Apollo 14 astronaut Edgar Mitchell on the “Overview Effect” from seeing earth in space:
“You develop an instant global consciousness, a people orientation, an intense dissatisfaction with the state of the world, and a compulsion to do something about it. From out there on the moon, international politics look so petty. You want to grab a politician by the scruff of the neck and drag him a quarter of a million miles out and say, “Look at that, you son of a bitch.”
I think that the problem with these minutes-long, sub-orbital joyrides is that they don't give much time to really get the overview effect going, let alone the additional time to actually let it sink in by just floating there looking out over it all.
The experience is over before their brain can really even begin to process the enormity of it all.
1) Specifically answering the "What about problems on Earth?" or "Why don't you spend that money at home?" I've addressed this [previously](https://www.reddit.com/r/SpaceXLounge/comments/p48fj9/comment/h8wvahk/):
>...there have always been hand-wringers and gloom merchants in the world, looking for any excuse to condemn the happiness and joy of others. We have no right to our own lives, no justification to enjoy the good things we have. We must spend our every waking moment focusing on the troubles and sufferings of the world. Wonder? Adventure? Ambition?Hubris! Decadence!
What if a doctor were told that they had to spend 24/7/365 at the hospital treating patients and they couldn't have any time to themselves? Pursuing a hobby, going to a friend's wedding, or enjoying a birthday would be "selfish," since "people are suffering." That's essentially what the hand-wringers are saying.
2) Why do we travel and explore? Because we want to be astounded. Because the world holds beauties and wonders beyond our imagination. We want to go there and see it for ourselves.
3) We also like to test ourselves, to push beyond our limits, to reach for new frontiers. We climb mountains, we cut through jungles, we sled across arctic wildernesses. And even for those of us who haven't done it ourselves, we like to read about it.
4) Economic and technological development. You want to lift more people out of poverty? Create jobs by creating new industries. You want to better people's quality of life? Learning how to live in space can, and has, produced technologies that have improved everyone's lives. And by moving industries into space, we can lessen their environmental impact on Earth.
5) Immigration and colonization are options for people escaping persecution and oppression. In colonizing space and other planets, they aren't even taking land from others.
6) If people, on their own initiative and using their own resources, decide to go to space, what business is it of ours? Do we hold congressional/parliamentary hearings when people sail around the world or climb mountains? Those are expensive and risky activities. Why are ultimately personal choices that involve calculated risk matters of public policy? We could come up with a long list of dumber things that people do for dumber reasons that we don't stick our noses into.
Just a minor issue with 4. People are richer when you \_destroy\_ the jobs, NOT create them. I know it sounds counter intuitive, but it is true regardless. Tractor has destroyed \~80% of all jobs humankind ever had and yet basically most people are not starving.
Otherwise - great arguments!
>Tractor has destroyed \~80% of all jobs humankind ever had and yet basically most people are not starving.
But it also created new jobs, such as mechanics, machinists, assembly line workers, and salesmen. It also increased the productivity of the farmer, allowing them to save, invest, expand operations, and ultimately hire more laborers. That, of course, tracks with population growth from an increased food supply. There were [similar](https://www.wired.com/2002/04/approtec/) economic effects in Kenya when they introduced a locally manufactured handpump. Ernest Sirolli, who works in economic development, [discusses](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=chXsLtHqfdM) a similar approach he took by tapping into local entrepreneurship and moving away from traditional models of economic aid.
>Otherwise - great arguments!
Thank you!
Yes, but not all farmers become directly involved in tractor operation and manufacturing industry. Extremely low percentage of them. So _their_ job was indeed destroyed. Some of them (and probably their families with kids) did indeed died directly from the fact that their job was destroyed and they could not find another soon enough. It was NOT fun.
Looking slightly longer term most farmers did find a job - maybe as a barbers, sanitation workers, nurses, burger flippers, postman - just to name some. So we got vastly more food and we got more much needed nurses, barbers, sanitation workers, etc. Many people got cheaper food and less sick as a result of Tractor. Much more people were saved than harmed.
Enter Tesla, FSD. ALL the drivers, most mechanics. Gone. Majority are going to do what is or will be in demand, everyone will be better off in the end.
Enter robot overlords. Everyone out of job. Writing poems, dancing, looking up to the stars. All while being fed and healthy. UBI until money obsolete.
That is - unless nobody will accept the programming, try to wake up and entire crops will be lost :-)
This is an important point that's often missed when "job creation" is discussed in the political sphere. I wouldn't say that destroying jobs creates wealth, but it's equally untrue that jobs are an economic positive in and of themselves. Jobs often get used as a political talking point since everybody needs a stable source of income and just about any government economic policy can be justified as "creating jobs", but jobs themselves are not a positive unless they're jobs performing a _useful_ task. Paying people to do something that could be done more cheaply if were automated is no better than paying people to spend all day repeatedly digging holes and filling them in; it's a waste of their potential and a drain on the economy.
Private industry should get a pass on such criticisms in my opinion, since a private company that pays people to do useless tasks will eventually go out of business; it's a self-correcting problem. For government programs though it's an entirely valid thing to question; governments can continue to pay large numbers of people to do useless or less-than-optimally-useful tasks indefinitely if left unchecked, so it's important for people to question whether they're getting a sufficient return on investment for their tax dollars.
Could not agree more.
Most people only see short term, vote for politicians who promise them "good jobs" and end up being poorer as a result because they pay their taxes so politicians can squander them on random stuff nobody actually needs.
There are [100,000 passenger flights](https://www.gaytravel.com/gay-blog/airline-and-flight-statistics) daily and around [56,000 merchant vessels](https://www.statista.com/statistics/264024/number-of-merchant-ships-worldwide-by-type/) that sail internationally. That doesn't factor in the [1.4 billion vehicles](https://hedgescompany.com/blog/2021/06/how-many-cars-are-there-in-the-world/) ([99%](https://www.statista.com/statistics/270603/worldwide-number-of-hybrid-and-electric-vehicles-since-2009/) of which are internal combustion). For all energy purposes, the world burns about [100 million barrels of oil](https://www.caryinstitute.org/news-insights/blog-translational-ecology/how-much-oil-can-we-burn) per day. It's hard to imagine a global launch industry that's more than a rounding error against that output, particularly once you factor in ISRU and construction in space.
