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Comment by jameskilton | Hacker News Reader

So here's the actual problem: People. People want to escape Earth because of people. But escaping Earth is impossible alone, so you have to escape with other people ... which means you're bringing along with you every single problem you are trying to escape from.

We'll never escape each other, we can only learn to live with each other, wherever we are.

Incidentally, The Expanse is a fantastic sci-fi book series and tv series that covers this beautifully.

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I've only seen two episodes of The Expanse after reading the books, but I will 100% upvote the book series. It's one of the best sci-fi series I've read in years.

I kind of want to give the series another go, I just rarely watch TV. I'm currently 5 episodes in of an 18 episode series over 3 months lol.

Side-tracking a bit further, "Murderbot" is also a fun sci-fi series although much lighter than The Expanse. And now I'm reading "Bobiverse", just ~150 pages in but enjoying it as well.

Bobiverse! Cooler than an entire bag full of cats!

I liked bobiverse ok, but not loved it. It felt a bit like a tech person wish-fulfilment fantasy where an average startup founder who cashed out, could solve every conceivable problem there is, just given enough time.

I wouldn't blame that on people, most people ARE fundamentally peaceful, rather, it's the (as I like to call it) "different interests" causing all these troubles.

Everyone is different in their personalities and their means to achieve what they want, so eventually someone may have conflict with you and makes you feel bad. But I've live long enough to realize all of those conflicts are just part of (good old) living, you can hate someone while still find a way to corporate efficiently to make both of you happy.

However, the story of The Expanse told me that, as long as we as human beings refuse to learn how to resolve or moderate our conflicts, we'll bring it along no matter where we go, different country, different continent, different planet or even different galaxy etc. We'll find a way to differentiate each other and attack.

That's why it's sometimes good to go back to the fundamentals, think what do we want to fill our lives with? Hope or hate?

The Expanse is highly realistic about certain human details that make it more beleivable and engaging. It's still science fiction, but the existence of gravity and inertia, mass, managing air and water... truly excellent. Good read.

I think most people's escapism around space involves only bringing along the people they like, who make places they already consider nice.

They just need to give it some time. And out of window their liking other people will go.

A really expensive, state-of-the-art gunship with nukes and a coffee machine doesn't hurt either

I think most of us would take a nice yacht over a desk job

And rail guns. Don't forget the rail guns.

But yeah, mostly coffee.

The problem is not people. The problem is a subset of the people. It always has been.

Frontiers and the associated extreme physical and psychological hardships have a way of practically filtering out whiners, weak people, and the uncautious/callous/thoughtless.

This is why they are attractive to some people.

Frontiers also attract people with other problems, unstable etc.

Every large group of people will have a subsets of people who will have different ideas about how things should be done. This is the source of most frictions, besides say just that some people are a-holes. There is no escaping the politics that will always emerge among a large enough group of people. And I don't even think that number has to be very big, like anything more than say 5, I think would start to splinter eventually.

Taking this opportunity to evangelize for Seveneves, which is much more relevant to the article.

Seconded

Great comment - it reminded me of Seveneves

Nobody goes there anymore. It’s too crowded.

Agree, but with the caveat that space does allow the possibility of escape from broken political and economic systems. That escape may be temporary, but it is real. Also, add me as another vote for the Expanse, both the books and TV series.

Doesn't living on a boat in the middle of Atlantic do the same? Or on a remote island in the middle of nowhere? Or in the middle of nowhere in the amazons or Siberia? Probably not the most comfortable places but probably more comfortable than space.

Those places are too accessible and too easy for major existing powers to lay claim to if a new settlements there start to thrive. This is especially true for any place on dry land (you really think Russia would allow independence of an economically healthy and growing city-state in Siberia? Fat chance).

Basically every square inch of Earth has effectively been spoken for already save for the oceans, but nation states will still happily invent reasons why they actually control the plot you’ve put your city on (“some tiny island in the vicinity is under ours, thus so is your city!”) or maybe just won’t bother with pretext at all and threaten military action unless you comply.

All that becomes much less practical in space, and the further out you go the less likely it is that Earth based powers will bother you (especially if we never invent the efficient significant-fraction-of-light-speed engines that enable the plot of The Expanse).

Now of course going out there introduces all sorts of other problems, but existing power interference is not among them.

Yeah, but we're not talking about cities. There will be a lot of time before you can establish a city with thousands of people on another planet. What we're talking about here is the first step where you and a few people go into space with a very uncomfortable spaceship and maybe establish a base on a planet which is probably just gonna have the bare minimum to survive. We're not talking about cities in our lifetime. So at that point if you're one of the first going you are not going to a city. So you're really living in more luxury in the wilderness of Siberia or the Amazon and the government there is not gonna bother you if you are just living there alone in the middle of nowhere interacting with nobody because the goal was to get away from all the politics and stuff.

Right, but usually part of the end goal of going out to settle a frontier isn’t just to get away from the status quo, but to build something bigger in the process. You’re right that governments aren’t going to care about just you living out in the middle of nowhere, but they will care once it grows into something significant, and that renders the whole thing moot. No point in building something up if it’s guaranteed to be snatched away.

Of course, that can happen to some off-world settlement that took generations to build too, but it’s not a given and your chances of retaining sovereignty are much better.

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