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I think that the pursuit of knowledge is a really good way to spend your time, but I do not like when simple solutions to real problems are sidelined in favor of the latest buzzword-oriented technology fetish. In times when the president-elect has announced that he is shutting down NASA's climate change research, ostensibly to fund space exploration, I think we need to remind ourselves that any work we chose to pursue has an opportunity cost. I really believe that we can address the main issues facing our society with pretty simple means, but that will not happen if everyone is too busy looking for problems to solve using their favorite tool. In the terminology of Hacker News, I guess what I am arguing is that colonization is bike-shedding for the reforms that I have mentioned in my first comment.

The problem is that your notion of "real problems" is artificial. If our society prioritizes space colonization above eliminating nuclear stockpiles, and people are willing to accept the risk posed by the existence of those stockpiles, then there is no sense in continuing to refer to it as a "main issue facing our society". Maybe you consider it to be a main issue, but society doesn't. Or maybe society does consider it an important issue, but not so important that everybody should stop working on everything else until it is solved (and as if Earth won't have new, seemingly equally important problems, when that happens). At least the people who are excited about space colonization don't propose to start dealing with environmental problems only after we've colonized Titan. You can't pretend to care about society when you are willing to ignore the actual things people find important.

Your fallacy is the same as claiming that we should care more about car accidents than about terrorism, because car accidents kill more people, instead of realizing that the number of dead simply isn't the only thing people care about when considering threats of this kind.

It's also unclear to me why you choose to single out space colonization when the vast majority of what most people do on Earth has nothing to do with solving the problems you mention. If anything, working on enabling space colonization is far more beneficial to life on this planet than almost every other subject on HN.

> The problem is that your notion of "real problems" is artificial. If our society prioritizes space colonization above eliminating nuclear stockpiles,

Nuclear stockpiles serve as a deterrent to aggression; the fact that the US and Soviet Union did not have a conventional WWIII between 1945 and 1990 is because both sides (and England and France) had nuclear weapons that made conventional invasions untenable.

Getting rid of "nuclear stockpiles" is a terrible idea.

Reducing the world's nuclear weapons to the much lower level would still leave enough of the deterrent, while it would prevent the ultimately cathaclysmic develompents which are very probable now.

Unless you're a Dr. Strangelove hoping to eventually end up in the bunker with a lot of pre-selected women (or simply falsly believing that the accidents are totally impossible) I don't understand why you'd be against the reduction.

Given the real probabilities that something can go wrong, if we don't do something to prevent it, something will seriously do go wrong, relatively soon, it's a question of time, and there's not too much of it. Only with the intentionally limited amount of the nuclear weapons the humanity can survive such an event.

I'm not sure I agree with that reasoning. This works until a future date when someone presses the trigger regardless, and then the nuclear winter arrives. I'm fairly certain you'll agree that past history isn't an indicator of how the world will look like in 20, 30, 50 years and so on.

Thinking of weapons of mass destruction, that HAVE been used in the past, as some forms of keepers of the peace just doesn't sit right with me.

Nuclear weapons have only been used without the deterrent of retaliation.

While there is an inherent danger in having weapons capable of leaving the Earth largely uninhabitable for humans there's also a very real danger that without them the last 70 years of unprecedented levels of peace ends.

I don't like to recommend books in these situations, but in this case you might find "Command and Control" interesting. It describes a huge number of near-disasters that I, for one, had never heard about (e.g. armed thermonuclear weapons accidentally dropping out of bombers in populated areas). Mind you, I am not even suggesting getting rid of the stockpiles, merely limiting them to the level required to constitute a reasonable deterrent. What we have today is far too great of a risk for the safety they are supposedly buying us.

What body on the globe is the seat of identifying and listing out "real problems" as canonical list of them?

It is a matter of fact that a huge number of people are excited about space colonization. So it is obviously important to them. How about letting them do what excites them, instead of telling them that their problem isn't "real" enough according to your personal definitions?

