Do you care about space exploration / colonization

[Nirnroot]

I don’t know if it’s important to send people to space necessarily, but it’s important to explore space in the sense of learning what’s out there. 

[Epitaph]

If you want the blunt truth? Na. Personally I don't think we should expand beyond our planet because there's not much of a relevant point in attempting to delay what's universally inevitable. Colonization of other worlds is just the footpath in an attempt to run away from the big bad monster we're biologically hardwired to fight against, that being death.

 

However, I do care about space exploration to some degree, because astrophysics in some sense can help us understand our reality a little better. And if we can understand our reality a little better, then we can hopefully improve and tend to our world a little better unless we simply want to hop from world to world and spread like poison in our current state in the ultimate rat race of futility.

 

We actually could expand and it technically wouldn't matter, since we can't escape the laws of physics and the fact that eventually the bonds between protons will break down and matter as we understand it will cease to be. But I do think to some degree it matters HOW we expand and why we bother to expand. If we're expanding for the sake of expanding and consuming resources, then all we're going to do is replicate human suffering on a grander scale, which is pointless.

 

Even assuming that by some miracle we can overcome the iron barrier that is the speed of light, I think if we were ever to think of expanding beyond our planet, we need to learn how to take care of it. Which is funny, because we don't actually need to take care of it because it is an efficient self regulating system. We simply need to learn how to better co-exist non destructively, while overcoming our respective flaws and innate nature to rely on what are obsolete instincts running amok in societies that pretend to be advanced.

 

But we won't ever do that, I think. We're far too primitive and the window of time needed to even slightly have a chance at evolving past that is too large. We'll go extinct first before we ever evolve beyond our rudimentary nature. Space exploration is a nice dream I think. A very nice one for certain. But I don't figure we're cut out for it, at least if all we're ever going to do is act like toddlers. 

[Lord Jade Cross]

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[uhtred]

26 minutes ago, Jade Cross said:

Humans have not being able to adequately handle living on this one planet. I highly doubt they have the capacity to effectively do different in space.

Its a lot harder to break space. What can we do to make the moon more lifeless and uninhabitable? 

[Lord Jade Cross]

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[uhtred]

52 minutes ago, Jade Cross said:

Everything actually. Just because a satelite does not carry a lifeform (that we know of anyways) sometimes the purpose of an uninhabited location is for it to be uninhabited and remain so. Altering it can have far graver consequences than what we might like to believe.

 

 

An interesting philosophical question: does a thing have value if it is never observed? 

[Lord Jade Cross]

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[Nevyn]

I'm all for Space Exploration. The useful technologies it produces makes it worthwhile by itself. I'm hoping privatization will be beneficial. 

[uhtred]

11 minutes ago, Jade Cross said:

It does

I wonder how many of what appear to be political and other disagreements are actually deep sort of philosophical postulates like this. There is no way to argue whether something that is never observed has "value" -  its is just an assumption that people have to make one way or the other.

[Karst]

I'm all for preservation of the Earth's environment, which is why I think we should colonize space.  If we can move people to Mars, then more areas of Earth can be allowed to revert to nature.  In addition, space habitats would allow the total human population to increase without further straining Earth's resources.  

As well as the potential ecological advantages, space colonization would greatly increase the odds of our species surviving if something like the Chixulub asteroid impact happened again.  Even if a natural disaster left most of Earth uninhabitable, we could bring some of its biodiversity to other worlds.