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Comment by Hermel | Hacker News Reader

You clearly are not a visionary pioneer. That's what it is about. To go where no one else has gone before, just for the sake of it. Remember, there are plenty of people doing things like climbing Mount Everest for fun while you and I are watching Netflix.

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there are plenty of people doing things like climbing Mount Everest for fun while you and I are watching Netflix

The net long term difference of which is effectively zero. Adventure travel Everest climbers are not pioneers, and provide no new knowledge about Everest or the human condition - while burning up millions in cash in the process.

The frontier is still terrestrial.

I mostly agree with you, but wanted to note that the money they spend doesn't get "burnt". Spent money gets just moved around, it isn't destroyed. And a significant part of the money spent on climbing Everest stays in Nepal - an extremely poor country - where it can maybe do some good.

Edit: Typos

> but wanted to note that the money they spend doesn't get "burnt".

Rocketry comes pretty close though.

Which is something that SpaceX and Blue Origin are working to stop.

IIRC Elon Musk has stated that the cost of fuel is almost negligible in current rockets.

The goal of rocket reusability is to get the fraction of launch costs that is spent on burning stuff as close to 100% as possible. In a somewhat literal way, by making launches cheaper they are making "rocketry is burning money" more true, not less.

In a strictly literal interpretation of an entirely figurative figure of speech.

The money might literal be burnt in the form of fuel, but it will be only the cost of the fuel. Modern and older rockets had to burn that and effectively burn all the other disposable costs, like the whole rocket and every piece of gear sent up. The situation is certainly being improved by these new innovators, and that is the point that was trying to be made and it is highly likely that you knew that.

The money stands for work and resources that get wasted though.

Oh, but I do have vision. I'm looking for more than a few wealthy joyriders poking holes in the atmosphere here for nothing more than shits and giggles and questioning how that might affect our planet.

If you're going to talk up preservation of the atmosphere while downplaying the enormous technological progress and bold, financially uncertain moves that SpaceX is making, you need to give your head a shake. The atmosphere has already been killed. And the methane that's being unlocked because of it's desecration will kill you, and it will kill me. We killed ourselves with the same type of ignorance towards new, uncertain technology that you have displayed in this comment chain. We took existing, working, and bad technology (ICE vehicles) and paraded it around to the world, and it worked, because we could show people how to use them to make money. We had an MVP with gasoline powered vehicles. People ate it up. Yet electric cars, the correct technology choice, get no mindshare with the serfs because they're heavier, slower, and can't exactly carry a dump truck full of aggregate rock up inclines for 24 hours a day.

You need to stop with the sour grapes, the tall poppy syndrome, and you need to start supporting the people who are actually doing shit. And you need to do it before the window of opportunity to use our technology to save ourselves closes. Keep in mind that me writing this comment to you is an enormous waste of my time, and I really thought it through, so please absorb the meaning in my words and stop having these pissing matches on the internet over things you completely misunderstand.

If you're saying climate change will kill any significant fraction of people alive today - enough that you expect it to kill you personally, then I think you need some evidence for that. It seems like quite an unbelievable claim - effectively the end of civilization within our lifetime.

I don't believe it's going to kill a lot of people. The planet went through this before during the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum[0]. Basically a quantity of carbon roughly equal to our industrial output estimate up to 2100 or 2200 was released into the atmosphere over about 20k years. It stayed there for several hundred thousand years, raising global temperatures by 8 degrees. We're talking aligators and crocodiles living in jungles on Antarctica. Massive die-outs of microbes in the oceans due to acidification and sea levels rising. 70m of sea level rise is locked up in polar ice and then there's also thermal expansion.

None of that is going to happen in our lifetime. But the lifetime of our great grandchildren? There's a good chance. After all, this isn't the first time. However we will have several centuries to adapt. The real issue is we're destroying the natural environment faster than it can possibly adapt or evolve, but we'd be doing that even without climate change.

[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paleocene%E2%80%93Eocene_Therm...

I haven't downplayed the tech advances at all here so that's a false narrative you concocted to make a point that ignores what I have done. That is I pointed out a few things that we should be discussing about this.

I really don't care if that causes some shade to fall on your fantasies of what this project might lead to. Not a bit. In fact, I couldn't care any less.

We are not discussing "Sci-Fi" here. This isn't a "Trekkie" convention, it's the real world effects of this we're talking about.

The people who are behind this effort are not doing this for "shits and giggles". In fact, these "wealthy joyriders" have specified exactly why they are doing it. Our future is uncertain. Visionary people spend their resources in a manner that brings about change that others later take for granted. For humans to survive far into the future it is necessary to become a multi-planetary species. For that to happen, it not only requires international cooperation amongst different nations but also individuals like Musk and Bezos, who have dreamt of these things since they were kids, and are now willing to allocate their substantial resources towards commercial endeavors that eventually bring about that reality.

When you have billions of dollars, there are many ways you can choose to spend your money. Some choose to use it on fleeting pleasures, but luckily humanity has others who have decided to use those resources in a systematic way that would help the greatest number of people possible, those like Bill Gates and Warren Buffet. We need those people. And we also need people who are willing to indulge the wildest fantasies of the human imagination in a completely reasonable way, like Musk and Bezos, who are thinking far ahead (and Bezos is the ultimate long term thinker), and realize that they now have the ability to bring about the innovation and lay out the first steps of commercial space exploration, which is necessary if the light of human consciousness is to see all the wonder the universe and the future has to offer.

Potentially, thousands of years from now there will be hundreds of billions of people populating multiple star systems. Their existence will be due to the efforts of people who are spending substantial amounts of money to make space travel feasible today, despite how unrealistic it seems to most of us.

Visionary pioneer "on space exploration".

Earth is complex enough for any person to be visionary. Please do not let your own interests overshadow others.

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