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Comment by incongruity | Hacker News Reader

Those "solutions" are only simple in theory, not in practice. Enacting that change would actually be exponentially harder than getting humans to Titan, IMHO. One requires massive social and economic change. The other requires sending a limited number of people to another part of the solar system. We roughly know how to do the latter but the former is on decidedly a longer timescale if it achievable at all.

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Do you really think that adopting a sustainable way of life is unfeasible, while establishing a self-sustaining colony on another planet is? Many of the changes I am talking about are already taking place. For example, renewables have recently become a viable alternative (http://www.sciencealert.com/india-says-the-cost-of-solar-pow...) and population growth is projected to taper off after 2050 (http://abcnews.go.com/Technology/story?id=98371). The only thing that can hold these solutions back is strong opposition from the beneficiaries of the current system. They will fight back, but I think that the odds are stacked against them.

Yes, I do. Ultimately there is no such thing as a sustainable way of life, thanks to the second law of thermodynamics. It's not that long until the sun burns out - by which time we'll have to have figured out how to settle not only on other planets but in other solar systems.

Nice one. I will make sure to bring out entropy next time someone accuses me of not thinking of the long run.

I don't think we know how to do the latter, in terms of colonization. Our experience locally is that living in hazardous environments is not something human beings can endure long term. We'd be asking people to live in a place that combines the worst elements of submarine and Antarctic living, with no real way of responding to any difficulty at all, even through communication.

Lot of people assume magical science fairies will solve this via "terraforming" or some other science fiction only idea, but more likely space exploration will remain unmanned probes if just because we aren't going to send a generation of explorers to their deaths or eventual madness.

> One requires massive social and economic change. The other requires sending a limited number of people to another part of the solar system.

Do social and economic factors magically not apply to people who colonize the solar system? Seems to me you now have 2 problems.

The scale and selectivity of a new colony make it vastly simpler, IMHO.

Scale is the critical thing here - even small social change at scale is hard - examples are aplenty.

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