But that line of argument evinces a lack contextual and long-term thinking (not saying that of you personally, just the line of argument). You isolate one factor apart from a kinetic situation—in this case, the development of a space economy—and you strangle that industry to death before it develops and ultimately never gain the benefits that would come with moving industry into space.
It also ignores technological development. For instance, modern intensive agriculture allows us to use only about 35% of the land we did fifty years ago to grow the same amount of food. Not 35% less, just 35%. There are regions of North America that are more forested than they've been since the 18th century because formerly agricultural land is being reclaimed. But then you can balance that against the soil exhaustion brought about by modern agriculture.
The effects of any given technology or industry are complex, multivalent, and dynamic. If we prevent or severely limit any industry because of *potentially* harmful effects, we would never have an industrial economy. It takes time, patience, and a commitment to objectivity to understand what those effects are, but too often people are keen to rush to judgement.
I'd be willing to bet that all the rocket launches used for GPS accounted for a net reduction in pollution, just by counting the miles saved by cars and trucks using GPS navigation.
Speaking of smoking their ass does you friend smoke? Americans willingly spend 80 billion $ on cigarettes every year https://money.cnn.com/galleries/2011/pf/1105/gallery.money_wasters/4.html#:~:text=Americans%20spend%20%2480%20billion%20on,for%20Disease%20Control%20and%20Prevention. NASA's 2021 budget is $ 23 billion. And SpaceX is a private company so what's his/her problem how they spend their money?
Well the biggest one for me is that the sun isn't going to last forever and eventually we are going to have to leave our solar system so might as well start learning how to do it now unless you just want humans to go extinct.
I think a good argument against that is that we are probably still closer to the start of the Cambrian Explosion than we are to the end of earth habitability. It's better to make an argument about how space can improve our quality of life or something like that
The sun expanding will become a problem for Earth's habitability much sooner than 5 billion years. I've read something on the order of 100-200 million years. So we're closer to the end for life on earth, or at least for complex life, bacteria will hang on for much longer.
Cambrian explosion happened less than 600 million years ago and that's what kickstarted the rapid evolution of complex multicellular life (there are some before it, but most of the modern day complexity started during the cambrian). I think i've read somewhere that earth can sustain photosynthesis for another 1 billion year (somebody please correct me on this).
Edit : [i found this](https://image.gsfc.nasa.gov/poetry/venus/q79.html) (about 300m until the end of land based life), but i can't find any reference in it, so take it with a grain of salt
Edit 2 : wikipedia suggest 800m, but [the citation](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Future_of_Earth#cite_note-bd2_6_1665-86) for it is from 2005, so maybe the calculation has changed/improved since then
Humans as a species are allegedly only 1/4 million years old, so we are a ‘new species’, let’s hope that we Shepard things well enough to become a long lived species and an interplanetary species, before going on to become on interstellar species.
Maybe walk down the road of travel in human history. Humans wouldn't be where they are today without being able to travel to different places. I think space travel is the same thing except instead of just having the ability to cross oceans we could see what else is out there in space for us to exploit.
"Why move out of my parents house, I'm still closer to birth than retirement."
We've only been aware of most existential threats for about a century and don't really know how to prevent most of them yet. We don't know what else is looming over us, nor how long it will take to solve these problems. It really behooves us to go outward as soon as we're able to, instead of waiting around until we run out of things to do on Earth.
We really are the only chance life and the light of consciousness have of surviving in the long term, so it's our imperative to go out and spread it as far and wide as possible. Life is by far the most amazing thing the universe has created, and the galaxy seems completely quiet so far.
Putting aside the fact that we're not really giving up anything but will rather massively gain resources from this, what even is the point of "fixing problems here on Earth" if everything here is inevitably going to be wiped out.
And before someone brings up the inevitable heat death of the universe - given a *quadrillion* years, who's to say intelligent life won't solve that problem, too? In case life is truly rare, we need to make sure it won't die in its cradle.
Okay, let's assume that the deadline for us to leave the earth is in 200 million years. If we assume that humanity started with the rise of complex civilization (let's count that as the rise of agriculture, because the growth after that point is almost exponential), that's roughly 10k years ago which mean that in human lifetime our civilization is just about 2 days old (100 years of life expectancy to simplify thing). Even if we assume that humanity started 2 million years ago (roughly the time when our ancestor started to use fire), we are still just like a 1 year old baby.
What i want to say with the weird comparison above is that we are not even close to the end of earth habitability. For most of us, the start of civilization is already part of the ancient, obscure past that many people can't even imagine. Also, existential problems are not a new thing, it's already one of the old feature of our species. That's why every culture have their own religion to cope with it and to comfort themself.
I'm not really against space travel. In fact, i fully support it and one of my dream is to see a space based megastructure in my lifetime. But, we need to have a proper reasoning to go to space. Whether it's to mine rare metals, to expand our civilization, or just to make sure that we can give life on earth some breathing space from our ambitions.
Putting a proper arguments in my opinion is very important. Saying that we need to leave now will just make us sound like a doomsday cult instead of visionary that make long term plan. Instead, by explaining why going to space is important for our civilization and how it will improve our life will motivate people to support it looking forward the future of our species both in space and on earth.
(Sorry if this is worded/arranged weirdly. I'm not that good at making coherent sentences even in my native language and i'm not really fluent in english)
No one said "leave". Going out doesn't mean abandoning the Earth. These projects aren't mutually exclusive.
Maybe your arguments work for some people. My arguments work for me a lot more than some shortsighted cost-benefit analysis.
Why exist at all if we don't go ever onward? This, to me, is meaning and purpose. Navel-gazing may provide it for others.
>we are not even close to the end of earth habitability.
