WoodScientist
@WoodScientist@lemmy.world
- Comment on Realistically, what do people plan to do on the Moon and Mars that requires a permanent, or long term human presence there? 10 hours ago:
You chose to focus on humanity’s failings. I choose to focus on our successes and aspirations. I choose the less misanthropic option.
- Comment on Realistically, what do people plan to do on the Moon and Mars that requires a permanent, or long term human presence there? 1 day ago:
The habitable lifespan of this planet is already 80% consumed. Life on this planet has another billion years left, even though it’s been here for four billion. In a billion years, the Sun’s slow heating will cause the Earth’s oceans to boil and the surface to become barren. If we do nothing, all life on Earth will be extinguished. If we do act, however. If we DO learn how to spread life far and wide, then there’s no reason that Earth life cannot continue to exist for hundreds of trillions of years into the future.
This isn’t about just “feeling good.” This is about taking our responsibility as stewards of life seriously. Maybe you don’t feel that responsibility, but that’s a skill issue.
- Comment on Realistically, what do people plan to do on the Moon and Mars that requires a permanent, or long term human presence there? 1 day ago:
Truthfully I don’t think we should even consider settling any body with a complex biosphere. We’re going to have to search for a very long time before we find a biosphere anywhere near as complex as Earth’s. You probably have to scour entire galaxies before you find another world with covered in a biosphere as rich as Earth’s. These worlds will be so rare and so far away, that by the time we can reach them, if ever, we’ll have already become experts at living in space. Hell, by the time we even attempt interstellar colonization, the vast majority of the human population likely won’t even live on a planetary surface. By the time we reach a true Earth twin, humanity will have become experts at transforming the deadest of dead rocks into living worlds. (Or just forego the idea entirely and use planets only as sources of raw materials for space-based habitats.)
I see no reason to ever colonize and exploit those rare Edens. Explore? Sure. Comb the organisms there for useful genetics and compounds? No problem. But actually settling en masse? Just leave them alone. We can afford to leave .00001% of planet’s untouched.
- Comment on Realistically, what do people plan to do on the Moon and Mars that requires a permanent, or long term human presence there? 1 day ago:
That will never not be true. There will always be room for improvement. In fact, the moment we don’t have anything to improve on Earth is the time we shouldn’t expand outward, as by that point we’ve probably become a society of narcissists that thinks we’re perfect and can do no wrong.
And moreover, expanding outward helps us protect Earth. We should be trying to move as much of our industry offworld as possible. Most of the universe is not a place we can “ruin.” There is no way to irresponsibly use a dead asteroid. There’s nothing to “take care of.” The only biosphere in need of protection that we know of is Earth’s. That’s half the point of space colonization - giving us space to do a lot of the things that really shouldn’t be done on a place as delicate as Earth. You can’t pollute the Moon to be more lethal than it already is. It’s already a barren, airless, radiation blasted hell hole.
Humans aren’t Captain Planet villains. No one pollutes for the sake of pollution. Pollution is always the negative byproduct of something else. And a lot of those industrial processes would best be moved off Earth in the long term.
I don’t think we’ll ever be perfectly responsible. If we turn Mars into a paradise and later wipe it out through our idiocy, well at least it had a brief time as a living world. But that’s fine. We can expand outward and turn a million dead worlds into a million living worlds. Will some of those new Edens later be driven to ruin by our own flaws? Certainly. But even if half die off, I’ll take 500,000 new Edens over a 500,000 barren rocks.
Those who wait for the perfect time to act die of old age before they ever accomplish anything.
- Comment on Realistically, what do people plan to do on the Moon and Mars that requires a permanent, or long term human presence there? 1 day ago:
Frankly then, this isn’t a topic for you. Space exploration is not something that will be done by the entire human race. It’s something that will be done by those that believe in it. You and those like you can stay home and play video games while other people advance the human race. If you don’t get it, that’s a you problem.
- Comment on Realistically, what do people plan to do on the Moon and Mars that requires a permanent, or long term human presence there? 1 day ago:
Again, if you don’t get it, you don’t get it. I don’t know how to explain to you why it’s a good thing for humanity to make something greater of itself, to spread life beyond Earth.
If you don’t get it, that’s fine. You simply won’t be part of that future. Space exploration is something that will be done by people that care about space exploration. You can stay home and play video games while others go out and explore the universe.
Some things are their own motivation, an end unto themselves. Stop looking for economic justifications. Not everything in life is about money.
