I suspect that you won't be swayed by the abstract benefits of intelligent life on Earth finding not just proof of life on another body in our solar system but actual life that we could perhaps even launch retrieval missions to return to Earth for analysis so I won't talk about Darwin and his voyages and the theory of evolution that it resulted in as people often do in these conversations.
Instead I'll ask you what you think the dollar value of studying and reverse engineering an alternate or similar biochemical system survives in a world totally different than our own. What sort of applications could this have in materials science? What kind of new materials could we discover from alien life? What kind of novel bio-mimetic applications could we derive from this?
I look around the room I'm in and I see a hardwood floor, I see a differnet species tree making up woodpaneling on the walls. My clothes are made of cotton and rayon, there's some sort of grass woven lampshade above me. books made of paper, paintings with linseed oil paint -- what's the commercial and cultural value of all that stuff to our species?
After all, everyone involved can just say it's inevitable! If we don't do it, someone else will.
In reality the existential crisis will be used as a means for control, exploitation, and corruption ...
c.f. USA, Israel, UAE as spring-to-mind obvious examples for hints and tips as to how this plays out.
It's also interesting that your mind goes immediately to common enemy instead of some alternative.
You can see it right now with AI barreling forward. If we don’t develop it, someone else will, so we will ensuring it happens.
Of course we can never prove or disprove their claim of “someone else will” because they went ahead and did it.
We've never seen a case where some government in some country doesn't work as hard as possible to ensure that they have the biggest possible weapon. So you should believe someone is doing that. (Point in fact, we know of several governments currently trying to achieve nuclear, aerial, and AI superiority today.)
You can check out why scientists use this same philosophy in modern discovery and belief systems by catching up on the subject of "the philosophy of science." You'll find some 5,000 years of scientific debate and conclusions that roughly culminate in the above system of belief.
So, if someone else is going to develop something very harmful, is the best solution to develop something equally or more harmful? Or are there maybe other better solutions to this problem?
So, it might be worth entertaining whether you can convince everyone in your culture to be subservient?
Here again, historically that's never happened, so it's not worth believing. And that's just to check if there's a better solution. You might arrive at an even worse outcome.
Revolutions require even bigger weapons, despite sometimes having better long term outcomes. How many people have to die to test our theory?
Genghis Khan created centuries of peace horrifically with bigger guns. The Ottoman Turks similarly did. The US, now. And many more cases that we know of. All of these examples coincidentally allowed multiculturalism, and even more, they enforced it as a matter of law. Just as an interesting side point.
Life is terrible in all cases in history where it's not clear who has the biggest guns. That's always been the demarcation of the beginning of a new regime at the cost of millions of lives.
Revolutions are horrible. That's what we know for sure.
I want to clarify that because I could see someone taking that statement to mean that multiculturalism is inherently wrong, which is the opposite of what I'm saying.
Sadam Hussein? IRGC? United States?
When?
It's never happened. The US itself doesn't abide by Geneva convention. Let alone other UN members.
You're living in pretense, I'm sorry to point out.
The world is run by terrorists. The only question is which terror group you want to retain power.
Personally, I like the multiculturalism that the US champions, and the Turks used to, and the Khan dynasty used to, and Persia used to. And only because it's the most likely recipe for the longest track record for peace.
Like it or not, history doesn't agree with your optimism as much as you and I wish it did.
Developing the more heinous weapons before the other guy is the pragmatic thing to do, but it doesn’t give you the moral high ground.
> (Point in fact, we know of several governments currently trying to achieve nuclear, aerial, and AI superiority today.)
And why are they doing that? To get it first since others will do it anyway.
I think making seemingly moral short term decisions that result in maximum casualties is not actually moral. It's stupid, and wrong.
Creating an arms race by letting someone who isn't the current leader gain an advantage ensures that a power struggle will ensue. It implies revolution in all known cases in history.
The moral high ground you're referring to should result in the best outcome. It doesn't arise from a guy standing at the top of a hill by himself shouting that he's the most moral guy while getting us all killed in the course of violent revolution. That's just megalomania.
They're very similar. One relies on rational thinking about actual expected outcomes, the other relies on one's own opinion about right and wrong.
You have to be careful because it's deceivingly easy to be the latter and end up an accidental megalomaniac that kills us all.
See history for countless examples.
You mentioned your feelings. I'm glad you did. Your feelings are nearly always a guide to bad outcomes. I'd trust you more as a leader if you instead relied on your rational faculties to guide us to good and moral decisions and outcomes.
And I'm confident that you'd find that your self doubt is diminished when you can self reflect on your decisions and find in all cases that they were made using the best information at the time, instead of how you felt about them at the time.
It's not a cool concept to write scifi books about, but it may still be the reality we live in.
The most likely situation (by many orders of magnitude) is that the only practical way of getting to another star system, even in the far far future, is a generation ship travelling 50+ years one way with a significant risk of people dying from organ failure or cancer along the route. This would represent a 1000x speed improvement over current tech and is only a factor of 10x slower than lightspeed.
