It is the single most beneficial act to the survival likelihood of the human species that seems available to us.
Good point. And arguably that's actually happening.
If your Mars colony is just a PR^H^H national pride game - you've got a handful of people, some high-school kids' plant experiment and the Little Box with the Antenna some TLA agency asked you to leave behind - then sure, it would be no more expensive than the SDI, the Libyan war or any other stupid boondoggle we can apparently afford.
If you want an actual self-sufficient colony, you've got a much bigger project. I don't think we know what is actually required to create a self-sustaining technical culture in space, because we've only really done it by accident and not in space. But this: http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2010/07/insuffic... is as decent a hand-wavey starting point as any. And it is quite a bit more resource-intensive than a few kilopeople/few percent of organized human output.
Diversity of thought and culture is a huge survival benefit, and to fulfill the western fantasy of poverty eradication we would have to impose a new set of values and thoughts upon all those affected. It would have to be built on the destruction of diversity that is of higher utility than those people's welbeing.
But this is admittedly, from a perspective that would be cruel to a great many people.
I can see strong arguments for modifying cultures worldwide to lower poverty, but only in ways that promote that they find their own varied and unique solutions to the problems, rather than imposing a single solution.
I don't want to save my ideology, i want to save the existence of any ideology.
(For example, think about genetically modified super-disease. And consider how much easier it could become to make one.)
And what feeds terrorism? Poverty and injustice.
Frankly, I guess I'll sound like a broken record, but if we're worried about the future then there's no bigger imminent threat than CO2. Left unchecked, every major coastal cities in the world will be underwater by 3000.
* Besides, are you seriously saying that "non-Western" cultures should remain poverty-stricken so that the "Western culture" can benefit from the resulting diversity? This is wrong on so many levels.
You hit the nail on the head here. The problem is not that we should or should not be helping them, but rather that we ACTIVELY and WILLFULLY base our economy on their continued poverty.
I think the best thing the US could do to end poverty is exit the world economy. The problem is that our standard of living and way of life is built upon the cheap labor of impoverished countries to produce the goods we consume.
I don't think western culture would benefit from such diversity. In fact the idea of diversity being a benefit is hinged upon the understanding that if western culture is not the most fit strategy, that there will be other cultures to rise when it falls.
The reason that I promote colonization as a more effective strategy then trying to fix problems here is simple:
- Attempting to fix problems here slightly improves the state of affairs, and reduces one of many possible causes for local extinction.
- Adding even one viable colony squares the chance of loss (that is an awesome improvement) and every additional colony exponentially improves on our likelihood of survival.
Even if we assume one of the worst case scenarios of a massive asteroid impact, the earth would still be more habitable than decades of development on Mars and without massive resource outlays to get it there.
I think we should be focus on building self-reproducing tin-cans that contain a minimal human-supporting ecosystem (and humans). The problem is not finding better planets, it is about being planet-bound at all.
> people assume that their pet ideas should be everyone's.
It's not exactly a pet idea, but it is against the grain of most Human thinking, which is far more geared for tribal thinking than thinking at the species level, which is why it doesn't "boggle my mind". That said, I think is important, and arguing it's not selfish[1] by definition, as it puts one's personal, community, national, continental and/or world interests above the interests of the species, which ultimately is survival. Off-world colonies is procreation at the species level, and is the only way to prevent an extinction level event of the type that we know happen occasionally on earth.
1: I'm not trying to imply your statement is selfish as much as make a general point.
To be fair it doesn't prevent an ELE at all, it just means that one would destroy 99.9%+ of the human species instead of 100%.
Shotgunning even a few tens of thousands of people in all directions would not meaningfully change the end result of an ELE on Earth unless you wound up with 100-200 of them on the same hospitable rock.[0]
[0] https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn1936-magic-number-for...
That is the difference between extinction and non-extinction. It changes what would previously have been an extinction level event into a non-extinction level event. That is, it doesn't prevent the event, it prevents it from being extinction level, which is the whole point.
> Shotgunning even a few tens of thousands of people in all directions would not meaningfully change the end result of an ELE on Earth unless you wound up with 100-200 of them on the same hospitable rock.
The point isn't to just send people to other locations, but to eventually create self-sustaining colonies. That doesn't happen without first getting people there. (and hospitable is relative).
Heck, we could maybe use the same tech to both robotically plaster the deserts with solar panels. Then send those finely tuned bots up to Mars to do the same thing there.
What we could be doing is manufacturing and launching panspermia spores.
K-strategy is fine. We can launch generation ships as well. But in the absence of any conclusive evidence that a life-like complex of self-propagating chemical reactions exists anywhere else in the universe, r-strategy seems best. Assemble the minimum viable package for propagation of Earth-style life, and manufacture copies until you run out of mass.
We don't actually know whether all life in the universe could be exterminated by sterilizing just one planet. Using a similar amount of resources, we could create about 140k reasonably stable human colonies, or we could send 5 kilograms of spores towards every star in the galaxy, instructing the probe controller to shoot off a few any time it can detect liquid water.
That way, if humanity fizzles out anyway after an eon or so, there will eventually be other species to try their grasping appendages at space colonization.
We've never been back since. A moonbase is the obvious place to experiment, develop and benefit from 1/6th gravity as a staging post to Mars. We should have been there for the last 40 years.
It saddens me we're so short sighted. No votes in it?
Could we even organise a global effort? The governments would spend decades arguing over who got to make which bit.
I'm much more hopeful of the private efforts to be truthful.
There are things that make the Moon interesting, but none of them are Mars.
Mars DRM 5.0 is still for direct launch, but they keep on talking about side projects as being essential to Mars because mumble.
Also : we're all going to die. We learn to live with this idea. Why the perspective of our end as individuals could not be extended to our end as a whole?
Also : if you want to ensure humanity's long term survival, spending hundreds of billions to go live on a desert, rusty planet with an oxygen-less, tenuous atmosphere is a weird idea. If you're afraid of asteroids, build a shelter and store food.
Maybe you could argue that they're just worried about their own particular genes (i.e. the Selfish Gene), but some people certainly care about ensuring that humanity survives.
So how can we change what people value, without destroying that which we are attempting to preserve?
Not with that attitude.
It's not so much that we "can't agree" but more that the main argumentative mode these days is sneering and insults, occasionally backed up by mob violence. No wonder people get stubborn about sticking to their positions.
(And since you brought up the topic of sneering and insults, frankly, the only time I've felt insulted at at on this site recently was your "Not with that attitude" comment. Perhaps you're assuming some kind of ill will or political motivation on my part that was not in fact there. Regardless, your comment still reads like a sneer to me, three days later.)
The most universally accepted argument is that one has an obligation to one's own ancestors to maximize their chances of survival.
I consider it to be the asymptotic biological imperative. I've decided not to have children, thus I have an obligation to ensure that everybody else's children have better odds of survival.
You are also forgetting how hard it to maintain that 1g of acceleration for a long period.
What single 'world economy' is there?
It's not as if establishing an off-world colony will solve any of our actual, serious challenges (mankind's aggression, our lack of empathy, our disregard for environments around us). If anything, it will only further spread the disease known as the human condition.
It's an escapist nerd fantasy and I say this as someone who sleeps next to a copy of Dune.