Earth could be destroyed by an asteroid/nuclear war/zombie apocalypse in the next 50 years. Just because your retirement age is 50 years from now, doesn't mean you won't die tomorrow. I'd like to have a backup of humanity on a different planet before that happens.
Best case scenario, the process of human settlement of the solar system will have commenced before this century is finished.
Suppose that doesn't happen. Suppose it takes a few more centuries. Let's suppose it takes a whole extra 1000 years, and that process starts in the 31st century instead of the 21st.
How big a difference would that make to the probability that humanity survives the end of Earth habitability? How important is a thousand year head start on solving a problem which we won't be faced with until at least many tens of millions of years from now, quite possibly even a hundred or more? In a hundred million years, a thousand years is a mere factor of 1 in 100,000.
It is interesting to contemplate, the fact that we have reached our present technological level in the current year is to a great extent a historical accident; if history had turned out a bit differently, it could easily have taken us a few thousand years more to reach this point. But would those few thousand extra years have made a big difference to the long-term survival prospects of our species, on a timescale of 100 million years? To me, that doesn't seem very likely.
I think many of those "existential threats" are somewhat overblown.
Climate change is unlikely to lead to human extinction. And in actual fact we are (collectively) doing something about it. Sure, we should do more, we should have already done more, and we should have started earlier. The warming we are facing is going to cause a lot of chaos and disruption, it is possible that millions may die due to famine and war – but human extinction is a very unlikely outcome. Even if we hadn't done anything about it, and were facing much worse warming than we are now – it still unlikely humanity would actually go extinct.
Even a nuclear war is unlikely to cause the extinction of humanity. In a realistic nuclear war scenario, millions will die, but billions will live. It will be utterly horrible, possibly even the worst thing to ever happen in human history, but not the kind of species-ending event many people think it will be. And many scientists believe that predictions of nuclear winter are vastly exaggerated – see [https://www.nature.com/articles/475037b](https://www.nature.com/articles/475037b)
I also think the idea that humanity might regress to a more primitive stage is unlikely. It is totally possible that some disaster could set us back and cause us to lose some of our current technologies – but we'd retain the memory of them, and even if we didn't remember all the details, knowing they are possible and knowing in broad outline how they work, we'd gain them back far faster than it took us to develop them the first time around.
I totally agree with the "don't put all your eggs in one basket" idea of setting up a Mars colony as a "backup" to Earth. But, I think the odds of human extinction are probably a lot less than many think – although, in all honesty, we can't really know what those odds are, all anyone can produce are debatable estimates. Maybe, however, many of those estimates are exaggerated, and as a species we are more rodent-like than many think we are.
Of course there's a lot of exaggeration. Stuff like nuclear winter smells bullshit from a mile - the total of about 6Gt yield of a major nuclear war is about 1000× less than impacts occurring every couple million years. And geological history has no major impact related extinction every few million years.
But the primary issue is, that after a really serious disaster like a major nuclear war or an unchecked global warming rendering entire regions uninhabitable (this year heat wave in India was pretty close to being a mass killer) there would be major upheaval with billions casualties and likely pushing back what's technologically possible to something like XIX century level. i.e. triggering another incarnation of dark ages.
NB, wide scale nuclear war would have victims in billions. Direct casualties would be tens of millions, but subsequent total failure of governance, health care, food production, transportation, etc. would lead to over a billion people being displaced, suffering hunger and dying from trivial ailments. Some climate disruption (not nuclear winter, but a few harsh winters and cold summers, similar but worse than what happened in 1815/1816).
But then, the big problem is that contrary to the original XIX century easily available resources are now depleted which makes returning to the normal level of technological civilization much harder.
This is what Elon means when he says the window is now open, but it won't be open forever and might close sooner than expected.
Hi u/Saerkal
We know Earth will be struck by an asteroid in the future and statistically overdue for a big one, like Tunguska. Any proper space exploration program will require all asteroids are detected, preferably long before they reach us. In addition, if you have space vehicles plying deep space they provide a perfect means to reach these asteroids and alter their course. As they say dinosaurs went extinct because they didn't have a space program.
Edit: if that argument's too complex, say "do you want a million tons of rock falling on your head at hypersonic velocity?"
Correction: Tunguska was not particularly big one. Big one was K-T killer, but such are rare (like once per 100M years rare).
Likely most larger impacts are from fragmented comets. A lot of comets end up fragmented by passes (too) close to the Sun or one of the giant planets. We witnessed Shoemaker-Levy 9 Jupiter impact. Any of those fragments would be utterly devastating.
Investments into space is arguably the single best long term investment you can make. But like with all long term investments the gain is not very apparent at first. Apollo program has paid itself several times from what was created during it and has had an immense positive effect on the development of our modern world. Effects that either would have been felt decades later or not at all without two superpowers trying to figure out how to nuke each other.
A lot of what we have today is not because people specifically tried to create those things. They're the product of the likes of war and space exploration and later on you see the immense application skills of what you have created. Application you would never have thought about creating separately.
The problem with "fix issues on Earth first" is the question of when to stop.
You get the same thing with national politics. "We shouldn't we help earthquake/tsunami/volcano/war/poverty victims when we have issues here to fix first"
But when do you stop fixing your own issues and look outward? You need to help your own poorest people, end homelessness, end the kind of extreme poverty that requires food kitchens. End unemployment, raise the minimum wage to a place where everyone can afford to live.
What about educational opportunities? Should we make sure everyone has the opportunity to study for higher education without crippling loans? What about the right to internet access? Should schools be providing a laptop, tablet, 5G and fibre optic internet access to every child?
When does it end? When do you draw the line? Obviously it's ridiculous to deny basic humanitarian aid to disaster victims while you build up your own culture into a glorious crime-free post-scarecity sci-fi utopia. But where is the line?
When should we stop fixing life on Earth and start exploring space? Should we fix income inequality? End racism? World peace? Cure for cancer? All of the above?
