we can only estimate and try to project it, so the case that it might take as long as it took to sail across some particular ocean for some particular group of people with the technology they had at the time is not only kind of irrelevant, but also not a claim that can be supported. This is what's typically referred to as "fudging the numbers"
The things you said and the point you are trying to be make by saying them is pretty ridiculous. You may choose to take that personally, but perfectly reasonable people say a lot of crazy shit. It may well be that the fact that internet fora make this a matter of somewhat durable record makes people view their arguments in this context as more tightly coupled with them as a person, but that's still ultimately for you to decide for yourself
> Like how long it takes to fly humans to mars. It hasn't happened yet, we can only estimate and try to project it, so the case that it might take as long as it took to sail across some particular ocean for some particular group of people with the technology they had at the time is not only kind of irrelevant, but also not a claim that can be supported. This is what's typically referred to as "fudging the numbers"
OTOH, we have sent robots and we know the underlying physics very well indeed. We have also sent an electric car with a test dummy wearing a flight-suit into a Mars-crossing orbit. If Musk had actually wanted to continue with the Red Dragon concept (which IIRC wasn't planned to be crewed), it could've already landed by now.
We also know what it would take to go substantially faster, and that we either don't have the tech (e.g. fusion), or don't want to risk it (e.g. fission), or we can't afford it (e.g. non-rocket launch systems). Even if we had more advanced propulsion, significantly faster trips are more likely to be exceptions than the rule until we have enough infrastructure in space that Mars itself stops being an interesting destination.
Rogue waves continue to be very deadly even to very large ships, and extremely unpredictable despite much better weather monitoring and communications.
Something hinted at, here, and something I've only recently come to accept, is that we - we humans - are Earth. I mean, literally, we're systems of systems composed of stuff that's Earth stuff. And of course many interlocking systems besides, all made of the same stuff.
Separate a portion of the larger system, and the component will not retain the original's complexity - it will lose complexity to entropy, and revert to the mean.
Along those same lines, imagine, just for a second, a completely separated other Earth, and the systems interlocked inside it. Now imagine those, mixing with ours, all those interlocking systems, interfering, constructively and deconstructively. There's only one way that shakes out[1]. It's not great.
I'm not saying interstellar voyaging is impossible. I just think it's impossible for us, as human animals, as Earth systems. But Earth systems are not the only systems that exist. Our technological systems have a leg up, in that they can be developed on a substrate of understanding beyond just the crust of the one planet. Technological systems have better messaging between systems, and they can make at least an attempt at centralized control. A technological surrogate will be the one to experience other suns. Something that remembers us, and maybe remembers us well enough it can pretend to be human occasionally.
I suppose that sounds nice, in the same way the traditional blue-sky-golden-gate-fluffy-cloud-big-bearded-old-chap afterlife sounds nice. But God, it also sounds patronizing as all hell. Just put me in the ground so I can help the garden. See, as I get older, watched things die and grow, I've come to realize: the afterlife quantifiably exists . . but you don't get to be selfish about it.
[1] Not counting technological solutions, like genetic engineering and, failing that, the magical realm of nanowhatever, although I suspect nanowhatsit will act an awful lot like living systems, which are of course their own sort of nanothingy
I’d be happy if we just start with long term orbitals. Build structures in space nearby (say L5) and try obtain self sufficiency. Then build more and move them farther out. Once you can survive in the Oort Cloud, interstellar travel becomes just a matter of time.
Any dreams of small ships and small populations colonizing planets are just dreams. Unless we develop magic replication technology that takes raw elements and builds compounds an atom at a time.
I completely agree, and, also suggest we bring bunch of sub-scale models down to somewhere open on Earth, like middle of North America, African desert, Australia, off its coast, somewhere giant and flat. It will provide safe opportunity to master environmental control before testing in production, as well as means to supply habitable megastructures cheaply.
Imagine a ~km wide cylinder just sticking up in Sahara, and inside it is New Shenzhen. Isn't that exciting!
Here's an idea: how about we start with a (at least seemingly) much smaller task: can we even try to genuinely be concerned about the (physically) preventable deaths of millions of people each year? And note, I'm not even talking about doing something about it, I am deliberately setting the bar only at trying(!) to be concerned (though: genuine concern).
The foundational idea of capitalism is that each person doing their own thing is automatically aligned with the betterment of us all.
This is, strictly speaking, incorrect; but despite the many various examples of it going wrong, it has also been a major part of the overall increase in living standards since 95% of us ploughed fields for the other 5%.
There are fewer people in abject poverty today than there were back then, not just as a percentage but as an absolute number. We live longer, childbearing is less dangerous and we have painkillers for it and other things, etc.
It's not evenly distributed; but even though the system which was founded on even distribution failed harder than capitalism (IMO for the same reason capitalism isn't quite right: nobody really knew about game theory until Nash), we have still eliminated one disease entirely, and are close with some others.