- Comment on Realistically, what do people plan to do on the Moon and Mars that requires a permanent, or long term human presence there? 1 day ago:
The problem is that you will never reach a point where you feel it’s worth expanding off of Earth. There will never be a point where things are perfect and all our problems here are solved. In fact, if we ever do reach that point, we probably shouldn’t expand out that point, as that means we’ve probably become a species of entirely self-obsessed narcissists that believes we are perfect.
Self-criticism is healthy. But you shouldn’t allow it to hold back your own life or your whole species.
I think you just have far to little faith in your fellow human beings. Thankfully history isn’t moved forward by naysayers. For every inventor that transformed the world, there were a hundred jealous naysayers that said it shouldn’t or couldn’t be done.
Just a thought.
- Comment on Realistically, what do people plan to do on the Moon and Mars that requires a permanent, or long term human presence there? 1 day ago:
Sorry, I just can’t wrap my mind around the motivations of misanthropic trolls. I have more faith in humanity than you do. You should try and find the good in other people rather than obsessing over the bad.
- Comment on Realistically, what do people plan to do on the Moon and Mars that requires a permanent, or long term human presence there? 1 day ago:
Frankly, there’s no point. We already know how to green the Sahara. That fact is not in any doubt. You don’t actually prove anything or accomplish anything by doing so. We have all the technology; there’s just no economic reason to do so. Spam solar panels, desalination plants, and water pipelines. Technologically, it’s quite simple. Performing such a thing would prove nothing about our ability to settle Mars. The technical challenges are completely different. Whether we can actually settle Mars is a different question entirely. Settling somewhere on Earth does not provide any useful information on whether we can do so on Mars.
And ultimately, the point of expanding off Earth is so we don’t have all our eggs in one basket. You’re just proposing that we more heavily exploit our current basket, rather than expanding out to another one.
And terraforming is hardly the first step here. You don’t jump directly into something like that. You figure out how to build a city first. Once you have a billion people living on Mars, then you can consider something as grand as terraforming.
- Comment on Realistically, what do people plan to do on the Moon and Mars that requires a permanent, or long term human presence there? 1 day ago:
Human expansion on Earth did require just the kind of investments you’re imagining. You’re just not using your imagination.
You couldn’t just immediately enter a new valley and start eating whatever you found there. Some things might be edible, but many could kill you. You encountered entirely different biomes than what your culture was adapted for, and you encountered new species that may or may not be habitable.
I imagine most expansion on Earth happened a lot like space colonization will happen in the future. When traveling to a new area, it probably started with exploratory expeditions. Small groups would go over the mountains and explore. Maybe they would bring back a few kinds of food to try. Maybe there they would find a few species they were already familiar with. (Similar to how there will be some resources we can use right from the get-go on Mars.) Later more regular expeditions would go, maybe once a year a group from the tribe would cross the mountains to gather some rare food type or animal skin. Over time, as people spent more time in the new biome, they did the hard work of figuring out what was edible. They did that hard painful work. And in time, they learned enough of about the plants and animals in the area to be able to safely gather enough food to sustain a population. It took generations. It was a learning process. A lot of people died in the process.
The thing you need to not forget about Mars is that we are no longer hunter gatherers. It doesn’t matter if we won’t find a garden of food on Mars, waiting for us to eat. We’re an advanced industrial civilization. We don’t gather food; we grow and manufacture it. What matters is not if there is food on Mars, but if there are the raw materials to support our food factories. Sure, settling Mars will require a lot more resources than hunter-gatherers than our ancestors needed when colonizing the next valley. But we also have a hell of a lot more resources and technology at our disposal than those ancestors did.
- Comment on Realistically, what do people plan to do on the Moon and Mars that requires a permanent, or long term human presence there? 1 day ago:
I would say that you should have more faith in your fellow human beings. We would have never accomplished anything if our ancestors had your poor misanthropic attitude.
- Comment on Realistically, what do people plan to do on the Moon and Mars that requires a permanent, or long term human presence there? 1 day ago:
You’re a member of a species that owes its entire existence to exploration and expansion. We expanded from one biome in a tiny corner of Africa to a species of billions dominating an entire planet. We explored every corner of it and adapted to every possible biome. We learned how to live everywhere from isolate islands to endless deserts to polar wastes. We’re the ultimate explorer and colonizing species.
I cannot comprehend how a human being can look at that and then respond with the most bone-headed take imaginable, “we don’t have exploration in our genes.”