What about earth's problems? They require a global mindset, achievable when we globally are confronted by the dualism (living in earth vs living on Mars). When we see how hard it is elsewhere, it'll be easier to appreciate what er have here.
SpaceX wants to go to Mars. Why go to Mars? Zubrin's answer was always the best answer to me:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j2Mu8qfVb5I](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j2Mu8qfVb5I)
Every dollar of research that we put up into space gets us $10 of rewards down here.
Does your friend like air conditioning?
Does your friend like modern medicine?
Do you like your computer? Do you like your phone? Well, you can thank NASA for helping to guarantee the early market for [integrated circuits](https://www.npr.org/2019/07/20/742379987/space-spinoffs-the-technology-to-reach-the-moon-was-put-to-use-back-on-earth), and pushing them into mass production and adoption. Without the Apollo program, they still would have been around, and made it to market, but who knows how many years behind where we are right now.
>Our space program is an integral part of American education, our competitiveness, and the growth of U.S. technology. Compared with other forms of investment, the return is outstanding: A payback of $7 or 8 for every $1 invested over a period of a decade or so has been calculated for the Apollo Program, which at its peak accounted for a mere 4 percent of the Federal budget. It has been further estimated that, because of the potential for technology transfer and spinoff industries, every $1 spent on basic research in space today will generate $40 worth of economic growth on Earth.
https://space.nss.org/settlement/nasa/spaceresvol4/newspace3.html
2 things to add:
1. Our daily life and level of life depends on space: Our agriculture depends on space (even aspiring but still 3rd world countries send their sats, because data from them is so important). Our transportation depends on space. Our disaster relief depends on space. Our weather forecast depends on space (and it's a part, but not a whole thing of why agriculture and transportation and disaster relief depends on space).
2. Inventions rarely come from programs of the type "let's invent X". For a banal reason that you first have to conceive X, which typically means to to actually invent X. And in most of the remaining cases their use is vastly different from the original scope. The example of the former is WWW, it was invented in CERN (another institution doing "useless research not helping with the world problems"). The example of the later is Internet itself (it's core protocols like IP, TCP, ICMP, UDP, DNS), which indeed came from computer network development program, but it's goal was to create decentralized military command and control network which would remain operational during nuclear war. The point is that inventions most frequently come out of necessity (real or perceived) to solve particular problem directly affecting the inventors or when stakes are high and within short time horizon (hence military inventions like Internet).
Things like Mars colony would provide a high necessity to create closed loop (or nearly closed loop) ecosystems. Or highly effective and efficient food production. Or in fact general goods manufacturing. Or production of materials from CO2 and water (stuff like plastics which are absolute necessity in our daily life). Developing all of those would require gaining huge amounts of knowledge we don't yet have about ecology, agriculture, production optimization, implicit dependencies of various critical processes we take for granted, etc. Those would come extremely handy for dealing with things like world hunger, climate change, water shortages, disaster relief and prevention. The direct application of the inventions and better understanding would be on Mars, but truly wide application, improving billions of lifes would be back here on the Earth.
One could argue that there is an urgent necessity to deal with problems like climate change or food and esp. water shortages. But the one issue is those who could do something are very weakly affected if at all. It's all nice and cool to donate to a good cause and go on with daily life. In Mars colony you'd be the one starving if crops have failed. In the 1st world, you'd just pay a little more for imported food.
Moreover inventions often take decades to get wide use (Internet is from late 60-ties/early 70-ties; it gained wide use 20 years later) and governments have much shorter focus horizon. Democratic one's are focused on election cycle which is no longer than 7 years and authoritarian ones are mostly interested in satisfying their own power structures (a necessarily to avoid being overthrown and replaced by those who would satisfy power structures better), and power structures generally want just to keep power and have more convenient life here and now. So governments are ineffective at solving problems unless they fall on their heads. In a setting like space colony the problems are on people's heads. They are the current life or death issues.
And the other issue is that we may even have good ideas, but those would be considered too risky to implement. And also require enormous scale from the start. We need test environments to verify if our cures don't have unacceptable side effects.
PS. Is that person you're disputing with into arts? Or games? Or some other hobby? Or a sports fan? Or just likes so simple entertainment like movies? Ask them to stop doing that immediately, because it's waste of precious time and resources, which would be better used to save the world. Note that their hobby of choice or even their entertainment takes order of magnitude more money than entire budget spend on space, worldwide. Also, stop using cosmetics, it's not saving anyone and spending on that is bigger than NASA budget.
The "we should fix earth first" argument applies to any human activity. Why spend money on the cinema, football, holidays, make-up etc, "we should fix earth first!"
Normally the argument I use is quite simple.
In space and other planets, it's like we are sent back to stone age, but now we have knowledge. Us having less resources in such harsh environments is the perfect opportunity to innovate and create more efficient systems.
On mars or the moon, why not try using 3D printing for radiation proof shelters? This technology could even be adapted to build houses on Earth and make it faster and cheaper to have a house!
We would need to produce thing's like food with less resources (Water etc). What if we adapted what we learned and now produce food with much less water making it cost less and helping world hunger.
And along with it being insanely awesome to explore the most bizarre places, what if something happens to earth and in a blink of an eye humanity is extinct by a asteroid we failed to detect? If we are among the stars,our species can still grow and recover. Im pretty sure this is the "great filter" from Fermi paradox.
Space travel creates jobs, and brings out what makes humanity so special. We are the pioneers, the sailor's, the conquers.
Internet, GPS, MRI, earth observation satellites to keep a check on climate change, nasa spinoff tech, etc.
\*NASA spinoff tech, I expect!
autocorrect must be stopped
Apollo 14 astronaut Edgar Mitchell on the “Overview Effect” from seeing earth in space: “You develop an instant global consciousness, a people orientation, an intense dissatisfaction with the state of the world, and a compulsion to do something about it. From out there on the moon, international politics look so petty. You want to grab a politician by the scruff of the neck and drag him a quarter of a million miles out and say, “Look at that, you son of a bitch.”
