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Comment by throwaway5752 | Hacker News Reader

Thank goodness someone is saying it

"We are talking about hundreds of millions of days using the means we have available today. We must take care of our planet, it is very beautiful and still absolutely liveable."

The 77-year-old said he felt the need to "kill all the statements that say 'OK, we will go to a liveable planet if one day life is not possible on earth'."

"It's completely crazy," he added.

You do the math on the energy, resource, and time requirements and it's pretty stark. Only 12 humans have set foot on a body other than the Earth. We have no permanent human settlements elsewhere in the solar system outside of low Earth orbit. We're more likely to set ourselves back hundreds of years in progress with warm or climate change.

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Agree with all your points except that "never migrate to another planet"

Humor me for a minute: (from strictly scientific view point)

Universe began with just photons disintegrating to matter and anti-matter. Starting from that somehow proteins evolved and eventually animated matter (life). On a very boring planet after 5 complete extinctions of "animated matter", humans show up who have the audacity to attempt to understand beginning of universe and controlling the forces which created them.

And now, you sir, suggest that this rudimentary life form will never be able to travel to an exo-planet and thrive. Well, to put it mildly, you are lacking perspective.

Ever notice how all the "Ya just gotta believe, man!" are largely non-technical SF fans whereas the people who say it's impossible are mostly scientists who are intimately familiar with the relevant science and engineering?

Ever heard human flight was impossible?

Ever heard that faster than sound was impossible?

Ever heard splitting of atom was impossible?

I understand that I might sound dreamy but here is the thing it's far better to believe, try and fail than to never believe.

There have always been scientists or natural philosophers or shamans (or whoever else was the most learned of their respective times) who have said "X is impossible" for some X. So far, they've always been proven wrong by a new discovery, often from an unrelated field, that somehow makes X possible. Are we so certain that it's different this time? Interstellar migration won't come soon enough to save us from the climate crisis, but to say it'll never happen is a strong statement.

I recommend you read the Accidental Scientist book. Its insane how many of human inventions were discovered out of luck. A super fast propulsion tech may be just around the corner and we don't know about it.

My point here is that you can never say never, its not a matter of belief its a matter of the future being unpredictable.

You can never say never. But you can often say "not at all likely".

0.000001% odds are "unlikely", but across a sufficiently large number of attempts by a sufficiently large number of scientists over a sufficiently large number of years, something great is bound to be discovered.

Sure. The odds of any particular "wouldn't it be cool" great thing are fairly low, though.

While we cannot say never, we know enough about the laws of physics to say that FTL won't happen. While there are still unknowns in physics, since those unknowns have to decay to our known physics in all areas we currently know about. That makes finding a loophole hard - assuming one exists.

Note that some physics predicts loopholes, but it isn't clear if they are real loopholes or places where out model isn't right in some detail.

I see your point but the same way as having loopholes which may be a mistake in our model our model can also be flawed in the sense that there are actually more loopholes than we can currently see.

I understand its inconceivable that something can exist that we haven't predicted with our current understanding of physics but we also need to realise that scientists 150 years ago thought the stuff we understand and use daily today were also inconceivable. I am talking about breakthroughs that may arise and after a few decades we'll be looking back and thinking how blind we are not to see them earlier. It happened before it may happen again.

> You do the math on the energy, resource, and time requirements and it's pretty stark.

The SF author Charles Stross summarized the math on his blog a while ago (and got pilloried for it) and, yes, it's indeed bleak: http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2007/06/the_high...

I don't even think it will come to this. The Earth has already starting fighting back. I think it is much more likely that we have massive loss of human life long before the planet becomes unlivable. Empty aquifers, food monoculture, and antibiotics overuse are going to come home to roost and we'll quickly learn what a sustainable population is.

Humans live in stories not in reality. In modern times we have figured out how to sublimate reality with stories, but this process is as old as civilization and propaganda.

So no matter how much stupid shit we do that makes no sense from any rational perspective we can tell a story about how it's good and make it all better. Then when someone like that 16 year old Thunberg girl tells a story that's against all the stories we have been telling we get angry about it going against progress, development, and technology... which are all stories of their own that obfuscate the fact that all of these things are not capable of co-existing with any sort of stable natural system here on earth... as they are meant to continuously destroy and recreate reality. They are in effect to turn reality into fantasy (we call it science fiction) by any means necessary.

it's true that each of us usually lives in a story and we all live in a collective delusion.

But. We all know the feeling in our own lives of suddenly waking up getting real.

You can't wake up as that's all also a story. It's turtles all the way down. All you can do is tell a different story, to change the script so to say. So far we have gone through a few scripts... Polytheism (many gods) -> Monotheism (one god) -> Economism (money is god and the way to reach god (get more money) is through science perhaps). We need to figure out the next story. I think Economism is terminal.

There is no science and epistemology without their drivers. They are in fact the political economy. You can not divorce how they are used from politics.

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