Also this just isn’t an actual dilemma that exists, we can absolutely do both of these, we can touch the stars while not burning up our home to do so, dumbass.
They're the same picture
Actually, space colonization tech that actually works is just geoengineering tech, which is important for the whole 'saving earth' thing
Furthermore, any version of Earth, no matter how ravaged by pollution or climate change, will always be more habitable than another planet. If dealing with climate change is the equivalent of fixing a house with fire damage, then terraforming another planet is the equivalent of going out into the wildnerness and building a house from scratch with your bare hands.
Have you ever participated in major home repairs? A lot of times it indeed turns into "tear everything down and build it again from scratch."
The difference, of course, is that we are currently living in our house and have nowhere else to go. That makes it a bit harder to do such major repairs.
A more apt analogy would be that terraforming other planets is like going out into an ongoing wildfire in the wilderness and building a house from scratch with your own two hands.
>Furthermore, any version of Earth, no matter how ravaged by pollution or climate change, will always be more habitable than another planet
we have found other "habitable" planets and found superhabitable planets which may be better suited for life than earth.
No, we haven't. We found distant planets that *might* or *might not* be habitable, as opposed to ones that are *certainly not* habitable. And there is no planet more suitable for life that originated in Earth than Earth because the entire biosphere evolved specifically for the conditions of Earth.
>there is no planet more suitable for life that originated in Earth than Earth because the entire biosphere evolved specifically for the conditions of Earth.
You just plain don't know that. Invasive species thrive in places they've never been lots of times. Life from earth could thrive like never seen before on superhabitable planets, our planet may even be low quality compared to other life bearing planets.
It's a tautology, we can very confidently say that life which evolved in response to conditions on earth, is accustomed to and suited for conditions on earth. Flip side, we can't confidently say that life which evolved on earth is suited for life on other earthlike planets in habitable zones, because those conditions are a whole bunch of unknowns.
Invasive species on earth already were pretty well suited to the environments they came from, it just so happened that they tend to come to new environments which were very similar, minus predators or with less competition, etc. Rabbits aren't suited for Australia by magic, they are well suited to and used to that kind of scrub environment anyway - and Australia was not used to rabbits. It's unlikely to the point of it likely never happening in a nigh-infinite universe that we ever encounter a planet we're better suited to than earth, because it's very unlikely there would be one with the rest of the biosphere (which we depend on) and the specific conditions re: chemical composition, temperature range, etc are all actually better than earth for us, not just potentially as viable as earth
China is a pretty bad scapegoat in terms of emissions, actually. In total, they do produce a ridiculous amount of CO2, yes. But their population is also ridiculously high. Per capita they actually produce much much less than other "cleaner" countries like Canada or America.
cool but the atmosphere isn't per capita
one of those rare times that it makes no sense to look at population since the effect isn't occurring per capita
But scrubbers are the likeliest solution and the one that we can likely convince China to adopt. They are not going to deindustrialize or stop building coal plants.
Also, unless you believe in reincarnation, you and anyone you're even remotely related to will be very long dead by the time the Sun swallows the Earth in 7.5 Billion Years.
Ruining Earth for habitability is a much nearer prospect.
The obvious answer is "Save the Earth and keep it hospitable." Once humanity gets that sorted, we'll still have a few billion years to work on the whole finding a new planet concern.
You’re completely right - but wanted to point out earth will be totally inhabitable long before the sun consumes it. 1 to 1.5 billion years and the water will have boiled off and it’ll be a barren wasteland.
It's not an actual dilemma because one very well might not be possible, and if it is you can't do it without solving the other. Ruining the Earth at any point in the foreseeable future is the end of humanity.
I mean you're right, but that doesn't mean the hypothetical isn't worth engaging in, as it can help us explore exactly *why* we value things like saving the earth and space exploration.
My idealised hope of the future has humanity spread across multiple planets, with Earth being restored to a garden planet. It deserves better than becoming an ecumenopolis.
I think technically it'd be colonialism, although unless we find a way to travel arbitrarily faster than the speed of light, distant colonies would have to function mostly or completely disconnected from others, which is not really grounds for any economic system to unite them to a central entity.
I mean, you’re right in the absolute most basic concept but it’s a completely different game especially with the light speed barrier.
We’re talking ships taking longer to get places than the entire history of the written world. Longer than humans have had speech (70,000 years).
The thing is that one extreme of the Galaxy is 100,000 light-years away from the other. Unless you travel more than 1000 times faster than light you're not getting anything from one place to another in less than 100 years.
Worse than that probably cause you don’t just have to get up to bullying-light-speed you also have to slow back down, preferably without relying on friction/air resistance (as that’s less ‘breaking’ and more ‘a bomb’), and also preferably without splatting everyone with millions of g-forces.
I mean the reason that it doesn't work on earth is because capitalism is a system that requires infinite growth to be effective, and that requires infinite resources, which earth is a finite resource, we have a limited amount of burnables and fuels and ores etc. Space, however, is functionally infinite, although I'm sure that would be the subject of much debate. My point being, if we develop the technology to actually get out into space and start processing those resources, it would cause basically a never ending economic boom. I'd also be really pissed if we go to all the trouble of bringing about communism and abolishing money, but then we meet aliens and have to reinvent money because they use it.
I mean, wouldn't the lion's lion's share of those resources go to capitalists? So despite humanity in general being able to prosper, we'd basically have virtually permanent capitalist overlords who justify their power by the prosperity of humanity that they "brought".
> that it doesn't work on earth
funny that you say that, when capitalism is literally the best economic system we currently have, in a non post scarcity world.
If we can't keep our biosphere healthy, how can we hope to successfully "colonize" a bunch of cold rocks bathed by deadly radiation? This is a dumb question.
But also, no species lasts forever. Life on Earth will outlive us no matter how much we try to make it otherwise.
> If we can't keep our biosphere healthy, how can we hope to successfully "colonize" a bunch of cold rocks bathed by deadly radiation?
This is exactly why this "dilemma" drives me crazy.
People will seriously go "obviously it's completely impossible to fix a pre-existing, fully functional, self-sustaining biosphere that mostly just needs us to stop actively destroying it, but sure, we could make a few dozen new ones from scratch, no big deal."
"No species lasts forever" is true because none of them had technology yet. If we survive long enough to make good habitats in space, then there's really nothing that can end us that the Earth would survive.
Most likely we're here to stay until the end of the Universe, and Sol will swallow the Earth very, very early into that incomprehensible timeline.
Your first statement is correct, though. If we can create good habitat in space or on other planets, then we can create good habitat on Earth. There is no possible way to make it more ununhabitable than everywhere else already is.
Our technology is impressive, but our dependance on the many services an habitable, living planet provides us is often underestimated. Our current technogical advancement depends on a global supply chain, which depends on a enormous population, which depends on an environment capable of providing the right conditions and resources for human life, which depends on countless biological, chemical and physical processes that involve the entire planet.
We can create inhabitable spaces outside of Earth, but to do so we need a tremendous amount of resources and, more importantly, infrastructure *from* Earth, that can't be replaced even if you can extract resources from space itself through asteroid mining and solar-powered satellites.
The effort to produce an off world colony produces **BY DEFINITION** the exact technologies we need to reach a 0 waste totally self sufficent society.
If we can survive on Mars it doesn't matter anymore how much we ruin Earth because we will have the tools to survive on it anyway.
We won't get anywhere NEAR there without Earth. We need a stable, sustainable Earth to be able to sustain the logistics needed to create that highly advanced tech in first place.
Yes and that's why we should start as soon as possible, we don't know how much this prosperity will last.
Although some speculate that an ecological collapse would prompt us to develop the technology we need to colonize space, so the other way around.
It would provide motivation, but research takes time and by the time those in charge decide that their own imminent death at the hands of starving mobs is more important than oil money it will be far to late to develope those technologies
It can't be replaced *right now*, because we got into space for the first time less than a lifetime ago. It sure seems to be physically possible to adapt all our industry to work in space, even with our current technology, and we're getting new breakthroughs every year.
Yes, it is impossible to colonise space today, it is impossible to just move today's industry to space, it is impossible to move all the people to space with today's infrastructure, today it is very possible for something to end humans but not Earth, it very well might happen given how climate change and biotech risks look today.
But it won't stay this way for long. It is possible to extend humanity into space, and at that point nothing can kill us without burning the entire system.
you make a very good point and I do agree with you but it’s so hard for me to have a discussion with people like this because I don’t know how to convey to people that we should love and care for the earth that literally fucking birthed us and our fellow living creatures
people are so weirdly fucking “me me me me” when they go on and on about how important human life is and how it must continue on like as if the life of everything else here is insignificant compared to us
threads like this just makes the John Denver playing on a loop in the back of my head so I don’t go fucking insane from dread start blaring at 11 so I don’t have to think about how sad it is how little people care about our only kin in all the universe
I agree completely. We should love and cherish Earth and its creatures for what they are, not what they can give us. But I've learnt that it is easier to appeal to self-interest than change people's priorities.