I will add ~1% more cleverness: take capitalism, and make one small change: eliminate one(!) class of hypocrisy: convert our fake concern for the well being of other humans into the real thing: stop war, get a roof of some kind over every person's head, food of some sort into their bellies, and put some genuine effort into ensuring that this is substantively permanent.
"Impossible, because {some meme magic}!" many will say, but I've heard there's a trick that can change this game we find ourselves in: stop speaking untruthfully. I'm a big fan of this challenge, because people (particularly smart people) like to criticize it for how simplistic or stupid it is, but I know something they don't: ~all Humans have some sort of an innate fear of non-untruthfulness, and while they'll confidently talk shit about the idea all day long, they never have the balls to actually try it.
Evidence that it isn't: all of human history dating back well before we had writing.
> I've heard there's a trick that can change this game we find ourselves in: stop speaking untruthfully.
I, too, follow this one weird trick.
Evidence that people who are willing to lie to my face get power by doing so:
* Basically all politicians, but specifically Boris Johnson — people like me even saw and called out the lies at the time, and yet, there he was, being Prime Minister
* Bernie Madoff, until he was finally caught
* Sun Tzu, The Art of War
The second you can argue is capitalism. The first? That's democracy. The third? You may not like warfare (I don't either), but it predates Capitalism and was also a big part of the Soviet world-view — this is the point at which Anarcho-Communists chime in to say "but in a post-Capitalist world there would be no need for guns", which is the same mistake Anarcho-Capitalists make: people with guns don't care that you're saying they don't need guns, and are also now taking as much of your stuff as they want.
I believe that it may be, though the manner in which it would be that would require a long conversation to articulate - metaphysical causal power is the mechanism I would argue....this "is" "woo woo" to most, but this is due to the flawed, scientific materialist fundamentalist training they have received, which has left them with horribly flawed models of reality (which they mistake for reality itself, also due to their training). Humans live in a reality dome of their owm=n making and if you try to break them out of it, numerous (predictable) defences will emerge. Understand LLM's, and you are well on your way to understanding humanity and its follies.
> Evidence that it isn't: all of human history dating back well before we had writing.
Perhaps (if you were incorrect, would you necessarily be able to realize it?)....but watch out for any conclusions that form (or, are formed for you) based on this apparently correct observation.
>> I've heard there's a trick that can change this game we find ourselves in: stop speaking untruthfully.
> I, too, follow this one weird trick.
To some degree, surely. But to what degree? Again, where you are incorrect, would you necessarily be able to realize it? Is there a fundamental problem here, that "should be" obvious? (Think: the benefits of pair programming.)
> Evidence that people who are willing to lie to my face get power by doing so.....
100% agree! Imagine:
a) the size of the list that could be produced if you and I sat down for 8 hours and worked on it
b) the size of the list that could be produced if {all of Hacker News | all of humanity} sat down for 8 hours and worked on it
c) the causal power of such lists (perhaps combined with other things that could be done, but cannot be done, because we live in a reality dome, and do not realize it, because we cannot realize it)
I believe that this is true. Of course, this is susceptible to the same semiotics counterargument I used above, except such an argument would work against the person who used it.
You and I happen to be in a game being run and played by silly amateurs, but the problem is that the nature and rules of this game are such that these silly amateurs run the show almost absolutely....and, they have an extremely well fortified position: they have literally hypnotized ~all players. I don't know about you, but I find this state of affairs terrifying, but also absolutely hilarious. Day after day I can come on here and laugh my ass off at "smart" people "telling us how it is....it is like being back in junior high, except this time I do not have a junior high mind.
Bold, intentionally* provocative claims (aside: is that what this site "is" "for"? Inside joke) like this are almost guaranteed to prompt memetic responses of ~impossibility, /r/iamverysmart, etc, all of which can be easily and skilfully shown to be incorrect, and mocked accordingly (if you are into having fun while playing). Unfortunately: one will always lose, because the judging is rigged, and all the players are hypnotized.
But hey: games that are easy tend to not be fun.
> this is the point at which Anarcho-Communists chime in to say "but in a post-Capitalist world there would be no need for guns", which is the same mistake Anarcho-Capitalists make: people with guns don't care that you're saying they don't need guns, and are also now taking as much of your stuff as they want.
This is but one mistake - an even more important mistake is that they mistake their hallucinations of reality for the real thing.
Also, there is flaw in your criticism:
> people with guns don't care that you're saying
I will note two flaws:
a) Technically, you have no way of knowing this.
b) While they may not currently care, it is "likely" possible to make them care. Even tyrants have numerous well known (but not realized/realizeable), as well as not very well known weak spots. We can choose to exploit these for the benefit of humanity, or we can continue to do what we do today: engage in silliness...as seen in this thread, and all others.
How will it all end!!!???? Stay tuned, perhaps you will find out!! ;)
PS: please disregard any sense of ill will directed at you personally, I tend to take out my extreme hatred of humans in general on individual instances of them, which is plausibly at least somewhat illogical and counter-productive....though not necessarily net counter-productive.