China engaged in all sorts of colonization. How do you think they ended up with Taiwan? India engaged in colonization in Sri Lanka and other areas. You’re just ignorant of history.
- Comment on Realistically, what do people plan to do on the Moon and Mars that requires a permanent, or long term human presence there? 1 day ago:
Change - sure, probably - but there’s still plenty of nutrients and water for vast forests to continue existing there.
The soil itself is pretty barren in the Amazon. The vast majority of the nutrients and minerals in that biome are in the trees and plants themselves. Without the continual topping-up from the Sahara, the Amazon is on a ticking clock.
Gaze upon the Amazon River:
Consider its breadth and depth. A titanic quantity of water, enough to drain a continent, emptying in endless torrent into the abyss of the sea. Except it’s not just water. Look at the color of it. It’s not blue; it’s brown. Consider the amount of water in that river. Then think of how much soil and dead plant matter must be flowing with it in order to turn it to such a rich chocolate brown.
That is where the Amazon’s phosphorous ultimately ends up. Nothing lives forever. Every plant and animal eventually dies. When it does, much of what it was gets recycled back into the plants and animals of the Amazon, but some doesn’t. A lot doesn’t.
Without the Sahara, the Amazon is on borrowed time.
- Comment on Realistically, what do people plan to do on the Moon and Mars that requires a permanent, or long term human presence there? 1 day ago:
Interestingly, the Solar System as a whole also works this way. You sometimes hear futurists proposing that in the long term, humanity might use self-replicating robots to dismantle Mercury, and use the material to construct a Dyson swarm, allowing humanity to access untold levels of energy and matter.
The big downside to this is that you can’t just start taking apart pieces of the Solar System. While the planets aren’t in a true resonance pattern with each other, they do have a certain clockwork stability to them. The planets we have now were not the first generation of worlds in this star system. Multiple rounds of planet formation happened, sometimes with multiple terrestrial worlds forming in the same or similar orbits. The early inner Solar System had dozens of Mars-sized rocks in it. They kept forming, colliding, breaking, merging, and shattering until the system found a state that would be stable for billions of years. Simulations on the future of the Sol system show it to be dynamically stable for billions of years into the future. But if you remove any piece of the Solar System from that clockwork intricacy, that stability disappears. Then you have to worry about the planets slowly perturbing each other’s orbits, small nudges building up over millions of years until world’s are colliding or being ejected from Solar orbit entirely.
- Comment on Realistically, what do people plan to do on the Moon and Mars that requires a permanent, or long term human presence there? 1 day ago:
No. The deserts are not an empty void just waiting to be filled with more corn fields. There are species that are adapted to there, can only survive there, and would be driven to extinction if we eliminated all of Earth’s deserts. The total biosphere per acre is not high in deserts, but the species that do live there have just as much right to live as any other.
This really gets to the whole point of space colonization. The Earth is a jewel. Every inch of it is covered in life of a wondrous variety of forms. And every time we as humans shape a biome to our will, we degrade or destroy whatever species was there before.
The great thing about space is that it truly is empty real estate. Maybe Mars has some bacteria living miles beneath the surface, maybe. But it is for all intents and purposes a dead rock. We can colonize it to our heart’s content. We’re not stealing any land from any natives by colonizing there. We’re not wiping out native species by setting up vast agricultural plantations. It’s a place that we can let our technology loose to the limits of its abilities, and we can do so without destroying a biosphere so complex that you probably have to scour a thousand galaxies before you find its equal.
In the very long term, I hope humanity greatly decreases its impact on the Earth. My dream would be for Earth to return to a mostly wild state. Most people would live in space. The only people living on Earth would be either:
a) Living in very dense towering cities built to be incredibly environmentally efficient and sustainable. b) People practicing extremely low-impact lifestyles like the Amish or people who willingly choose to live as neo-hunter gatherers.
The vast majority of the human species, and all of our industry, would move off of Earth. Earth would essentially become one big nature preserve.
- Comment on Realistically, what do people plan to do on the Moon and Mars that requires a permanent, or long term human presence there? 1 day ago:
If exploration is so core to the human experience, why did the people of Asia - much more numerous than the Europeans even back then - not undertake any large exploration or colonization efforts? Or those of Africa?
You have deeply disappointed Admiral Zheng He.
- Comment on Realistically, what do people plan to do on the Moon and Mars that requires a permanent, or long term human presence there? 1 day ago:
It will just be Earth, but worse.
