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Without the desire to explore and expand there would be no America. If the Spanish and Portuguese would have waited to solve all of humanity’s problems first an

Without the desire to explore and expand there would be no America. If the Spanish and Portuguese would have waited to solve all of humanity’s problems first and then set out to explore new worlds the world would be a different place today. Same with space exploration. It is in our dna as the most advanced life forms to go out there. It is also a duty to all life on this earth to expand beyond. Finding even a hint of former life on mars means life is a rule not an exception in the universe. Being able to colonise it means we can outsource all our destructive resource gathering to mars. Or even better we can live on it. Doing so would mean trade with earth and as a result development on a scale never seen before.

HillRat 4y ago
The Americas and Africa would probably like to have a word about the legacy of Spain and Portugal's decision to "explore new worlds"...
- klyrs 4y ago
  - mlindner 4y ago
    The ride home is free because the vehicles need to come back anyway to carry more people. And not within our lifetimes will we be in a situation where people stop being the citizens of the country on Earth they are from.
    - ben_w 4y ago
      The vehicles have to come back, but the people have to eat and breathe on the way. And right now, I’m more than a little worried he’s heading the same way as the French royal family, even if "Qu'ils mangent de la brioche" predates Marie Antoinette.
      - mlindner 4y ago
        I'm not sure where you see any indication that he doesn't care about people. If anything he seems to care quite a lot about people. Most of the reason for what he's doing is based on the reasoning of caring for people. You may not agree with him, but that's one of the driving things that's been consistent his whole life.
        ben_w 4y ago
        "Not caring" is not where I was going with that. It's the lack of alignment with normal people that makes me think of "let them eat cake" — it's very easy to be blind to someone else's economic realities with a mere x2 change in income, let alone when you're so rich your debt is the bank's problem if you mess up. That said, there also seems to have been a set of significant personality shifts in the last 12 months, starting with Twitter being "yeah, I can afford it *shrug*" and him not even doing due diligence (he used to be cautious and signal risk of e.g. rockets exploding), to trying to back out of the purchase and saying the bosses were defrauding advertisers, to saying the purchase is a perfect opportunity for an "everything app" and comedy was ok now, to complaining about the advertisers who started leaving right after he let anyone blue tick themselves and some jokers got a blue tick and names suspiciously close to advertisers and memed away in various high-profile brand damaging satirical retorts against them. I don't know if that's a mid-life crisis, side effects of prescription medication, experimentation with nootropics, recreational drugs, or something else, but he doesn't seem stable right now.
    - klyrs 4y ago
      > And not within our lifetimes will we be in a situation where people stop being the citizens of the country on Earth they are from. Sounds like you aren't familiar with maritime law. Slavery is still a common practice on this planet, due to a lack of jurisdiction. https://www.humanrightsatsea.org/news/eradication-modern-slavery-sea https://www.humanrightsatsea.org/news/eradication-modern-sla...
      - deleted 4y ago
        [deleted]
    - moloch-hai 4y ago
      The Cans don't have to come back. It is overwhelmingly cheaper to leave them there and build more. (Scrap value of a Can on Earth is somewhere <$50k. On Mars, probably rather more.) You might gather up the Raptor engines and ship them home (with their bells cut off). It is the only export from Mars that could conceivably be worth the bother, and then only if you had a Can returning for other reasons.
- TEP_Kim_Il_Sung 4y ago
  While I in no way disagree, I would like to note that some of the bad activities attributed to foreigners in Africa, have been practiced for millennia by the locals, and the World over.
- yrgulation 4y ago
  Unfortunately the only thing to motivate most people is greed. I am aware of the legacy, but the way to sell this is by highlighting the profit that can come out of it. And fortunately there is nothing to kill on mars in the process. It’s a win win.
idlewords 4y ago
This logic applies just as much to the Moon, but no one seems to be lining up to board lunar colony ships.
- googlryas 4y ago
  There are no lunar colony ships.
  - idlewords 4y ago
    There are just as many lunar colony ships as Mars colony ships.
    - googlryas 4y ago
      Which tons of people signed up for a yearlong simulation of run by NASA. Granted, I bet a lot would drop out if presented with the actual prospect of spending a year in a bubble with 5 others.
- ben_w 4y ago
  FWIW, I think we should aim for the moon before mars. Things will go wrong, the moon is close enough to mount a rescue if that problem is “the food is all gone”, whereas Mars… the gap between launch windows is long enough for things to go from “fine” to “everyone’s starved to death, including the ones who turned to cannibalism to survive”. Then there’s the practicalities: while the moon has long days and nights, there’s no global dust storms, and we can send power from the light side to the dark side with a simple wire (the lunar regolith and the vacuum are both insulators, there’s nothing alive or tectonic to mess with one just draped on the surface, only impacts). The Martian atmosphere is so thin it’s only useful for aerobraking and drones, not breathing, and the lack of atmosphere on the moon means non-rocket-based launchers are much easier, which in turn makes the long-term economics easier (though still terrible with current tech).
- lmm 4y ago
  Mars is easier to send material to; gravity and rotation are also better there.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
UI_at_80x24 4y ago
>Without the desire to explore and expand there would be no America. Please don't act like Europeans getting lost trying to find a shortcut to India was a good thing.
jcranmer 4y ago
> Without the desire to explore and expand there would be no America. If the Spanish and Portuguese would have waited to solve all of humanity’s problems first and then set out to explore new worlds the world would be a different place today. Of all the examples you could have picked, you picked the one that was most explicitly not about desire for exploration. Europeans were not exploring the world for exploration's sake; they were stridently motivated by the promise of loot. The Spanish in particular explored the New World primarily to find new cities of gold to plunder, destroy, and loot, as was done to the Aztecs and Incas, with these entradas funded by people hoping for a share of the loot (unfortunately for them, there was nothing else on the scale of the Aztec or Inca Empires). Later, other countries sought less to actively loot the place but instead monopolize control over raw resources (beaver pelts being key in North America). Better examples would have been, say, the Polynesian migrations that settled isolated islands in the Pacific Ocean, which the navigators would have had no reason to believe even existed.
civopsec 4y ago
> Without the desire to explore and expand there would be no America. ... Is that good or bad?
bavila 4y ago
I'd prefer our most brilliant technologists tap into the desire to explore and expand the domain of robotics. Once I own a robot that can reliably clean every surface of my bathroom without my intervention, maybe then Mars might sound a bit more interesting. But, hey, that's just me.
culi 4y ago
> If the Spanish and Portuguese would have waited to solve all of humanity’s problems first and then set out to explore new worlds the world would be a different place today I mean... yeah it probably would've been a lot better. They weren't the ones who explored the Americas. It was the people we now call Native Americans If the Spanish and Portuguese had instead solved AT LEAST their own problems of constant famines and the inefficiencies and brutality of monarchies, they probably would've been a much kinder people... People like to act like hierarchy is just an inevitable result of increasingly complex societies but there is no archeological or anthropological evidence to support this myth. There's fascistic hunter gatherer groups and the Americas themselves had examples of very large complex and extremely egalitarian societies. Like Teotihuacan which was nearly as large as Rome. After a brief fling with total authoritarianism the people had a revolution and ended up creating one of the first examples of public housing we have evidence of as well as dramatically increasing the average standard of living of everyone Yeah I think the world definitely be a better place if they waited to solve their problems actually

