Hacker News Reader

Comment by erentz | Hacker News Reader

This kind of thing is motivated reasoning. Elon is guilty of it too. They want to play with space technology, then go searching for moral justifications that don’t add up.

Anything we might do in space or to try to live on Mars is much-much (much) more difficult than fixing what problems we have on Earth to keep it healthy and habitable. These people would be better spending money here if they really cared.

View on HN

There are definitely a lot of people finding moral justification for their lifestyles.

Actually one of the more interesting ideas I heard is that this is how deist religions came about: early farmers had a tough time domesticating animals with animist religions (where each animal has a spirit and can be talked to) and so needed to remove the guilt that came with owning and slaughtering animals. By moving the spirit away from the animal directly and towards an animal god, they were able to absolve themselves of the guilt.

seeing as we evolved from animals that don't appear to experience guilt about eating other animals, I find it implausible that feeling guilt is the original state and not a pro-social trait that evolved much much later as we started forming societies.

That’s correct, guilt would be something that evolves with social structure, but social structure arose pre-hunter-gatherer. The jump to agriculture took hundreds of thousands of years after the first hominids (pre sapiens).

Exactly and they even know what those things might be, they just rather live in la-la land and imagination rather than reality. For one thing, Bezos, use your damn money and buy as much land as you can and set it aside as pristine reserve. And then make it so that this land can never be sold by your heirs under any circumstance. Do it all over the world, use your drones to patrol it. Something that you can do with your wealth relatively easily which makes a difference.

People have been making accusations along these lines since the very start of spaceflight:

http://www.lettersofnote.com/2012/08/why-explore-space.html

Perhaps the only thing that's changed since then is that the US spends far, far less on spaceflight.

Personally, I would prefer that the allocation of the nation's (or the world's) wealth be assigned to the democratic process, rather than to the whims of a few people, irrespective of how wise and noble they are or aren't. However many defects the American political process has (and, it has many), I wager it's more democratic than just having Jeff Bezos decide to do whatever he wants. So, when people made accusations along those lines during the start of spaceflight and for many decades later, in principle there were public, democratic mechanisms in place for them to do something about it (i.e., at the very least, they could vote). With Jeff Bezos, I think we're relegated to little more than complaining about it on the internet.

Communal ownership has proved to be questionable.

And private ownership hasn't?

> nation's (or the world's) wealth be assigned to the democratic process

It's not the nation's wealth. It's Bezos' and Musk's wealth. You and I didn't earn it.

Exchanging money is democratic. When I perform a service for someone else, they give me their votes in the form of dollars and then I can then give those votes in the form of dollars to someone else. Collectively we do this every single day.

Like the Bicameral Legislative, we have one democratic system with equal representation (the Senate) and another democratic system with proportional representation (the House). Likewise, individual citizens like states enjoy equal representation (one vote) and proportional representation (wealth) where the proportion of representation you get is dependent on how much cash others in society have voluntarily given you in exchange for something they find valuable.

> You and I didn't earn it.

Speak for yourself.

>Anything we might do in space or to try to live on Mars is much-much (much) more difficult than fixing what problems we have on Earth to keep it healthy and habitable.

This sounds true upon first glance, but is it really? Scientifically/technologically speaking you're certainly correct, but fixing Earth is also a political problem.

I have much more faith in humanity's ability to create technology that saves Earth then I do to humanity's ability to put aside vested and/or selfish interests and work together for a common goal. The former is hopefully a matter of several (or more) generations, while the latter I imagine will never be "fixed."

You're definitely right, but I think Bezos is thinking long term. In 100 years smelting of metals mined on the moon might take place in space. Heavy industry growth might be limited to space another 100 years after that.

He's glossing over the short term, but I'm all for having diversity amongst billionaires. If two of them are obsessed with space, but more have philanthropic aims, them so be it.

I love the way Musk is planning a multi use rocket in the BFR, and the space colonies Bezos has envisaged, but I also hope that coal and natural gas use (and meat eating) can be reduced as soon as possible.

An extinction level event asteroid is pretty much a matter of when not if. We probably don't need to go to space to survive, but space is a great research area to develop life sustaining technology, skills and knowledge that could be put into practice on earth to survive the many years it might take for humans to survive that ELE.

The earth will blow up one day. And when that times comes we need to have mastered inter solar travel.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com