If one of these worlds interests humanity enough to have a coordinated attempt to reach there, that itself will be a huge win in terms of the side effect technology benefits that will come out of it.
If these worlds had biomes it would be imoral to colonize, because for the indigenous population already living there our arriving could mean a world-ending event for them. We have to be very careful these are sterile worlds before sending missions.
We have no idea how two entirely different biologies would interact, if they would at all. Its something that we should study before jumping in head first, but to think that we would travel light-years but not consider the implications is a little preposterous.
We're considering these implications right now, so yeah it's preposterous, but you'd be surprised (or maybe not) with the number of people that would dismiss these considerations as pointlessly delaying progress.
These planets are also so damn far away that we’d never hear from any ship we could possibly send out there again. Even if we could send information at the speed of light. It would be pointless.
Given that after arriving everyone could just die from some weird protein floating around in the air and you might want to look before you spend the entirety of our economic efforts reaching it… erm, look before you leap.
Not GP but yeah I do feel there are some serious ethical problems created by the proliferation of humans and subsequent mass extinction event. Do you not?
Ethical problems being created by a scenario does not necessarily mean that you should not execute that scenario. Sometimes you're caught between a rock and a hard place, and ethical problems are created regardless.
I'm Brazilian, I'm feeling the world ending effects of colonization today with the US actively sabotaging our democratic election process, so you bet I do, but anyone with a bit of humanity would also feel the same way.
I love the space program. The argument that it provides good ROI in terms of incidental technology R&D is weak and even counterproductive.
There is some return on that investment but it's necessarily much lower than ROI for direct investment in the needed non-space technologies. I do think there's some argument that we wouldn't spend the R&D at all without the space program, but that's speculative and still doesn't make the ROI worthwhile IMHO.
What makes the R&D worthwhile is space exploration itself. That is of incredible value itself. If you start trying to justify the cost with incidental tech development, you implicitly agree with the framing that space exploration really isn't worthwhile and needs other benefits to justify it - you undermine what you believe in. It's like humanities professors who argue that a history degree has good value in the job market - it does somewhat, but they are accepting the framing that their field and college education has no other value but early career employment and income, instead of life-changing understanding and skills (really embarassing for humanities professors who should understand framing better than anyone!).
Regardless of long-term ROI, or tech innovation, or whatever, the US space program is a broadly enormous jobs program. I believe that the Apollo program supported 5-digits worth of very good jobs nationwide.
Jobs in aerospace are not limited to NASA and SpaceX. They extend to most all defense contractors, as well as a lot of research universities. Every little instrument on every little probe and satellite supports a team of scientists who have designed the thing, and they’re taking the lead in receiving the data, processing it, and producing results.
Even undergrads are getting great experience in research, technical fields, all the gadgetry and computer systems. Transferable skills for lifelong careers in technology.
All of those engineers and scientists and labor-union guys have families to support. So even if space exploration gets us nowhere and we learn nothing and produce nothing, we are right now supporting thousands of jobs and thousands of American families.
And that is worth every penny to me, as a taxpayer.
> All of those engineers and scientists and labor-union guys have families to support. So even if space exploration gets us nowhere and we learn nothing and produce nothing, we are right now supporting thousands of jobs and thousands of American families.
On that basis, we can just send people money and skip the job part. It's just a massive giveaway - mostly to people who don't need it (who can get other jobs).
Even saying the space program is semi-productive doesn't make sense - on that basis, the money could go to many, many places.
Economic growth and wealth - and societal investment in healthcare, education, etc. and also in science and space exploration - increases when economic efficiency increases, and that requires redirecting resources (especially money) to where it has the highest ROI. Corrupt and state-run economies are poor because resources are used used inefficiently - resources go to the corrupt or to the unproductive.
Again, I think the space program is highly productive (though of course not universally). But otherwise we should spend money where it is most productive.
How many dystopian sci fi films feature some background ad campaign to go “off world” as an extreme measure the wealthy are able to take, or desperate indentured servants are shipped off to work.
Maybe as an interstellar program where your great grandkids will be the ones that reach the promised land will attract a different clientele tho
> story without conflict, where everything goes well
America has been lurching from crisis to crisis since Nixon, so it isn’t a surprise that our fiction highlights interpersonal drama. That shouldn’t lead us to conclude that it’s necessary, however. Stories about a team working together against the environment (often portrayed as gods and monsters) are as old as storytelling itself.
> as an extreme measure the wealthy are able to take, or desperate indentured servants are shipped off to work.
This is the part I don't think people appreciate: space sucks. It's horrible. There is not a chance that the rich decide that they'd do that rather than lounge on a yacht. The working class goes first into the mines.
It doesn’t matter how long it’ll take to reach them. The real benefits of such moonshot (or alien-shot) projects is the technological breakthroughs that come about from them. For example: water purification systems which were originally built to sterilize spacecraft drinking water.
As far as I’m aware, the science at the moment says that we cannot reproduce in space, so unless we send embryos that are raised by the machine machines it’s likely impossible
> the science at the moment says that we cannot reproduce in space
It absolutely does not. We don’t know if mammals can reproduce in space because we haven’t done those experiments yet. The closest we’ve come is culturing mouse embryos for four days on the ISS [1].
Drawing from my own life experiences, the more I learn the more things I worry about that could go wrong. This worry creeps into all aspects of life and becomes the norm. This creates a sense of dissatisfaction which can be a form of unhappiness.
Smart folks get aware of environment/challenges etc much sooner than others and maybe that creates the pathway to erosion of happiness.
You can easily flip this perspective on its head and postulate that being smarter helps you come up with more complex and logical rationalizations for your unhappiness in a way that totally orthogonal to its source. You could view excessive worry about things outside of your control as a pathological case of a certain kind of intelligence.
A lot of very intelligent philosophers written about how to lead a good/happy life over the centuries and none of them to my knowledge encourage a focus on problems outside of your control.
Nothing wrong. The person I responded to seemed to suggest there’s something wrong with the system when it might simply be a gap that the child has to close.
My personal opinion is that grades are one aspect of a filter that decides which college and subsequently which network a certain individual will have access to. It has a high correlation with intelligence but not linked via causation.
Every generation has struggled with it, except now it’s discussed heavily on social media and other forums. Hence the impression that it’s unique to this generation.
Are there challenges today that didn’t exist for previous generations? Yes! Are they more complex compared to what the previous generations faced? No!
