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Comment by frisco | Hacker News Reader

I fundamentally don’t understand how anyone can see this and think, “nah, fuck those guys.” Clearly we cannot be a single-planet species forever and survive. Beyond that, it’s such a hard challenge to push our technical skills against, and the ultimate adventure for those who go.

The universe is vast and we haven’t left the cradle yet. There is so far to go for us. It makes me feel so much better about Earth and humanity just knowing we are doing this.

As was said by XKCD: "The universe is probably littered with the one-planet graves of cultures which made the sensible economic decision that there's no good reason to go into space--each discovered, studied, and remembered by the ones who made the irrational decision."

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>> I fundamentally don’t understand how anyone can see this and thing, “nah, fuck those guys.”

It's currently en vogue to hate Bezos, Musk, and anyone else who is spending money on spaceflight instead of donating all of it to poor people / fixing the planet / fixing the government / whatever, as if it's a money-only problem and that these people don't have vast charitable giving programs.

I realize this doesn't answer your question, but that's the main opposition.

The reason to hate on Bezos, Musk et al is the same reason why we hate cancer: an entity that is malfunctioning has found a way to maximize short term gain at the expense of long term survival.

Worse, while the billions they have can buy them a private island filled with whatever perversions they enjoy they are too poor by an order of magnitude or three to actually finance real space exploration.

It takes unfathomable amounts of time, effort and money to bring in a technology from R&D to the consumer market. "Entrepreneurs" merely privatize the gains in the last step of the process and call themselves a genius.

Space exploration is so far away from commercialization that the private market will not be able to finance any thing past low earth orbit for another generation or three. By then the climate change already locked in would make the world hospitable for Lizard People and put most of our major cities 0.2m below sea level.

>> real space exploration

I assume you are the arbiter of real space exploration, then? The last fifty years don't show real progress on this endeavor, so I'm not exactly sure who is going to do this for real if it isn't the status quo or these two billionaires who are engaged in a pissing contest.

>> "Entrepreneurs" merely privatize the gains in the last step of the process and call themselves a genius.

Ah yes, another person who thinks Musk is not an engineer and that SpaceX somehow doesn't... manufacture all their engines and 95%+ of their stuff here in America... while NASA was using Russian equipment and most private companies were launching using foreign material, land, and resources.

Right. He's just free-riding. Then what were we and everyone else doing before SpaceX undercut ULA (leaning on Russian tech) by massive amounts?

>> By then the climate change already locked in would make the world hospitable for Lizard People and put most of our major cities 0.2m below sea level.

I should really read comments back to front before spending any time on them.

What a silly idea of entrepreneurship. The profits are a tiny percentage of the actual wealth entrepreneurs bring to the rest of the people. There's only limited resources and anyone who re-arranges them profitably have sply made all of us richer. The cumulative benefit of an Amazon to consumers must be in the trillions in the next decade or so

To put space launch into perspective: the fraction of a satellite's cost that is the launch ranges from 1/10 to 1/3, and only a small amount of that is launch profit. Meanwhile, cheaper launches means there's cheaper consumer prices for satellite Internet and more satellite TV channels, in addition to more earth observation satellites. And more earth observation satellites means we have better weather and climate prediction, better disaster recovery, more safety for boats and planes, and less inexpensive communications in rural areas. All of these are excellent things for humans, and all of these get a little better as launch costs fall.

What is your definition of benefit? Pushing workers to pee in bottles is not a cumulative benefit to humanity.

"single planet species" -> something suggests that you've drunk too much of Elon Musk's cool aid.

Want a counter argument? What about: life redundancy on Mars (or the Moon) would change the fact that if we fuck up Earth, it means suffering for Billions of people, multiplied across many generations. "Preserving" life on another planet doesn't make the pill sweeter, to me.

Please respect (but not necessarily agree with, of course) this point of view, instead of blindly accepting what Elon or others are trying to force-feed you with.

Elon Musk didn't invent the idea of becoming multi-planetary, for safety purposes or otherwise. Sure he's advocated the idea, but I think it's a pretty natural thought to have when learning about dinosaur-killing meteors, the death of the Sun, etc. Lots of people have had the same idea for hundreds of years, some have fleshed it out more thoroughly with calculations, etc. It's perfectly possible to agree with those people without ever knowing about Elon Musk, much less "drinking his cool aid". Heck, it's possible to disagree with Musk/Bezos/etc. whilst being in favour of humans as a multi-planet species (e.g. disagreeing with reasoning, calculations, motivations, approaches, timelines, etc.).

PS: Elon didn't invent the idea of rogue AI either. Again, lots of people have considered this and calculated risks, etc. but his name keeps getting brought up as if nobody thought of this before. I've got nothing against Elon or his fans, but there seems to be an anti-Elon crowd who like to reframe in-depth discussions about some large, complex topic (space colonisation, AI, energy infrastructure, etc.) as if it's all about one guy, just so they can state their disagreement with that guy.

The quote is from the alt-text of https://xkcd.com/893/

Just ruining this planet and spilling over to other systems to do the same there would shockingly resemble what viruses do.

Also what all biological agents have been observed to do. We aren't special in that regard.

Most of the universe is lifeless and much less interesting:than the Earth. We should absolutely try to preserve diversity and unique systems, but I see no problem with transforming a few of the sterile, dime-a-dozen hunks of rock into colonies, strip mines, etc.

In fact Bezos has stated that his ideal future would be for the majority of humanity to live off the Earth, so that it could be left as a nature reserve.

"I'd like to share a revelation that I've had during my time here. It came to me when I tried to classify your species and I realized that you're not actually mammals. Every mammal on this planet instinctively develops a natural equilibrium with the surrounding environment but you humans do not. You move to an area and you multiply and multiply until every natural resource is consumed and the only way you can survive is to spread to another area. There is another organism on this planet that follows the same pattern. Do you know what it is? A virus."

In order to understand how one could be dismissive of the efforts to colonize other planets consider a viewpoint that doesn't share the imperative that we as a species must survive.

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