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Comment by oceanplexian | Hacker News Reader

> He encourages us not to get hung up on galaxies far, far away but to pay more attention to our own fragile planet and the frail humans around us.

While I don't necessarily agree with the motives of the Silicon Valley billionaires you must have a really basic imagination to hate on the future, and the answers to Man's oldest questions which may be on Mars and beyond. Of course, like a broken record, out comes the trope of "Why don't you solve poverty on Earth (with all that money)".

For once, can the malthusians come up with a single unique idea or viewpoint rather than recycling the same content? People criticize AI for producing slop but look at what makes the NYT.

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I don't see how solving poverty on earth can't be more important than the endeavor of trying with the current rather limited tech to inhabit an as good as inhabitable planet.

It is more important. We spend > $2T per year fighting climate change. We spend > $10T per year on social welfare programs.

We spend less than $10B per year on going back to the moon and trying to inhabit Mars.

And both of these amounts seem to not be enough based on the resulting state of the world.

Given that world GDP is only $100T, it's impossible to spend significantly more. (where significant is defined as an order of magnitude).

As others in the thread mention, these are problems of political economy that no person or mega corp or even nation state can solve.

So, continuing to also work on other things is both rational and morally sound.

Progress in one area unlocks new possibilities in other areas. E.g. abundant near-free energy would make eliminating poverty a more tractable political problem than it has proven to be.

> seem to not be enough

This is an impossible way to get to a useful conclusion. Provide stats if you're going to make a claim like "the world is bad"

Space exploration is merely a _technological_ problem. Solving poverty is a _political_ problem, one that is resistant to just throwing money at the problem.

Both problems are technological as well as financial problems, with politics involved in choice of precedence.

Even if we solve poverty, we can always turn right around and un-solve poverty. Something like this has happened in quite recent memory with a whole lot of other "solved" problems. Luckily, we can come back from that failure and solve those problems all over again, as long as we don't go extinct.

It depends on how you answer the question "why are we here?"

Is the goal is to create an earthly utopia with minimum suffering and maximum happiness? Is it aggressive progress so that we can't be wiped out by a random cosmic event? Or should we be eschewing all of that and living harmoniously with nature and dying spiritually content when our time is up?

There is also the argument that if we had focused on solving poverty 150 years ago instead of prioritizing rapid industrialization and economic growth more people would be in poverty today. A 50 year period of scarcity would completely erase all progress we have made towards lifting people out of poverty, regardless of how equitably we distributed the scarce goods.

There are large swathes of earth that are too inhospitable, like deserts. They're more accessible and easier to support life in than Mars, and yet no one lives there.

The deserts even have breathable air.

I will say the compelling thing about Mars is that you wouldn't be disrupting an ecosystem to terraform it.

That said, I'm definitely on the side of making Fresno a paradise before we try mars.

I know what happens in Vegas stays in Vegas, but really? We're going this far with it? It doesn't even exist anymore?

But there are people living in the inhospitable deserts that have useful resources like oil. Or artificial resources like legalized gambling.

Antarctica is even more inhospitable than deserts, and there are people living there for research purposes.

I'm just making the basic point that we have a wealth of much more hospitable places to live on earth, and somehow they're not viable candidates as "backup plans" for humanity.

Going a little further, living in the ocean is easier than living on Mars. As far as I can tell there are no billionaire-funded submarine civilisation programs.

They're not viable candidates as backup plans for humanity because they have the same vulnerabilities to comet strikes, global nuclear war and pandemic as the rest of the Earth.

OTOH, if one of those took out human life on Earth, people living on Mars could re-colonize Earth.

Earth after a global nuclear war or comet strike is still more hospitable than Mars.

It's hard to imagine anything that would make Mars a better place to live than simply staying on earth.

Yes it would be. But that doesn't matter if no humans make it through the apocalypse in the first place.

The moon would do the job at a lot cheaper price.

Nope. Because of aero braking, Mars takes less delta v to get to and land on than the moon does.

Now I'm wondering why the Apollo program went to the moon if doing Mars is so much cheaper.

Going is cheaper. Coming back is more expensive. And of course the 3-6 month travel time is a challenge.

Of course, why use our limited resources to improve the lives of human beings on Earth? That lacks imagination.

Let's funnel those resources to some ridiculous endeavor to put some people in an arid bleak red wasteland instead.

There are approaches to solving hunger and housing, however extremist capitalism & avoidance of paying taxes by oligarchs and their corporations are standing in the way of it.

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