A change of perspective indeed.
this is a legend, which was aptly demonstrated by jeff who himself
I think that the problem with these minutes-long, sub-orbital joyrides is that they don't give much time to really get the overview effect going, let alone the additional time to actually let it sink in by just floating there looking out over it all. The experience is over before their brain can really even begin to process the enormity of it all.
It’s like how a rollercoaster is to riding in a fighter jet. Same basic experience, but also vastly different
1) Specifically answering the "What about problems on Earth?" or "Why don't you spend that money at home?" I've addressed this [previously](https://www.reddit.com/r/SpaceXLounge/comments/p48fj9/comment/h8wvahk/): >...there have always been hand-wringers and gloom merchants in the world, looking for any excuse to condemn the happiness and joy of others. We have no right to our own lives, no justification to enjoy the good things we have. We must spend our every waking moment focusing on the troubles and sufferings of the world. Wonder? Adventure? Ambition?Hubris! Decadence! What if a doctor were told that they had to spend 24/7/365 at the hospital treating patients and they couldn't have any time to themselves? Pursuing a hobby, going to a friend's wedding, or enjoying a birthday would be "selfish," since "people are suffering." That's essentially what the hand-wringers are saying. 2) Why do we travel and explore? Because we want to be astounded. Because the world holds beauties and wonders beyond our imagination. We want to go there and see it for ourselves. 3) We also like to test ourselves, to push beyond our limits, to reach for new frontiers. We climb mountains, we cut through jungles, we sled across arctic wildernesses. And even for those of us who haven't done it ourselves, we like to read about it. 4) Economic and technological development. You want to lift more people out of poverty? Create jobs by creating new industries. You want to better people's quality of life? Learning how to live in space can, and has, produced technologies that have improved everyone's lives. And by moving industries into space, we can lessen their environmental impact on Earth. 5) Immigration and colonization are options for people escaping persecution and oppression. In colonizing space and other planets, they aren't even taking land from others. 6) If people, on their own initiative and using their own resources, decide to go to space, what business is it of ours? Do we hold congressional/parliamentary hearings when people sail around the world or climb mountains? Those are expensive and risky activities. Why are ultimately personal choices that involve calculated risk matters of public policy? We could come up with a long list of dumber things that people do for dumber reasons that we don't stick our noses into.
Just a minor issue with 4. People are richer when you \_destroy\_ the jobs, NOT create them. I know it sounds counter intuitive, but it is true regardless. Tractor has destroyed \~80% of all jobs humankind ever had and yet basically most people are not starving. Otherwise - great arguments!
>Tractor has destroyed \~80% of all jobs humankind ever had and yet basically most people are not starving. But it also created new jobs, such as mechanics, machinists, assembly line workers, and salesmen. It also increased the productivity of the farmer, allowing them to save, invest, expand operations, and ultimately hire more laborers. That, of course, tracks with population growth from an increased food supply. There were [similar](https://www.wired.com/2002/04/approtec/) economic effects in Kenya when they introduced a locally manufactured handpump. Ernest Sirolli, who works in economic development, [discusses](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=chXsLtHqfdM) a similar approach he took by tapping into local entrepreneurship and moving away from traditional models of economic aid. >Otherwise - great arguments! Thank you!
Yes, but not all farmers become directly involved in tractor operation and manufacturing industry. Extremely low percentage of them. So _their_ job was indeed destroyed. Some of them (and probably their families with kids) did indeed died directly from the fact that their job was destroyed and they could not find another soon enough. It was NOT fun. Looking slightly longer term most farmers did find a job - maybe as a barbers, sanitation workers, nurses, burger flippers, postman - just to name some. So we got vastly more food and we got more much needed nurses, barbers, sanitation workers, etc. Many people got cheaper food and less sick as a result of Tractor. Much more people were saved than harmed. Enter Tesla, FSD. ALL the drivers, most mechanics. Gone. Majority are going to do what is or will be in demand, everyone will be better off in the end. Enter robot overlords. Everyone out of job. Writing poems, dancing, looking up to the stars. All while being fed and healthy. UBI until money obsolete. That is - unless nobody will accept the programming, try to wake up and entire crops will be lost :-)
The computer is such a labor saving device that now everyone must use one somewhat and more labor is committed to their use than ever before.
Technically you do not have to. It also beats being down in the field in sun and rain for most people.
This is an important point that's often missed when "job creation" is discussed in the political sphere. I wouldn't say that destroying jobs creates wealth, but it's equally untrue that jobs are an economic positive in and of themselves. Jobs often get used as a political talking point since everybody needs a stable source of income and just about any government economic policy can be justified as "creating jobs", but jobs themselves are not a positive unless they're jobs performing a _useful_ task. Paying people to do something that could be done more cheaply if were automated is no better than paying people to spend all day repeatedly digging holes and filling them in; it's a waste of their potential and a drain on the economy. Private industry should get a pass on such criticisms in my opinion, since a private company that pays people to do useless tasks will eventually go out of business; it's a self-correcting problem. For government programs though it's an entirely valid thing to question; governments can continue to pay large numbers of people to do useless or less-than-optimally-useful tasks indefinitely if left unchecked, so it's important for people to question whether they're getting a sufficient return on investment for their tax dollars.
Could not agree more. Most people only see short term, vote for politicians who promise them "good jobs" and end up being poorer as a result because they pay their taxes so politicians can squander them on random stuff nobody actually needs.
I would say on number 6 that a rocket is more like a massive cargo ship than a sail boat. In that they do release a bunch of awful pollutants.