And except for yourself participating in the capitalist system you deride, what's your personal contribution to what you easily propose? I'd wager that you yourself are at least subconsciously speaking as untruthfully as anyone else from a rather shaky place of moral superiority.
Also, the very argument above yours isn't that people show a false concern for the well-being of others, it's that whether they do this or not, their own efforts to improve their own lives even for selfish reasons still more often than not help society in general through market mechanisms. It has worked remarkably so far, even if it's imperfect in many ways, like nearly anything human.
> And except for yourself participating in the capitalist system you deride, what's your personal contribution to what you easily propose?
Some methods.
> I'd wager that you yourself are at least subconsciously speaking as untruthfully as anyone else from a rather shaky place of moral superiority.
State some specifics, let's find out the quality of your heuristics.
>Also, the very argument above yours isn't that people show a false concern for the well-being of others, it's that whether they do this or not, their own efforts to improve their own lives even for selfish reasons still more often than not help society in general through market mechanisms. It has worked remarkably so far, even if it's imperfect in many ways, like nearly anything human.
Can you explain how you measure counterfactual reality, which is an implicit assertion within your claim?
Even if you re-directed all resources, all leisure, everything beyond bare minimum of survival into keeping as many people possible alive as long as possible, everyone will still die.
So who’s to decide what we should sacrifice to keep others alive?
The above poster specifically wrote "physically preventable", so as an advocate for mass human sacrifice, how many do you think it'll take to make an experimental bouncy castle in space?
Do you envision yourself as more of an Acceptable Human Sacrifice type, or Guy Who Enjoys The Bouncy Castle type?
"Physically preventable" is a moving target. The more resources are invested in preventing currently preventable deaths, the more farther away the target moves, because more and more causes of death become preventable. So, this is a false argument. There's no preventing all preventable deaths.
Let me give you a different argument: what would it take to prevent absolutely ALL car-related deaths? Before you answer, be aware that even ambulances that mostly save lives sometimes cause deadly accidents.
How many deaths would be prevented in the long term (let's take 2000 years, equal time period since Roman Empire until today) if we choose to go to space and accept a big increase in death risks for those pioneers, instead of preventing deaths on earth?
How about this argument: How many improvements in medicine that make those deaths preventable today came from United States, Canada, South America or were funded by those states? If sailors from the middle ages didn't risk their lives to cross the ocean and discover America, would we have today's medicine, 500 years later? How many lives would have been lost without it?
Do you genuinely believe that when people say "we have very pressing issues about preventable human suffering", that they're saying "we should literally bring all forms of suffering to absolute zero before we do literally anything else"?
Personally I simply don't know of anybody who actually hold that view, because it's obviously a nonsensical way to approach the issue. I do however keep seeing people strawman it into existence to dunk on it with the exact points you typed out here. What is being achieved by insisting that perfection is impossible, therefore we shouldn't try at all? Just the comfort of not having to think too hard about it?
How else should anyone answer that? Whatever improvement are done (and you can't deny that there are continuous improvements), a person with that view will always find that "more" could be done. They don't actually say that they want perfection, but actually that's the same as always saying "more could be done".
I have to say, this just reads as a thought-terminater happening on your end - we evidently live in a world where even people who strongly believe more should be done to stop human suffering ARE RIGHT NOW engaged in doing all kinds of other stuff not directly going towards preventing that, including assigning non-negligible amounts of resources to said stuff. Obviously the opposition is a question of the relative perceived scale of the expense of X to other problems Y, rather than literally wanting an indefinite Achilles-and-turtle race to perfection.
It's not that we can't do more than one thing, it's that if we are gonna devote massive amounts of resources to some grand scale project, there are disagreements about what's more pressing.
Now personally I do believe becoming interstellar should be one of our shared goals, and that it will be good for us (and the rest of the biosphere) long term. However, I really think that "nevermind the starving kids they will die anyway, it is what it is, focus on space instead" is gonna actively deteriorate our chances of ever getting anything done because it comes off as deeply detached and cruel.
You know what would be a tangible benefit of automated asteroid mining? Making child-powered cobalt mines obsolete in a flash, and full-stopping the environmental devastation of stripmining on earth. These are vastly better selling points than "there is no such thing as zero suffering".
> Now personally I do believe becoming interstellar should be one of our shared goals, and that it will be good for us (and the rest of the biosphere) long term. However, I really think that "nevermind the starving kids they will die anyway, it is what it is, focus on space instead" is gonna actively deteriorate our chances of ever getting anything done because it comes off as deeply detached and cruel.
Your intuition is correct, but there's even more reasons that that. I will use a movie clip to introduce what I would try to do if "we" "decided" to set off on an unnecessary interstellar voyage prior to taking care of people (particularly children) here on Earth first:
b) Some other reasons that are more well thought out
Humans would be well advised to not forget (or, learn in the first place) that it is MUCH easier to wreck things than it is to build them. I recommend "measuring twice and cutting once", as my grand daddy always told me.
