Comment by pavelrub | Hacker News Reader

Comment by pavelrub | Hacker News Reader

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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.

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