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Comment by sverhagen | Hacker News Reader

I'm sure this is not a popular opinion here, but as long as I trip over homeless people, sleeping on the sidewalks, on my stroll to work, it's weird that space exploration would pop up as a "must" instead of a "nice to have".

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They're really orthogonal problems, we could absolutely have our cake and eat it too on this front but we just.....don't. We're this tiny dot in the middle of a massive universe of untapped resources and starting that push could open innumerable opportunities for societal advancement. It doesn't even take much wealth to unlock in the grand scheme of things but we've structured a lot of our society to make it as difficult as possible to solve both problems.

Once we colonize mars, I’d bet that we would have 2 planets with homeless people. I hope I’m wrong though.

Eventually, yeah. But that's kind of touching on the actual problem, isn't it? Homelessness isn't just a lack of houses. It's also a social and psychological problem, and you can't fix just one of those things and hope the problem goes away.

It also shows it's not entirely a resource problem... At the end of the day we choose to have homelessness even though we don't need to. Space or no space, it doesn't really make a difference. Ideally space access isn't solely granted through having a trillionaire class to fund it though.

That's a bit like not writing any new code unless you fix every single bug in the existing code. The counter-argument being that newer code will improve the design or fix some architectural issues, or handle upcoming feature requests better, etc and indirectly improve upon the flaws in the existing code. Its not always zero-sum.

So, why not do both, and prioritize the money accordingly?

Much the same was said about going to space in the first place, decades ago. Now we have satellites able to aid global communication services and information dissemination, as well as observation and analysis platforms available to billions, including farmers in poorer countries, so they can improve their lot.

Who knows what the next stages will bring? if we mine platinum and gold-heavy asteroids, we can make common use of previously-rare elements, or (as Bezos wants) foster an environment for heavy-polluting, but critical industry, to go off-world.

Never mind that the entire technological evolution necessitated by the process can be used to better humankind's lot.

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