Comment by flenserboy
8 hours ago
not taking the chance is cowardly & nihilistic, & everyone who went up would know the score when they signed up. better to give it as much of a chance as possible than to give up & just watch the world degrade & rot around us.
>> not taking the chance is cowardly & nihilistic
It seems reasonable to argue that giving up on a planet where everyone but a handful of people will be for the long-term future is the cowardly path.
That's a fake binary. We could spend the money to prevent the world from degrading and rotting.
but that isn't what would or will happen. at best there will be a wind-down where spending goes toward mollifying an aging, uneducated population with food & shiny baubles as infrastructure decays, access to resources & power is reduced year after year, & in a gen or two there won't be anyone left who knows how to make the old systems run (& if they do they won't have the resources needed because the supply chain will be gone).
without an eye on advancing things for the future, & keeping the wheel spinning with activity & forward movement, with optimism that things can get better, all we're looking at is a controlled demolition of what has been built up.
> without an eye on advancing things for the future, & keeping the wheel spinning with activity & forward movement, with optimism that things can get better, all we're looking at is a controlled demolition of what has been built up.
I agree with you on this, but I guess I disagree on the specifics of what "forward movement" means; to me, launching a crewed, multi-generational mission to Mars now would be a huge waste of money.
Even if they manage to survive the three or four generations, and keep education up to make sure old systems can run, how does that help anyone? They're effectively trapped there, and we're effectively trapped here.
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