Just in time
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People expanded to places with resources that they could live in, or bring back home. There are no resources that we know of in space that are not more easily accessed on Earth, and living out there would require a material investment from Earth that would be devastating.
Most of the Earth is currently empty of humans, while space is colder than Antarctica, and less accessible than both the top of Everest and the bottom of the Mariana trench. You could build a city in any of those 3 places easier than even low-earth-orbit and any other celestial body would be thousands of times harder still.
wrote last edited by [email protected]The idea that there are no resources we know of in space which are not more easily accessed on earth is just outright untrue, or at least is only true in a narrow sense. My example here would be Helium-3, the ideal fuel for fusion (a difficult choice due to high fusion temperatures, but it has the advantage of not kicking off neutron radiation in the process the way something like Deuterium-Tritium fusion would). Earth contains ~10-50,000 tonnes of feasibly accessible Helium-3, and if we were to move over to fusion power at a large scale at our current rate of power consumption, we would consume that amount of fuel in a matter of years, likely less than a decade. By contrast, the moon contains orders of magnitude more Helium-3 in its regolith, somewhere in the ballpark of 600,000-1,000,000 tonnes, a sufficient quantity to last over a century in the same usage conditions as outlined for Earth. Additionally, both of these sources pale in comparison to the amount available in Sol’s gas giants.
The caveat here is, of course, that it’s unlikely we would switch to fusion entirely in the first place, and that accessing that helium-3 at scale is not easy, no matter where it comes from (though doing so at scale is likely easier on the Moon than it is on Earth). It also ignores ideas like degrowth, energy efficiency improvements, dealing with the drawbacks of alternative fusion fuels, etc. I think, however, that it remains illustrative of the larger point: there are compelling reasons to go to space, even from a raw materials perspective alone.
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I technically disagree, most periods human history had "good times" and the happiness of those people was relative to their expectations and equilibrium with the social and technical possibilities of their moment. You might be miserable if you were teleported to a relatively comfortable life in the year 1500, but they were probably every bit as content as some financially comfortable credentialed working class individual today.
You make an excellent point, my only rebuttal would be that on average people are have become much kinder and more compassionate as they've moved up on the hierarchy of needs. Which I believe demonstrates that an ever increasing amount of people are living in comfort and security in our current world, much more than in the 1500s, though I'm sure you could find them.
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That is mostly a myth. They may have worked less than people at the height of the industrial revolution, but even a laborer who was paid a salary had to spend at least several hours per day on average on "not work" things like food preparation, home maintenance, feeding livestock, gathering firewood, repairing and cleaning clothing. Many tasks that are trivial today were highly arduous.
Then to top it all off it was fairly common for the local lord to force them to do extra labor without pay, like maintaining roads or training in a militia.
Don't forget all the time spent dying from now preventable diseases!
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I feel like everyone saying op is glorifying the past and future seems to be missing the fact that this is a shitpost.
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I hate to break it to you. But if you were born back then, you wouldn't be a knight. You wouldn't be an explorer. You'd be a peasant. Working your farm from birth to grave.
Even if you were a knight. Most knights lived shitty lives and didn't have armor and maidens that glamorous.
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I currently and never have made enough money to pay professionals to do those things. A LOT of my time is spent preparing food and repairing/cleaning my clothes and dwelling.
wrote last edited by [email protected]If you hand wash your clothes and process all your food from scratch you're most likely the exception.
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I disagree that life requires a narrow set of conditions to continue. What I believe is the case is that life requires specific conditions to begin, but once it exists, it is incredibly resilient. There are extremophiles which could reasonably survive in the vacuum of space, and from a more anthropocentric perspective, humans have proven ourselves to be remarkably resilient in the face of climatic tests. Sure, the most inhospitable of earth conditions is a paradise in comparison to something like Mars as it exists now, but we adapted to those when the height of technology was a flint knapped hand-axe. It’s safe to say that the technological aspect of humanity has come a long way, and our ability to survive in and adapt to the conditions of bodies other than earth improves steadily day by day as the wheel of technology turns ever-faster (to say nothing of outright space habitats, which we could absolutely reasonably build with our current understanding of physics). I don’t mean this as a glorification of human industry; rather, I mean to say that ingenuity, adaptability, and tenacity are fundamental characteristics of our species - it’s why we’re here today.