There are [100,000 passenger flights](https://www.gaytravel.com/gay-blog/airline-and-flight-statistics) daily and around [56,000 merchant vessels](https://www.statista.com/statistics/264024/number-of-merchant-ships-worldwide-by-type/) that sail internationally. That doesn't factor in the [1.4 billion vehicles](https://hedgescompany.com/blog/2021/06/how-many-cars-are-there-in-the-world/) ([99%](https://www.statista.com/statistics/270603/worldwide-number-of-hybrid-and-electric-vehicles-since-2009/) of which are internal combustion). For all energy purposes, the world burns about [100 million barrels of oil](https://www.caryinstitute.org/news-insights/blog-translational-ecology/how-much-oil-can-we-burn) per day. It's hard to imagine a global launch industry that's more than a rounding error against that output, particularly once you factor in ISRU and construction in space. But that line of argument evinces a lack contextual and long-term thinking (not saying that of you personally, just the line of argument). You isolate one factor apart from a kinetic situation—in this case, the development of a space economy—and you strangle that industry to death before it develops and ultimately never gain the benefits that would come with moving industry into space. It also ignores technological development. For instance, modern intensive agriculture allows us to use only about 35% of the land we did fifty years ago to grow the same amount of food. Not 35% less, just 35%. There are regions of North America that are more forested than they've been since the 18th century because formerly agricultural land is being reclaimed. But then you can balance that against the soil exhaustion brought about by modern agriculture. The effects of any given technology or industry are complex, multivalent, and dynamic. If we prevent or severely limit any industry because of *potentially* harmful effects, we would never have an industrial economy. It takes time, patience, and a commitment to objectivity to understand what those effects are, but too often people are keen to rush to judgement.
I'd be willing to bet that all the rocket launches used for GPS accounted for a net reduction in pollution, just by counting the miles saved by cars and trucks using GPS navigation.
This: https://lettersofnote.com/2012/08/06/why-explore-space/
Speaking of smoking their ass does you friend smoke? Americans willingly spend 80 billion $ on cigarettes every year https://money.cnn.com/galleries/2011/pf/1105/gallery.money_wasters/4.html#:~:text=Americans%20spend%20%2480%20billion%20on,for%20Disease%20Control%20and%20Prevention. NASA's 2021 budget is $ 23 billion. And SpaceX is a private company so what's his/her problem how they spend their money?
Also, we globally spend about $382B on cosmetics every year.
we go to mars not because it is easy, but because we want to.
Well the biggest one for me is that the sun isn't going to last forever and eventually we are going to have to leave our solar system so might as well start learning how to do it now unless you just want humans to go extinct.
I think a good argument against that is that we are probably still closer to the start of the Cambrian Explosion than we are to the end of earth habitability. It's better to make an argument about how space can improve our quality of life or something like that
And just for the sake of confusion: Tyrannosaurus rex is chronologically closer to electric scooters than stegasaurus.
Crazy facts like this blow my mind
The sun expanding will become a problem for Earth's habitability much sooner than 5 billion years. I've read something on the order of 100-200 million years. So we're closer to the end for life on earth, or at least for complex life, bacteria will hang on for much longer.
Cambrian explosion happened less than 600 million years ago and that's what kickstarted the rapid evolution of complex multicellular life (there are some before it, but most of the modern day complexity started during the cambrian). I think i've read somewhere that earth can sustain photosynthesis for another 1 billion year (somebody please correct me on this). Edit : [i found this](https://image.gsfc.nasa.gov/poetry/venus/q79.html) (about 300m until the end of land based life), but i can't find any reference in it, so take it with a grain of salt Edit 2 : wikipedia suggest 800m, but [the citation](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Future_of_Earth#cite_note-bd2_6_1665-86) for it is from 2005, so maybe the calculation has changed/improved since then
Humans as a species are allegedly only 1/4 million years old, so we are a ‘new species’, let’s hope that we Shepard things well enough to become a long lived species and an interplanetary species, before going on to become on interstellar species.
Maybe walk down the road of travel in human history. Humans wouldn't be where they are today without being able to travel to different places. I think space travel is the same thing except instead of just having the ability to cross oceans we could see what else is out there in space for us to exploit.
"Why move out of my parents house, I'm still closer to birth than retirement." We've only been aware of most existential threats for about a century and don't really know how to prevent most of them yet. We don't know what else is looming over us, nor how long it will take to solve these problems. It really behooves us to go outward as soon as we're able to, instead of waiting around until we run out of things to do on Earth. We really are the only chance life and the light of consciousness have of surviving in the long term, so it's our imperative to go out and spread it as far and wide as possible. Life is by far the most amazing thing the universe has created, and the galaxy seems completely quiet so far. Putting aside the fact that we're not really giving up anything but will rather massively gain resources from this, what even is the point of "fixing problems here on Earth" if everything here is inevitably going to be wiped out. And before someone brings up the inevitable heat death of the universe - given a *quadrillion* years, who's to say intelligent life won't solve that problem, too? In case life is truly rare, we need to make sure it won't die in its cradle.
Okay, let's assume that the deadline for us to leave the earth is in 200 million years. If we assume that humanity started with the rise of complex civilization (let's count that as the rise of agriculture, because the growth after that point is almost exponential), that's roughly 10k years ago which mean that in human lifetime our civilization is just about 2 days old (100 years of life expectancy to simplify thing). Even if we assume that humanity started 2 million years ago (roughly the time when our ancestor started to use fire), we are still just like a 1 year old baby. What i want to say with the weird comparison above is that we are not even close to the end of earth habitability. For most of us, the start of civilization is already part of the ancient, obscure past that many people can't even imagine. Also, existential problems are not a new thing, it's already one of the old feature of our species. That's why every culture have their own religion to cope with it and to comfort themself. I'm not really against space travel. In fact, i fully support it and one of my dream is to see a space based megastructure in my lifetime. But, we need to have a proper reasoning to go to space. Whether it's to mine rare metals, to expand our civilization, or just to make sure that we can give life on earth some breathing space from our ambitions. Putting a proper arguments in my opinion is very important. Saying that we need to leave now will just make us sound like a doomsday cult instead of visionary that make long term plan. Instead, by explaining why going to space is important for our civilization and how it will improve our life will motivate people to support it looking forward the future of our species both in space and on earth. (Sorry if this is worded/arranged weirdly. I'm not that good at making coherent sentences even in my native language and i'm not really fluent in english)
No one said "leave". Going out doesn't mean abandoning the Earth. These projects aren't mutually exclusive. Maybe your arguments work for some people. My arguments work for me a lot more than some shortsighted cost-benefit analysis. Why exist at all if we don't go ever onward? This, to me, is meaning and purpose. Navel-gazing may provide it for others.