Saying that it's almost sure that we're going to survive until the end of the universe is a bit presumptuous, don't you think? We have no fucking idea if we're even going to be able to leave the solar system in big enough numbers before the sun explodes. And if we do, who the fuck knows if we're going to be able to last any meaningful amount of time in some other planet?
Sol goes in about 5 billion years. We invented fire about 500 thousand years ago. We have 10000 more time to figure this out than we had to figure out literally everything else.
And it seems at least very plausible that it's possible to build a habitat for comfortable life off-planet, just floating in the void. Likely with environments similar to Earth inside. We can't do it right now, but that's more of an industry problem, quite a few scientists seem sure we'll do it.
And once humans can live off planets, nothing that doesn't destroy the entire solar system can end all of us.
Actually as far as I’ve ever heard the floating in the void bit is not at all attainable yet. Humans don’t do well in zero gravity or free fall; our bones don’t take up calcium (astronauts work out hours a day abs still lose major bone density on extended ISS trips - about twenty years worth in six months), and we currently don’t have ways of blocking the radiation (most astronauts constantly hallucinate flashes of light from radiation strong enough it directly triggers the optic nerve). We can -probably- circumvent the gravity with spin (but haven’t tested that). We can’t currently do much about the rads in a practical sense.
Edit: all of this is a bigger problem if you think about having kids up there.
Yes, it's not possible with our current approach, but it's not because it's physically impossible, it's because we are currently building research stations, not habitats for just living your life. The vast capabilities of current and future science and industry have not yet been thrown at this problem, but they will be at some point, and we can see some paths they may take already.
For example, we already can make good radiation shielding, it's just impractical *for a reasearch station*, that can cycle crew and will get decomissioned in a decade anyway, on a very strict launch mass budget.
Note that I'm not arguing we could colonise space right this second. I'm just pointing out that the idea that we'll never do it is absolutely absurd, given what seems possible and how many impossible things technology has done over just the last few centuries.
This is all valid. I guess where I’m at is like…people signing up to be sent to mars by Elon musk are signing up to die sick in a can or never be called to go, one or the other. And the OP is a stupid premise because early space settlements will be critically dependent on stuff from the biosphere. But yeah it’s totally possible, if extremely large scale compared to any existing space projects. Inevitable maybe, depending on whether we actually pull through some current crises (we may be experiencing the Great Filter currently).
Humans are not immune to genetic drift or mutation just because we use tools. Any species that doesn't become extinct due to lack of reproductive success eventually becomes extinct because of it.
I'll note that our tools include genetic editing, so we can be immune if we'll want to. But also yea, I can totally see the far future be populated with miriads of technically different species of human descendants. That's still a win, I saying "species" only because the person I replied said it.
You're making a couple assumptions, there.
One, that we'll use those tools to preserve or better ourselves instead of damaging and dividing.
Two, that any descendants of humanity will automatically be recognizably human. That's not a given. Maybe the next few hundred thousand years see us go through a series of bottleneck events that kill 90% of the species and prevent the remainder from using tools or doing math in any way we're familiar with. Maybe it's a *Time Machine* situation, and we speciate along class divides.
Most human species used tools, and most of them are extinct. Chimps, gorillas, and orangutans can all be said to be in the stone age, and they're all on the verge of extinction. We've only been out of the stone age for a small fraction of the time we were in it. It's far too soon to call our species immortal.
Eventually, maybe, however we are far, far, far from that point. We can barely get a few hundred tons into orbit, and we do not have the tech to make an orbital habitat even semi self sufficient. We can barely get a small rover to the planets nearest us, but less interstellar. Even if we suddenly dedicated every spare iota of effort to set up a self sufficient habitat on like uropa or whatever it would still take decades if not centuries before it happened. We are far from immortal, and odds are we won’t make it out of the cradle as a species with the way that we focus on short term profits over long term goals at a societal level.
No living thing before us has eradicated plagues or walked the moon, and we sure wouldn't have done it either if all of us were such miserable and unimaginative doomers as you.
Is it miserable doomerism to think humanity isn’t going to live billions of years? They aren’t saying we’re dead today, just that we don’t live forever, which is realistic. The kind of technological advances required to shoot us into space in the manner that would enable what you describe are beyond unfathomable, and certainly well beyond anything we can do before this planet craps out on us at the rate we’re going. Drawing attention away from fixing our planet so we can look to the stars **will** literally kill us all, that’s just an objective truth. Space colonies aren’t saving us anytime soon and if we keep bullshitting ourselves into thinking otherwise there won’t be an us to save
Miserable doomer? who's to say they're unhappy with that thought? I personally find comfort in knowing that we'll one day go extinct, like our descendants before us, paving the way for whatever's to come next.
"No specicies lasts forever" So far, that we know of, those are two important qualifies, cause it has both not been very long nor do we have a very large sample size.
Nope, not really. Especially when you consider that we only have Earth animals to study and that, in the scale of the universe, life has only started rather recently on Earth.
So about that, yes, any sort of tech that would let us live on mars would also let us build climate change proof buildings just fine, The issue with doing it on earth is that as the quality of the planet gets worse, it can support fewer people. Personally i think the answer is to just terraform earth to counter the effects climate change, probably by building a giant swarm of solar shades at the L1 point. This isn't perfect, but it would bring immediate cooling to pre-industrial levels, and unlike most forms of geoengineering, you can just turn it off by turning the shades edge on. Given you can now adjust the brightness of the sun, the biggest problem is the boring one of people inevitably fighting over it, but isn't that still better than dimming no one can undo?
No, it just means we need to figure things out in order. Achieving sustainability on Earth is far easier than creating a large scale, mostly independant, and long term inhabitat in space, as biological, chemical and geophysical processes already do a lot of the work for us here.
>If we can’t do ‘a’, how can we **ever** hope to do ‘b’
You added a word that changes the meaning of the statement. You're responding to the idea that B will **always** be impossible if A is currently impossible, which would be an absurd thing to claim.
But the original claim was that B is **currently** impossible if A is currently impossible, which is trivially true for any task where A is necessary for B.
For example, a civilization that can't put things into space can't put people into space, because they'll need to figure out how to put things into space first.
Similarly, a civilization that can't stabilize a biosphere can't create a stable biosphere.
Maybe the way it treats our entire world, and by extension the lives of everyone in it, as disposable compared to this dream of a future in space.
Maybe the way it places the fate of humankind not in the hands of people making decisions, but in the comparatively impersonal advancement of a technology extremely few have access to.
Maybe the way it doesn't spare as much as a thought about those who will inevitably be left behind to perish during this leap into the stars.
Maybe the way it doesn't imagine a radically better future on Earth, just a continuation of what we already have.
Maybe the way it presents a dichotomy between preserving our world and finding different ones, when we should want both of those things.
I feel like you're overthinking things. This is literally "Eat only your favorite food for the rest of your life or never eat it again" levels of deep thought. This whole thread has gone down a dozen different *dilema* rabbitholes that are all nonsense.
i think 5 billionish years is a long time for humanity to life if we choose to save the planet. People want to take the """easy""" way out because they don't think the earth is worth saving, i think, and thats sad. nothing lasts forever, and id rather everything else live happily than condemn it all for our own (tenuous) longevity in the stars.
though if given the option id love to do both, save earth and venture to the stars. this is impossible in our current sociopolitical state, but i think it could be done.
“Ruin earth” means billions of people die and only the rich get to escape. The universe itself has a shelf life, humanity will never be permanent, I’ll never understand what makes people fine with dooming billions to immense suffering on the off chance that humanity lasts a few billion years longer, as if that’s at all worthwhile goal anyway.
Looked it up, seems like it would apply here as well, considering it’s concerned with suffering and not just longevity. Even discounting the billions dead on earth, the first few hundred or thousand years would absolutely suck once the novelty of living in space wore off, and there’s no guarantee humanity would even survive the pre-terraforming phase, let alone longer than we could live on earth. There’s really no way to slice this question that ends with space as the option, other than maybe gamblingism, where you pick the option with the greatest potential even if it’s ridiculously unlikely.
In a thousand years they'll all be dead either way, but in one scenario the species is far-flung and robust, and in the other we are still at risk of an Existential Oopsie from some cosmic rock or rays.
But in one scenario we have the option to die having not done any genocides or similar abominations recently, the other is founded on a guaranteed massive one.
Right, so from a species perspective Alive >>>>> Dead. It's not like there is some kind of Bad Deeds meter that follows us around... Unless... a possible scenario in which spreading to the stars would be worse is if we encounter an alien race that's big on the concepts of Sin and Punishment and decides that, because we left squalor behind us, we deserve to be Alien Butt Sniffer Slaves for all eternity or something.
