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> One of those is actually an urgent need

We're on Hacker News. Divide a population in two, tell one of them what they have to work on and let the other fuck around with whatever they fancy. Tell me you'd have any uncertainty around which will innovate more.

Like sure, it would be great if everyone dropped what they were doing to work on climate change. But we aren't and don't want to. You're never going to convince all of the engineers inspired by going to space to work on a slightly-better solar panel. But you may get a much-better panel by letting them force themselves to make one that works in deep space.

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> But you may get a much-better panel by letting them force themselves to make one that works in deep space.

That "may" is doing a lot of work there, to the point I find it absurd. One of the bigger, more cohesive biases on Hacker News I see (understandably) is that technical solutions trump everything. I consider it wishful thinking.

[JumpCrisscross]

> "may" is doing a lot of work there, to the point I find it absurd

Not really something you have to hypothesise about. Cordless tools, water-purification technologies, integrated circuits and all manner of imaging, navigation and battery technologies came out of the Apollo programme.

> more cohesive biases on Hacker News I see (understandably) is that technical solutions trump everything

Irrelevant to proving or disproving mutual exclusivity between "populat[ing] Mars and improv[ing] earth."

(Also, wrong. The Outer Space Treaty and failed Moon Treaty inspired significant portions of the UN Convention on the Law of the Seas, including the assertion that the seabed is the common heritage of mankind.)

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https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42300388

Last paragraph mainly.

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I may be missing something, but I see zero overlap between space exploration and environmental concerns. They tap into completely different parts of our psyches. The first, exploration, is inherently optimistic. The second, preservation, is inherently risk averse. While there are idiots claiming we'll solve our climate troubles with space, the reality is they're orthogonal pursuits.

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Indeed. I lost the plot from my original comment, so I'll try to refine it here. I had brought up pollution and exploitation, a broad survey of negative features of our civilization because I think people don't weigh positive and negative things remotely fairly. All things have a social/ideal (as in ideas) backing. Space exploration is positive and hopeful; throw money at it and there are plenty of people who would be enthusiastic to join in. Fixing the environment, the economic system, and other woes is negtive, large scale, and nigh intractable. In a perfect world, people would probably have enough time, resources, and innate motivation to work on many different things and advance them all. In reality, we seek bright, hopeful pursuits like space exploration and push aside the environment. My original criticism of Walter Bright's attitude is that it exemplifies how we as humans have poor psychological balance of issues. It's why throwing money at environmental causes isn't comparable to throwing money at space exploration: we simply have far less collective will to actually fix the environment, especially not with corporate propaganda that shifts the blame and whatnot.

You're right that these pursuits are entirely orthogonal. Unfortunately, whether or not space exploration is in the picture, we are far less enthusiastic about doing what actually matters to fix the environment and whatnot. It's just that I myself only realized this imbalance from seeing Walter Bright's blatant positivity on space exploration. I will maintain that, not only is the negative pursuit a nightmare to work on by itself, but introducing the positive pursuit will be a psychological distraction, like how some people scoff at negative effects of capitalism and focus on the positives. Because we love feel-good stories and gravitate to them.

[JumpCrisscross]

> not only is the negative pursuit a nightmare to work on by itself, but introducing the positive pursuit will be a psychological distraction

You can’t distract someone who isn’t in the room. I’ll admit to tuning out a lot of climate catastrophism because it just doesn’t hold my attention. I know the outlines of the situation; it doesn’t strike me as productive to obsess over it. (Or more accurately, it isn’t fun.)

> we love feel-good stories and gravitate to them

There are people who like feel-good stories and people who like catastrophism. I’m arguing you’re never competing for one against the other.

It isn’t a coïncidence that the feel-good sectors of the climate movement, EVs and solar energy, have so much overlap with space start-ups.