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Comment by slv77 | Hacker News Reader

When my grandfather was a child (age 11) he took his 10 year old brother to the state fair by train a distance of about 40 miles. They spent their remaining funds on ice cream and then hitchhiked back home.

The trains were gone by the time my father was a child and he wandered as far as a bike could take him and back in a day. He would play at Army Dumps that dotted the landscape in the 50's.

When I was a kid the freeways and major thoroughfares created islands that couldn't be crossed by a kid on a bike. The farmland and riparian areas around creeks created walking corridors and I would spend time watching tadpoles and building forts.

For my kids the farmland was developed and the creeks tightly fenced off by an interlocking thicket of HOAs. They wandered virtual worlds.

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>They wandered virtual worlds.

That's fairly insightful right there. I'm juust old enough that my childhood contained some of the last years of "the woods" and juust young enough that when I started WOW, I recognized the feeling. Logging on in those early days had the same essential flavor as grabbing the bike and heading out.

Seconded. A very insightful comment. Your comment rings true as well. I spent quite a bit of time in "the woods" as a boy but also plenty of time in front of computer screens. You're right - the feeling is the same whether it's outdoors, a virtual world, or even the inner world of my thoughts when I would read a book with a fully realized world.

Remember when the internet allowed you to have multiple identities on message boards and so on? It was a really unique time.

I love virtual worlds and don't fetishize nature, but there seems something essentially different between a world created by physics and a world created by humans. It would be a shame to miss out on either.

I ran a Minecraft server with myself and friends about two years ago. They were most interested in exploring (and finding neat treasures), so I added mods for new lands, spontaneous adventures, rarer treasures and other places to go.

OTOH, I enjoyed building factories and ever more complicated toys and one friend created art pieces everywhere (we gave him creative mode and some other tools and sent him off).

One girl loved to farm almost exclusively for whatever reason; maybe I should have done something to make it more engaging somehow?

And now I've forgotten my point, but I'm reminded just how different everybody is!

Awesome way to put things into perspective. Nothing is "lost"... it is only changing. Everything will change. Embrace fate, control what you can control, and live.

I did things my kids will not do, as it is simply not possible to take a train from Nogales to Puerto Vallarta anymore, for example. They will do things that are not possible for their kids to do... and so on. Don't harken back to days gone by as if they (kids) are somehow going to be deficient due to these perceived losses. They are not.

And hopefully their children will roam the stars.

Yeah, the cold, distant stars. Super!

Seriously, can we get over the idea that life in space is going to be better? The stars are too distant to visit. Elon Musk doesn't have the nous to fix our political problems, just to competently execute engineering tasks.

If freedom and self-determination are the goals, it's surely best to conserve the liberties and territories that already exist or have only recently been lost. Keep the space travel agenda to mining asteroids.

There's nothing wrong with dreaming.

There is if you spend your life aiming for something that is unattainable then missing something worth while that was right under your nose.

Seriously, can we get over the idea that life across the sea is going to be better? There are no lands there, the ocean is too large and too dangerous to cross. Perhaps our ancestors said this.

It's in our DNA. We won't stop. We can't stop. A virus can't consider it's host "enough", nor can we consider a valley, a continent, or a planet enough. That's my opinion.

I also think it is both fascinating and noble to attempt to out-live the Sun, and maybe even the Universe as we know it.

Really? SpaceX made it over 90℅ cheaper to launch a rocket into space. That changes economic forces significantly already. Ancient humans walked continents and spread to the whole earth for no clear individual advantage (although perhaps a species advantage). Wanderlust and exploration appears ingrained in our species. It doesn't have to make (short term) sense for us to colonize other planets and stars, we are going to do it anyway. Politics change, technology grows at faster rates and culture will eventually support it. Why not?

We still have to fix our own planet's problems, but we can still colonize others. Some people will work on one and others will work on the other.

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