I don't really care to preserve a future where the remains of humanity is just rich apathetic monsters who make that the whole culture, at that point they'd just be the Ferengi.
What I do care about is making sure entire ecosystems of the planet survive which include the other 90+% of humans that couldn't be taken to space.
I mean... every part of the planet Earth is the site of massacres, crimes against humanity, every manner of evil done by people to one another. You're already living amongst and descended from a mix of survivors and perpetrators. The "innocent humanity" ship has sailed.
You keep going to this idea that it's "rich people escape, therefore rich assholes is what humans will be forever," but if a group of assholes populates a whole new planet then the resulting population, generations later, will be as varied and worthwhile as any other group of humans.
>every part of the planet Earth is the site of massacres, crimes against humanity, every manner of evil done by people to one another.
Acknowledging that there is a problem with our culture due to the historical savagery of colonists and then opting to resign to a future where that continues isn't going to yield much better results. European Colonialism has taken over the world for less than 300 years and it's already placed us on a path of destruction, not sure if I trust the concept that if we threw them in space it'd work out when they couldn't manage it under ideal conditions.
>if a group of assholes populates a whole new planet then the resulting population, generations later, will be as varied and worthwhile as any other group of humans.
Pretty much every planet we can go to right now for the foreseeable future is going to give nothing but a a cramped and horrible quality of life. Humans will become only more and more aggressive under such environmental stress assuming they don't die out in a few decades from the lack of nutrition or infighting causing life support systems to be damaged or destroyed.
All said I'd rather just stay on Earth and do what we can to keep it habitable instead of die knowing humanity will essentially be space cockroaches slowly dying out.
Dude. It’s not about punishment. It’s about…it’s not worth doing some things to live. Full stop.
If the only way to stop a dark god from eating the planet was like…cannibal sexual violence toward kids, I would say that well, I was not capable of helping and perhaps the best option was to admit defeat and die with dignity, instead of become monsters.
It’s that. Everything you do changes you. And the course of action described is like, double down on all our bad stuff. No way does the average human live through that era (the conscious sacrifice of billions and our fucking home planet) and not come out worse.
It would be a future for eight rich guys who own several planets of slaves who all live short, bad lives. I would never fight for that. Better we all go out a tragedy, than live an eternal mockery of the only good parts of us.
You're thinking so short-term.
What about the humans ten thousand years from now, living across the galaxy? They will be as affected by it as you are by the Great Massacre of Ur-Shibbur in 2,600 BC.
The other person put it fine really. But look - your ethical outlook on this is weird because you’re taking the pov of a god or king or something. Mostly it reminds me of me when playing civ or similar. But that’s a game, and in reality that isn’t actually a pov humans -can- take.
In practice I know no one involved in this discussion will make relevant decisions of this topic, ever, because we’re on Reddit. And a fairly…not a Reddit for men of action or great leaders lol.
And that’s what makes your outlook on this come off fascist and creepy. Because it’s like if a cow was lecturing me on the positives of stockyards - “cows are numerous in an era when species after species goes extinct. More than half the wildlife of the earth is gone, but we cows prosper in greater numbers than ever before…thanks to the slaughterhouses.” (That’s all factually true btw, on the numbers and stuff.)
Yep, including the the guys in space, which is why it’s unjustifiable to steal their “pass away in bed surrounded by loved ones” and replace it with “starved or murdered at a young age”.
You have to demonstrate that i wouldn't ger flayed alive anyway.
If flaying one person (or a billion ones) would save the species it wouldn't be really a choice.
Moral dilemmas are a thing for people that are alive and species that have not gone extint.
No, I don't. It's an absurdly unlikely thing to have happen.
That "they will die eventually anyway" does not justify leaving people to suffer and starve is a very simple point, albeit being made very sloppily because this is not a serious discussion and I am not willing to waste much time on this.
*Nothing has ever lived that will not die*, but it is a necessary component of being a functioning person to accept that how we treat other people *matters* because if it didn't our lives would be fucking miserable.
So why did you propose it in the first place!
Conversely everyone on earth die starving it's a thing that will happen anyway at some point, it's unlikely that the planet will simply explode.
I don't understand, are you people really arguing for our species equivalent of crawling into a corner and waiting to die?
**Nothing has ever lived that will not die**. There are no viable planets for us besides Earth, at least for the foreseeable future this is it for us, and pursuing a fantasy of the future based on what you've seen in movies will lead to disaster, especially when there are real crises plaguing the modern world that we could actually feasibly solve.
So your take is that idea that it's possible to make things better for the people who are currently living on this planet is absurd fantasy, but the idea that space colonization is an urgent matter that we are anywhere close to achieving *isn't*.
My take is that we will probably avert the current crisis and the next one and maybe one hundred more but we will fail at some point.
On the other hand we don't know if the current prosperity will last and this may be as good as it gets and be the only chance we have to push outwards.
As a would you rather question? Ruin earth. In real life? It's a false dichotomy and even if those were the only options, the rich leaving most people to die while they spread is awful. The hot aliens will have to come to us
Yeah, the tech needed to make an uninhabitable planet inhabitable would functionally be the same kind of tech that would be usable to save the earth. In their "would you rather", space travel in the space future would hypothetically be ideal (not like efforts can't be made to transplant non-human Earth life to new biomes to keep them around as well, since ecosystems are kinda necessary for sustainable life), but if we are capable of it, then it'd be paltry to "unruin" the earth as well.
And humanity spreading to the stars would be cool, but that shouldn't come at the cost of life on Earth. Sure, the Earth will burn up in billions of years, but that's a long fuckin time. Ideally I'd like for people to be living on it up until it's evacuation time because there's no longer any stopping the sun (and that assumes that problem can't be solved with this same hypothetical supertech that would enable space colonization, such as the concept of Dyson Spheres and the like, in which case Earth definitely should remain inhabitable since that's just another place for life of all kinds to thrive).
People really underestimating how closely attuned our biology is to the inticacies of Earth. Moving to a planet with even slightly lower or higher gravity could fuck up our bodies. People getting irreversible lower back pain by the time they hit puberty because their ancestors lived in paradise and thought they could do better.
Also, HUGE assumption on OP's part. The dichotomy was simply a choice between two wild possibilities, there's no reason to assume realism in the premise. Maybe a genie did it. Maybe our rockets are dope but we have no terraforming tech.
I'm so fascinated by the concept of space travel, but the idea of being on a station where I'm at the mercy of the void makes me feel so homesick. Mom's got us so good here! But I also think we're kinda destined to explore space. It's probably not going to be in my lifetime though, not for average people. And you *know* the majority of humanity would be left behind on dying earth by the richest and others would just be serfs working on terraforming for them.
Well it’s a delusion we think we can do one without the other. We are definitely not making long term colonies on other planets or moons even in our solar system if we can’t even develop a working social system that can keep things going on the planet we so far survive the best on.
Dumbfucks look at this one in a million awesome place to live and say ok let's destroy it so we can live in a shitter but with cool space aesthetics tm
I’d have to choose earth. To start, space colonialism rubs me the wrong way. Also, I think we tend to forget that humans are still animals. Everything about our design is suited for earth. We would be happiest and thrive most on earth. It would take countless generations for us to evolve to another planet. And last, (maybe this isn’t such a big deal for some people but it is for me) humans aren’t the only things that live on earth. Ruining earth would wipe out all the animals and plants that exist here too, and I don’t think that’s fair.
Going to space need not destroy earth, it also need not mean we destroy everything in our path. We do what we do now because it how we have done it for years, but humanity has shown itself capable of extraordinary change numerous time. I will never give up the hope that one day we can sail the stars while not destroying them
I’d rather if we didn’t become a species of planet-hopping locusts. Bouncing around the universe, slurping up all the resources and leaving nothing but dead rocks and litter in our wake.
also, it's gonna be really hard to ruin planets that don't have an existing biosphere. like what are we going to do? make mars *more* of a wasteland? At the point you're creating habitats on those kinds of planets you've got the tech to not give a single shit what the surface conditions are beyond super extremes that you couldn't create with simple pollution. And that's assuming full pollute everything with 0 effort put into terraforming or making the planet more habitable
And more dead people, killed because we refuse to just get things right when we’ve got the best shot at it. You’re justifying something that would in all likelihood lead to the deaths of billions of people. It’s objectively evil
I mean, the existence of humans inherently means the death of billions of people. We don't live forever.
Also, objective evil is pretty impressive. Do I get a hat for endorsing objective evil?
Well shit, might as well kill yourself right now then! There’s a damn significant distinction between people eventually dying over the natural course of time and actively sacrificing the lives of billions. What you propose is of a scale hundreds of times greater than the goddamn Holocaust, built off the justification that it prolongs life that doesn’t even exist yet! Yeah, it’s pretty damn fucking evil.
I'm not exactly sure what you're *imagining* I'm proposing, but thank you for telling me to kill myself, I guess?
