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Comment by sneak | Hacker News Reader

For a film with no narrative it sure does seem sad (and wrong) to claim our modern life is “out of balance”.

Still one of my favorite works of music and cinematography both; I just don’t agree at all with the implicit message. We are destined for the stars.

That end scene with the Atlas missile that you linked is def the best though (and Prophecies is the best song/track too).

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> We are destined for the stars.

The stars suck, though. Even Mars is entirely awful.

Like, that's not very different from "we're destined for Hell". Not an inspiring sentiment, right? It's really bad.

How awful it is aside, it's also roughly as realistic as "we're destined for Tolkien's Middle Earth". Only marginally less fantastical.

First orbit, then mars, then the stars.

First orbit, then piss money away for 70-years with no discernible progress, then maybe Mars (for "reasons"), then we probably ruin the habitability of Earth long before "stars". I grant that's not as pithy as yours...

Part of the trouble is that an Earth with "ruined" habitability (let's throw together both severe climate change and also a nuclear exchange, why not?) is still far better & easier to live on than anywhere else we know about.

That's what I mean about space being just the worst. Like, it's so bad. Even Mars, which is relatively decent by space standards, is complete shit. Complete shit that's also insanely expensive to reach.

The ocean also sucked(s) but we have pushed our dominance into there as well.

Dominating the environment is what we do. for better or worse... its the one true value we can measure ourselves against.

We are very far from dominating the oceans.

The longest time spent under water is what, maybe a month or two for those on nuclear submarines? Which is probably 25% the length of one leg of the mars trip? And subs can always just surface and call for help for 99% or problems they’d face?

Just fantastical thinking that we’ll make any headway on that trip in the next 50 years.

Mars is only “entirely awful” on the surface. It’s a fair sight better than the raw vacuum of space, and we already have permanent installations of people living there, both on Tiangong and ISS.

It’s only “entirely awful” if you want to do things like walk around outside and sit under trees. It has a lot of co2 and h2o around, and while the sunlight situation isn’t great, it isn’t dire either.

> it sure does seem sad (and wrong) to claim our modern life is “out of balance”.

I think the global CO2 levels would disagree. Our oceans, and therefore most of the biosphere are quite literally out of (pH) balance due to rapid CO2 release.

> We are destined for the stars.

I doubt it. Don’t get me wrong I love the idea of it, but the reality is our physical form is so fragile and fleeting relative to the harsh vastness of the Universe.

We should protect this cradle of our genesis with everything we have. That we have not met other life should be taken as a warning of how difficult the road ahead.

For sure, don't know if I agree with the central "message" of that title / song. But I can see the complaints raised therein.

I'm just a bit of a contrarian, and couldn't resist the appeal of that reply :@)

There is no sense in which we're destined for the stars.

We could have been destined for the stars fifty years ago, but it turns out we're a stupid species with no planetary intelligence.

So we spend far too much energy finding clever ways to blow things up - cities, rockets, economies - and far too little on boring shit like keeping the climate stable and the lights on.

And even less on the breakthrough physics, psychology, politics, and ecology needed to make interstellar travel even remotely likely.

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