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Comment by claydavisss | Hacker News Reader

Starlink will provide an immediate benefit to humanity, the astronomy performed otherwise, won't. Looking for exoplanets isn't a practical concern for humanity any time soon.

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Odd perspective when defending technology from the same guy that wants to save humankind by literally colonizing other objects in space.

Not necessarily- exoplanets beyond our solar system really aren't going to be feasible to physically travel to until we can come up with something along the lines of faster-than-light travel. Given the lack of light pollution on Mars, I almost wonder if we wouldn't be better off doing all of our astrophysical study out there or in deep space anyway (assuming we have a steady supply of transit back and forth to transfer the data since streaming isn't likely to have good enough quality for a long time either).

Then again, I am also not a fan of putting more satellites into orbit either... mostly just struck by your comment as being not terribly odd to me.

Ofcourse astrophysical study works better in soace, but who is oaying the added cost of launching telescioes to space?

Travelling to exoplanets is not hard, it just takes 1000 - 10,000 years.

There will be no FTL untill we can manipulate black holes, if ever at all.

So the first trip to exoplanels will be in a multi-hundred year hybernation, or a genration ship, or people that are so different from us that they don't mind the journey.

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