Comment by erikpukinskis | Hacker News Reader

Comment by erikpukinskis | Hacker News Reader

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It's a bit disappointing to me that poverty, human trafficking, addiction, habitat destruxtion, cultural erasure, genocide, torture, extinction, etc aren't very powerful motivators for such people.

I feel such pressure to use our new skills to solve these problems, but I know 10 years ago they were a combination of invisible/impossible to me. If I hadn't been aggressively pushed by smart feminists to examine my life more closely I might still feel the same way. If I hadnt been intellectually curious enough to stick with them, despite their worldview seeming so alien and wrong, I would probably be working in VR now instead of housing.

Maybe it's just that such challenges are too dark for some people... Mars is all optimism, no need to struggle with the realities of evil. Maybe some people just cant handle the pain of working on poverty and violence. I totally understand the desire to avoid fields where evil plays a daily role in your job. I grew up in an alcoholic household so pain seems sort of normal, although I have an intense desire to dismantle its causes. I accept that a more emotionally healthy person might just nope out of such challenges.

I guess it's also a little like the video games vs life choice: Mars is a clear goal, with all the players in a clear sandbox. Poverty is a messy mindfuck of a problem. That makes it more intellectually challenging, but also scarier. Failure hurts worse: a rocket that doesn't launch is one thing. Watching your friends die is another.

Still, it puzzles me that so many smart people need something like Mars to feel like they have a hard problem that's worth solving. I see so many around me. Easing violence seems like such a bigger win than getting off planet.

The understanding of climate change was born out of the study of planets in our solar system. It is reasonable to expect that the investigation of the human condition would greatly benefit from its study away from the planet that humans evolved from.

There are insights into ourselves that we are simply unable to even conceptualize that would be possible. Humans living (not just surviving) on another planet, will change us

They're not really comparable. You can engineer your way to Mars. You cannot engineer your way to a solution for addiction or violence; unless you want to launch a full-blown dystopian eugenics program.

That's a bit disingenuous. There are people are trying to engineer solutions to those problems, both with and without technology. They've also been around longer than rocket scientists. For every 1 SpaceX engineer, say there's 10 other humans working solving violence, addiction, homelessness using data and science. What if they just don't show up in TechCrunch.

hehe i think you can engineer a solution for addiction

Things like space-flight can be solved by relatively small teams without having to convince billions of people from different cultures to change what they are doing.

In terms of global development, things have improved greatly over the last 50 years, say.

So it depends what kind of person you are. Do you like sitting in committees? Do you like, or can you tolerate a great deal of convincing other people to do things? How many cycles of that have you been through? How many otherwise good projects have you seen fail due to (human) factors entirely outside of the participants' control.

Although it may seem that way sometimes, hard engineering problems aren't really an adversarial game. Hard human problems typically are.

Do you have an equation for easing violence? There is an equation that tells us how to get to mars - we only need to design a machine that meets the requirements.

Human nature does not lend itself very well to engineered solutions. If you can so much as put a minor dent in that problem that does not involve cures worse than the disease that would be an engineering feat much more impressive than anything that SpaceX has done to date.

The thing about Mars is that it does not solve any problem. It just give us time to solve the problem. It mulitply the chance of humanity surviving a problem that kills our only "capsule", Earth.

And that dangerous event could be external to humanity. So Mars is a part of a solution for all that : buy all the rest of humanity time to solve that problem and making sure enough humans can be born and live so that at least one find a solution. It is the only thing engineers can do. Give us the chance.

There are no plausible scenarios where survival of the species is easier on Earth than on Mars. Even in the worst runaway climate change scenarios or the worst nuclear war scenarios, Earth is still more habitable than Mars.

I never said easier. You just add a bit of redundancy for some events. This is not a "safe" system.

Everything today is better then yesterday and tomorrow everything will be better then today (on average on a global a scale for all the issues you pointed out). Progress is being made all the time. But the news/media mostly just reports the failings/problems/issues (sells better) so it feels like everything is getting worse.

(There are some looming issues on the horizon like climate change etc. which might change this course in the future.)

My morality doesn't work in terms of averages. "Better on average" doesn't equate to "good enough" to me. It's a way for people to make themselves feel better about doing violence. I am responsible for countless murders due to living a normal American lifestyle. The fact that previous Americans were responsible for a higher number of murders doesn't make that go away.

There are quite possibly more slaves today than there have ever been. The fact that there are more non-slaves too doesn't cancel that out for me.

We are the first generation with the information processing tools to cut these problems down by orders of magnitude in a couple decades. The faster we do the more lives will be saved. If we make the same incremental improvements our parents generation did, we will have failed.

> My morality doesn't work in terms of averages. "Better on average" doesn't equate to "good enough" to me....

Nobody is expecting it to. But do you know why poverty, disease, hunger and slavery are at far lower levels compared to historic norms? It's because at the global scale we are enormously richer than we have ever been before. We can afford multi-billion dollar programs to fight diseases such as Ebola, HIV, Malaria and the many others we have actually eradicated. We have huge reconstruction and investment programs for developing countries. Space technology, including satellite communications systems, GPS and weather monitoring are revolutionizing third world agriculture and market economies as well as saving lives.

A richer and more prosperous world is also a world better able to tackle the problems you quite legitimately raise.

Easing violence is harder than getting to mars.

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