PS: I should really try to be not such a pessimist/asshole, so I will also include this clip from the same movie as a counter-balance:
> this just reads as a thought-terminater happening on your end
That's exactly what it is. Not just that "more could be done" is always true, but it's irrelevant at the same time, because what they propose - taking resources from space agencies and sending truck-loads of food - won't do any good to those children. It will probably just fuel more war and terrorism and more schemes to divert those money to opaque bank accounts in some tropical country.
> It's not that we can't do more than one thing, it's that if we are gonna devote massive amounts of resources to some grand scale project, there are disagreements about what's more pressing.
Can't just ignore a project because it's not "pressing". And, btw, it IS pressing. We have 50 year of oil left with no alternative that is nearly as good as diesel. Do you tink that mankind can support a grand scale project after that?
> [...] is gonna actively deteriorate our chances of ever getting anything done because it comes off as deeply detached and cruel.
More cruel than it is now? More cruel than current wars and genocide (you know which ones, I won't name them). People already don't care, except for having their iSomething to brag about. How many children were exploited for all the copper in those devices? Did the buyers care? How many people went to buy FairPhone instead?
I think a big project like this is the only thing that can still unite most of the people. I hope China does it first so we could have a race again, like it happend in the 60's.
> You know what would be a tangible benefit of automated asteroid mining? Making child-powered cobalt mines obsolete in a flash, [...]
We are already preventing 99% of preventable deaths. As you say, most ‘preventable deaths’ we prevent just turn into a new later more creative preventable death. In many cities you can be homeless and have better mortality prevention than a medieval king.
I don’t know how people think that we’ll draw a line somewhere clear. It is (and should always be) a moving target.
I think most progress has this moving goalpost. Because of this, we need to multitask as a civilization. We can’t just focus on ‘safety is number 1’… because we’ll never do anything else.
Honestly a mental swag. To put actual numbers in it, life expectancy was 20 years, now 80 years.
That means roughly 0.9% chance a of death per year now, vs 3.4% ancestrally. Thats 73% of deaths avoided per year. I think that compounds year over year since those people who would otherwise have did are also alive to avoid more deaths.
> We are already preventing 99% of preventable deaths.
Makes an implicit claim of optimality on an absolute basis. What you posted here doesn't even try to prove that claim, at best it only proves a relative improvement.
Humans can be very clever and generous ($60,000 USD per interceptor missile, hoo baby!! Is "democracy" not the greatest thing ever!!!???) when they set their minds to something. Unfortunately, delusion, untruthfulness, deceit, misdirection, etc are also somethings, and apparently very desirable somethings, seemingly irresistible to some.
> The more resources are invested in preventing currently preventable deaths, the more farther away the target moves, because more and more causes of death become preventable.
Something seems off here - when you say "farther away", what is the unit of measure? To make sense (if you can pardon the colloquialism) of this argument, I think it would help if you gave a quantitative example to prove that your fact is actually factual. My intuition is that you may be conflating [1] physical death (concrete) with causes of death (abstract).
> So, this is a false argument.
A problem for you - some of us know of this phenomenon:
...and not just abstractly. There is a very interesting tangential conversation related to this seemingly [1] minor distinction - perhaps some day (some) Humans will have such conversations.
I suspect this ("this 'is' [1] a false argument") may be another one of those not actually factual facts.
Here I cannot disagree, because you are necessarily correct. But think about it from this perspective:
a) if preventable death was about to pay a visit to your (or your family's) doorstep, would you like for someone to stop in and stop it?
b) During the COVID pandemic / mass psychological phenomenon [1] a few years back, were you pro-vaxx or anti-vaxx?
> Let me give you a different argument: what would it take to prevent absolutely ALL car-related deaths? Before you answer, be aware that even ambulances that mostly save lives sometimes cause deadly accidents.
I do not know the answer to this question; I would (speculatively) classify it as unknowable.
I might ask you a similar question about children dying globally from malnutrition.
Or, I might also ask you if there are certain meaningfully important conclusions (relevant to the discussion we are having) that necessarily logically follow from this question or my inability to answer it, what your motive is for asking it (assuming you have one [1]), etc.
Or, I might also ask you whether you believe atoms existed before they were discovered to exist.
> How many deaths would be prevented in the long term (like 2000 years, time period about as long as form Roman Empire until today) if we choose to go to space and accept a big increase in death risks for those pioneers, instead of preventing deaths on earth?
Again (imho): unknowable.
Also: I (speculatively) smell misdirection, though I explicitly do not make an accusation of intent [1].
> How about this argument: How many improvements in medicine that make those deaths preventable today came from United States, Canada, or were funded by those states? If sailors from the middle ages didn't risk their lives to cross the ocean and discover America, would we have today's medicine, 500 years later? How many lives would have been lost without it?
