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Earth is a single point of failure.
by monomyth 6y ago
Earth is a single point of failure.
- dmos62 6y agoEscapism can be a precursor to failure too. I'm not being cheeky. I think that we're not open enough about the fact that we're jumping ship, because we're not sure we can take care of this one. That's important, because it carries serious concerns for how well we'd do on Mars.
- Jetrel 6y agoThat's an absolutely fair point. One thing to watch out for though, is that it's only half of the rationale behind escapism: we're concerned about our own stewardship of the Earth, but there's a very real concern that a disaster could happen to it that's not of our own making. An asteroid, for example. Mars would protect us from several categories of these, and becoming multi-stellar would protect us from several more.
- monomyth 6y agoI think the idea of "jumping ships" is silly, this is technically impossible in the near future. But urgency of expanding existed long before any recent events. To survive we need to spread.
- dmos62 6y agoTo survive we need to take care of ourselves and our environments. Reducing dependence on earth is a small aspect of that, in my mind.
- tacocataco 6y agoOr, we could live in harmony with what is.
- blueprint 6y agoHedging is not a bad idea. We clearly have the resources for it. And to make matters worse, every day we are discovering something new about the instability we are wreaking upon this planet. Why on earth would you argue against hedging in the situation we are so badly ignorant we might see a planetary collapse within a minor variation sufficient to wipe us all out?
- dmos62 6y agoI agree that hedging is a good idea. It's just that earth-sustainability requires resources as well.
- phkahler 6y agoFair. But I think there is a lot we can learn about sustainability and what humans really need by putting them on an empty planet with zero natural resources except the minerals in the ground and some frozen water. Mars will build up to sustainability, while on earth we try to cut back to sustainability.
- MereInterest 6y agoI see it not as escapism, but as steps to learn how to take care of a limited resource. Large-scale geoengineering will be necessary sooner or later on Earth. However, it almost certainly has failure modes that we don't know about, and won't know about until we can experiment with it. Testing the effects on Earth, with nearly 8 billion people, is wildly reckless. Testing the effects on Mars or Venus, though costlier to implement, has the advantage of not risking those 8 billion lives.
- bufferoverflow 6y agoThere's no jumping ship. Every other planet / moon in our solar system is far worse than the worst projections for the Earth for thousands of years.
- oscargrouch 6y agoThat was what i've always think as well. If theres a problem with our culture, that we keep passing through generations, we could even buy more time if we escape, but the problem might go with us. If we dont fix the problem in the core before we colonize other planets, we will become a interplanetary virus working as a parasyte and killing our host with time.
- pydry 6y agoBuilding an ecosystem of O'Neill cylinders is probably more viable means of space colonization than colonizing mars.
- smokelegend 6y agoThis is a major life altering question. If we can't learn to all live together peacefully, learn to help each other solve problems here on earth; what makes anyone think that we will survive in space & beyond... I love everything about space exploration, but I'm not naive enough to believe its the solution to our problems here on earth. One might argue its a distraction from our ongoing global humanitarian crisis. People everyday are dying from lack of food, water, shelter, etc... What time & money is spent on solving the galaxies mysteries, could be brain power backed capital used to solve our dire terrestrial affairs. IMHO... Food for thought...
- jiofih 6y ago> What time & money is spent on solving the galaxies mysteries, could be brain power backed capital used to solve our dire terrestrial affairs This is often repeated but makes no sense at all. The time and resources humanity as a group spends on those activities corresponds to 0.1% of our output. Infinitely more is wasted on mundane stuff like manufacturing cars, golf carts, office jobs or reading online forums.
- adwn 6y agoThe root causes of many (but not all) of our major problems are political or social in nature and can't be solved by throwing money or engineers at them. Also, there are many people on Earth, "we" can work on multiple problems simultaneously.
- pydry 6y agoIt's a bit of a false dichotomy I think. Injustice causes our global humanitarian crises and while rocket scientists are very smart they're probably not the best people to solve corruption and injustice. There are 7 billion people on earth. That gives us a bit of leeway to multitask. We can have activists and rocket scientists solving different problems.
- r00fus 6y agoYou say this as if it's easy to add another biosphere - like it's some project resource. It's the only place we can inhabit, so we should focus on protecting it.
- defterGoose 6y ago> Earth is a single point of failure Only in the sense that a climbing harness is also a single point of failure.
- Zenbit_UX 6y agoIt very much is. So is your rope, carabiner and belay device.
- Ace17 6y agoSo is the universe.