I will also note that there’s no guarantee that there aren’t habitable worlds in other solar systems, and no reason to assume that they couldn’t be found. Even within our solar system, there are planets which, with sufficient effort, could feasibly be colonized near to our current tech level (looking at you, Venus. I know Mars gets all the attention but you’re my one true love).
And, indeed, I wonder if you’ve proven the fundamental point yourself with your observation on organization and long term planning. After all, is it perhaps possible that the very reason we have never demonstrated that level of resource management in our modern, industrial world is itself capitalism? Such a duplicative, wasteful structure is fundamentally inefficient, and more to the point, is fundamentally at odds with the communalist nature of humanity. We are a species which, historically, shares, and just the mere fact that we have convinced ourselves that selfishness is in our nature does not make it true. Additionally, centuries of planning becomes a lot more reasonable when humans reach the point of living for centuries, which is a prospect that I think a lot of people ignore the (relatively speaking) imminent nature of.
All that is to say: we are a species of firsts, and typically when we are met with a survival challenge on a physiological level, we conquer that with technology. Clothing, fire, tools, and planning allowed us to conquer the arctic despite a body plan which is adapted for equatorial living, why should we assume we won’t also eventually rise to this technical challenge in the long term? I have no idea what that intermediary period will look like (except that it will likely be, at minimum, equally unpleasant for us as it is at present), but if history shows us anything it’s that we eventually pull through. Humanity tried to migrate out of Africa several times before it stuck, populations died out, and we find fossil remains which have genomes entirely unrelated to anyone not from Africa, but the notable thing is that we kept on trying anyways.
We’re just stubborn like that.
wrote last edited by [email protected]I would contend that you haven't really grasped the sheer scale of the universe if you think space travel or colonization is even remotely possible. Sure we went to the moon once but it took pretty much all of our might coupled with gobs and gobs of money. We will surely be back at some point, and I think it's inevitable that some humans will at some point travel to mars, or one of the moons of Saturn/Jupiter (on what will assuredly be one-way trips), but that's it. Forget about even attempting to reach our closest neighboring star; our current understanding of physics ensures that we would never be able to make that trip. Same reason we're not hounded by alien tourists all day every day even though the universe is teeming with life, those other instances of life are equally locked to the respective places where they spawned, which brings us to the next point:
Life. Yes, earth-based life is very resilient, on earth. Consider the massive, incomprehensible planetary forces fighting it out for billions of years until some semblance of a stable -but incomprehensibly unique- balance was reached, where life was finally allowed the necessary time to thrive, flourish and diversify around that very particular balance.
Take life out of the environment in which it developed and it fizzles out very quickly. 99% of the effort in any kind of human space exploration would be on trying to replicate earth's environment to a ridiculous degree of precision and then hope/pray that nothing ever breaks on any of the systems/machinery/technology you use to replicate earth, because then you'd be SOL and fizzle out quickly.Here on earth we've got gargantuan industries (just to name a few think about electronics, plastics/petroleum, metals), built piece by piece over hundreds of years in all material sciences, mutually interacting and interdependent, with massive and incredibly specialized supply chains that rely on readily available amounts of very specific resources that you can get on earth. You can get a plastic ring seal, any size of nut&bolt, and a microcontroller here on earth for $1. No amount of money will get you any of these out there in space. We only manage this for the ISS because it is pretty much tethered (at a distance of only 400km) to a huge-ass planet that can source and produce anything it could ever need, put it on a rocket (costs a lot of money but can be done on demand) and have it get there in a matter of hours, and even then it's very specialized, technical and perpetual effort to maintain it.
I can see us maybe pulling that off for something built on the moon (our backyard, really) but for Mars, our closest neighbor? No chance if you want to have actual humans involved, only machines and very slowly over hundreds of years, if at all.
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If you hand wash your clothes and process all your food from scratch you're most likely the exception.
You didnt say processing. You said preparing. There have been bakers and butchers for centuries. Im a laborer, so i trade my wage for others goods like people have forever. But yes, i tend to wash my clothes by hand in my sink unless i can afford the laindromat that month
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I feel like everyone saying op is glorifying the past and future seems to be missing the fact that this is a shitpost.
Yeah, one should not take this random post too serious.
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Yeah I don't think that's going to be the future.
It's going to look more like those space images of Venus.