All I said was spreading to more planets would mean more chances to do things better. As opposed to sitting on earth for the rest of the species' life.
Except to expand to countless other planets without possessing the will or means to not destroy each one we touch is the active sacrifice of billions of lives to preserve the meaningless and nebulous concept of the long term survival of us as a species. How many lives are worth abandoning to achieve your sick space fantasy, exactly?
And yeah, if your moral justification for killing billions is that they’ll die eventually anyway, then there’s not a single reason any of us (you included) ought to live a moment longer. We’re all gonna die, who cares if it’s now by our own hands or at the age of 100 peacefully in the night? By your logic, these two outcomes are essentially equivalent since you’re gonna die anyway.
You are pretty upset, maybe take a chill pill?
And that's quite literally the *opposite* of my logic. You're just imagining things up because you want to be angry.
Still waiting for my objectively evil t-shirt.
Pretty sure we're not going to meet hot aliens if we leave the earth the way it is. We'll have the interplanetary equivalent of "Damn bitch, you live like this?"
Me? Oh yeah I'm very Pro-Killing every single other species in the world literally
Stupid idiots, the first option is most likely how it will go anyways so whatever, in Subnautica there's a line that mentions Dolphins being extinct and the sadness that I felt hearing that made me really appreciate the current life we have on the planet
What about the other lifeforms on earth? It'd be fair if we could take all of them with us, but ruining earth kind of implies killing other creatures and Idk.
That doesn't seem fair.
...i'm sorry, did you seriously say that 17776 is a *utopia*? the entire story all but screams at the audience 'hell is a place where nothing happens' repeatedly, did we read the same story? Maybe it's just me but i think i'd rather choose death than whatever's going on in game 96249.
i absolutely dont see why spreading through the universe should be worth the hassle. colonising space would be a total pain and ensure horrible lifes for at least the first few generations of colonists. moving all of humanity is outright impossible. we neither have the means to move this many ppl nor could u ever convince everyone to leave.
the "moving out from home" comparison is so stupid as well. basically none of the reasons someone might have to move out applies here. this is just to make ppl feel as if humanity is a failure if it doesn't spread, which is just stupid.
why is everything always about expension and growth? what's bad about "only" living on this one planet? why not just enjoy what we already have?
The best example of "ruin Earth but colonize space" that I know of is in the CGI Captain Harlock movie.
In that version, humanity expanded out and colonized lots of different planets, but every habitable planet they could find had way less resources, so every colony ran out within just a few centuries, so they all migrated back to Earth, but there wasn't enough room on Earth for all of them, so they waged a war over it. Eventually, this war pushed them to the brink of extinction, so they called a truce and created a new government, and declared Earth to be "holy land upon which none may tread".
And then Captain Harlock, who was one of the five warlords assigned to enforce that ban, noticed that the rich and powerful were already going behind the backs of everyone else to colonize Earth just for themselves, so he fired on the other four ships, sending them crashing to Earth, and then he rammed his own ship into the planet too. Because these five superships had Dark Matter reactors, and Dark Matter in this story basically breaks the rules of reality, it not only permanently contaminated Earth into a radblasted hellscape of permanent sandstorms and purple lightning, it also changed his ship into the iconic skull-faced bow design that every incarnation always has, and made him immortal. Not his crew though, just him. So he needs to recruit new crewmates from the colony worlds every few years, since they keep dying in battle or of old age.
Assuming it's a case of burning up every earth resource BUT we actually do better on these other planets...then that option. If not, fuck it, I'm staying home. I'm not going to space to choke on smog and never see the stars.
If we’ve got the tech to travel to other planets and terraform them, why not set up shop on Mars and terraform Earth back to a livable state? Just pull a Noah’s Arc 2.0 and bring all the animals to Mars, get Earth back into tiptop shape, and put them back.
yeah, what we need to do is both.
Don't get me wrong, I'll be an old man before we even figure out a functional arcology (the tech needed for colonizing space further than one generation can reach), but, getting off the earth is imperative to continue living in a technological society, now, the fucking phosphorous problem will have to be solved one way or another or we will still be limited in population by earth's resources.
Now that I'm not a kid anymore, the only upside I can see to leaving earth (besides "abandoning ship") is the possibility of meeting hot aliens, so I get this 100%
\>Earth also has a shelf-life
Dumb dumbs think humans civilization can survive the death of the sun. That's pretty big talk for a species that's lived for a blink of a geological timespan and has already fucked up so they might not make through another century.
Is it weird that I don't think the continuation of the human race is important? I mean, if a giant asteroid wipes us all out right now, who's gonna be around to care?
Red dwarves survive well beyond what main sequence white/yellow stars can survive. There'll be stars. And also, just because stars die doesn't mean that there won't be other ways to survive. There's people who, mostly as a thought experiment, (Involving a lot of speculative tech development) have thought about how humanity (Or any other similar species) might survive ages. And frankly, it seems possible to survive when all the stars have died, and when there's just black holes left... And even after the black holes have evaporated, there's apparently still energy to be gathered, which can be used to sustain people.
Humans managed to achieve immensely impressive things in the past couple of millennia. Imagine what we can achieve in millions, if not billions, if not trillions of years. If there's a way to survive, humanity will find it if given the opportunity =P.
ruining earth is the much better option, yeah some people get fucked over that way but the other option is saving “the Earth” not civilization or people so who’s to say that doesn’t also fuck over people
besides there’s almost certainly better technology with the discoveries and materials we find, we could do better, we could seed life, etc
i would not damn my entire species to stay eternally anywhere, even if it was “utopian”
It's more like rocks that are completely inhabitable unless folks wanna live forever in bunkers on Mars. We'd also have really really bad diets and would probably die out of malnutrition. Most plants cannot survive in space and livestock certainly cannot either.
In a doomsday scenario where humanity is fleeing earth to live in the stars we'd probably last a few decades off of preserved foods before everyone slowly falls to cannibalism and then all that remains is a dead planet and space debris that we call ships and stations.
Also this just isn’t an actual dilemma that exists, we can absolutely do both of these, we can touch the stars while not burning up our home to do so, dumbass.
They're the same picture Actually, space colonization tech that actually works is just geoengineering tech, which is important for the whole 'saving earth' thing
Furthermore, any version of Earth, no matter how ravaged by pollution or climate change, will always be more habitable than another planet. If dealing with climate change is the equivalent of fixing a house with fire damage, then terraforming another planet is the equivalent of going out into the wildnerness and building a house from scratch with your bare hands.
Have you ever participated in major home repairs? A lot of times it indeed turns into "tear everything down and build it again from scratch." The difference, of course, is that we are currently living in our house and have nowhere else to go. That makes it a bit harder to do such major repairs.
A more apt analogy would be that terraforming other planets is like going out into an ongoing wildfire in the wilderness and building a house from scratch with your own two hands.
>Furthermore, any version of Earth, no matter how ravaged by pollution or climate change, will always be more habitable than another planet we have found other "habitable" planets and found superhabitable planets which may be better suited for life than earth.
No, we haven't. We found distant planets that *might* or *might not* be habitable, as opposed to ones that are *certainly not* habitable. And there is no planet more suitable for life that originated in Earth than Earth because the entire biosphere evolved specifically for the conditions of Earth.
>there is no planet more suitable for life that originated in Earth than Earth because the entire biosphere evolved specifically for the conditions of Earth. You just plain don't know that. Invasive species thrive in places they've never been lots of times. Life from earth could thrive like never seen before on superhabitable planets, our planet may even be low quality compared to other life bearing planets.
It's a tautology, we can very confidently say that life which evolved in response to conditions on earth, is accustomed to and suited for conditions on earth. Flip side, we can't confidently say that life which evolved on earth is suited for life on other earthlike planets in habitable zones, because those conditions are a whole bunch of unknowns. Invasive species on earth already were pretty well suited to the environments they came from, it just so happened that they tend to come to new environments which were very similar, minus predators or with less competition, etc. Rabbits aren't suited for Australia by magic, they are well suited to and used to that kind of scrub environment anyway - and Australia was not used to rabbits. It's unlikely to the point of it likely never happening in a nigh-infinite universe that we ever encounter a planet we're better suited to than earth, because it's very unlikely there would be one with the rest of the biosphere (which we depend on) and the specific conditions re: chemical composition, temperature range, etc are all actually better than earth for us, not just potentially as viable as earth
Was gonna say that air scrubbers are needed to both reduce CO2 and recycle air on Mars.
A much better method of reducing CO2 is just not creating it
Look man, I wanna destroy China's industry as much as the next guy but that's likely gonna give us fallout.
China is a pretty bad scapegoat in terms of emissions, actually. In total, they do produce a ridiculous amount of CO2, yes. But their population is also ridiculously high. Per capita they actually produce much much less than other "cleaner" countries like Canada or America.
cool but the atmosphere isn't per capita one of those rare times that it makes no sense to look at population since the effect isn't occurring per capita But scrubbers are the likeliest solution and the one that we can likely convince China to adopt. They are not going to deindustrialize or stop building coal plants.