You couch your arguments in the language of logic, but are in fact utterly incoherent. Your references to "people" (even if supplemented by "a huge number") mask the fact that your only available real reference is to yourself and perhaps your friends. If you would reflect for a moment you would have to acknowledge that the "huge number" of people excited about space colonization pales into insignificance compared to the number of people who have an interest in the environment of this planet and its continual degradation. These are not personal definitions. For what it's worth, my - personal - imagination is fired by the notion of space exploration and colonization, but given that to harness collective wills and energies to pursue even one project on a large scale is a supremely difficult task, one has to pick and choose. Far from the OP's post being utopian, it is in fact your own picture of the world, in which groups are free to pursue large-scale projects at whim, which is a luxurious utopia bearing no relationship to the status quo.

http://globalprioritiesproject.org/ kind of tries to do this

A company I am building at the moment is doing just this: www.developfy.com.

I think we should colonize other planets because we can. Not as a solution to any problem.

I will defer to The West Wing to explain: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9yUHnERJ0zs

What you are describing is inverse vandalism. If we ignore the problems of here and now, the realization of a future where we colonize the stars may never occur. Obligatory quote:

Yeah, yeah, but your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could that they didn't stop to think if they should. - Dr. Ian Malcolm.

Our focus should not be on whether we can do something. We should carefully consider why we are doing something and ensure we aren't acting in a self-destructive way.

As odd as it may seem, the human race is fully capable of accomplishing both space-expansion efforts and cleaning things up here on Earth. More than that, space opens the door to a wealth of possibilities for ameliorating or even solving many of the major problems we face today. That includes environmental efforts and energy production.

Even if we were to pursue a massive space race, it'd only consume a relatively small fraction of humanity's industrial capability and resources as they exist today. In the context of a long-term terraforming effort, after a significant space-borne industry has been created, these sorts of binary comparisons become all the more laughable.

You act like there is some master-judge who will tell us what we should do that will give different results from our own introspective desire to do exactly what we want. We should do what we want to do, and there is no such thing as vandalism outside of human created law.

OK, you had me at "because we can" :)

I think The West Wing has better explanations than that. I was sure your link was going to be to https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-s92lsTMcZQ

EDIT: this one has a bit more context: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R2HzHSeV9v8

Just because we can, but we can't.

So she was basically trolling him to get to see him all puffed up :-)

Those "solutions" are only simple in theory, not in practice. Enacting that change would actually be exponentially harder than getting humans to Titan, IMHO. One requires massive social and economic change. The other requires sending a limited number of people to another part of the solar system. We roughly know how to do the latter but the former is on decidedly a longer timescale if it achievable at all.

Do you really think that adopting a sustainable way of life is unfeasible, while establishing a self-sustaining colony on another planet is? Many of the changes I am talking about are already taking place. For example, renewables have recently become a viable alternative (http://www.sciencealert.com/india-says-the-cost-of-solar-pow...) and population growth is projected to taper off after 2050 (http://abcnews.go.com/Technology/story?id=98371). The only thing that can hold these solutions back is strong opposition from the beneficiaries of the current system. They will fight back, but I think that the odds are stacked against them.

Yes, I do. Ultimately there is no such thing as a sustainable way of life, thanks to the second law of thermodynamics. It's not that long until the sun burns out - by which time we'll have to have figured out how to settle not only on other planets but in other solar systems.

Nice one. I will make sure to bring out entropy next time someone accuses me of not thinking of the long run.

I don't think we know how to do the latter, in terms of colonization. Our experience locally is that living in hazardous environments is not something human beings can endure long term. We'd be asking people to live in a place that combines the worst elements of submarine and Antarctic living, with no real way of responding to any difficulty at all, even through communication.

Lot of people assume magical science fairies will solve this via "terraforming" or some other science fiction only idea, but more likely space exploration will remain unmanned probes if just because we aren't going to send a generation of explorers to their deaths or eventual madness.

> One requires massive social and economic change. The other requires sending a limited number of people to another part of the solar system.

Do social and economic factors magically not apply to people who colonize the solar system? Seems to me you now have 2 problems.

The scale and selectivity of a new colony make it vastly simpler, IMHO.

Scale is the critical thing here - even small social change at scale is hard - examples are aplenty.

To play devils advocate for a minute: with or without climate change research the results are the same: non-action.

No solution that involves mobilizing seven billion people for a cause can be considered "simple".

