Why? Because we've done stuff before? We live past the times of flying cars and meals in pill form. We are 40 years from the Jetsons, three years past the original Blade Runner, etc.
This is just handwaving away all of the hard parts of the solution and saying that otherwise, it would be simple. Yes, yes it would. It would definitely be easy if it weren't hard.
There's also the logistical practicality of what is being proposed. We don't have flying cars for many reason, one of them being that any benefits they may have is outweighed by all of the very real logistical issues they have.
I find this level of "techno-optimism" just flat out naive. It's a bet you never have to worry about being called. On the time scale of thousands of years, neither you nor I will be alive to find out who was right, but you are willing to say with unwavering faith that we will be able to do it.
Simply because you believe smarter people than you will be able to solve the hard problems. Including problems we don't even know exist yet. Just to get to the moon, we had to first discover just how ill-equipped the human body is for travel outside of our atmosphere.
But you talk as if building a giant shade in space is going to be relatively trivial in the future. There is nothing trivial about leaving the Earth. And it's quite possible that it will never be trivial. Before we worry about solar shades, we should wonder how we're first going to solve those hard problems.
You then said we haven't done flying cars yet. You singled it out and made it the point of your response to me.
So I was supposed to not respond? Because there are good reasons to not have flying cars. And I mentioned that. But most of all of my posts have been about things other than flying cars.
We may feel comfortable to extrapolate on timescales humans haven't even existed on yet, that doesn't make that extrapolation good. You want to look at just the last 100 years and extrapolate from that. First by assuming that the last 100 years is geometric progress and not linear. But even given that it is geometric, where's the evidence that it will continue being geometric. Look at the last 50 years. We haven't done much more. We went to the Moon in 1969. We've thrown some robots at Mars since then. It's possible that progress isn't a vertical asymptote, but a sigmoid with a hard upper boundary. We don't know.
And we can't get to Mars. As in actual people. It will take a person 9 months to make it to Mars, assuming all of the other problems are solved. Because there are other problems. We are not built for space travel. The radiation and lack of gravity are real problems with no good solutions at the moment. We haven't been to space (depending on your definition of space) since the Moon missions. Everything we do now is technically in the atmosphere and protected by the Earth's magnetosphere. Yes, the ISS is above the Karman line, but it's still within the thermosphere. And I'm not completely sure about the Apollo missions, but the Moon spends some time within our magnetosphere as well, so they may have done those missions during the time when the Moon was under Earth's protection.
And that magnetosphere is important. Like all life on the planet would die without it important.
So, living outside the Earth's atmosphere is not something we do. Ever.
I find this extreme long term techno futurist optimistic thinking worse than useless. This is navel gazing at its most extreme. It either wants us to ignore the problems of today or ignore very real limitations imposed on us by various aspects of reality. Thinking ahead is fine. But techno-optimism forecasting out millenia is not thinking ahead. It's wishing.
Exactly as long trash the ecosphere - not coincidental.
> This will be a non-issue
I despair.
Arguably, since less than 600 individuals have made it to LEO with 2 dozen going around the Moon, this doesn't translate to "spacefaring society." If only 600 people had cars among 8B, we wouldn't describe this as an automotive society. When thousands are regularly traveling outside the Earth-Moon system, then we will be spacefaring. Troubles are lowering the expense and having the practical incentive beyond discovery.
I suppose that climbing Everest never had any practical purpose, and an economy has developed around it. But still, cost per person is a fraction of $1M to do so. It costs an average of $58M/person to get to orbit and back safely for a short trip, and that is just LEO for a few days or maybe a couple weeks. Economies of scale may never materialize for space travel. Even if we do legitimately become spacefaring and stretch out into the Solar System for some reason, high costs and accidents may, like nuclear energy, cause it to scale back and diminish to its current state of roughly 50 people per year to LEO.
Without the incentive of profit, which I doubt tourism could sustain by itself, I don't see how spacefaring ever gets off the ground. Maybe mushrooms found on Europa become an insanely expensive delicacy, or similar. But it seems astronomically unlikely. If the profit incentive can be found, then it could not be stopped, but it really needs to do more than pay for itself, and at a current pace of sinking $20B/yr into it without a return, ever, who knows if it will ever even break even?
So, yeah, if you want to argue for "never", it's valid. It's just talking about delays that isn't.
(But somehow the "no large enough group - and it means 100 or 200 people - will ever want this" argument doesn't look reasonable either. We are talking about an empty ecological niche and a timeframe large enough for biologic kingdoms to appear.)
> But somehow the "no large enough group - and it means 100 or 200 people - will ever want this" argument
idk who argued that, but it wasn't me. My argument is economic. I didn't make it but would make further argument(s) basically that 1) it's insanely dangerous, and 2) there's nothing out there, which together is really the same risk vs reward argument that is notably top heavy with a wide spread.
This is false equivalence. Assume everyone wanted it to the maximum possible level of desire, and it is still possible that desire will be unfulfilled due to economics, namely, expense. You can't say of a home that someone can not afford means they did not want it badly enough. No matter how badly they want it, it is not possible for them to get it if it is beyond their means. Humanity may not be able to afford human-attended space exploration beyond LEO and, vanishingly rarely, the Moon simply due to expense no matter what the level of desire is.