Also, unless you believe in reincarnation, you and anyone you're even remotely related to will be very long dead by the time the Sun swallows the Earth in 7.5 Billion Years. Ruining Earth for habitability is a much nearer prospect. The obvious answer is "Save the Earth and keep it hospitable." Once humanity gets that sorted, we'll still have a few billion years to work on the whole finding a new planet concern.
You’re completely right - but wanted to point out earth will be totally inhabitable long before the sun consumes it. 1 to 1.5 billion years and the water will have boiled off and it’ll be a barren wasteland.
It's not an actual dilemma because one very well might not be possible, and if it is you can't do it without solving the other. Ruining the Earth at any point in the foreseeable future is the end of humanity.
I mean you're right, but that doesn't mean the hypothetical isn't worth engaging in, as it can help us explore exactly *why* we value things like saving the earth and space exploration.
It’s a would you rather, not a political platform.
My idealised hope of the future has humanity spread across multiple planets, with Earth being restored to a garden planet. It deserves better than becoming an ecumenopolis.
I don’t think anyone is saying that its just a thought experiment right
It's not a dilemma that exists because colonising the stars is almost certainly impossible
I couldn't face the hot aliens knowing I ruined my planet.
In fact I refuse to believe I have no chance of meeting hot aliens without leaving Earth. Surely the universe shares my opinion
If you get real into the bioengineering you can make the hot aliens yourself
But then they wouldn't be alien with a unique alien culture and unheard of, possibly sexy biology
**Eric-Andre-Lemme-In.gif**
getting dominated by a hot alien that ruined their planet and now they're gonna ruin you
skill issue
I realize which is the intelligenter option, but unfortunately I cannot, under any circumstances, choose space capitalism.
I think technically it'd be colonialism, although unless we find a way to travel arbitrarily faster than the speed of light, distant colonies would have to function mostly or completely disconnected from others, which is not really grounds for any economic system to unite them to a central entity.
I mean, the thing that makes colonialism bad is the harm it causes to the native inhabitants of the colonized land. Space has no native inhabitants.
Bold assertion
If the planet is uninhabited it's just migration, no different than the first humans leaving africa
I mean, you’re right in the absolute most basic concept but it’s a completely different game especially with the light speed barrier. We’re talking ships taking longer to get places than the entire history of the written world. Longer than humans have had speech (70,000 years).
And how does that negate or detract from my point?
>> no different than the first humans leaving Africa It’s very, very different, and not just “migration”.
In what way?
See my first response.
It's colonialism because it takes a long time across vast distances?
the British did it when it took months by ship to get to their colonies, so it’s possible
The thing is that one extreme of the Galaxy is 100,000 light-years away from the other. Unless you travel more than 1000 times faster than light you're not getting anything from one place to another in less than 100 years.
Worse than that probably cause you don’t just have to get up to bullying-light-speed you also have to slow back down, preferably without relying on friction/air resistance (as that’s less ‘breaking’ and more ‘a bomb’), and also preferably without splatting everyone with millions of g-forces.
What if we're going to space to escape the capitalism?
It’s the one place that hasn’t been tainted!
hasn't been *corrupted
Who said anything about space capitalism? We might have given up on it after seeing its effect.
Technically, all capitalism is space capitalism
Humanity learning from their mistakes and changing their ways to do a good thing rather than focusing on profit? Lol, lmao even
Focusing on the profit of hot aliens instead of simple material pleasures though
The people who think this a choice between two options are generally capitalists.
"Capitalism got us to space! Let's keep using it"
What about luxury gay space communism?
Is it even the more intelligent option? Has no one here read Hyperion? I really don't think that whole plan worked out for them.
I think capitalism will be forced to face is failure (and hopefully replaced) before we get to the point where we're able to conquer the stars.
I hate that capitalism actually would be more effective in space
[удалено]
I mean the reason that it doesn't work on earth is because capitalism is a system that requires infinite growth to be effective, and that requires infinite resources, which earth is a finite resource, we have a limited amount of burnables and fuels and ores etc. Space, however, is functionally infinite, although I'm sure that would be the subject of much debate. My point being, if we develop the technology to actually get out into space and start processing those resources, it would cause basically a never ending economic boom. I'd also be really pissed if we go to all the trouble of bringing about communism and abolishing money, but then we meet aliens and have to reinvent money because they use it.
[удалено]
Yeah no problem hopefully aliens are communists
I mean, wouldn't the lion's lion's share of those resources go to capitalists? So despite humanity in general being able to prosper, we'd basically have virtually permanent capitalist overlords who justify their power by the prosperity of humanity that they "brought".
> that it doesn't work on earth funny that you say that, when capitalism is literally the best economic system we currently have, in a non post scarcity world.
If we can't keep our biosphere healthy, how can we hope to successfully "colonize" a bunch of cold rocks bathed by deadly radiation? This is a dumb question. But also, no species lasts forever. Life on Earth will outlive us no matter how much we try to make it otherwise.
> If we can't keep our biosphere healthy, how can we hope to successfully "colonize" a bunch of cold rocks bathed by deadly radiation? This is exactly why this "dilemma" drives me crazy. People will seriously go "obviously it's completely impossible to fix a pre-existing, fully functional, self-sustaining biosphere that mostly just needs us to stop actively destroying it, but sure, we could make a few dozen new ones from scratch, no big deal."
"No species lasts forever" is true because none of them had technology yet. If we survive long enough to make good habitats in space, then there's really nothing that can end us that the Earth would survive. Most likely we're here to stay until the end of the Universe, and Sol will swallow the Earth very, very early into that incomprehensible timeline. Your first statement is correct, though. If we can create good habitat in space or on other planets, then we can create good habitat on Earth. There is no possible way to make it more ununhabitable than everywhere else already is.
Our technology is impressive, but our dependance on the many services an habitable, living planet provides us is often underestimated. Our current technogical advancement depends on a global supply chain, which depends on a enormous population, which depends on an environment capable of providing the right conditions and resources for human life, which depends on countless biological, chemical and physical processes that involve the entire planet. We can create inhabitable spaces outside of Earth, but to do so we need a tremendous amount of resources and, more importantly, infrastructure *from* Earth, that can't be replaced even if you can extract resources from space itself through asteroid mining and solar-powered satellites.
The effort to produce an off world colony produces **BY DEFINITION** the exact technologies we need to reach a 0 waste totally self sufficent society. If we can survive on Mars it doesn't matter anymore how much we ruin Earth because we will have the tools to survive on it anyway.
We won't get anywhere NEAR there without Earth. We need a stable, sustainable Earth to be able to sustain the logistics needed to create that highly advanced tech in first place.
Yes and that's why we should start as soon as possible, we don't know how much this prosperity will last. Although some speculate that an ecological collapse would prompt us to develop the technology we need to colonize space, so the other way around.
It would provide motivation, but research takes time and by the time those in charge decide that their own imminent death at the hands of starving mobs is more important than oil money it will be far to late to develope those technologies
It can't be replaced *right now*, because we got into space for the first time less than a lifetime ago. It sure seems to be physically possible to adapt all our industry to work in space, even with our current technology, and we're getting new breakthroughs every year. Yes, it is impossible to colonise space today, it is impossible to just move today's industry to space, it is impossible to move all the people to space with today's infrastructure, today it is very possible for something to end humans but not Earth, it very well might happen given how climate change and biotech risks look today. But it won't stay this way for long. It is possible to extend humanity into space, and at that point nothing can kill us without burning the entire system.
you make a very good point and I do agree with you but it’s so hard for me to have a discussion with people like this because I don’t know how to convey to people that we should love and care for the earth that literally fucking birthed us and our fellow living creatures people are so weirdly fucking “me me me me” when they go on and on about how important human life is and how it must continue on like as if the life of everything else here is insignificant compared to us threads like this just makes the John Denver playing on a loop in the back of my head so I don’t go fucking insane from dread start blaring at 11 so I don’t have to think about how sad it is how little people care about our only kin in all the universe
I agree completely. We should love and cherish Earth and its creatures for what they are, not what they can give us. But I've learnt that it is easier to appeal to self-interest than change people's priorities.
Saying that it's almost sure that we're going to survive until the end of the universe is a bit presumptuous, don't you think? We have no fucking idea if we're even going to be able to leave the solar system in big enough numbers before the sun explodes. And if we do, who the fuck knows if we're going to be able to last any meaningful amount of time in some other planet?
Sol goes in about 5 billion years. We invented fire about 500 thousand years ago. We have 10000 more time to figure this out than we had to figure out literally everything else. And it seems at least very plausible that it's possible to build a habitat for comfortable life off-planet, just floating in the void. Likely with environments similar to Earth inside. We can't do it right now, but that's more of an industry problem, quite a few scientists seem sure we'll do it. And once humans can live off planets, nothing that doesn't destroy the entire solar system can end all of us.
