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Comment by trgn | Hacker News Reader

European explorers and early colonist would write back letters or come back with stories about how lush, rich and plentiful the new world was. Walk up to any stream, and just scoop up a fish with your bare hands. Mountains of silver and gold, just under your feet. Of course you would want to sail off into the horizon for a place like that. And they weren't lying either, the new world was an untapped treasure trove. What's the likelihood that another planet is more than just a dull rock. Sure, we can go to other planets, but space looks incredibly dull and inhospitable to me. Compare that to the excitement and prospect of riches early European explorers must have felt, there's just no comparison.

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I like that the argument is traveling to a new continent is more exciting than traveling to a new planet. Some of the first people to Australia and the colonies were criminals. The first settlers also dealt with disease and untimely death on a regular basis. You've glamorised it quite a bit when in fact it was miserable.

You are absolutely correct about one thing though. There were many people traveling for a new life. Just like the travels from East to West in the US during the gold rush people went there for wealth, opportunity, and land but not for easy living. I suspect the push for exo planets will be the same.

If we are able to unlock FTL and the time and finacial investment to get there is low or comparable enough to a human lifetime then I see people, assuming we aren't just digital intelligence by then, moving there to start a new life and get away from whatever society is going through. There is always a disenfranchised portion of the population willing to give up their life for a new one somewhere else. Even if the journey and new life is relatively harder to what the rest of society is living in.

There was certainly some very creative and fraudulent promotion going on, leading to families emigrating for the fabulous opportunity and finding themselves in indentured servitude or on some marginal land even worse than at home. Or, like early many colonists rapidly succumbing to new and interesting fatal diseases.

Course having got there they were mostly stuck without coin for passage home.

I too suspect the push to space might go similarly.

In order for there to be letters, someone had to go first before there were any letters in order to write them.

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