It's stupid because it's simply text completion on a GPT-2 level. There's already an association between space travel and carbon, so you hear space travel and just go "yes, but global warming". No thought was put in either acquiring the association in the first place, nor in deciding if this is a good moment to use it. And definitely no fact checking.
It's a mix of stupid and evil because this kind of text completion turns the public discourse in an echo chamber of unproductive repetitions, which creates the strangest of paradoxes - like the more climate concerned somebody is, the more likely they are to be against nuclear power. This never happened because anybody made the case for nuclear being bad for climate and people actually believing this claim. There was no case and no claim in the first place - just GPT-2 style reflexes and blind associations. Space tourism bad, bio-fuel good.
And it's plain evil because it assumes that we should only dare to dream if we follow the current orthodoxy. It's not even something like "in order to dream we should make sure survival is ensured", because it was never about doing the math or actual tradeoffs. It's simply that some dreams are being painted as dirty and we shouldn't be allowed to have them, ever.
Also, your explanation of why GP attitude is evil is not clear at all. You can dream and still thing that this is stupid. In fact, the dream of a nice earth for all of us is a beautiful dream, much more than a 5 minute ride for a very few.
And the inclusion of nuclear power when it was not mentioned in the original post is like a GPT hallucination.
Lack of farsightedness in this thread is weird!
Science doesn't work in a linear manner. When Ramanujan and Hardy were working on Primes, nobody knew some of the work would lead to cybersecurity applications.
We cannot be sure that these advancements don't lead to anything significant in the future.
The only focus should be on taxing the profits of this company, and also applying a high levy/VAT to the ticket price.
We also cannot be sure that this service won't cause huge damage. If we're going to assign value to it based on its unknown potential, we must consider both its possible benefits and its possible detriments.
the words of a religious lunatic.
But the more time goes by, the more I think the movie nailed it.
Personally, I put far more value on giving people an unparalleled (and in some cases life changing) experience than a few years of commuting.
[1] https://www.treehugger.com/what-is-carbon-footprint-of-space...
but they will be doing both those things.
people who go to space don't stop driving cars when they get back.
Sometimes, you just have to call out the obvious. But it's been upvoted again. It seems more people have a rather dim idea of this contribution to science and humanity.