Comment by bamfly | Hacker News Reader

Comment by bamfly | Hacker News Reader

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> [1]the sci-fi optimists' predictions of it leading to permanent colonies and starships within a generation or two have aged worse.

Space-romantics tend to wildly overestimate the benefits of space colonization relative to the difficulty and cost.

Space is... kinda shit. Including all the other rocky bodies in our star system. In the best case, it's like if Earth suffered a half-dozen biosphere-ruining apocalypses and was yet worse than that, even.

The "why?" needs a damn good answer, and we just don't have one, certainly not for long-term human habitation. Even "colonize Mars as a humanity backup" isn't great. There are cheaper ways to achieve most of that supposed benefit, and maybe do it even better, possibly even involving space in some capacity, most of which projects we could kick off today if we really wanted to—yet we don't bother with any of those, no, we fixate on Mars because of the romantic and pop-culture appeal, not because it's the most efficient solution.

Colonizing Mars or the clouds of Venus or putting dome-cities on the Moon or whatever is undeniably cool as hell, but when you sit and really think about it... eh.

The why is because humans like exploring and colonizing. Our most successful civilizations (in the evolutionary sense, not the meritocratic or moralist sense) were good at exploring and expanding, so a lot of people are wired to want to do that. There are only 2 accessible frontiers - space and the ocean.

This is exactly the romanticism I was writing about.

Very little of the expense of historical exploration was undertaken just so people could scratch their exploration itch. Besides, we have a pretty good idea of what we'll find most of these places, now, without having to send people there, and certainly without needing them to live there. We don't have a strong history of bending entire economies to support these kinds of projects just for exploration's sake, but for expected returns. We can do most of the preliminary exploring of our star system cheaper with robots and closer-to-home remote sensors, now.

Would we have funded so many expensive expeditions, in the age of sail, to explore the Arctic and northern Canada if we'd had satellites to tell us there was no Northwest Passage? Just for the sake of exploring in-person? I doubt it, but that's the conclusion one must draw from the "the need, deep in the human heart, to explore is enough justification! It's our nature!" (see the romanticism?) position if one supposes that justifies massive human space exploration and colonization programs, today, barring new information.

> This is exactly the romanticism I was writing about.

And you don't think the people allocating the resources subscribe to it? That's more or less my point about why they're doing it. The VOC and British India Companies may have done it for profit, but the romanticized version has been drilled into our barons and leaders.

I'm 80/20 on Musk's Mars thing being a way to get great PR in certain circles at near-zero cost. His periodically erratic behavior is the only reason I allocate the 20. Who else is seriously talking about space colonization and even kinda putting their money where their mouth is? Which money, conveniently, would have had to have been spent for much-lesser goals anyway... I'll be convinced he means what he says, on that front, when he starts spending serious cash on projects that have little purpose other than reaching and/or colonizing Mars. For now, I believe he wanted to own a rocket company, and wanted to have a stated mission that might make recruiting easier and buy him some goodwill points.

We have an entire continent which is far more hospitable than either space or the ocean and we don't dare attempt to really colonize it. Hell, Africa is a perfectly fine piece of land and first world countries don't invest any money into building anything worthwhile past the Mesopotamian cradle because they'd rather keep the people poor and exploit them for their resources.

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