Won't dreams stay dreams?
There's literally nothing there, why go all that way? The distances are so incredibly vast. It seems like we ought to be content with staying put.
There's literally nothing there, why go all that way? The distances are so incredibly vast. It seems like we ought to be content with staying put.
“Literally everything is in space.”
There was literally nothing there? Why go all that way? To see what was there. And then to make something there.
[Edit, because I'm rate limited: No, interstellar space is something to cross, to get to stellar space. You think the New World was rich? How about a whole solar system of untapped resources?
That's why people will try to go.]
No there wasn't. There was a whole continent of untapped resources.
You can argue that the solar system is a lot of untapped resources too. Harder to extract than sailing a piece of wood across an ocean growing some food, and killing the people who are already there. Harder than colonising Antarctica or the surface of the sea too, but there are resources - not just minerals but solar energy too.
But interstellar space? Beyond the Oort Cloud? There's no evidence of anything other than perhaps some very sparse dust. That is nothing, and (jokes aside) completely incomparable to Ohio.
The hypothetical riches were quite obvious: same stuff we have over here, but not owned by someone yet.
What are they hypothetical riches of outer space?
This is a question we should think about clearly and logically without resorting to stuff like "oh tally-ho the adventure!" type nonsense.
Just imagine the economic output of a civilisation a million times the size of ours.
Then we can use all of that new productivity to start working toward the next rung?
Our economy is not currently throughput limited on water or space so I don’t find this compelling.
In the past, I've challenged the "Let's colonize Mars!" people to do something that's far easier: Move to Bouvet island, now.[1]
This is a frozen uninhabited rock that is nonetheless a tropical paradise compared to Mars. It's far easier to reach, has free unlimited oxygen and water, and gets more solar radiation also for power! It's luxurious compared to the colder, dryer deserts of Mars where there's only dry rocks and near-vacuum.
If you really want to spice things up, donate $10,000 to a charity per pound of material you take to the island (what does a shelter weigh?), take 100% of your food and water with you, and never go outside without wearing full scuba gear. For "realism mode" sprinkle a small amount of radioactive powder evenly everywhere around your habitat area.
"Yay! Adventure! Honey, tell the school we're unenrolling the kids and taking them with us to this wonderful opportunity to start a new life!"
You miss the whole point. The point of becoming an interplanetary civilization is not to fill every barren rock you see (and there are plenty on Earth, and, if climate change isn't controlled, there'll soon be more). The point is to put just enough humankind on all the places we can easily reach (at that given time) so we can expand from there with in-situ resources rather than only expand from here, using only Earth resources (which WILL run out).
Some humans seem to have evolved a motivation to explore their surroundings. At first we walked, then we learned to ride animals, wheels, boats, airplanes, and, recently, spacecraft. We travel to learn both about other places as we do to learn about ourselves. Some people might feel content with our current reach, but I feel constrained.
You can't answer that from Bouvet Island, can you?
If you have an argument for why the reverse ordering, or in parallel, would be better, that's what I'm asking for: what's the argument?
Flesh it out beyond just "imagine if we succeed with no substantial opportunity loss!"
The benefit, however, is minuscule compared to what an expansion into quadrillions of highly educated humans could create.
In fact, technically, there's nothing here. It's all out there.
Jupiter: ~0.095% of the total mass, and ~71% of the non-solar mass.
Saturn: ~0.03% of the total mass, and ~19% of the non-solar mass.
Uranus and Neptune: Contribute a small percentage to the remaining non-solar mass.
All other objects: (inner planets, dwarf planets, moons, asteroids, comets, etc.) account for less than 0.002% of the solar system's total mass.
Your brain mass is about 3 disposable water bottles in weight and we can debate what parts of that are thinking and actually "you".
You are insignificant on the scale of the solar system let alone the universe.
>Into one end he plugged the whole of reality as extrapolated from a piece of fairy cake, and into the other end he plugged his wife: so that when he turned it on she would see in one instant the whole infinity of creation and herself in relation to it. To Trin Tragula’s horror, the shock completely annihilated her brain...
~Douglas Adams, The Restaurant at the End of the Universe
Are we the chemicals or just the electrical signals, that makes the mass that makes up "you" even less of an thing.
For whatever reason, humanity's attitude in this regard has changed drastically in the last century. We can't even bother to make the next generations, and a shrinking population eventually (quite quickly, really) shrinks to zero. Not only do they want to "stay put", they want to lay down and die.
That doesn't seem like a strong argument to me. It seems like a distraction from the crowd that would save the planet by extinguishing humanity if that's what it took. Though what value the planet might have with all of us gone I leave as an exercise for the reader.
The first priority of any society that wants to continue to exist into the future must always be to make the next generation. If you do not do this, or if you just leave the task to others hoping that someone else will do it, then you are behaving in a way that will in all probability lead towards there being no next generation sooner or later. The "global warming is the apocalypse" movement constantly talks about how the best way to reduce your carbon footprint is to have no children.
>The only large-scale planetary engineering in humanity's history is Veniforming its home world.
So it is claimed, but from my point of view it looks very much as if it's intent on making itself extinct through fertility decline. But at least carbon dioxide levels will return to normal, eh?
By "literally nothing there," I mean there's literally nothing for us. Three stars and a few Earth-sized planets in the habitable zone that are, more than likely, uninhabitable by humans. There's nothing there worth going all that way for.
I like sci-fi as much as the next person but the reality of the situation, it seems to me, is that the universe is mostly empty, vast, and inhospitable to human life.
So is the Pacific Ocean for practical definitions of emptiness. You don't got to the empty places.
I’m not sure that after spending a lifetime in an ample space colony its inhabitants would feel nostalgic of the time we spent sitting on round rocks cooking around a star.
Ask ten different scientists about the environment, population control, genetics, and you'll get ten different answers, but there's one thing every scientist on the planet agrees on. Whether it happens in a hundred years or a thousand years or a million years, eventually our Sun will grow cold and go out. When that happens, it won't just take us. It'll take Marilyn Monroe, and Lao-Tzu, and Einstein, and Morobuto, and Buddy Holly, and Aristophanes, and - all of this - all of this - was for nothing. Unless we go to the stars
That's the fallacy in the given argument.
Might very well be the last question we need to ask ourselves.