Bill Gates questions worth of space exploration for improving humanity (2013)

The reason we have a solar power industry at all is because satellites needed robust long term power sources, not because someone cared about the environment. The first solar cells were invented in the 1880s, and were so inefficient -- less than .5%! -- they were little more than a scientific novelty. They stayed this way for 70 long years, until Bell Labs began researching them as a source of power for satellites in the 1950s.

Space is an extremely demanding environment, and it's precisely those demands that actually drive the development of technologies that enable us to radically reduce our environment impact on the Earth.

Human beings living on the Moon or on Mars will need to reuse and recycle everything imaginable, for instance, creating closed-loop systems where there is little to no waste. They will have to grow food in ways that recycle nutrients instead of destroying topsoil. They will have to be able to make extremely reliable products, and they'll have to be able to reuse and repair these items in ways we will never have the incentive to do in a disposable consumer economy.

It's simply not economically efficient to develop those kind of technologies terrestrially. It's cheaper to dump obsolete electronics and ship them to some impoverished part of the world, like rural China, where they contaminate the ground water and poison the air and the residents.( http://tinyurl.com/toxic-e-waste )

The planet is big and human labor and human life is cheap here. Recycling is optional here. Up there, it's not. It's only the extreme demands of manned space that will drive these sorts of advances.

It ain't just about shootin' rockets up into the sky.

I strongly agree - but education in regular sense - schools, etc probably won't do. We maybe need something closer to the training Buddhists monks get in a monastery, a training that deeply changes the structure of their mind, and instill them with deep compassion and caring for others, eclipsing at enlightenment.

But:

1. Buddhist monasteries aren't scalable - they fit only a rare few, they take too long, and are very hard. And it seems that with science/tech we can create something better.

2. Once we have the tech - it isn't trivial to use it. People fear messing with their brain. How do we prevent abuse. Making people too relaxed and compassionate may make them less fit for the 21 century. How do we integrate this. How do we convince everybody .etc.

I feel like this is THE biggest question of our current century, because once this can be offered mass scale, human nature changes deeply - and everything changes with it.

As the only life form capable of spreading it off planet, I feel like we have a moral obligation to do so before it is snuffed out.

and

> Look at how we are (mis)treating the environment

It took the realization that we are living on something that's not flat, and actually sharing the same sphere, to make people conscious that we are at risk when damaging the environment. This is linked to everything we have learnt through our exploration of space and the fact that we could NOT find find life so far on any other planet in the solar system.

Not sure why you think it's no so important. Actually, it's the other way around. In order to better protect our environment, we need to do more research to better understand the climate models of other worlds and make correct assumptions on ours in the end. If we only study a system with n=1, we can never be sure about our predictions.

The economy also have to change. We must rethink our definition of wealth. What is wealth? Vitality, time, resources and intelligence. Money only helps creating a movement, but the accumulation of vast sums of money is problematic as we're seeing now. Money needs to circulate.

Women will also play an important part, here. Humanity can't progress if 50% of its population can't develop to its full potential.

We need more women in position of leadership, in science, but also in position of religious leaders, because yes, a huge percentage of the world is religious and women can contribute in lots of ways there.

We need more cooperation, more responsibility. Instead of thinking in terms of nations, we'll eventually have to think in terms of civilization if we want a future that is desirable.

We're still floating around on a single planet in a single solar system in a universe we know almost nothing about. Like a fly crossing a highway, it seems dangerous to me.

Perhaps this is unrealistic, but we could increase the admission requirements of politicians. First show that you care about more than just yourself for at least a decade or so, and then you may decide about the fate of millions of citizens, their offspring and planet Earth.

Space travel cannot fix humanity polluting the environment, therefore we should not do space travel.

space travel is not there to fix humanities issues, it is there to provide an option for survival if humanity faces an (self-induced) extinction event.

"Erst kommt das Fressen, dann die Moral" (first we gorge ourselves, then the morality.)

These are interesting thoughts. But lets not forget what unsound good old Billy used (and MS still used) to establish his former OS monopoly.

And here you are, claiming that these people are ego-maniacs that can't get enough and want to be the best, when in fact they are preserving the very technology that once propelled the great country of USA to become the first people on the moon. It's insane that you could say that.

And let me also note that Bill Gates has set the software industry back decades with his campaign to destroy Linux in the 90s. But you're so proud to tear down other great technologists with him! Why?

Finally, you must take note that democracy, a great improvement for life on earth (the kind of improvement you advocate) was created by leaving the oligarchies of the UK and creating a brand new society in a brand new continent. In those times, you would have been a serf living under harsh rule saying that "Those explorers are so self-serving, so self-interested, they don't care about us" when in fact their actions improved your quality of life 100-fold in just two centuries.

I feel like this is faulty reasoning. That money might fund a project that otherwise wouldn't get funded which may cure cancer (unlikely, but honestly I'd say finding a moderate breakthrough for treating a specific strain of cancer with a few billion dollars is about as likely as that few billion dollars getting us significantly closer to Mars). It's not that every project is getting funded and it's just how much they get funded - some projects don't get funded at all. Nobody can predict the future which is why startup investing is so hard - the winners often start out looking like losers (DropBox, AirBnB, Google, Tesla, Apple all struggled to raise money initially). And big accomplishments often come from underdogs, like the Wright Brothers (who were up against much better funded and better educated competition). And sometimes the best discoveries are completely accidental - like penicillin.

Nobody knows the best way to allocate resources. I think the smart thing to do is to back things because you believe in them, not because they seem underappreciated. And honestly, Elon Musk has such a cult following that I'd say anything he does gets way more love than all the other things that money could be spent on.

> Musk is without doubt a dazzling salesman. Who better than a guardian of human welfare to sell you your new, self-driving Tesla? Andrew Ng—the chief scientist at Baidu, known as China’s Google—based in Sunnyvale, California, writes off Musk’s Manichaean throwdown as “marketing genius." “At the height of the recession, he persuaded the U.S. government to help him build an electric sports car,” Ng recalled, incredulous.

Based on the TED talk [1], Musk seems to be proposing a scarce luxury transport solution. The Boring Company is an answer to the question, "What inconvenience do Los Angeles millionaires suffer daily?" And for this he is being elevated to no less than savior of humanity?

[0] http://www.vanityfair.com/news/2017/03/elon-musk-billion-dol...

[1] https://www.ted.com/talks/elon_musk_the_future_we_re_buildin...

80% - Science and its marvels 15% - Humanity survival (IMHO not possible) 5% - So we know more and more and somehow fix problems where that knowledge may be applicable (is that what you're calling moral value)?

I do think that we should be better off spending money elsewhere. I don't know why Trump is so pro-space travel and stuff.

We, as a species, do not have any sort of power capable of stopping the Earth from doing its thing. In fact, one could argue that we are part of the Earth's thing. We don't exist on Earth, we are part of Earth.

I think you misconfigured a word there, but what about the price of getting 1 ton of iron into space? If it's already there, we can manufacture in space. More important is the price of rare Earth metals like Platinum. We could build goods in orbit or build missions in orbit. Space mining and manufacturing should bring about a new era where 3rd world country slave mines shutdown and entirely new products can be made when the high price of rare Earth metals become the low price of common space metals.

That's why I badly want us to go out into space and colonize other planets. The modern world is flat and there isn't enough diversity in culture and ways of looking at the world. Having people on other planets will change this. (Theoretically)