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Comment by whythre | Hacker News Reader

Only in a hand-wavy roughly analogous kind of way. The devil is in the details. We are just not evolved for an environment like space:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Effect_of_spaceflight_on_the....

Even with air and food and shielded from the vast majority of radiation, space is just not great for human comfort or mid to long term survival.

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I mean, we're not biologically adapted for the open ocean or winters above the arctic circle either. If all you're living in is your skin, then a Siberian winter will kill you in under 15 minutes. It takes a crazy amount of technology -- in terms of habitat-building and wearables -- to be able to survive in that environment. Yet humans were doing it 47,000 years ago.

So these kind of biological arguments really don't hold. We're not constrained by our biology. That ship has sailed, literal aeons ago. We're constrained by our technology, and in technological terms, relative to our evolutionary cradle, Inuit garb is about 80% of the way towards being a space suit. Doesn't mean that space is "easy". Just that "easy" isn't what we do.

It’s apples and oranges. Many, many human cultures live close to the water but none live on or in it exclusively, we are no longer an aquatic species. I think the arctic comparison might be more apt, but even so, it is such a staggering difference of degree. The amount of technology required to learn how to hunt arctic wildlife, preserve food, and turn animal skins into clothing and shelter is not trivial. But it is nothing compared to having to replicate our entire habitat in space. Food, water and air are the minimum in terms of long term survival; there are so many other heath considerations in the micro-gravitational radioactive vacuum of space.

Edit: also Inuit garb being 80% space suit is just… what(?!?). How do you quantify that? The main features they share is that insulates from extreme cold temperatures and can protect against glare, but our space suits also insulate from high temperatures and provide life support and are air tight and radiation resistant and… this assertion is just nonsense.

"Build a vessel that suits the environment" is a big difference. One person can build boat that can sail across the ocean. A team can build a ship that will do it safely. People sail across the ocean on canoes.

Space ships are a whole other level of technology that we don't have but have ideas on how to build.

Starships are level where we don't know if can be built. We have ideas, but those ideas aren't possible with achievable technology. It is quite possible that not possible with any technology.

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