Honestly, starting a colony on mars is a much, much easier task than getting 7 billion people to stop eating meat.

I don't believe parent was suggesting that current problems be the sole focus of our attention to the exclusion of all else. However there is a valid point to be made with respect to people's ability (or lack thereof) to line up behind even the most moderate of global proposals. For example, in the grand scheme of things we (human race) can't even accept a slight change to our lifestyle and moderate economic imposition in order to avoid significant climate change that will have far greater human and economic costs. On what possible basis then is it reasonable to expect that people would be willing to make an even greater investment in a far more marginal venture?

I get the feeling that some people view space colonisation as a kind of Deus ex machina that will magically give us a fresh start, unbound by the mistakes of the past. They don't realise that the mistakes of the past are carried with us wherever we go since they live between our ears.

I'm all for basic science and reaching for frontiers, but as a species we are proving incapable of making the mental and social leaps that the next evolutionary steps require of us. Would love to be proven wrong. :-(

Yeah but some of us think the social problems we currently inflict on our selves aren't going anywhere soon. So let's see what we can find out in space while everyone is still trying to find a way to play nice back on earth. It's not going to fix anything back here but man it would be kick ass. That's enough reason for me.

"I would much rather live in a world where some people care about clean energy and sustainability, others about colonizing space, others about mathematics, and others about art, etc."

Right, if someone cares about something, they tend to talk about it. If they think it's important, they think it should be given priority over other things.

But then this is exactly what you're replying to and exactly what you're disagreeing with. As if somehow by saying, "I think other things are more important than colonizing space" stops anybody doing anything. The tyranny of someone with an opinion different from yours, voicing it.

If humans cannot live sustainably on Earth then what hope is there of existing in any form elsewhere?

I'm not sure the efficiency of the whole of humanity on earth and the efficiency of a comparably tiny colonial group is related in any way. There's a ton of momentum to overcome here on earth, and any change will need to occur across vast swaths of the population to be effective. That's an extremely tall order and it's extremely unlikely, as humans tend to ignore impending danger if there's no immediate consequence involved. Significant change will be seen at a generational pace at best.

Colonists, on the other hand, must be efficient if they wish to exist for longer than a few weeks, and they're a small and smart enough of a group that maintaining efficiency isn't an issue. Efficiency is a way of life for them. If anything, extremely low waste yet modern lifestyles will get their start in planetary colonies and make their way back to earth, not vice versa.

I think he means in the long run. His claim is that eventually you have a large group of average intelligence humans on our new planet and we decided to pursue colonization tech instead of sustainable energy and environment tech.

Of course, my bet is that we will reach the point where we can sustain a planet before we run out of planets (assuming we colonize a planet).

My actual bet is that it's gg for humanity.

Perhaps there are advantages that other planets have, that we don't have on earth.

There are certainly massive disadvantages, life support, ect, but there could be things like large amounts of plentiful fuel.

Well, if the Earth really gets that bad (e.g. the entire surface is all water, no land; or extremely destructive weather events; or too dark because sunlight can't reach our surface), it might actually be easier to set up self-contained (bubble) cities on another planet than on earth itself.

But if you're talking about terraforming, then if we could terraform another planet we could probably re-terraform earth itself.

We'd still have protection from cosmic radiation. Antarctica is far more livable than anywhere else off earth, but I don't see us living there in a self-sustained fashion.

Space exploration and colonisation is important, but it's not an answer for the Earth's problems. It may lead to new technologies that will help on earth though - not least the requirement for sustainability.

Even if all glaciers on Earth melted and went into the ocean, sea level would "only" grow by about 65 meters.

The issue with climate change is that higher temperature means more energy and thus more extreme climate. Plus there's desertification but that is, to some extent, a different issue.

No it wouldn't. Not at all.

I'd like to live in a world where my grandchildren can live at all, so sustainability seems pretty damn important to me.

Yes let's stop all scientific and technological progress which isn't directly related to achieving utopia on earth, until a hypothetical point in the future that will never come.

Slapstick arguments don't help. The whole point is that none of the proposals offered in the comment above yours are even remotely "utopian". They're all pretty much common sense (or should be by now), actually.

Your first paragraph there is a straw man -- that's not even remotely what was suggested, and you know it.