This is a fine argument - I worry that you might "have us"[1], but I cannot be sure.
How about this argument: is there any necessarily and objectively true reason why the next time there "is" a "pandemic", I shouldn't do the literal opposite of The Expert's advice? Or for that matter, why I should even bother waiting for such an opportunity? After all, "shit happens" as they say.
Or, how about this argument: are we having a fun here today? Are all other Humans on this planet having a fun? Should we care about such things, and if so: why should we care about them?
OMG, that's a long reply... I'll try to answer, but I doubt I can cover all of it.
> [...]what is the unit of measure? [...] My intuition is that you may be conflating [1] physical death (concrete) with causes of death (abstract).
The context of my reply was this:
1>> Here's an idea: how about we start with a (at least seemingly) much smaller task: can we even try to genuinely be concerned about the (physically) preventable deaths of millions of people each year?
2>> So who’s to decide what we should sacrifice to keep others alive?
3>> The above poster specifically wrote "physically preventable"
There's no quantitative argument in there and it's not needed for the argument to work.
Example: A person has a car accident X miles away from the hospital. The traffic is bad. The ambulance is late. The person dies before reaching the hospital. IF there was an emergency hospital closer, or a highway nearby that leads to the hospital and improves the traffic in the area, that person could still be alive. That death could be prevented. Let's imagine that a hospital or highway is built. The ambulance arrives in time and saves his/her life. But then, accidents happen everywhere. With that hospital or highway built, a person that has the exact same accident, only this time is X miles away from the NEW hospital - that was previously unpreventable, no ambulance had a chance to get there in time - becomes preventable now with another hospital and/or highway. Because: we did it before, why not do it again?
> if preventable death was about to pay a visit to your doorstep, would you like for someone to step in and stop it?
Yes, obviously. No person that is emotionally involved would answer differently. Fortunately, the persons that make decisions in this matter are (usually) not emotionally involved. If they are, they (usually) take the morally corrupt way of improving services for their location, or situation, with resources that could better cover a larger area/population.
> During the COVID pandemic / mass psychological phenomenon [1] a few years back, were you pro-vaxx or anti-vaxx?
Niether. My opinion is that vccines should be free, people should be allowed to vaxx or not, but if they choose not to vaxx, and they get sick with the disease, they should pay the <cost of treatment> * <vaxx efficiency %>. AFAIK, this was never applied.
> I might ask you a similar question about children dying globally from malnutrition.
I'm not getting the point you are trying to make. All NASA's money would only save a few of them, while increasing truck accidents, polution, forests cuts for agriculture, and probably terrorism too. Child malnutrition is not preventable today in my opinion, not unless developed countries stop exploiting their countries - but that doesn't require NASA's resources.
> Should we care about such things, and if so: why should we care about them?
Some people care about the future and some don't. Some care about the future, but only the immediate future. Some care about the future for their remaining estimated life time (après moi, le déluge). Some care about the far future of humanity. I consider myself in the last category.
Concerning the far future of humanity, the more variation in everything, the better. Uniformity, global-<anything>, and Earth-only is very bad, because it all falls apart at the same time in the same way. We should colonise space, have other economic systems than capitalism around the world, have some kings, have some dictators, have rich, have poor, have safe cities, have death zones, have peace in some coutries, have war in others, have free mandatory vaxx in some places, have no vaxx at all in others. See what works and what doesn't. What good does it do if nobody vaccinates and we all die in the next pandemic and what good does it do if we all vaxx and the vaccine is bad and kills us all? What good is global peace if we don't invest in rocket engines, guidance systems, GPS and crypto, and what good is a global war that destroys the entire planet? I would like that future people have a choice, if what they want is to move to Mars.
> Even if you re-directed all resources, all leisure, everything beyond bare minimum of survival into keeping as many people possible alive as long as possible, everyone will still die.
True; similarly, even if everyone will still die, the airspeed velocity of an unladen European swallow is still ~20.1 miles per hour. Mother Nature has a cruel side to her, I do not deny it.
> So who’s to decide what we should sacrifice to keep others alive?
"Earth stuff" was bad phrasing on my part. The actual dichotomy is "naturally evolved systems" versus "designed systems". I might be an optimist, but I DO think designed systems can self-sustain in space. Not today- the tech isn't there yet - but soon. However, naturally evolved systems - like humans, non-bioengineered humans - I don't think will make it past a few generations, or, if you move a HUGE generation ship, a few thousand years. But it's always going to have a "use by" date without designed systems integrating with the naturally evolved systems.
When it comes to ALIEN natural systems, all bets are off. Who the hell knows what happens when we interact with that - even super-duper-ultra-tech designed systems might not be able to correct in time if two completely alien biologies interact destructively.
Curious though: what else was "magical thinking"? That's something I take pretty seriously - unless I'm doing it recreationally, which I am not - so I don't want to leave it hanging out for the universe to see.
