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Comment by brundolf | Hacker News Reader

I agree that they made some big leaps when turning this into a narrative, but I think there's truth to the basic premise that focusing too much on a hypothetical future amongst the stars - which at best would be harsh, difficult, and miserable - serves as a distraction against the very real and very urgent and very solvable problems facing our species and habitat as it exists right now.

Even if we managed interstellar travel (and that's a big if), it's highly unlikely we would ever find anything remotely as good as Earth, when it comes to being tuned precisely for our human needs. Evolution has geared us for this world. We might be able to cobble together a survival elsewhere, but I doubt we could ever thrive.

Beyond that: space exploration and research obviously still has value. It's just that it's a very long-term and theoretical value, and at this particular moment in history there are much more pressing concerns.

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> Evolution has geared us for this world. We might be able to cobble together a survival elsewhere, but I doubt we could ever thrive.

People on Earth thrived in the Arctic, which is incredibly far from the savannas of Africa, and did this with the technology of 10,000 years ago. Saying that people with the technology of 1000 years from now can't possibly thrive on an airless rock is a little pessimistic to me.

And that's ignoring space habitats, which would plausibly be better tuned to our human needs than Earth is.

> People on Earth thrived in the Arctic

Can you define "thrive"?

Because according to my definitions, I wouldn't "thrive" if I lived there - I would actually "cobble together a survival" like the parent wrote, and think I'm not in a minority that thinks so.

Thrive: Exist over many generations developing unique and rich culture and society.

Yes, the Inuit quite clearly thrived in the arctic:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inuit_culture

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inuit_cuisine

Wouldn't it be the standards of the people that lived there that mattered? I'd certainly die if placed in such a situation, but cultural knowledge is a technology too.

Well, they thrived enough to pose a serious challenge to Vikings in Greenland - and might have been a big part of their eventual downfall there.

This is perhaps getting a bit pedantic, but the development of Arctic civilizations (and specifically arctic climate here, not subarctic) seems to actually be more around the third millennium BC, or 4-5kya rather than 10kya.

It's also worth pointing out that Arctic peoples adapted to their environment largely by utilizing the capabilities of existing fauna (e.g., hunting existing apex predators, or using reindeer furs to keep warm). And when non-Arctic peoples tried their hands in the region without similar adaptations, the result tended to be "everyone dies," as in the Shackleton and Franklin expeditions.

Note that there are places on Earth we haven't been able to successfully inhabit. For example, somewhere around 17,000 feet appears to be the maximum possible altitude for permanent human habitation.

Certainly the subarctic was populated well-before 10kya[0], but I was under the impression that the true arctic saw long-term inhabitants before the Paleo-Inuit[1], with the Paleo-Arctic tradition around 10-7kya[2]. But looking now, its not clear to me if they were far enough north to count.

[0] https://www.researchgate.net/project/Late-Pleistocene-Archae...

[1] Who arrived in the Arctic circle around 4-5kya (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paleo-Eskimo)

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paleo-Arctic_Tradition

Those people still had free access to water, oxygen, sunlight that would warm and illuminate but not incinerate, Earth-strength gravity, shielding from astral radiation, a self-sustaining ecology of animals and microbes, self-circulating air replenished and cross-pollenated from other parts of the globe. I would even argue that psychological foundations like a horizon, and a sky above, and space that one can roam with one's own two feet, are essential to human thriving.

There are so many things we take for granted that probably don't exist, exactly this way, anywhere else in the universe.

We could probably satisfy our basic survival needs on a planet like Mars. We could make water, and nutrients, and oxygen, and shield ourselves from radiation. But it would mean living inside a box, possibly underground, forever, in constant precarity because if our artificial biomes ever have problems, we're out of luck. We can't fall back to nature; there is no nature. The world outside doesn't have a life of its own, it's fully dead. Even the very most optimistic version of this scenario is a bleak shadow of the life that can be lived on Earth.

> Evolution has geared us for this world. We might be able to cobble together a survival elsewhere, but I doubt we could ever thrive.

"Nothing human makes it out of the near future."

> It's just that it's a very long-term and theoretical value, and at this particular moment in history there are much more pressing concerns.

Like blowing up people living in mud huts in deserts going by US economic priorities. A regime largely in place to protect biased trade relations for cheap materials and goods from around the world and more importantly (to those orchestrating the regime) to the line the pockets of select defense contractors.

Investments in space represent, what, .1% of the US GDP? Astoundingly the single mother raising her kid in food scarcity in <insert dystopic cityscape here> actually probably really doesn't give a hoot about terraforming in 2500, but would really give a damn about having healthcare and avoiding societal collapse from climate catastrophe in her lifetime.

A lot of unreasonably rich people are unreasonably obsessed with space, but thats largely because they are sociopaths. Thats how they got rich in the first place, or were born to such extreme luxury they are psychologically impaired to be unable to relate to anyone outside their class meaningfully. So they go full scifi because they don't think the world we have with all its problems not so easily solved by throwing money at them (that isn't for their own immediate personal gain) is worth it.

> Like blowing up people living in mud huts in deserts going by US economic priorities. A regime largely in place to protect biased trade relations for cheap materials and goods from around the world and more importantly (to those orchestrating the regime) to the line the pockets of select defense contractors.

Haha. How on earth did they convince US citizens that indeed sending highly trained soldiers each worth their weight in gold to fight a war of attrition in the desert against sons of goat farmers?

At what point did everyone agree and say "this is a brilliant idea Mon general!" and proceed to send their sons to die in the desert?

>>A lot of unreasonably rich people are unreasonably obsessed with space, but thats largely because they are sociopaths. Thats how they got rich in the first place, or were born to such extreme luxury they are psychologically impaired to be unable to relate to anyone outside their class meaningfully. So they go full scifi because they don't think the world we have with all its problems not so easily solved by throwing money at them (that isn't for their own immediate personal gain) is worth it.

Or they think that expanding the amount of clean energy available to humanity a million fold - which a significant space economy would make possible - would do more to elevate the quality of life humanity enjoys than any other endeavor.

This hyper-cynical outlook, where you assume a focus on pushing the technological boundaries to make more of the universe accessible to humanity is motivated by sociopathic priorities, is toxic and totally inconsiderate of the goodwilled individuals it maligns.

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