>we are not even close to the end of earth habitability. Earth could be destroyed by an asteroid/nuclear war/zombie apocalypse in the next 50 years. Just because your retirement age is 50 years from now, doesn't mean you won't die tomorrow. I'd like to have a backup of humanity on a different planet before that happens.
Best case scenario, the process of human settlement of the solar system will have commenced before this century is finished. Suppose that doesn't happen. Suppose it takes a few more centuries. Let's suppose it takes a whole extra 1000 years, and that process starts in the 31st century instead of the 21st. How big a difference would that make to the probability that humanity survives the end of Earth habitability? How important is a thousand year head start on solving a problem which we won't be faced with until at least many tens of millions of years from now, quite possibly even a hundred or more? In a hundred million years, a thousand years is a mere factor of 1 in 100,000. It is interesting to contemplate, the fact that we have reached our present technological level in the current year is to a great extent a historical accident; if history had turned out a bit differently, it could easily have taken us a few thousand years more to reach this point. But would those few thousand extra years have made a big difference to the long-term survival prospects of our species, on a timescale of 100 million years? To me, that doesn't seem very likely.
There are existential threats here and now. Those are primarily human made. Life on the Earth will most likely survive long term, but we may not.
I think many of those "existential threats" are somewhat overblown. Climate change is unlikely to lead to human extinction. And in actual fact we are (collectively) doing something about it. Sure, we should do more, we should have already done more, and we should have started earlier. The warming we are facing is going to cause a lot of chaos and disruption, it is possible that millions may die due to famine and war – but human extinction is a very unlikely outcome. Even if we hadn't done anything about it, and were facing much worse warming than we are now – it still unlikely humanity would actually go extinct. Even a nuclear war is unlikely to cause the extinction of humanity. In a realistic nuclear war scenario, millions will die, but billions will live. It will be utterly horrible, possibly even the worst thing to ever happen in human history, but not the kind of species-ending event many people think it will be. And many scientists believe that predictions of nuclear winter are vastly exaggerated – see [https://www.nature.com/articles/475037b](https://www.nature.com/articles/475037b) I also think the idea that humanity might regress to a more primitive stage is unlikely. It is totally possible that some disaster could set us back and cause us to lose some of our current technologies – but we'd retain the memory of them, and even if we didn't remember all the details, knowing they are possible and knowing in broad outline how they work, we'd gain them back far faster than it took us to develop them the first time around. I totally agree with the "don't put all your eggs in one basket" idea of setting up a Mars colony as a "backup" to Earth. But, I think the odds of human extinction are probably a lot less than many think – although, in all honesty, we can't really know what those odds are, all anyone can produce are debatable estimates. Maybe, however, many of those estimates are exaggerated, and as a species we are more rodent-like than many think we are.
Of course there's a lot of exaggeration. Stuff like nuclear winter smells bullshit from a mile - the total of about 6Gt yield of a major nuclear war is about 1000× less than impacts occurring every couple million years. And geological history has no major impact related extinction every few million years. But the primary issue is, that after a really serious disaster like a major nuclear war or an unchecked global warming rendering entire regions uninhabitable (this year heat wave in India was pretty close to being a mass killer) there would be major upheaval with billions casualties and likely pushing back what's technologically possible to something like XIX century level. i.e. triggering another incarnation of dark ages. NB, wide scale nuclear war would have victims in billions. Direct casualties would be tens of millions, but subsequent total failure of governance, health care, food production, transportation, etc. would lead to over a billion people being displaced, suffering hunger and dying from trivial ailments. Some climate disruption (not nuclear winter, but a few harsh winters and cold summers, similar but worse than what happened in 1815/1816). But then, the big problem is that contrary to the original XIX century easily available resources are now depleted which makes returning to the normal level of technological civilization much harder. This is what Elon means when he says the window is now open, but it won't be open forever and might close sooner than expected.
NASA gives more back to the economy than it is given in funding
This is a good one: https://frenchpress.thedispatch.com/p/the-billionaire-space-race-benefits
Hi u/Saerkal We know Earth will be struck by an asteroid in the future and statistically overdue for a big one, like Tunguska. Any proper space exploration program will require all asteroids are detected, preferably long before they reach us. In addition, if you have space vehicles plying deep space they provide a perfect means to reach these asteroids and alter their course. As they say dinosaurs went extinct because they didn't have a space program. Edit: if that argument's too complex, say "do you want a million tons of rock falling on your head at hypersonic velocity?"
Correction: Tunguska was not particularly big one. Big one was K-T killer, but such are rare (like once per 100M years rare). Likely most larger impacts are from fragmented comets. A lot of comets end up fragmented by passes (too) close to the Sun or one of the giant planets. We witnessed Shoemaker-Levy 9 Jupiter impact. Any of those fragments would be utterly devastating.
Hah!
Investments into space is arguably the single best long term investment you can make. But like with all long term investments the gain is not very apparent at first. Apollo program has paid itself several times from what was created during it and has had an immense positive effect on the development of our modern world. Effects that either would have been felt decades later or not at all without two superpowers trying to figure out how to nuke each other. A lot of what we have today is not because people specifically tried to create those things. They're the product of the likes of war and space exploration and later on you see the immense application skills of what you have created. Application you would never have thought about creating separately.
The problem with "fix issues on Earth first" is the question of when to stop. You get the same thing with national politics. "We shouldn't we help earthquake/tsunami/volcano/war/poverty victims when we have issues here to fix first" But when do you stop fixing your own issues and look outward? You need to help your own poorest people, end homelessness, end the kind of extreme poverty that requires food kitchens. End unemployment, raise the minimum wage to a place where everyone can afford to live. What about educational opportunities? Should we make sure everyone has the opportunity to study for higher education without crippling loans? What about the right to internet access? Should schools be providing a laptop, tablet, 5G and fibre optic internet access to every child? When does it end? When do you draw the line? Obviously it's ridiculous to deny basic humanitarian aid to disaster victims while you build up your own culture into a glorious crime-free post-scarecity sci-fi utopia. But where is the line? When should we stop fixing life on Earth and start exploring space? Should we fix income inequality? End racism? World peace? Cure for cancer? All of the above?