Is it possible to even approximate a universal/perfect insulator? If not, then there will always be some situation in the universe that will have some effect on a static entity, unless it stops being static by adapting. Now, in terms of human bodies, these adaptations may be quite fundamental (i.e. on a genetic level)
Adaptation is just another word for "complexity breeds complexity," which is just more words for "entropy," which is just another description of all fading to static white noise background radiation, until it all fades into the heat death of the universe.
The question is whether you choose to resist entropy and slow down, or embrace entropy and burn bright.
Whichever path you choose, make the most of it my friends!
My cells have changed over enough to say with some degree of assurance that, Ship of Theseus style, consciousness is indeed quite transferable, but at the same time, you will never be the same person today that you were yesterday.
Quite a bit of this is covered in George Dyson's book 'Analogia'. I found Analogia to be interesting and well written, but lacking in overall coherence.
There's actually a third intractable reality up against star travel:
A significant portion of the human species doesn't have adequate food or housing, much less modern health care or education. Even populating Mars is a ridiculous waste of resources given this situation.
The whole "sun runs out in 5B years" thing is so disconnected from our present situation, that it doesn't even matter if it's even actually true or not (I'm not doubting it, just it's influence on our current situation).
Does anyone really think our species will still even be here in 5B years?
With the current trends in eco destruction, and primate warfare, it's questionable if we'll make it to the end of the century.
Understanding and dreaming of the stars can certainly continue to intrigue and inspire humanity, but dedicating massive resources so people can live in underground shipping containers on Mars, while billions of people still live in mud huts, is just so outrageously wasteful, not to mention self-centered and selfish, that's it's literally a crime against humanity.
This is all emblematic of the incredible failure of perspective of our place in this world...
True, humanity has big problems. But those aren't caused by resources diverted to space exploration.
And more importantly: diverting those resources elsewhere would do little to solve those problems. History, politics, dictators, colonialism, economic inequality, greed, ethnic/religious conflict, etc etc. Nothing that eg. NASA or a bag of $$ would fix.
Particularly when considering how small the amount going towards space is, which in the US, Congress is all too eager to pare down even further. Funding would be better sourced from cuts to things like military spending, which is well known for being egregiously wasteful and inefficient with its problems with pork barrel projects, fractal spiral subcontracting, and how practically anything it asks for gets rubberstamped with little question.
fundings for it is low now, how about when we have thousands on the Moon/Mars? will Earth poverty be eradicated etc.?
the point the op raised is relevant from a historical perspective, as probably the firsts who will populate the moon and Mars will think they are living the future; meawhile people die of dehydration this night
also we barely can't grow lettuce at space and that's missions at millions of USD... i think a society which is well stablished and care for everyone's welfare is more likely to collaborate and build technology to get away from the solar system than our shit greed of today, despite the great amount of good and intelligent people who sometimes can't even do stuff because academia conflict etc.
Settlements on the Moon, Mars, or anywhere else beyond Earth’s orbit are going to be brutal for decades to come, no matter how much money gets poured into them. The first settlers are going to be spending every waking moment securing their existence and making it more sustainable. These places won’t be joyride destinations.
Perhaps it’s pessimistic, but I have little faith that even a single country will eradicate suffering within its own borders, let alone all countries coming together to cooperate and eliminate it globally. If we wait until all earthly problems are solved before going into space, we’ll simply never go to space. At some point something will happen that will stop launches entirely, we’ll lose our institutional knowledge of rocketry and spaceflight, and putting things in orbit (let alone people on the moon) will become an impossibility again.
won't be a joyride but won't be living close or in starvation and in an overly cold/hot house...
settlement on Mars/Moon is a multi-disciplinary act! figuring out efficient and safe geothermal or nuclear or whatever technology to improve Earth's life, definitely translates to future settlements... so why not do it here? it isn't about eradicating suffering, as it's part of the existence (probably) but it's about providing a decent life for everyone
The capacity to make Mars work, necessarily means we develop the capacity to drop an autonomous pod anywhere (on Earth or Mars) that can make fuel from the air and use local dirt to either fashion a complete shelter or at least place a protective layer over a lightweight one from 50 million miles away.
(I assume, but have no hard numbers, that it's also cheaper to send hydroponic systems to Mars than to ship food regularly: conditional on that, also to ship an autonomous food factory).
Going to Mars long term also requires the shipping cost to space is reduced so much that the cost to LEO is competitive with current airline rates, so when I say "drop an autonomous pod anywhere" I really do mean anywhere — Sudan, Malawi, Nepal, Everest, Antarctica, are all much easier than Olympus Mons.
> But those aren't caused by resources diverted to space exploration.
Going to space IS politics. It is, essentially, a vanity goal for a whole society. The resources diverted are, essentially, mindshare and political.
It is only fair then that people ask why we as a society look to space when we have so many problems here, just as it was fair to ask why so much attention was given to the race to the moon rather than, say, civil rights [1].
