[quote]Schwarzfahrer wrote:
Going to another planet is the most important thing our human race could ever hope to achieve.
Even just dreaming about it is nobler and more productive than >99% of what usually occurs during terrastrian days.
Claiming space as our playground, our property, our shit is what can and will redefine us.
@Cooper
First of all, fertilizer, guns and husbandry have had a much slower impact than Smartphones. The rectangular fuckers already made commuting over 9000 times more annyoing.
Plus, you need to see the bigger picture. There will be a functioning man machine interface in 50-100 years and we are now ~1/16th [boring Google] cyborgs.
[quote]I guess that I just can’t get behind the cut-and-run philosophy behind massive human migration to another planet.
I mean, is the Earth so totally fucked beyond repair that we need to start looking into moving to other planets?[/quote]
For starters, most of Earth is uninhabitable or unusable anway. Most of it consists of oceans, deserts, iceplains and mountains.
If we take american household consumption standards for everyone, even the most conservative models comes up with multiple Earths we’d need [b]right now [/b].
And we’re talking only rescouces, not the massive pollution we’re doing to this incredibly filligrane strip of gas and organic soil.
Most of the damage we do (drilling for oil, metals, gas; nuclear waste; fucking up our atmosphere; raping the ecosystems etcetc) is for all practical purposes permanent.
But even if we all vote green tomorrow and smoke the good oregano peace-pipe - all we need is a meteor, another religious wave, some systemic crash, or …just a few more decades of good ol’ fornication.
With a two-digit billion world population, you can expect big wars coming in like clockwork that’ll make the 20th Century look like a “the Teletubbies hang out at Woodstock” special.
And even if we vote all green, smoke the peace-pipe, build the best damn orbital anti-meteor laser batteries this side of Orion’s Belt, ban the ridiculously idiotic religions, have Einstein’s Brain rule us AND stabilize population -also reduce it beforehand- … even then our time is short.
Just a few more centuries and genetic selection + drift alone will make us dumber and less ambitious.
I mean, maybe you have a vision of a meticulously balanced population of communist cyborg hunter-philosophers, who initiate wars and eugenic programs when their calculations tell them to?
Warpspace travel sounds more realistic to me.
And there doesn’t has to be a “massive human migration”, maybe just a few waves of a thousand colonists.
Plus, most [read:all known] rocky planets are just wastelands. Most of them are very unpleasant in terms of gravity, radiation, breathable air supply and so on. What the worst that can happen?
“Oh no, we’ve accidentally sent the Aids in a petri dish to Mars- the gay astronaut community will be furious!”
[/quote]
I guess I just have a very fatalistic view of man’s existence. I think this is our fate, to destroy our planet. Maybe we’re inherently this way, maybe social mores have evolved too quickly in the wrong direction, but we are consumers first and foremost.
Humans want status and power and comfort and all that shit. Our culture demands that people consume MORE in order to achieve more status and all that shit. The ability to consume more of something, anything, is a sign of success in this country and on this planet in general.
Unless that perception is changed, we are doomed to consume everything on this planet until we can no longer inhabit it. Rather than live in some Game of Thrones-type society, we’d rather pump trillions into finding a new planet to live on without changing our ways.
And why wouldn’t we? Have you SEEN Game of Thrones? Is that the sort of society you want to live in? Of course not. To cut so far back on consumption that we might actually be able to significantly prolong our existence on this planet would not be in any large consumer’s self-interest. And we act primarily with our self-interest in mind.
So no matter what we do, we are simply doomed to repeat the same mistakes on another planet that we’ve already made here. WE are the problem, not the finite nature of this planet. And that will never change. Shit, half the hardcore religious people in this world walk around with delusions of grandeur, convinced that all of THIS is for THEM. Why wouldn’t people feel entitled to consume whatever they can get their hands on, and fuck anyone too lazy or unmotivated or weak or uneducated or liberal to get their hands on more of it themselves? Is that a mindset that is going to be reversed anytime soon? No.
It’s what people in 12-step programs call “doing a geographical”, where you move to another area thinking that it’s the place you live that is the problem. All geographicals do is shift your bullshit and your problems from one locale to another.
But if it’s all in the name of technological advancements, then it must be progress, right? Bullfuckingshit. Progress is a change of mindset. All this slavish adherence to the infantile mindset that technology is inherently a good thing simply leads to an acceleration toward the point of no return.
