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Bel Shazar posted:The earth will eventually be destroyed by a collision or a gamma ray burst or the sun's own death throws and it is an appropriate government activity to develop the capacity to live in other solar systems as a way to mitigate that apocalyptic scenario. Any of those types of scenarios don't make a good case right for expansion into space right now (and I say that as a massive supporter of space exploration). Something that would threaten our entire solar system is so unlikely that if it ever happens it will likely be hundreds of millions of years in the future. If our descendants are still around and technological by then they have plenty of time to deal with it with their god technologies. If they don't have those technologies because of engineering limits inherent to the universe then hopes of expanding humanity outside our solar system in any significant way are misguided as well. The argument I see having the most merit is that we are using up the Earths resources so quickly that we need to start gathering resources from space before we dig up the entire planet. We're using up the easy to access resources and energy so quickly that not only will it start to hinder our civilisation, but it will introduce scarcity to the extent that we can't spare resources on things like space exploration that isn't seeing immediate returns and we'll become trapped on the Earth forever. However even in the realistic best case scenarios it seems like it would take centuries to reach a point where a significant percentage of industrial activity takes place off-world, and if we keep on down the path we're on we'll be in big trouble before then anyway.
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Jan 24, 2022 11:51
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| # ¿ May 18, 2024 19:36 |
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