It is entirely unfeasible for any company or even government to spend money on such a project. Even if the ground on the other planet is strewn with diamonds and gold and the elixir of eternal life, you are looking at ~200 years before any ROI can be realised.
1) The first mission would almost certainly be a set of robotic probes (especially in light of recent developments)
2) As controversial as it may be, we could genetically engineer descendants who are better suited for space travel
3) Cybernetics hold the potential to preserve the biological human 'essence' (brain and nervous system) while minimizing the amount of living material requiring maintenance
4) Hibernation is still a possibility, or at least we haven't ruled it out yet
When you're looking at long enough time spans - which we should have available if we manage to avoid extincting ourselves - many more possibilities emerge beyond simply "put a bunch of regular humans as we currently are into a tin can".
This does not extrapolate to a dark forest scenario.
History is full of monuments and art who's only purpose was to be cool. And sending humans to another solar system would be a pretty cool monument to humanity.
It is more of a PR problem really to convince people to contribute.
Do that first. It has huge medical benefits too, so it’s dual use not just for space flight.
there's far too much unknown about the origins of life to say we even have a basic guess as to the probabilities of life
It is called enlightenment and the discovery of knowledge. Otherwise, we would still have been running around with pitchforks and flaming torches, waging crusades in the name of one deity or another.
Besides, humans spend $50 billion or – equally arguably much more – killing or trying to kill each other. If that gets spent on new discoveries and knowledge, it becomes apparent that the $50 billion investment into science is a substantially better value proposition.
Serious answer: on a yearly 130T$ GDP at least a good third is spent on destroying this planet. 50$B which ends up paying phds is barely one peanut.
I'll acknowledge that that is wishy-washy language, but that's kind of my point. I'm not sure I can point to an objective "good" that comes out of it, but I also don't know that that's the norm for these kinds of things either. It might have been hard to say that going to the moon was an objective "good" outside of one-upping the Russians, but I do think it's good that we did it, even if I don't really know how to quantify why.
Because it could then tell us if it's related to us or not, potentially we could get to see how life unrelated to us looks like, how life in general is originally formed, how likely in the universe it is...
I honestly struggle to imagine how it can be considered unimportant, unless your stating position is that said life is completely unreachable to current and future tech, which I don't find likely.
From a non-economic standpoint: Aside from ensuring we don't destroy this planet, what is more important than finding out if we're alone in the universe? Not much, if you ask me.
(I realize finding algae on Saturn's moon doesn't definitively answer that question but it's certainly a uh... pretty big data point)
Where are you getting 50bn from? There are currently two large probes on their way to study Jupiter's moons, JUICE (costing 1.5bn EUR) and Europa Clipper (costing 5bn USD). Saturn's _somewhat_ more difficult, but not enough to take the cost to 50bn!
* If we find life on another planet it provides a realignment for most of our world religions. That's important to several billion people. It might even create a new religion. We haven't had one of those in awhile, how exciting is that?
* If we spent $50 Billion to find algae on Enceladus we'd definitely spend 200x that to put said algae on a billionaire's plate for them to eat. That would fuel hard sciences and the economy in numerous ways, similar to how the space race gave us Nike Air shoes and the Dustbuster [1]. Like you say a human would probably never dip their toe in the water of Enceladus but we would get a lot better at drilling holes and extracting.
* We need more enemies and aliens would be great, even if they are single-celled. It would probably result in a global defense system within 50 years which would once again have several ancillary benefits for technology and warfare.
[1] https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/infographics/20-inventions-we-would...
Thanks to the 2nd most hated man alive, it doesn't cost nearly this much to get to space anymore.
People can simultaneously be terrible humans and accomplish positive things while doing it.
It doesn't make them a better human.
He was not; he managed to kill off the style, but it's from the 19th century and was actually somewhat popular at one point.
Why are you yourself important to people? Certainly nothing I care about relies on your existence. The answer isn't anything you do, even the things you do for other people, because why do they matter either? You don't need any utilitarian justification.
We don't spend $x to attain any specific goal like buying an acre of land or a lathe. We spend $x to find out whatever is the reality. It doesn't matter what we find, whether it has some obvious immediate "can I eat it or F it?" application or not. The goal was to find out whatever the facts are.
The utility of that knowledge is unknown but infinite. For the infinite rest of time it will be part of whatever infinite humans want to do.
You can contrive infinite possible infinitely valuable utilitarian uses but that misses the point and dignifies an assumption that was invalid to begin with.
We spend $x to explore the nature of reality because we are not incurious ants merely following just enough programming to perpetuate.
The only value of utility itself is that it empowers us to pursue whatever goals we may want. Not merely the power to continue existing. We don't need any knowledge or tools or materials at all for that. Utterly brainless plants continue to exist without knowing or posessing anything.
Nothing that you do find useful, like presumably an accessible mineral deposit, is any different than something like this that you don't find useful.
> Seriously want to know what people really think...
> find "life". So? Why is this important to people?
Are you saying people would rather have an apartment? It would house 250,000 people for 10 years. But the slime is cooler.