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Comment by BHSPitMonkey | Hacker News Reader

And how many in that group are actually fit to spend many years living that lifestyle without losing their mind and getting into deadly fights with one another?

And who's covering the great expense of building these generational colony ships and training their only inhabitants, only to have them zip away never to be heard from again? (With no benefit other than believing there's a slight chance we've succeeded in making our species multi-plantary)?

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As humanity becomes more numerous and richer, the fraction of humanity you need that have such strange ideas and desire keeps shrinking.

(Btw, I share your intuition that the number of people willing to sign up for a one-way trip to the stars, or even just Mars, is fairly low. However, if you already look at people who are dedicated enough to become astronauts, I suspect the additional filter of asking for one-way-trip volunteers for a mission to the stars isn't all that severe. My purely speculative guess is that at least 10-20% of current astronauts would be willing to sign up.)

> 10-20% of current astronauts would be willing to sign up.

Astronauts seem to me to have a higher propensity for kookiness than the general population. You may be right.

Yes. There's currently way more people who want to be astronauts, than people who can be astronauts. So you get some extreme selection effects; and those tend to bring out weird people.

I was really thinking of astronauts who have actually been to space; I wonder whether the experience disposes people to kookiness. I suspect that trainee/aspiring astronauts might suppress their kookiness.

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