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Comment by DanAndersen | Hacker News Reader

There's supposed to be some sort of Arabic proverb that's something along the lines of "Me against my brothers, me and my brothers against my cousins, me and my brother and my cousins against the world".

It feels like a lot of attempted global social policy of the past 50 or so years has been trying to create a stronger consciousness of "humanity" as a thing, with our new enemies being abstract issues like poverty, hunger, climate change, drugs, inequality, etc. The "War on [...]" branding is part of that. Doesn't seem like it really gets the blood going as much. We'll probably have to have conquering aliens to fight against before that happens.

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I wish people felt the same about going to space as I do. I think that if we were more knowledge focused as a species that we'd be racing to the stars which would mean an insanely different mentality than the 'tow the line' kind of thing I think we have nowadays.

I would very much like us to go to space.

Im a huge fan of learning about space, but sending human bodies seems impractical outside the novelty.

Everything is unfathomably far away.

There are lots of obstacles, near light speed travel is a necessity and we are nowhere near this ability, or that ability with a human undergoing the acceleration to light speed.

EDIT: So I suppose I'm suggesting putting our resources toward those beneficial causes on earth is better use.

The greatest enemy of us all is the Universe itself. It's the thing that is trying to kill each one of us individually, and all of us together, and to destroy everything we ever built or cared about, and then even tear apart the very atoms.

Agreed. I think Ronald Reagan tried to evoke something like that during the cold war asking the lines of: imagine how well we'd get along if aliens discovered us

You see this in political parties too. When one fights hard enough to take power, infighting usually divides it and weakens it enough for the next party to take power

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