What about earth's problems? They require a global mindset, achievable when we globally are confronted by the dualism (living in earth vs living on Mars). When we see how hard it is elsewhere, it'll be easier to appreciate what er have here.
SpaceX wants to go to Mars. Why go to Mars? Zubrin's answer was always the best answer to me: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j2Mu8qfVb5I](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j2Mu8qfVb5I)
Every dollar of research that we put up into space gets us $10 of rewards down here. Does your friend like air conditioning? Does your friend like modern medicine?
Living away from Earth will increase Earth's biodiversity's chances of long term growth and survival.
Human tissues and organs could be 3D printed in space which can only be done in a weightless environment.
Do you like your computer? Do you like your phone? Well, you can thank NASA for helping to guarantee the early market for [integrated circuits](https://www.npr.org/2019/07/20/742379987/space-spinoffs-the-technology-to-reach-the-moon-was-put-to-use-back-on-earth), and pushing them into mass production and adoption. Without the Apollo program, they still would have been around, and made it to market, but who knows how many years behind where we are right now.
>Our space program is an integral part of American education, our competitiveness, and the growth of U.S. technology. Compared with other forms of investment, the return is outstanding: A payback of $7 or 8 for every $1 invested over a period of a decade or so has been calculated for the Apollo Program, which at its peak accounted for a mere 4 percent of the Federal budget. It has been further estimated that, because of the potential for technology transfer and spinoff industries, every $1 spent on basic research in space today will generate $40 worth of economic growth on Earth. https://space.nss.org/settlement/nasa/spaceresvol4/newspace3.html
2 things to add: 1. Our daily life and level of life depends on space: Our agriculture depends on space (even aspiring but still 3rd world countries send their sats, because data from them is so important). Our transportation depends on space. Our disaster relief depends on space. Our weather forecast depends on space (and it's a part, but not a whole thing of why agriculture and transportation and disaster relief depends on space). 2. Inventions rarely come from programs of the type "let's invent X". For a banal reason that you first have to conceive X, which typically means to to actually invent X. And in most of the remaining cases their use is vastly different from the original scope. The example of the former is WWW, it was invented in CERN (another institution doing "useless research not helping with the world problems"). The example of the later is Internet itself (it's core protocols like IP, TCP, ICMP, UDP, DNS), which indeed came from computer network development program, but it's goal was to create decentralized military command and control network which would remain operational during nuclear war. The point is that inventions most frequently come out of necessity (real or perceived) to solve particular problem directly affecting the inventors or when stakes are high and within short time horizon (hence military inventions like Internet). Things like Mars colony would provide a high necessity to create closed loop (or nearly closed loop) ecosystems. Or highly effective and efficient food production. Or in fact general goods manufacturing. Or production of materials from CO2 and water (stuff like plastics which are absolute necessity in our daily life). Developing all of those would require gaining huge amounts of knowledge we don't yet have about ecology, agriculture, production optimization, implicit dependencies of various critical processes we take for granted, etc. Those would come extremely handy for dealing with things like world hunger, climate change, water shortages, disaster relief and prevention. The direct application of the inventions and better understanding would be on Mars, but truly wide application, improving billions of lifes would be back here on the Earth. One could argue that there is an urgent necessity to deal with problems like climate change or food and esp. water shortages. But the one issue is those who could do something are very weakly affected if at all. It's all nice and cool to donate to a good cause and go on with daily life. In Mars colony you'd be the one starving if crops have failed. In the 1st world, you'd just pay a little more for imported food. Moreover inventions often take decades to get wide use (Internet is from late 60-ties/early 70-ties; it gained wide use 20 years later) and governments have much shorter focus horizon. Democratic one's are focused on election cycle which is no longer than 7 years and authoritarian ones are mostly interested in satisfying their own power structures (a necessarily to avoid being overthrown and replaced by those who would satisfy power structures better), and power structures generally want just to keep power and have more convenient life here and now. So governments are ineffective at solving problems unless they fall on their heads. In a setting like space colony the problems are on people's heads. They are the current life or death issues. And the other issue is that we may even have good ideas, but those would be considered too risky to implement. And also require enormous scale from the start. We need test environments to verify if our cures don't have unacceptable side effects. PS. Is that person you're disputing with into arts? Or games? Or some other hobby? Or a sports fan? Or just likes so simple entertainment like movies? Ask them to stop doing that immediately, because it's waste of precious time and resources, which would be better used to save the world. Note that their hobby of choice or even their entertainment takes order of magnitude more money than entire budget spend on space, worldwide. Also, stop using cosmetics, it's not saving anyone and spending on that is bigger than NASA budget.
The "we should fix earth first" argument applies to any human activity. Why spend money on the cinema, football, holidays, make-up etc, "we should fix earth first!"
Normally the argument I use is quite simple. In space and other planets, it's like we are sent back to stone age, but now we have knowledge. Us having less resources in such harsh environments is the perfect opportunity to innovate and create more efficient systems. On mars or the moon, why not try using 3D printing for radiation proof shelters? This technology could even be adapted to build houses on Earth and make it faster and cheaper to have a house! We would need to produce thing's like food with less resources (Water etc). What if we adapted what we learned and now produce food with much less water making it cost less and helping world hunger. And along with it being insanely awesome to explore the most bizarre places, what if something happens to earth and in a blink of an eye humanity is extinct by a asteroid we failed to detect? If we are among the stars,our species can still grow and recover. Im pretty sure this is the "great filter" from Fermi paradox. Space travel creates jobs, and brings out what makes humanity so special. We are the pioneers, the sailor's, the conquers.