Comment by freehunter | Hacker News Reader

Comment by freehunter | Hacker News Reader

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You could say pretty much the same thing about other cities, other states, other countries, other continents. Why did mankind leave Africa if they just repeated the same mistakes in Europe and Asia? Why did they leave Europe to go to the US if they just did the same thing over there? Why would someone leave New England and go west across America if they're just bringing the same thing?

All of that ignores, of course, that the culture of mankind evolved dramatically between and during those big migrations, and then again ignoring that Africa, Asia, Europe, and America all have wildly, wildly different belief systems, cultures, politics, and people.

Who is saying that we'd take our same problems to Mars? The kind of people who were willing to move from Europe to America were not the same kind of people who wanted support the system in Europe at the time, and the kind of people who want to move to Mars aren't going to be the same people who want to continue the same system we have on Earth.

"Fix our problems here"... but what if "here" is the problem? If the Pilgrims had stayed in England and the Netherlands, they wouldn't have been able to fix what they considered to be "the problem" no matter how hard they tried. It was only by starting a new life that they could solve their problems.

Europe certainly brought their problems to their colonies: they exported their religious extremists, criminals and brought their need to profit, proselytize and conquer with them.

Considering the same pressures are behind space colonization as were behind colonization of old, I find your concerns as merely speculation based in fantasy and not history.

> but what if "here" is the problem?

The same "here" that is humanity's proverbial garden of Eden? Food grows out of the ground, an atmosphere can exist and it's breathable and, until relatively recently, we didn't have to worry too much about the Sun's radiation destroying our own biological processes.

If "here" is the problem, and the solution is a dry, cold rock that's millions of miles away without any signs of life, we're truly doomed.

> If the Pilgrims had stayed in England and the Netherlands, they wouldn't have been able to fix what they considered to be "the problem" no matter how hard they tried

The problems pilgrims face were those of religious persecution. The problems we face as whole are truly existential, we're in the process of changing our planet for the worse.

The same forces that are driving the destruction of our planet are driving space colonization. I don't see any evidence to the contrary.

You talk about these things like they're some kind of final solution, like either option is the one single path that humanity must travel, and if we pick the wrong option we're doomed, and if we pick the right option we're saved. I don't see it that black and white.

Many people in Europe stayed and eventually fixed their problems, and ended up with revolutions across almost all of the continent to throw off the monarchy and old religious system in favor of tolerance and democracy. They did that even after people who were sick of the old system left for the New World. The Pilgrims established the system they wanted on another "world", and eventually everyone who stayed behind fixed their problems as well. It can be both.

It can also be neither. Like you mentioned, both America and Europe have a lot of the same problems now that they did back then. They never got fixed. So in your vision, we all stay on Earth, never fix the problems, and eventually die off. Or we send some people to Mars and even if we never actually fix the problems we're facing on Earth, at least we reset the clock to give us more time.

Ditching capitalism and militarism isn't going to stop the sun from devouring the planet. Shunning religion and solving the problem of crime isn't going to prevent a supervolcano. And being in the Garden of Eden won't matter much when an asteroid destroys the planet. What seems like fantasy to me is the idea that we can solve all of humanity's oldest and most deeply ingrained problems if we just try hard enough. What is actually history is that extinctions have happened before, and the biggest one wasn't caused by humans.

Under rated perspective here.

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