Comment by pharke | Hacker News Reader

Comment by pharke | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

I'm of the opposite opinion. I think we need to spread out as soon as possible because it's not clear we can ever completely future proof our civilization here. There are simply too many things that can go wrong, many of which are not within our control. Take the pandemic for example, if it had been 10x worse it could have collapsed our current global civilization. There's no way of preventing it from spreading to every corner of the Earth without also destroying civilization as we know it. Same goes for asteroid impacts, super volcanos (consider Tonga a warning), tsunamis, solar flares, CMEs. Then there are the man-made disasters that we may or may not be able to keep under control such as war, terrorism, religious fanaticism, industrial accidents, pollution or even just apathy and hedonism.

I'm not saying we should ignore all the other things in favour of escaping to space. The Earth is the largest volume of habitable space that we have right now but it is also the only one and that's the problem. We should be building other habitats in parallel with solving our current problems. We need a literal backup plan in case things go seriously wrong.

Big picture, I think all this pushing to make everything perfect for every person on the entire planet Earth before expanding to space is a TERRIBLE strategy

Imagine a StarCraft/Factorio player who hides out in his starting base, building it up more and more and more forever, while talking about "living within his means".

There are effectively unlimited resources right there for the taking! Let's go take them!

Bit of a straw man - nobody said anything about pushing for perfection at home, just "we can do better than this".

Also - "right there for the taking" gets to the heart of my objection as it is nowhere near true. Space is vast and delta-v is expensive - even if we get past the problem of deadly radiation outside the ionosphere, we are incredibly far from being able to make space travel anything other than an enormous sink for money and resources.

Maybe I'm optimistic, but these are just problems to be solved. Space exploration is a big risk / big reward investment. Yes it would require a comparatively huge investment to mine an asteroid vs. open a pit mine in Brazil but "mining" an asteroid likely means carving off hunks of solid metal for transit back to the Earth's surface rather than processing megatons of rock by blasting, trucking, and smelting. Like many things about space, it boggles the mind that a single asteroid mining mission could produce more platinum group metals than have ever been mined on Earth throughout human history. How does the total amount of money and resources spent on mining those metals on Earth stack up against the cost of a single successful asteroid mining operation?

I think this argument extends to colonization efforts as well. What is the economic and cultural benefit of founding a new nation? It's not something that we are familiar with at this point in history so we are relatively blind to it. We just take it for granted that the nations in which we live have always been there since they have always been there for us. I have no doubt that once we begin colonizing Mars or the Moon or even just Earth orbit it will have as great of an impact as the colonization of the New World.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com