[ethbro]

Earth always has been, and in all likelihood will forever be, screwed up. Climate change will never be solved until (to paraphrase a quip from memory) global inequity has been evened out to a level a Pakistani brickmaker would consider prosperity. I don't see countries with higher standards of living making those sacrifices for the greater good of our planet.

I'd sleep much better betting our species on space expansion than on sustainability.

PS: To say nothing of the possibility of peak global output. Maybe we only get one shot at the level of resources and technologies required to seed space.

[kazagistar]

If peak global output is barely enough to colonize, then there is no way any of the colonies will ever reach that level of output, and then whats the point? It should be done sustainably, or it doesn't really matter at all.

[ethbro]

Resources, especially outside of a gravity well, and a new Frontier Thesis.

[DanielBMarkham]

"Earth always has been, and in all likelihood will forever be, screwed up."

Agreed. Not only screwed up, but screwed up in multiple ways. Throwing more money at the dozens of money sinks here does nothing to significantly help ensure our long-term survival. It might be the right thing to do, and over time continuing to do things like this may mean that mankind enters into some new wondrous universe free from pain and suffering. But right now, right here? We need an insurance policy. We need to get the hell off this ball of mud.

Want to know why the space program never went anywhere? Because back in the 60s and 70s, people said exactly the same thing "We need to spend our money on earthbound problems"

We've spent trillions on those problems. They are still here. In fact, the places we've made the most progress are the places we didn't try to fix.

I'm not in favor of a new huge national mission. I think a huge national goal to decrease LEO launch costs by 99.9% or more would be worth spending tens or hundreds of billions of dollars on. But heck, if we narrowed our focus to just that, we could probably get it done a lot cheaper than if we went down the mission creep road again.

[ethbro]

To be accurate, we did go to the moon and do the other things.

The other things at the time happened to be ensuring people weren't lynched for the color of their skin and ensuring Vietnam didn't fall to communism on the current administration's watch.

[DanielBMarkham]

We did the other things. You are correct.

Care to go back to that porch in the Appalachians that LBJ sat on when he declared his war on poverty -- a war that has cost trillions -- and take a look at the results?

Or heed Bono, when he states the obvious that dumping money on things because they are politically important is a counter-indicative factor of success of the effort. In fact, just look at the evidence.

Political systems exist for political reasons.

The danger, as I have outlined it, is that instead of spending money in some kind of mathematical way, we behave as humans always have, and spend money based on immediate pain or rewards.

That's fucked. We need to leave. Now.

[streuselpie]

If you can't sustain a a huge, rich, self-repairing ecosystem, what are your chances of getting one of the ground where there is none, and then sutaining it?

Are we really sure this isn't just a bunch of rationalization because really, we ought to confront the people who carve up resources and people? Going to the moon, even colonizing the whole Milky Way is completely uninspiring compared to something like bringing war criminals to justice, rather than celebrating and comforting them. So yeah, if we can't do the serious things, I guess toy stuff is all we're stuck with.

[geocar]

I believe we can sustain a huge, rich, self-repairing ecosystem, but I don't think we should want to:

Building the capability to get into space will be hard.

Building the capability to get into space while trying to preserve the self-repairing ecosystem of the Earth that birthed us, may be much harder, and might be impossible.

If a catastrophic event is truly inevitable (and whether it's an asteroid, or too many cows is irrelevant to me), then getting into space is absolutely essential for our species long-term survival, and a conversation about sustaining our ecosystem really needs to be about how long we need this ecosystem to last us: At the current rate of pollution, it's very possible the earth will never become uninhabitable to humans simply because humans aren't yeast.

That being said: A more measured conversation about increasing quality of life by reducing pollution isn't necessarily in conflict with the goals of getting off the planet. It'd just be nice to have that conversation instead of the polarizing one that most people seem to want to have about climate change.

[ethbro]

> Going to the moon, even colonizing the whole Milky Way is completely uninspiring compared to something like bringing war criminals to justice

I'm all for creating as much justice and sustainability as we can with an efficient amount of effort, but still for stopping short of perfection. In a thousand years, which of your options is going to matter more to our future descendants?