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Comment by cryptoz | Hacker News Reader

Deserve to lose the next space race because of a minor delay? Too much hyberbole.

Honestly, I'm a huge huge huge Mars fan and spaceflight fan and all-things-space fan but I don't care one inch about the environmental review delays.

WTF is the point of going to Mars if we don't even care about the endangered wildlife we're killing on Earth while we go? I mean, yes, some wildlife will die in the human pursuit of spaceflight. It already has, lots of it. Humans too.

But at the end of the day, we ought to care. The whole point of going to Mars is to spread life to other words. At the very least we should observe and care about the ways we kill it here especially when in the pursuit of space travel.

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Arguably turning the site into a launch facility preserves the area from even more destructive future development. Cape Canaveral/Kennedy Space Center is some of the last pristine waterfront on the eastern Florida coast. The rocket launches keep most people away, giving more space for wildlife.

I’m a big wildlife person but shorebirds that can’t migrate are fucked regardless. Fragile food supply.

It really depends on the tradeoffs though. Preserving a handful of hyper-specific species (eradicating which would still be the worst case scenario and hardly a given) is arguably much less useful than heavy lift launch capacity.

The truth is that we are killing off the planet way faster with other means than we are with rocket development, so these decisions don't exist in a vacuum. The faster we can heavy lift tons of material in to space, the faster we will get outer-space industry up and running. The faster we do that, hopefully the less destructive we can be on earth. For example, wouldn't it be cool if we were able to mine lithium-rich asteroids instead of destroying entire regions with open-pit mines here on earth?

As I see it, expanding into space is one of the few ways we can continue to grow and progress as a species without further decimating the earth by necessity. Certain people in our society would prefer that "progress" just halts entirely and that we should care more about preserving [insert random animal or plant species here] than about the future of humanity, but I can't really agree. And more importantly, there are other players on the board that don't care at all about the externalities, so it seems important that the players who actually care try to lead the way, lest they get left behind and the environmental destruction happens anyway.

Maybe they hope to live in a planet buffet where they can all be exploited non stop and we don’t have to deal with “minor inconveniences” like the devastation of the one functional planet we have.

Mars must be getting sold by timeshare salesmen because there’s nothing but incredible hardship waiting for yet it’s somehow supposed to be our ticket. A ridiculously speculative bet in some distant future.

It’s sad that we will do anything as a society other than stop. True tragedy of the commons at play.

>The whole point of going to Mars is to spread life to other words.

I sincerely would prefer if we keep our chaotic, destructive, cancerous lifely existence out of the rest of space. The universe would be better off for it.

And before the inevitable flaggings and warnings come in: Imagine how peaceful Earth would be without us, or at least not in any significantly influential form. I sincerely would prefer the rest of the universe be peaceful.

You're free to remove your own influence if you feel so strongly about it.

Have you seen make nature? We're so much more peaceful

You prefer death to the chaos of life?

I prefer anything but humanity spread out of this planet.

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