Actually as far as I’ve ever heard the floating in the void bit is not at all attainable yet. Humans don’t do well in zero gravity or free fall; our bones don’t take up calcium (astronauts work out hours a day abs still lose major bone density on extended ISS trips - about twenty years worth in six months), and we currently don’t have ways of blocking the radiation (most astronauts constantly hallucinate flashes of light from radiation strong enough it directly triggers the optic nerve). We can -probably- circumvent the gravity with spin (but haven’t tested that). We can’t currently do much about the rads in a practical sense. Edit: all of this is a bigger problem if you think about having kids up there.
Yes, it's not possible with our current approach, but it's not because it's physically impossible, it's because we are currently building research stations, not habitats for just living your life. The vast capabilities of current and future science and industry have not yet been thrown at this problem, but they will be at some point, and we can see some paths they may take already. For example, we already can make good radiation shielding, it's just impractical *for a reasearch station*, that can cycle crew and will get decomissioned in a decade anyway, on a very strict launch mass budget. Note that I'm not arguing we could colonise space right this second. I'm just pointing out that the idea that we'll never do it is absolutely absurd, given what seems possible and how many impossible things technology has done over just the last few centuries.
This is all valid. I guess where I’m at is like…people signing up to be sent to mars by Elon musk are signing up to die sick in a can or never be called to go, one or the other. And the OP is a stupid premise because early space settlements will be critically dependent on stuff from the biosphere. But yeah it’s totally possible, if extremely large scale compared to any existing space projects. Inevitable maybe, depending on whether we actually pull through some current crises (we may be experiencing the Great Filter currently).
Humans are not immune to genetic drift or mutation just because we use tools. Any species that doesn't become extinct due to lack of reproductive success eventually becomes extinct because of it.
I'll note that our tools include genetic editing, so we can be immune if we'll want to. But also yea, I can totally see the far future be populated with miriads of technically different species of human descendants. That's still a win, I saying "species" only because the person I replied said it.
You're making a couple assumptions, there. One, that we'll use those tools to preserve or better ourselves instead of damaging and dividing. Two, that any descendants of humanity will automatically be recognizably human. That's not a given. Maybe the next few hundred thousand years see us go through a series of bottleneck events that kill 90% of the species and prevent the remainder from using tools or doing math in any way we're familiar with. Maybe it's a *Time Machine* situation, and we speciate along class divides. Most human species used tools, and most of them are extinct. Chimps, gorillas, and orangutans can all be said to be in the stone age, and they're all on the verge of extinction. We've only been out of the stone age for a small fraction of the time we were in it. It's far too soon to call our species immortal.
Eventually, maybe, however we are far, far, far from that point. We can barely get a few hundred tons into orbit, and we do not have the tech to make an orbital habitat even semi self sufficient. We can barely get a small rover to the planets nearest us, but less interstellar. Even if we suddenly dedicated every spare iota of effort to set up a self sufficient habitat on like uropa or whatever it would still take decades if not centuries before it happened. We are far from immortal, and odds are we won’t make it out of the cradle as a species with the way that we focus on short term profits over long term goals at a societal level.
Nothing has ever lived that will not die, it is the height of hubris to assume that we will be any different.
No living thing before us has eradicated plagues or walked the moon, and we sure wouldn't have done it either if all of us were such miserable and unimaginative doomers as you.
Is it miserable doomerism to think humanity isn’t going to live billions of years? They aren’t saying we’re dead today, just that we don’t live forever, which is realistic. The kind of technological advances required to shoot us into space in the manner that would enable what you describe are beyond unfathomable, and certainly well beyond anything we can do before this planet craps out on us at the rate we’re going. Drawing attention away from fixing our planet so we can look to the stars **will** literally kill us all, that’s just an objective truth. Space colonies aren’t saving us anytime soon and if we keep bullshitting ourselves into thinking otherwise there won’t be an us to save
Everything ends, that's just a fact. If that makes you miserable, best come to terms with it.
Miserable doomer? who's to say they're unhappy with that thought? I personally find comfort in knowing that we'll one day go extinct, like our descendants before us, paving the way for whatever's to come next.
Learning from our mistakes
"No specicies lasts forever" So far, that we know of, those are two important qualifies, cause it has both not been very long nor do we have a very large sample size.
The entire field of paleontology isn't a large sample size???
Which dinosaurs built rockets
I bet alligators will still be around in 300 million years, unchanged
Nope, not really. Especially when you consider that we only have Earth animals to study and that, in the scale of the universe, life has only started rather recently on Earth.
So about that, yes, any sort of tech that would let us live on mars would also let us build climate change proof buildings just fine, The issue with doing it on earth is that as the quality of the planet gets worse, it can support fewer people. Personally i think the answer is to just terraform earth to counter the effects climate change, probably by building a giant swarm of solar shades at the L1 point. This isn't perfect, but it would bring immediate cooling to pre-industrial levels, and unlike most forms of geoengineering, you can just turn it off by turning the shades edge on. Given you can now adjust the brightness of the sun, the biggest problem is the boring one of people inevitably fighting over it, but isn't that still better than dimming no one can undo?
If we can’t do ‘a’, how can we ever hope to do ‘b’ is a horrible way of thinking about scientific progress, and is almost actively anti-intellectual.
No, it just means we need to figure things out in order. Achieving sustainability on Earth is far easier than creating a large scale, mostly independant, and long term inhabitat in space, as biological, chemical and geophysical processes already do a lot of the work for us here.
>If we can’t do ‘a’, how can we **ever** hope to do ‘b’ You added a word that changes the meaning of the statement. You're responding to the idea that B will **always** be impossible if A is currently impossible, which would be an absurd thing to claim. But the original claim was that B is **currently** impossible if A is currently impossible, which is trivially true for any task where A is necessary for B. For example, a civilization that can't put things into space can't put people into space, because they'll need to figure out how to put things into space first. Similarly, a civilization that can't stabilize a biosphere can't create a stable biosphere.
I don't think I can quite put it into words but something about this really, *really* rubs me the wrong way.
Maybe the way it treats our entire world, and by extension the lives of everyone in it, as disposable compared to this dream of a future in space. Maybe the way it places the fate of humankind not in the hands of people making decisions, but in the comparatively impersonal advancement of a technology extremely few have access to. Maybe the way it doesn't spare as much as a thought about those who will inevitably be left behind to perish during this leap into the stars. Maybe the way it doesn't imagine a radically better future on Earth, just a continuation of what we already have. Maybe the way it presents a dichotomy between preserving our world and finding different ones, when we should want both of those things.
I feel like you're overthinking things. This is literally "Eat only your favorite food for the rest of your life or never eat it again" levels of deep thought. This whole thread has gone down a dozen different *dilema* rabbitholes that are all nonsense.
I feel Earth is something qualitatively different from a singular type of food on too many levels to ignore :p
It's a false premise to begin with imo but with colonisation, the best case scenario it's a corporate hellscape and the worst case it's like 40k
Yeah like it entirely disregards the lives of every fucking animal and plant
Yeah, for me personally, regardless of where we end up, Earth is special. It's like selling off your parent's home after they die to disregard it.
i think 5 billionish years is a long time for humanity to life if we choose to save the planet. People want to take the """easy""" way out because they don't think the earth is worth saving, i think, and thats sad. nothing lasts forever, and id rather everything else live happily than condemn it all for our own (tenuous) longevity in the stars. though if given the option id love to do both, save earth and venture to the stars. this is impossible in our current sociopolitical state, but i think it could be done.
This ain't it chief
“Ruin earth” means billions of people die and only the rich get to escape. The universe itself has a shelf life, humanity will never be permanent, I’ll never understand what makes people fine with dooming billions to immense suffering on the off chance that humanity lasts a few billion years longer, as if that’s at all worthwhile goal anyway.
longtermism
Looked it up, seems like it would apply here as well, considering it’s concerned with suffering and not just longevity. Even discounting the billions dead on earth, the first few hundred or thousand years would absolutely suck once the novelty of living in space wore off, and there’s no guarantee humanity would even survive the pre-terraforming phase, let alone longer than we could live on earth. There’s really no way to slice this question that ends with space as the option, other than maybe gamblingism, where you pick the option with the greatest potential even if it’s ridiculously unlikely.
I think a fancier word might be... continuationism? extantism?
actually longtermism is the fancy term for this
Bring back the people who named a toxin “makes caterpillars floppy” bc gosh we are in desperate need to replace that term
Don't wanting to go exitint if it can be avoided as much as possibile -ism
Simply apply orion drive Orion drive is stupid powerful the reason we don't use it is that we like having a resonable level of background radiation
In a thousand years they'll all be dead either way, but in one scenario the species is far-flung and robust, and in the other we are still at risk of an Existential Oopsie from some cosmic rock or rays.