1. There are people who live the way they do by choice. Folks who got that education and opportunity and rejected it. Your perspective of "mud huts bad" is very centric to how you were raised. It's one step removed from handing the natives a bible and having them build a church to civilize them.
2. No matter how we organize the word, there's always gonna be a line, and someone will be at the back. Sending that line in a new direction might be the next evolution of the species. Your iPhone is magic to someone 200 years ago, should we wait till everyone has a iPhone till we make any more advancement.
3. Warfare? Eco destruction? Unless your very old, its likely primate warfare at scale was well before your lifetime. As for the eco side of things, well you should take some comfort in the rate of change for the positive that your seeing.
> No matter how we organize the word, there's always gonna be a line
About one million people die of dysentry each year. I doubt that people got the opportunity to not die of dysentry and rejected it. You can have an ivory-tower argument about this hypothetic line, but in this world of ours, it's going to be hard to claim we're past that line.
You can't really be arguing that people live in mud huts by choice?
Or that they squandered their copious opportunities?
"More than 80 percent of Indians (about 700 million) live on less than $1.25 a day"
Saying that we shouldn't spend money to send humans into inter-stellar space is not the same as saying we should stop all technical advancement.
But really, we'd be better off without iPhone or Android as well. A more democratized technological advancement would benefit many more people, to a much greater degree.
Do you really think if Steve Jobs hadn't been born that smart phone would not have been invented?
But they'd almost certainly be a more accessible s/w development platform...
>>> You can't really be arguing that people live in mud huts by choice?
You should go look at the indigenous protection efforts in the amazon. You should look at what much of Africa has done.
There are plenty of people living in their areas version of mud huts, with cell phones and solar panels. "Mud huts" are in some places very much the local, renewable building material. https://thisisafrica.me/lifestyle/wisdom-african-hut/
I think you've misunderstood! You seem to have taken the "mud huts" comment literally. The person you replied to was using it as a euphemism for extreme poverty, not a literal description of a particular construction material. Hope this lifts any further confusion.
Your quote requires India to have a population of about 875 million, it's currently about 1.4 billion.
> A more democratized technological advancement would benefit many more people, to a much greater degree
What does "democratized" even mean here? This stuff is widely available, do you want governments getting involved?
> But they'd almost certainly be a more accessible s/w development platform
What does "more accessible" mean? The knowledge to learn is given away for free. Making the tools multilingual or blind-accessible is hard but the big players do it anyway. Open source tools have man pages, which always had terrible reputations. Both open and closed source tools have wikis and forums and blogs.
The problem with this argument is that is that it logically dictates that we can only spend money on one thing at a time.
You bring up space travel, but the exact same argument applies to sports, movies, art, technology, evenbthe Internet itself. Once distilled as "how can we spend money on x when y" then it behoves us to identify y, and spend on literally nothing else.
Globally not-spending on defence for example would free up resources enough to substantially raise the standard of living for billions.
On the other hand, spending is raising the standard of living for billions already. Movies spend huge amounts, employing the services of hundreds of professions. The money poured into movies doesn't get destroyed, it gets distributed. (Including globally to places like India, Cape Town, and so on.) So it is with spending on space. The bulk of the money is spent/recycled here on earth.
The problems you highlight (poverty, living conditions, health facilities etc) are complex though and seldom fixed simply with money. In some ways money is the easy part, other factors (like human greed leading to corruption) are trickier.
So, I hear what you are saying, but its not an either-or proposition. There's room for both. I applaud your desire to focus on the problems of others. Don't worry about other areas, focus on the people you can help.
Yeah. Money does get recycled, and some, invested in something that increases productivity, say a tractor for the farm, instead of an armoured vehicle for defence, increases wealth quicker. Unfortunately without that armoured vehicle we may all be gobbled up by a neighbour with bad intentions. A balance between many things seems what keeps us going forward. The hard part seems to agree on the balance.
Personally I found that there is enough opportunity in areas which improve things, work against poverty, environmental destruction etc, that this is what I focus on.
The last century has involved the fastest reduction in severe poverty ever seen in human history, and it's not stopping anytime soon. We're allowed to also do other things.
This is analogous to arguing against exploring the Americas because Europe had poverty.
It seems to me that over a couple hundred year time horizon the new land, resources, technologies and economies of scale added by the new world were clearly a net benefit to europeans as a whole and paid back the initial investment many times over.
If Europe had ended poverty before enslaving the rest of the world, it would be a much better world now.
How could anyone argue against that?
A people that were interested in raising others around them out of poverty, before setting off to devastate and enslave other continents, would probably have treated the people they found on those continents much more humanly.
If the european colonial diaspora had set out to advance other places, as opposed to exploiting them, we probably wouldn't have global poverty today.
The "return on investment" of colonizing north america was made by exporting tobacco to europe, clear cutting the north american continent, near extincting major mega-fauna and replacing them with invasive species, and shipping africans to the americas for slave labor.
Considering that a net positive is a dubious conclusion. But of course we have to ask: net positive for whom?
