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Comment by mandmandam | Hacker News Reader

> 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."

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> 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.

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