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Comment by siruncledrew | Hacker News Reader

Before anyone has their own opinions and conclusions over what may or may not happen over the next who-knows-how-many years, consider this:

We already have a planet with water, life, food, resources, ecosystems, and everything we need. Isn't it a hell of a lot easier to maintain and respect what we currently have than jump to "re-creating the Earth" somewhere else from scratch?

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It is a false choice that we have to protect this planet OR work on the technology to move elsewhere. It doesn't have to be either or. In fact, right now even it isn't. We're putting effort toward both, but the amount spent on moving to another planet is so little it is practically rounding error, so really we are putting effort toward preserving this planet and not moving when looked at through that lens.

There are, however, problems outside of human-made pollution that threaten the planet. Asteroids aren't fiction. The one that was famously recorded in Russia a few years ago shattered windows, but if, by chance, had impacted at a different angle we would have been looking at a crater in the ground and we'd probably be discussing increases to the asteroid defense budget on Hacker News today still. Historically we can see the effects of the asteroid that caused the K-T mass extinction in a variety of places. Reducing, reusing, and recycling won't help us in the cases of stellar-based threats like large asteroids, a field of millions of smaller asteroids that gets captured by earth, or some, as of yet, barely understood phenomenon like a hypothetical traveling black hole or radiation burst of some kind.

Europe already had a continent with water, life, food, resources, ecosystems, and everything they needed. Wouldn't it have been a hell of a lot easier to stay there rather than sailing off over the horizon?

But they didn’t have ‘spices’ and they knew who did.

Europeans sailed "off over the horizon" because they could get spices, gold, silk, furs, and slaves. Meanwhile, tech bros want us to collectively invest trillions of dollars to satisfy their infantile power fantasies by bringing back some red rocks.

That's colonization, not migration. Migration implies moving the majority population, while colonization is just sending seed colonists out and letting the colony mostly grow via internal births.

If the future is stable than chances are very good we will be flinging colonists everywhere, but the majority of earth's population will still stay planetbound

Yes I agree. In fact I'd argue migration is much less of a concern than colonisation. If colonies are established and work is put in to make it at least a decent liveable environment, people will move. Hands down, people will move.

European explorers and early colonist would write back letters or come back with stories about how lush, rich and plentiful the new world was. Walk up to any stream, and just scoop up a fish with your bare hands. Mountains of silver and gold, just under your feet. Of course you would want to sail off into the horizon for a place like that. And they weren't lying either, the new world was an untapped treasure trove. What's the likelihood that another planet is more than just a dull rock. Sure, we can go to other planets, but space looks incredibly dull and inhospitable to me. Compare that to the excitement and prospect of riches early European explorers must have felt, there's just no comparison.

In order for there to be letters, someone had to go first before there were any letters in order to write them.

I like that the argument is traveling to a new continent is more exciting than traveling to a new planet. Some of the first people to Australia and the colonies were criminals. The first settlers also dealt with disease and untimely death on a regular basis. You've glamorised it quite a bit when in fact it was miserable.

You are absolutely correct about one thing though. There were many people traveling for a new life. Just like the travels from East to West in the US during the gold rush people went there for wealth, opportunity, and land but not for easy living. I suspect the push for exo planets will be the same.

If we are able to unlock FTL and the time and finacial investment to get there is low or comparable enough to a human lifetime then I see people, assuming we aren't just digital intelligence by then, moving there to start a new life and get away from whatever society is going through. There is always a disenfranchised portion of the population willing to give up their life for a new one somewhere else. Even if the journey and new life is relatively harder to what the rest of society is living in.

There was certainly some very creative and fraudulent promotion going on, leading to families emigrating for the fabulous opportunity and finding themselves in indentured servitude or on some marginal land even worse than at home. Or, like early many colonists rapidly succumbing to new and interesting fatal diseases.

Course having got there they were mostly stuck without coin for passage home.

I too suspect the push to space might go similarly.

There's certainly an argument to be made that even the absolute worst places on Earth to try to establish a settlement (Sahara desert, Antarctica, Mariana Trench, top of Everest) are all orders of magnitude less challenging than going to Mars, which is in turn orders of magnitude easier than leaving the solar system.

But it still isn't a reason not to try, especially now. Elon isn't wrong about the possibility of the window closing, especially in various future scenarios where climate change and war disrupt global supply chains.

I don't believe the message is "don't even try", it's more "this isn't anywhere near as realistic as you think it is and if you're relying on it for our continued survival you're a fool".

There's the potential of a lot more money to be made exploiting new frontiers. Europeans already had all that stuff in Europe and it didn't slow anybody down to the colonies.

He who controls the spice controls the universe!

Is there anyone (in discussions about this topic) advocating not maintaining and not respecting what we currently have? I've seen comments similar to yours made in every single discussion about colonizing off Earth, and I've never seen a useful discussion as a result.

Not when the sun grows to envelop Earth. Sure that’s a long time from now but eventually it will happen.

And a life-ending asteroid strike very likely will happen many orders of magnitude sooner than that. Could even be in the next hundred years. We don’t have a way of knowing when.

Given the progress on climate agreements in the last years: yes

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