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Comment by klyrs | Hacker News Reader

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klyrs·

I made it this far:

> But, we can imagine the scandalized fanboys wailing in the distance...

Oh, piss off. If you've got a sound argument, you can do it without the ad-hominem attacks on strawmen.

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Same. I don't understand how people arrive at these emotions about mining asteroid belts.

I kinda get it -- we've gone a long way to making the earth uninhabitable, and (most) scifi paints a very rosy picture of the viability of space travel. In the US, getting to the moon was an incredibly big deal. The grass looks greener on the other side, and there is a huge emotional investment in this on the pro-space side. On the anti-space side, it looks like an incredible expenditure of resources, dumping tons of CO2 into the air, and for what? So there's a huge fear about the conditions of the earth; opportunity to fix matters being squandered. There's high emotions on both sides, which makes it both more difficult and more important to maintain discipline in discussions.

So direct an article towards all things climate change and resource management. That’s not what this is. This is attacking people unrelated to that too far and too too harshly.

Note that I'm not defending the article nor the positions taken therein. I'm exploring some reasons that I see behind this being an emotional issue. Bit of a role reversal for happytoexplain :)

I would like to point out that nowhere in the best current scientific consensus position we have (IPCC reports) words like "uninhabitable" (or anything to that effect) are mentioned. This is an invention of activists trying to sway public opinion with alarmist predictions. See also [0]

[0]: https://extinctionclock.org/

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