If people had had your attitude, humanity would still be huddled in one tiny corner of Eastern Africa, never having advanced past hunter-gathering. “Why go to that new empty valley over the mountains? First you have to get over the mountains. Then once you get there, there’s nobody there. You’ll be all alone. It will be just like our current home, but worse.”
- Comment on Realistically, what do people plan to do on the Moon and Mars that requires a permanent, or long term human presence there? 1 day ago:
Somehow I knew it would be SFIA before I even clicked the link.
- Comment on Realistically, what do people plan to do on the Moon and Mars that requires a permanent, or long term human presence there? 1 day ago:
So was the Internet.
- Comment on Realistically, what do people plan to do on the Moon and Mars that requires a permanent, or long term human presence there? 1 day ago:
The point of mining things in space is not to bring them back to Earth.
- Comment on Realistically, what do people plan to do on the Moon and Mars that requires a permanent, or long term human presence there? 1 day ago:
Long term, the reason to expand into space is to expand into space. The point of going to Mars is not to make money. The point is to find a way for people to live there.
Let go of your sci fi visions of the future. Space colonization does not look like humans getting on a rocket ship on Earth’s surface, blasting off between stars, and landing on a second Eden around another star, a world where you can take your helmet off, breathe the local air, eat the food, and drink the water. What we’ve learned from our exoplanet studies is that the cosmos has exercised infinite creativity in generating new Hells, worlds uninhabitable and lethal to us in ways we never even dreamed of.
Real space colonization is going to take a whole lot of engineering and building. Mars is actually quite habitable compared to the vast majority of world’s in the universe. If you have some basic self-replicating machines, making Mars habitable is quite doable. Cover as much of the surface as you want in vast greenhouses. Live under domes potentially spanning the entire world. Long term, Mars has great potential for human settlement.
As for why? Well I would say it’s a moral responsibility. We know if we stay on just one planet, just one star, then it’s only a matter of time before some natural or artificial disaster wipes us out, and possibly the rest of life along with it. Earth has the type of biosphere you probably have to scour multiples galaxies to find one of comparable complexity. That’s a jewel worth protecting.
We tend to be too hard on ourselves as as species, viewing ourselves as some sort of cancer on the world. At the same time, we are the only hope for life on this planet to survive past a certain point. We are the children of Gaia. It’s our duty and moral obligation to spread life as far and wide as possible. Life itself has intrinsic value. And it’s our job to spread it.
- Comment on Boobs in unexpected places 1 week ago:
I’m just saying you are denying yourself a great deal of happiness. It’s not about reaching some idealized final state. It’s about living a life of joy instead of the alternative.
- Comment on Boobs in unexpected places 1 week ago:
Sounds like quitter talk. You got one life to live. Don’t kill the girl you’re meant to be.
- Comment on Won't you come? 1 week ago:
I didn’t bumble the physics. The point of the joke is that any number of things would prevent the person from cumming, even just the neutrino flux. It assumes a certain knowledge of physics. Then the “umm aktually” chud had to come out of the woodwork and ruin it.
- Comment on Boobs in unexpected places 1 week ago:
You have one life to live. Stop wasting it.
- Comment on Won't you come? 1 week ago:
Thank you for subtracting from the point.
- Comment on Won't you come? 1 week ago:
The lethal neutrino flux.
- Comment on "I am an ancient nobleman and need some coin made prove to me youre a craftsman that can make quality coin" "check this thing out." 1 week ago:
In other words, they were masterpieces in the original meaning of the word. Masterpiece originally meant not just some great or acclaimed work, but something much more specific. It was the work a guild artisan would use to demonstrate their ultimate skill and earn the title of Master. It was the craftsman equivalent of an academic dissertation. For a specific historical example, see columbine cup.
- Comment on Congrats on your big win!!! 2 weeks ago:
I see it as a direct continuation of:
Slavery->Sharecropping and Jim Crow->mass incarceration
Slavery never ended. The name just changed to be more polite, with a fig leaf of freedom and free will. Additionally we realized two things:
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It’s more economical to hold slaves in large central facilities than dispersed.
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The best way to fight abolitionism is to convince the populace that the slaves deserve it.
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- Comment on To be happy… 2 weeks ago:
When talking about air fryers, my husband once rightly pointed out that air fryers are just countertop convection ovens.
I walked over to him, held my index finger up to his lips, and said to hmm, “shhh. Air fryer. AIR FRYER.” 🤣