And of course, misses the point of the original comment: that there are no resources to be exploited 40 light years from earth! It's a one way trip...
try a broad History of Slavery before asserting that the Age of Exploration was just one big slave-fest, please. Its a bigoted statement to meld them together without the actions of other civilizations taken into account.
This is such a silly take. Europe enslaved the world? Sorry, but slavery was an institution long before some Europeans took part in it (emphasis on "took part" as it was cooperative, involving African, Arab, etc. slave traders), and continues to be practiced long after those European empires abolished it within their own empires. The abolitionist movement was also European, and certainly Western. And how can you know if the world would have been better? That's a counterfactual you either cannot know, or one that fails to account for all the good that was also transmitted through colonialism, or absorbed by the colonial powers. It wasn't black and white. And even where the bad is concerned, while there is not argument for chattel slavery, good can come out of bad things. Furthermore, you are reducing European influence to one aspect of one aspect, not even just colonialism, which is not even uniquely European, but slavery per se. This is ridiculous.
Your argument w.r.t. poverty is also the same boring reductive fallacy that people who argue against beautiful architecture and art make ("You could have fed so many people with that money!"). Guess what: you can do both. You don't "solve poverty" by spending a sum of money on food over art. Those people will be hungry soon. That's one. Two, Man does not live by bread alone. Beauty matters. We don't live to eat. We eat to live. And yes, we can both care for the starving and invest in things other than helping the poor.
The idea that Europe is responsible for global poverty is also obtuse, historically illiterate, and devoid of common sense. There was plenty of poverty in the world before the evil European showed up. If anything, Western commerce, whatever its flaws, has lifted many out of poverty. Yes, capitalism, whatever its flaws, has lifted many, especially the West, out of poverty and into a good deal of material comfort. Look at the 20th century alone. It's better to be poor today than poor a century or a few centuries ago. The average man today is far better off today materially than he has ever been, than even the materially better off in previous centuries were.
Our ancestors weren't perfect, and we should not repeat their errors, but it takes a certain kind of ingratitude and blindness to fail to appreciate the cumulative good they did leave us, an ingratitude and blindness seemingly particular to snarky, ideologically infected oikophobes in the West. Believe me: Africans aren't generally seething with hatred at the good of the West the way people in the West do. If anything, they are more likely to despise the malaise and decadence they see in the West today, that the West is trying to force down the throats of everyone else. They are looking to replicate what is actually good in the West in their own countries.
You’re assuming the resources can be distributed better, if only they weren’t “wasted” on space travel. I suspect the problems you’re describing exist _because_ we can’t distribute better - we don’t know how. We’ve reached the limits of social organization at this stage of civilization and those problems won’t ever be solved unless we innovate our way out of it.
You might counter my argument with a plethora of “obvious” solutions, but I suspect most of them will be top-down ones, that, unfortunately, that don’t seem to ever work. You might also enumerate instances where top-down initiatives have worked successfully, but I’d argue that in each of the cases there was something about the environment that made it stick - the soil was already fertile.
The amount of money spent on “lofty” pursuits like space exploration is almost orthogonal to the issue at hand, within reason, obviously - it’s definitely possible to bankrupt yourself like the Soviet Union did.
I put “lofty” in quotes because these pursuits are obviously very practical in the long run. I don’t want to repeat the argument you’ve probably heard a million times, but it’s obviously true that if everyone thought like this back when we living in caves - we’d never even get huts. And we were much poorer back then.
> There's actually a third intractable reality up against star travel:
How is this intractable? This is a moral argument. It won't stop anyone from doing it. I am not sure you are using the word intractable correctly. It implies impossible, or unrealistic to be solved even if hypothetically possible, etc.
Whereas from what you say it seems it's possible, you just think it should not be done (due to being in your view immoral).
It's not a crime against humanity. "Crimes against humanity" are actually very specific things, if you consider them real at all and not made up and enforced post hoc. General considerations of property rights let you go to mars using your resources if you want to.
1) There will always be some people who will live in mud huts. Do I need to explain why?
2) Probably the biggest improvements in quality of life on Earth came because of America (North, mostly). Those countries exists today because extremely big resources were invested by the kings in Europe to cross the ocean at a time when standards of living there were unimaginably bad. They could have given the money to the poor instead.
I don't think anyone is arguing we need it to be perfect, which is impossible, but certainly the extreme situation we find ourselves in right now is ridiculous and much could be done. I love space, I want us to spend on space, but the price tag does matter. If we can take the money out of the military, that would be a great step.
In the greater scheme of things, spaceflight isn't that different from early ocean explorers, right?
Build a vessel that suits the environment it'll travel in, stock it with equipment & supplies, head off into the unknown. Hope that supplies last long enough to set foot on the other side, and/or 'live off the land'.
Viewed like that, asteroids are kinda like islands, where some fresh fruit, timber etc may be found. Adventurers may like it & hang there while the ship sails on.