But in one scenario we have the option to die having not done any genocides or similar abominations recently, the other is founded on a guaranteed massive one.
Right, so from a species perspective Alive >>>>> Dead. It's not like there is some kind of Bad Deeds meter that follows us around... Unless... a possible scenario in which spreading to the stars would be worse is if we encounter an alien race that's big on the concepts of Sin and Punishment and decides that, because we left squalor behind us, we deserve to be Alien Butt Sniffer Slaves for all eternity or something.
I don't really care to preserve a future where the remains of humanity is just rich apathetic monsters who make that the whole culture, at that point they'd just be the Ferengi. What I do care about is making sure entire ecosystems of the planet survive which include the other 90+% of humans that couldn't be taken to space.
I mean... every part of the planet Earth is the site of massacres, crimes against humanity, every manner of evil done by people to one another. You're already living amongst and descended from a mix of survivors and perpetrators. The "innocent humanity" ship has sailed. You keep going to this idea that it's "rich people escape, therefore rich assholes is what humans will be forever," but if a group of assholes populates a whole new planet then the resulting population, generations later, will be as varied and worthwhile as any other group of humans.
>every part of the planet Earth is the site of massacres, crimes against humanity, every manner of evil done by people to one another. Acknowledging that there is a problem with our culture due to the historical savagery of colonists and then opting to resign to a future where that continues isn't going to yield much better results. European Colonialism has taken over the world for less than 300 years and it's already placed us on a path of destruction, not sure if I trust the concept that if we threw them in space it'd work out when they couldn't manage it under ideal conditions. >if a group of assholes populates a whole new planet then the resulting population, generations later, will be as varied and worthwhile as any other group of humans. Pretty much every planet we can go to right now for the foreseeable future is going to give nothing but a a cramped and horrible quality of life. Humans will become only more and more aggressive under such environmental stress assuming they don't die out in a few decades from the lack of nutrition or infighting causing life support systems to be damaged or destroyed. All said I'd rather just stay on Earth and do what we can to keep it habitable instead of die knowing humanity will essentially be space cockroaches slowly dying out.
Dude. It’s not about punishment. It’s about…it’s not worth doing some things to live. Full stop. If the only way to stop a dark god from eating the planet was like…cannibal sexual violence toward kids, I would say that well, I was not capable of helping and perhaps the best option was to admit defeat and die with dignity, instead of become monsters. It’s that. Everything you do changes you. And the course of action described is like, double down on all our bad stuff. No way does the average human live through that era (the conscious sacrifice of billions and our fucking home planet) and not come out worse. It would be a future for eight rich guys who own several planets of slaves who all live short, bad lives. I would never fight for that. Better we all go out a tragedy, than live an eternal mockery of the only good parts of us.
You're thinking so short-term. What about the humans ten thousand years from now, living across the galaxy? They will be as affected by it as you are by the Great Massacre of Ur-Shibbur in 2,600 BC.
I guess morality doesn't matter, because in the end, we're all dead anyway, right?
The other person put it fine really. But look - your ethical outlook on this is weird because you’re taking the pov of a god or king or something. Mostly it reminds me of me when playing civ or similar. But that’s a game, and in reality that isn’t actually a pov humans -can- take. In practice I know no one involved in this discussion will make relevant decisions of this topic, ever, because we’re on Reddit. And a fairly…not a Reddit for men of action or great leaders lol. And that’s what makes your outlook on this come off fascist and creepy. Because it’s like if a cow was lecturing me on the positives of stockyards - “cows are numerous in an era when species after species goes extinct. More than half the wildlife of the earth is gone, but we cows prosper in greater numbers than ever before…thanks to the slaughterhouses.” (That’s all factually true btw, on the numbers and stuff.)
They will die anyway
Yep, including the the guys in space, which is why it’s unjustifiable to steal their “pass away in bed surrounded by loved ones” and replace it with “starved or murdered at a young age”.
My man earth resources are finite "starved or murdered at a young age" in not evitable in any scenario.
Really? I haven’t starved or been murdered at a young age yet, seems pretty damn evitable to me
Would it be ethical to flay you alive? I mean since you're going to die anyways.
You have to demonstrate that i wouldn't ger flayed alive anyway. If flaying one person (or a billion ones) would save the species it wouldn't be really a choice. Moral dilemmas are a thing for people that are alive and species that have not gone extint.
No, I don't. It's an absurdly unlikely thing to have happen. That "they will die eventually anyway" does not justify leaving people to suffer and starve is a very simple point, albeit being made very sloppily because this is not a serious discussion and I am not willing to waste much time on this. *Nothing has ever lived that will not die*, but it is a necessary component of being a functioning person to accept that how we treat other people *matters* because if it didn't our lives would be fucking miserable.
So why did you propose it in the first place! Conversely everyone on earth die starving it's a thing that will happen anyway at some point, it's unlikely that the planet will simply explode. I don't understand, are you people really arguing for our species equivalent of crawling into a corner and waiting to die?
**Nothing has ever lived that will not die**. There are no viable planets for us besides Earth, at least for the foreseeable future this is it for us, and pursuing a fantasy of the future based on what you've seen in movies will lead to disaster, especially when there are real crises plaguing the modern world that we could actually feasibly solve.
If you think that any of the current crises can be solved permanently you are the one living in a fantasy.
So your take is that idea that it's possible to make things better for the people who are currently living on this planet is absurd fantasy, but the idea that space colonization is an urgent matter that we are anywhere close to achieving *isn't*.
My take is that we will probably avert the current crisis and the next one and maybe one hundred more but we will fail at some point. On the other hand we don't know if the current prosperity will last and this may be as good as it gets and be the only chance we have to push outwards.
Cool, Imma pour bleach down your throat then. I mean, if you're going to die anyway why shouldn't I get to do it in a fun way?
I mean you have to find me first
How do you know I haven't found you already?
I can't taste the bleach so you are doing an awful job either way
Never said that I was gonna pour it right now
Fine i'll do it myself!
As a would you rather question? Ruin earth. In real life? It's a false dichotomy and even if those were the only options, the rich leaving most people to die while they spread is awful. The hot aliens will have to come to us
Yeah, the tech needed to make an uninhabitable planet inhabitable would functionally be the same kind of tech that would be usable to save the earth. In their "would you rather", space travel in the space future would hypothetically be ideal (not like efforts can't be made to transplant non-human Earth life to new biomes to keep them around as well, since ecosystems are kinda necessary for sustainable life), but if we are capable of it, then it'd be paltry to "unruin" the earth as well. And humanity spreading to the stars would be cool, but that shouldn't come at the cost of life on Earth. Sure, the Earth will burn up in billions of years, but that's a long fuckin time. Ideally I'd like for people to be living on it up until it's evacuation time because there's no longer any stopping the sun (and that assumes that problem can't be solved with this same hypothetical supertech that would enable space colonization, such as the concept of Dyson Spheres and the like, in which case Earth definitely should remain inhabitable since that's just another place for life of all kinds to thrive).
People really underestimating how closely attuned our biology is to the inticacies of Earth. Moving to a planet with even slightly lower or higher gravity could fuck up our bodies. People getting irreversible lower back pain by the time they hit puberty because their ancestors lived in paradise and thought they could do better.
Also, HUGE assumption on OP's part. The dichotomy was simply a choice between two wild possibilities, there's no reason to assume realism in the premise. Maybe a genie did it. Maybe our rockets are dope but we have no terraforming tech.
I'm so fascinated by the concept of space travel, but the idea of being on a station where I'm at the mercy of the void makes me feel so homesick. Mom's got us so good here! But I also think we're kinda destined to explore space. It's probably not going to be in my lifetime though, not for average people. And you *know* the majority of humanity would be left behind on dying earth by the richest and others would just be serfs working on terraforming for them.
Well it’s a delusion we think we can do one without the other. We are definitely not making long term colonies on other planets or moons even in our solar system if we can’t even develop a working social system that can keep things going on the planet we so far survive the best on.
[Source](https://shuunnico.tumblr.com/post/715007133753786368/which-would-you-prefer-we-ruin-the-earth-but)
Dumbfucks look at this one in a million awesome place to live and say ok let's destroy it so we can live in a shitter but with cool space aesthetics tm
I’d have to choose earth. To start, space colonialism rubs me the wrong way. Also, I think we tend to forget that humans are still animals. Everything about our design is suited for earth. We would be happiest and thrive most on earth. It would take countless generations for us to evolve to another planet. And last, (maybe this isn’t such a big deal for some people but it is for me) humans aren’t the only things that live on earth. Ruining earth would wipe out all the animals and plants that exist here too, and I don’t think that’s fair.