HillRat 4y ago

The Americas and Africa would probably like to have a word about the legacy of Spain and Portugal's decision to "explore new worlds"...

klyrs 4y ago
- mlindner 4y ago
  The ride home is free because the vehicles need to come back anyway to carry more people. And not within our lifetimes will we be in a situation where people stop being the citizens of the country on Earth they are from.
  - ben_w 4y ago
    The vehicles have to come back, but the people have to eat and breathe on the way. And right now, I’m more than a little worried he’s heading the same way as the French royal family, even if "Qu'ils mangent de la brioche" predates Marie Antoinette.
    - mlindner 4y ago
      I'm not sure where you see any indication that he doesn't care about people. If anything he seems to care quite a lot about people. Most of the reason for what he's doing is based on the reasoning of caring for people. You may not agree with him, but that's one of the driving things that's been consistent his whole life.
      - ben_w 4y ago
        "Not caring" is not where I was going with that. It's the lack of alignment with normal people that makes me think of "let them eat cake" — it's very easy to be blind to someone else's economic realities with a mere x2 change in income, let alone when you're so rich your debt is the bank's problem if you mess up. That said, there also seems to have been a set of significant personality shifts in the last 12 months, starting with Twitter being "yeah, I can afford it *shrug*" and him not even doing due diligence (he used to be cautious and signal risk of e.g. rockets exploding), to trying to back out of the purchase and saying the bosses were defrauding advertisers, to saying the purchase is a perfect opportunity for an "everything app" and comedy was ok now, to complaining about the advertisers who started leaving right after he let anyone blue tick themselves and some jokers got a blue tick and names suspiciously close to advertisers and memed away in various high-profile brand damaging satirical retorts against them. I don't know if that's a mid-life crisis, side effects of prescription medication, experimentation with nootropics, recreational drugs, or something else, but he doesn't seem stable right now.
  - klyrs 4y ago
    > And not within our lifetimes will we be in a situation where people stop being the citizens of the country on Earth they are from. Sounds like you aren't familiar with maritime law. Slavery is still a common practice on this planet, due to a lack of jurisdiction. https://www.humanrightsatsea.org/news/eradication-modern-slavery-sea https://www.humanrightsatsea.org/news/eradication-modern-sla...
    - deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
  - moloch-hai 4y ago
    The Cans don't have to come back. It is overwhelmingly cheaper to leave them there and build more. (Scrap value of a Can on Earth is somewhere <$50k. On Mars, probably rather more.) You might gather up the Raptor engines and ship them home (with their bells cut off). It is the only export from Mars that could conceivably be worth the bother, and then only if you had a Can returning for other reasons.
TEP_Kim_Il_Sung 4y ago
While I in no way disagree, I would like to note that some of the bad activities attributed to foreigners in Africa, have been practiced for millennia by the locals, and the World over.
yrgulation 4y ago
Unfortunately the only thing to motivate most people is greed. I am aware of the legacy, but the way to sell this is by highlighting the profit that can come out of it. And fortunately there is nothing to kill on mars in the process. It’s a win win.

