Comment by jfengel | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jfengel | Hacker News Reader

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You're pinning a lot of hope on space, and I doubt it's going to work out to you.

You right now exist on a planet with an epic amount of empty space: deserts, oceans, and a ton of 3D volume under the ocean surfaces. You can spread out today, right now. You'll have air available for free, at a pressure and temperature you can tolerate (or easily modify to get there).

Space isn't going to improve your nihilism. It's incredibly hostile to life, and you'll put in all of your effort just keeping from asphyxiation. The rocks out there are different from earth rocks, but I bet you haven't even put much thought into all of the different kinds of rocks you have available to you right now.

I suspect you'll quickly get bored of the fact that non-living planets have a lot less going on than living ones. There will be a chance for people to do them the first time, but the low-hanging fruit will all be picked quickly, and everybody else is just going to be standing about wondering why they wanted so badly to go to a place with nothing interesting happening.

Don't get me wrong: space is cool and I'm glad we're going. But I don't think it's the existential cure-all that you (and many others) seem to imagine that it is. If your actual interest was spreading out, you'd already do it. I believe that your malaise is due to something else entirely, and I think you could take more realistic steps to do something about it.

> You right now exist on a planet with an epic amount of empty space: deserts, oceans, and a ton of 3D volume under the ocean surfaces.

All already owned and claimed by someone, backed by the force of violence.

I agree with you about space not being solution, but I don't think its as simple as you put it.

Most of the ocean is unclaimed and unclaimable.

Most of the deserts are technically owned by somebody, but you can easily get far away enough that nobody is going to come looking if you don't call attention to yourself.

"Easily" here is defined as "walking for many weeks through deeply unpleasant territory". Which is, of course, very hard, but orders of magnitude easier than space.

None of it's simple, of course, as you note. But space is always far, far, far harder. You could go McCandless yourself right now. Which, of course, means dead, but even McCandless made it there, and a few (miserable) months. Which is months longer than you'd survive in space without vast armies of people helping.

I bet even if you did nothing everyday on the moon it would feel more productive and have more gravitas just because you’re on the moon; atleast for the first few decades.

It's more than one place, all humans shouldn't just be on Earth, because if this place was wiped out then we're gone, all that time/knowledge gained wasted.

I wasn't talking about as a solution to over population/pollution or anything. Just eventually when we have the tech eg. warp drive/FTL that would be nice.

The future in space will come about from terraforming the moons and planets.

Unfortunately, NASA is terrified of introducing terran life to any of the bodies it visits. We should be doing the opposite - spreading life everywhere we go.

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