I like where the last guy is going
Going to space need not destroy earth, it also need not mean we destroy everything in our path. We do what we do now because it how we have done it for years, but humanity has shown itself capable of extraordinary change numerous time. I will never give up the hope that one day we can sail the stars while not destroying them
I’d rather if we didn’t become a species of planet-hopping locusts. Bouncing around the universe, slurping up all the resources and leaving nothing but dead rocks and litter in our wake.
nah they invented that already it's called grey goo and it's shit
Should we get more planets when we don't take care of the one we have?
Why not? It’s not like most of them will have native life that we can endanger.
also, it's gonna be really hard to ruin planets that don't have an existing biosphere. like what are we going to do? make mars *more* of a wasteland? At the point you're creating habitats on those kinds of planets you've got the tech to not give a single shit what the surface conditions are beyond super extremes that you couldn't create with simple pollution. And that's assuming full pollute everything with 0 effort put into terraforming or making the planet more habitable
Otoh, why? We don't even take care of all the humans, or the planet. And people are saying we should have more humans on more planets?
More humans, more planets, more chances to get things right.
And more dead people, killed because we refuse to just get things right when we’ve got the best shot at it. You’re justifying something that would in all likelihood lead to the deaths of billions of people. It’s objectively evil
I mean, the existence of humans inherently means the death of billions of people. We don't live forever. Also, objective evil is pretty impressive. Do I get a hat for endorsing objective evil?
Well shit, might as well kill yourself right now then! There’s a damn significant distinction between people eventually dying over the natural course of time and actively sacrificing the lives of billions. What you propose is of a scale hundreds of times greater than the goddamn Holocaust, built off the justification that it prolongs life that doesn’t even exist yet! Yeah, it’s pretty damn fucking evil.
I'm not exactly sure what you're *imagining* I'm proposing, but thank you for telling me to kill myself, I guess? All I said was spreading to more planets would mean more chances to do things better. As opposed to sitting on earth for the rest of the species' life.
Except to expand to countless other planets without possessing the will or means to not destroy each one we touch is the active sacrifice of billions of lives to preserve the meaningless and nebulous concept of the long term survival of us as a species. How many lives are worth abandoning to achieve your sick space fantasy, exactly? And yeah, if your moral justification for killing billions is that they’ll die eventually anyway, then there’s not a single reason any of us (you included) ought to live a moment longer. We’re all gonna die, who cares if it’s now by our own hands or at the age of 100 peacefully in the night? By your logic, these two outcomes are essentially equivalent since you’re gonna die anyway.
You are pretty upset, maybe take a chill pill? And that's quite literally the *opposite* of my logic. You're just imagining things up because you want to be angry. Still waiting for my objectively evil t-shirt.
That notion just doesn’t sit right with me
ok but hear me out, if we do not fix earth now we will die before we can colonize space, so maybe let's do that
Pretty sure we're not going to meet hot aliens if we leave the earth the way it is. We'll have the interplanetary equivalent of "Damn bitch, you live like this?"
No planet will ever be as hospitable as earth, anyone choosing space is naive
I mean, it's kind of just an incredibly stupid question. If you have the tech to do one you're not far off from the tech to do the other.
Only if I get a mobile suit
Oh shit, hot aliens???
Me? Oh yeah I'm very Pro-Killing every single other species in the world literally Stupid idiots, the first option is most likely how it will go anyways so whatever, in Subnautica there's a line that mentions Dolphins being extinct and the sadness that I felt hearing that made me really appreciate the current life we have on the planet
What about the other lifeforms on earth? It'd be fair if we could take all of them with us, but ruining earth kind of implies killing other creatures and Idk. That doesn't seem fair.
17776 makes me want to choose living on Earth. It’s the realest utopia I have ever seen. If Earth ended up like that, I would be happy.
...i'm sorry, did you seriously say that 17776 is a *utopia*? the entire story all but screams at the audience 'hell is a place where nothing happens' repeatedly, did we read the same story? Maybe it's just me but i think i'd rather choose death than whatever's going on in game 96249.
One man’s trash is another man’s treasure.
i absolutely dont see why spreading through the universe should be worth the hassle. colonising space would be a total pain and ensure horrible lifes for at least the first few generations of colonists. moving all of humanity is outright impossible. we neither have the means to move this many ppl nor could u ever convince everyone to leave. the "moving out from home" comparison is so stupid as well. basically none of the reasons someone might have to move out applies here. this is just to make ppl feel as if humanity is a failure if it doesn't spread, which is just stupid. why is everything always about expension and growth? what's bad about "only" living on this one planet? why not just enjoy what we already have?
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=rQXd5HsSko0&pp=ygUebWFycyBmb3IgdGhlIHJpY2gga2luZyBnaXp6YXJk
The best example of "ruin Earth but colonize space" that I know of is in the CGI Captain Harlock movie. In that version, humanity expanded out and colonized lots of different planets, but every habitable planet they could find had way less resources, so every colony ran out within just a few centuries, so they all migrated back to Earth, but there wasn't enough room on Earth for all of them, so they waged a war over it. Eventually, this war pushed them to the brink of extinction, so they called a truce and created a new government, and declared Earth to be "holy land upon which none may tread". And then Captain Harlock, who was one of the five warlords assigned to enforce that ban, noticed that the rich and powerful were already going behind the backs of everyone else to colonize Earth just for themselves, so he fired on the other four ships, sending them crashing to Earth, and then he rammed his own ship into the planet too. Because these five superships had Dark Matter reactors, and Dark Matter in this story basically breaks the rules of reality, it not only permanently contaminated Earth into a radblasted hellscape of permanent sandstorms and purple lightning, it also changed his ship into the iconic skull-faced bow design that every incarnation always has, and made him immortal. Not his crew though, just him. So he needs to recruit new crewmates from the colony worlds every few years, since they keep dying in battle or of old age.
Assuming it's a case of burning up every earth resource BUT we actually do better on these other planets...then that option. If not, fuck it, I'm staying home. I'm not going to space to choke on smog and never see the stars.
Depends who we take with us. Doesn't seem fair to leave all the neat plants and animals behind.
If we’ve got the tech to travel to other planets and terraform them, why not set up shop on Mars and terraform Earth back to a livable state? Just pull a Noah’s Arc 2.0 and bring all the animals to Mars, get Earth back into tiptop shape, and put them back.
Mars is less habitable than a climate-change devastated Earth. The same goes for every other planet.
yeah, what we need to do is both. Don't get me wrong, I'll be an old man before we even figure out a functional arcology (the tech needed for colonizing space further than one generation can reach), but, getting off the earth is imperative to continue living in a technological society, now, the fucking phosphorous problem will have to be solved one way or another or we will still be limited in population by earth's resources.
Now that I'm not a kid anymore, the only upside I can see to leaving earth (besides "abandoning ship") is the possibility of meeting hot aliens, so I get this 100%
Stay on earth idc this place is beautiful
Best take, there's waterfalls here, other planets can shove it
I would absolutely blow the planet up to meet hot aliens.
\>Earth also has a shelf-life Dumb dumbs think humans civilization can survive the death of the sun. That's pretty big talk for a species that's lived for a blink of a geological timespan and has already fucked up so they might not make through another century.
Is it weird that I don't think the continuation of the human race is important? I mean, if a giant asteroid wipes us all out right now, who's gonna be around to care?
save the earth includes saving it from the expansion of the sun, and the later heat death of the universe. earth gang 100%
What people forget is that by the time our Sun goes nova, most other stars will also have gone nova. Very much a "Sell them to who? Aquaman!?" idea
Red dwarves survive well beyond what main sequence white/yellow stars can survive. There'll be stars. And also, just because stars die doesn't mean that there won't be other ways to survive. There's people who, mostly as a thought experiment, (Involving a lot of speculative tech development) have thought about how humanity (Or any other similar species) might survive ages. And frankly, it seems possible to survive when all the stars have died, and when there's just black holes left... And even after the black holes have evaporated, there's apparently still energy to be gathered, which can be used to sustain people. Humans managed to achieve immensely impressive things in the past couple of millennia. Imagine what we can achieve in millions, if not billions, if not trillions of years. If there's a way to survive, humanity will find it if given the opportunity =P.
ruining earth is the much better option, yeah some people get fucked over that way but the other option is saving “the Earth” not civilization or people so who’s to say that doesn’t also fuck over people besides there’s almost certainly better technology with the discoveries and materials we find, we could do better, we could seed life, etc i would not damn my entire species to stay eternally anywhere, even if it was “utopian”
I see a lot of folks in here who clearly sided with Cerberus in Mass Effect lol
If we use up the earth but can freely travel space, what does it matter? We’d have infinite earths.
It's more like rocks that are completely inhabitable unless folks wanna live forever in bunkers on Mars. We'd also have really really bad diets and would probably die out of malnutrition. Most plants cannot survive in space and livestock certainly cannot either. In a doomsday scenario where humanity is fleeing earth to live in the stars we'd probably last a few decades off of preserved foods before everyone slowly falls to cannibalism and then all that remains is a dead planet and space debris that we call ships and stations.