idlewords 4y ago

This logic applies just as much to the Moon, but no one seems to be lining up to board lunar colony ships.

googlryas 4y ago
There are no lunar colony ships.
- idlewords 4y ago
  There are just as many lunar colony ships as Mars colony ships.
  - googlryas 4y ago
    Which tons of people signed up for a yearlong simulation of run by NASA. Granted, I bet a lot would drop out if presented with the actual prospect of spending a year in a bubble with 5 others.
ben_w 4y ago
FWIW, I think we should aim for the moon before mars. Things will go wrong, the moon is close enough to mount a rescue if that problem is “the food is all gone”, whereas Mars… the gap between launch windows is long enough for things to go from “fine” to “everyone’s starved to death, including the ones who turned to cannibalism to survive”. Then there’s the practicalities: while the moon has long days and nights, there’s no global dust storms, and we can send power from the light side to the dark side with a simple wire (the lunar regolith and the vacuum are both insulators, there’s nothing alive or tectonic to mess with one just draped on the surface, only impacts). The Martian atmosphere is so thin it’s only useful for aerobraking and drones, not breathing, and the lack of atmosphere on the moon means non-rocket-based launchers are much easier, which in turn makes the long-term economics easier (though still terrible with current tech).
lmm 4y ago
Mars is easier to send material to; gravity and rotation are also better there.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

UI_at_80x24 4y ago

>Without the desire to explore and expand there would be no America. Please don't act like Europeans getting lost trying to find a shortcut to India was a good thing.

jcranmer 4y ago

> Without the desire to explore and expand there would be no America. If the Spanish and Portuguese would have waited to solve all of humanity’s problems first and then set out to explore new worlds the world would be a different place today. Of all the examples you could have picked, you picked the one that was most explicitly not about desire for exploration. Europeans were not exploring the world for exploration's sake; they were stridently motivated by the promise of loot. The Spanish in particular explored the New World primarily to find new cities of gold to plunder, destroy, and loot, as was done to the Aztecs and Incas, with these entradas funded by people hoping for a share of the loot (unfortunately for them, there was nothing else on the scale of the Aztec or Inca Empires). Later, other countries sought less to actively loot the place but instead monopolize control over raw resources (beaver pelts being key in North America). Better examples would have been, say, the Polynesian migrations that settled isolated islands in the Pacific Ocean, which the navigators would have had no reason to believe even existed.

civopsec 4y ago

> Without the desire to explore and expand there would be no America. ... Is that good or bad?

bavila 4y ago

I'd prefer our most brilliant technologists tap into the desire to explore and expand the domain of robotics. Once I own a robot that can reliably clean every surface of my bathroom without my intervention, maybe then Mars might sound a bit more interesting. But, hey, that's just me.

culi 4y ago

> If the Spanish and Portuguese would have waited to solve all of humanity’s problems first and then set out to explore new worlds the world would be a different place today I mean... yeah it probably would've been a lot better. They weren't the ones who explored the Americas. It was the people we now call Native Americans If the Spanish and Portuguese had instead solved AT LEAST their own problems of constant famines and the inefficiencies and brutality of monarchies, they probably would've been a much kinder people... People like to act like hierarchy is just an inevitable result of increasingly complex societies but there is no archeological or anthropological evidence to support this myth. There's fascistic hunter gatherer groups and the Americas themselves had examples of very large complex and extremely egalitarian societies. Like Teotihuacan which was nearly as large as Rome. After a brief fling with total authoritarianism the people had a revolution and ended up creating one of the first examples of public housing we have evidence of as well as dramatically increasing the average standard of living of everyone Yeah I think the world definitely be a better place if they waited to solve their problems actually