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Comment by throwaaaway1231 | Hacker News Reader

As someone who also is a military researcher, I may be able to help. I have worked on things that if the USA went to war, I know that I have directly contributed to that war.

I truly hate that my research will contribute to killing. I wish that it wasn't necessary. But as events like Crimea annexation and the South China Sea shows, if the USA is not there, then other nations are very happy to use their might to boss others around. I truly do think the USA is a force for good, and I want that to be there for my following generations.

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> if the USA is not there, then other nations are very happy to use their might to boss others around.

This is kind of the same logic that often makes me wish for an extraterrestrial invasion.

An alien species has a much higher chance of treating us all equally, than we do ourselves.

Funny. I wrote a blog post sometime back claiming that an external real or perceived threat is a unifying factor for societies and nations.

So if we want to unite the earth, we need an extra terrestrial threat. It could be asteroid or alien invasion. Now these are less probable, hence we should set up Martian colonies and then just allow the earthlings to do their thing. They will eventually treat Mars humans as a threat. This is our only option to unify the earth.

Simply having an "exit" from the complications on Earth, the possibility of relocating to Mars and starting from scratch, would give a lot of people hope, something to look forward to.

It could also end up being an exclusive resort for the elite of our society to escape to, so they may no longer have to pretend to care about Earth at all.

Sounds eerily similar to concepts in the Sci Fi novel https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Three-Body_Problem_(novel)

> This is our only option to unify the earth

Why do we think that a unified earth will be a good thing? It seems too utopian to me...

Unified as in: Nobody trying to harm each other, or other species, or prevent them from doing their thing.

Why would anybody think that's not a good thing?

> Why would anybody think that's not a good thing?

It sounds boring...

I agree with you, but it's not so black and white.

The atomic bomb is a notable example, and consider Eisenhower and many other military leaders said "there was no reason to use that awful thing." I realize my high school education, and most othet's, led me to believe this wasn't the case.

I'm not trying to say it's wrong, but it deserves a lot of skepticism.

Reading a biography of Oppenheimer explores much of this. One thing is clear, the bomb was used on an essentially defeated enemy. From another angle though, it was necessary to push back Stalin and could be considered not as the last blow of WWII but the first blow in the cold war.

It is difficult to question the possible outcomes if different choices were made but you can be sure that the last 80 years could have been much different and much worse. The bomb did make certain kinds of war impossible, and it is not clear if that would be true if they had not been used when they were.

> One thing is clear, the bomb was used on an essentially defeated enemy.

The bomb were used on an enemy that was sooo defeated that there was a coup attempt by the military between the two bombs to prevent the emperor from capitulating.

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