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Comment by endoblast | Hacker News Reader

Author is clearly not a happy bunny.

Some people may be motivated by a wish to escape other people, but many will want to go to space because it's so cool. In other words: for adventure, romance and blazing a trail for other people to follow.

Having the right spirit and the right motivation creates mental well-being, not material or social conditions. By those standards, medieval life was far worse than today, but I don't think the people then were less happy or less motivated than people today. Quite the reverse.

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> Author is clearly not a happy bunny.

Scouring the article I see no evidence for this claim whatsoever.

> Having the right spirit and the right motivation creates mental well-being, not material or social conditions.

The right spirit and motivation isn't going to help you avoid chromosome & telomere damage, or chronic lack of sleep.

Wouldn't it best to know the risks (and smells) going in? Because that's what the author is laying out. The author isn't stopping you from going into space, just putting the facts out there.

I don’t think anybody who’s serious about off-planet habitation is shirking the risks. They’re just confident that the problems can be solved one way or another and are trying to get the ball rolling so that all the required systems are in place to enable iterating on solutions. That way, when the technology is ready we can just go instead of twiddling our thumbs waiting for tech and systems to arrive.

I have no problem with any of that, though it sure would be cool if we dealt with the worst of our climate, war, inequality and poverty issues before burning money to privatize space.

But clearly laying out the very real risks and discomforts, as the author here as done, doesn't justify accusations of "not being a happy bunny". That's all.

> I have no problem with any of that, though it sure would be cool if we dealt with the worst of our climate, war, inequality and poverty issues before burning money to privatize space.

Sadly, I’m not sure that’s possible. There’s a very high chance that if we wait for those things to be solved before going out, we’ll simply never go out.

That’s why I think it should all be done in parallel.

> There’s a very high chance that if we wait for those things to be solved before going out, we’ll simply never go out.

I think the opposite is true.

Right now, humanity is unable to solve genocide, nuclear proliferation, starvation, incredible inequality; or even airplane food.

If we go out as this privatized mess, there's not a good chance of a positive outcome. Space is too vast - far, far, far, far, far too vast*. And far more dangerous than most people think, as this article scratches the surface of.

If we come together as a species and fix our major problems before we kill the planet, then we have thousands of years to get space right; and when we do, we won't be bringing our massive problems with us.

* - "Space is big. You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is."

> If we come together as a species and fix our major problems before we kill the planet, then we have thousands of years to get space right; and when we do, we won't be bringing our massive problems with us.

That’s the sticking point. I don’t have any faith that this can or will happen. When considering all of the different parties vying for power at any given point, it seems impossible. There’s just too much self-interest from too many powerful forces involved.

There’s a non-trivial chance that we will never come together, even on a millennial time scale. It wouldn’t surprise me at all if we either drive ourselves to extinction or go out along with the inner solar system when the sun becomes a red giant without it having ever occurred.

> There’s a non-trivial chance that we will never come together, even on a millennial time scale

If you really believe that, then why do you think we deserve to infest the rest of the galaxy? We'd be planet killers, bringing death and mayhem wherever we god. Intelligent life would be wise to put us out of their misery before we pop our landers.

I believe our problems are solvable, because our problems all seem to boil back to the same tiny group of people fucking things up for everyone... And some of that group are the people privatizing space.

Because the scale of space means that by necessity, humanity will cease to be a monolith. There’s simply no way for a culture that’s scattered across the Sol system and eventually multiple star systems to move as a single piece.

Instead, it’ll splinter into many groups that all undergo independent cultural evolution, each going in its own direction, many of which will be unimpeded by the others. Just by sheer numbers, eventually one (probably multiple) will find a better way forward that leaves the baggage of humanity’s past behind and allows it to become incredibly prosperous.

The chances of something like that happening on Earth seem much lower. We’re too stuck within our local maxima and too beholden to self-preserving power structures for substantial change to occur.

I mean investing in space is investing in ways out for all your issues. There is multiple billion people on the planet. Plenty of work to go around.

Yay, space serfs. Buddy, sci-fi warned us about this one real hard.

Also, it's not as if our biggest problem is shortage of work. That's not even in the top 1,000 of our problems.

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