A few years back famed sci-fi author Kim Stanley Robinson (of Mars Trilogy fame) wrote a space book where the takeaway was basically about how interstellar colonization is hard and sucks, and that maybe we should appreciate living on our precious planet Earth.
And a certain section of sci-fi nerds got so mad.
Think about that a lot with stuff like this. Kill the space nerd in your head folks.
To colonize other worlds, it's more economically viable to send machines, create biologically synthesized new species (taking dna from local species there), and then transfer consciousness to them. Similar with Avatar, but without having to have the spaceships arrive in the planet full of humans. Humans remain on earth, and they project their consciousness somewhere else, in an instant due to entanglement.
I don't even travel anymore. It's more economically viable to email my friend and ask them to impersonate me when I'm thinking about visiting them.
In order to colonize other worlds, it's more economically viable to not go there in the first place. Even if you wanted to send just machines to another planet, it would take decades or even centuries to get there.
Unless you have a massive energy source, it's going to take our current speeds over 100,000 years to make it to Alpha Centauri. If you harvested all the fossil fuels on earth, you could probably get a space shuttle near 98% light speed. You'd need to harvest the energy of a supernova to get to 100%. At 100% lightspeed, it takes four years to travel to our nearest neighbor. .
In other words, you're using up all the energy on one planet to travel to another planet so you can harvest all the energy on that one to send an empty shuttle back to earth. The only way it's going to be economically viable to travel to another star system is if we figure out something where our current understanding of physics is limited. Otherwise, our sole purpose for going to other systems should be for scientific exploration and research. It will be a money sink regardless of what we do.
ppl in that thread really advocating for genetically modifying humans to live in space or remote controlling 'avatars' with quantum entanglement, when we could just have cool mecha instead, smdh...
imagine wanting to be this
Show
instead of this
Show
anthro-pessimistic biopunk, not even once
looks to the left crippling pressure and acid atmosphere
looks to the right barren planet with toxic soil
well there's still asteroids we literally have no idea how to mine and process rubble piles asteroids in zero gravity
Just do lasers at them. They either blow up and you drive over the loot or each shot of the laser magically teleports resources into your hold. It's not that hard... to think about space
Yeah, but if you take too long Sinistar chases after you. We need think about these things!
Just let people who are interested in tech talk about tech ffs.
It's neither particularly pro-Marxist nor anti-Marxist.
Pick your battles. Let them talk.
ACKSHYUALLY a space station is a piece of tech that exists in a vacuum.
I'll see myself out.
If you think of space exploration as an "Elon Musk thing" that says more about you than anything, IMO
Soviets pioneered space exploration. You're internet poisoned, you have no functioning mind left.
I mean, there's just one person out there constantly talking about going to Mars and it's the Muskrat. Anyone who talks about ”colonizing planets” as if it's something that's actually going to happen is deeply unserious.
Anyone who talks about ”colonizing planets” as if it's something that's actually going to happen is deeply unserious.
Depends on what timescale you're talking about. e.g. if we keep building stuff for 1000 years (barring a catastrophe) then it'll presumably happen.
Normal political thikning is different because it isn't on that kind of timescale.
I was thinking within my lifetime, basically, which is also the timescale where climate change really starts to hit.
I mean, there's just one person out there constantly talking about going to Mars and it's the Muskrat.
Who cares if he's noisy on mainstream media?
Don't let shit like that distract you, that's what they want.
I'm positive the soviet union didn't posit space exploration as the key solution to ecological overshoot, depleting energy and mineral reserves, demographic collapse, and climate apocalypse. This is what is central to bazinga theory. You don't need to solve any contradiction. You don't need to make choices. Just, uh, genetically engineer robots who will terraform random planets for us. Yeah. That's the plan.
oh i was looking for that movie title ever since youtube recommended one of its scenes a year ago, what an interesting movie
anyways its beyond dumb to think of colonizing mars (irradiated lifeless shithole) or building space megastructures (doomed mass graves in space) when the blatantly obvious answer is to "terraform" earth (unfuck the effects of climate change and pollution)
these are questions if humanity ever destroys capitalism and makes it into the far future when this sort of shit becomes reasonable
terraform earth
This is the go-to answer lol. If we can't even terraform earth to stop climate change, we sure as shit are not going to terraform a place with no atmosphere or water and is years of travel distance away from us. AFAIK right now it would take about 5 years to send humans to Mars and back.
I think the adult sons who unironically dream of colonising other planets (although no suitable candidate has been discovered thus far) are comfortable spouting this nonsense because they feel they will remain insulated from the effects of climate change 20 or 50 years from now (as they are right now) and they are too misanthropic to consider people losing lives and livelihoods to it right now as legitimate problems.
That's why these adult sons are comfortable having conversations about space stations and stuff as one of them puts it while the top scientists and engineers in US and China struggle to send like 5 people to the moon and back. If you bring up Musk you must be deranged despite the fact that he is an outspoken fascist deeply coupled with American space endeavours. Please let the adult sons talk about space stations and stuff completely disentangled from political and economic realities in discussions that would have been dated twenty years ago.
