There was a time when there was nothing (European) in the entire New World. There was a time when there was nothing known (to the US) about what was in most of the Louisiana Purchase. There was a time when there was nothing (European) in, say, Ohio. And then Nebraska. And so on.
There was literally nothing there? Why go all that way? To see what was there. And then to make something there.
[Edit, because I'm rate limited: No, interstellar space is something to cross, to get to stellar space. You think the New World was rich? How about a whole solar system of untapped resources?
There is many times more water in gas giant moons than on Earth. If we develop the technology needed to make a multi-generation ship we also have the technology to make deep space habitats - enough for trillions or quadrillions of people.
Just imagine the economic output of a civilisation a million times the size of ours.
These people are dreamers that grew up watching Star Wars and Star Trek. The world painted by those shows has lodged in their minds, and no amount of logic will shake it loose.
In the past, I've challenged the "Let's colonize Mars!" people to do something that's far easier: Move to Bouvet island, now.[1]
This is a frozen uninhabited rock that is nonetheless a tropical paradise compared to Mars. It's far easier to reach, has free unlimited oxygen and water, and gets more solar radiation also for power! It's luxurious compared to the colder, dryer deserts of Mars where there's only dry rocks and near-vacuum.
If you really want to spice things up, donate $10,000 to a charity per pound of material you take to the island (what does a shelter weigh?), take 100% of your food and water with you, and never go outside without wearing full scuba gear. For "realism mode" sprinkle a small amount of radioactive powder evenly everywhere around your habitat area.
"Yay! Adventure! Honey, tell the school we're unenrolling the kids and taking them with us to this wonderful opportunity to start a new life!"
> It's far easier to reach, has free unlimited oxygen and water, and gets more solar radiation also for power! It's luxurious compared to the colder, dryer deserts of Mars where there's only dry rocks and near-vacuum.
You miss the whole point. The point of becoming an interplanetary civilization is not to fill every barren rock you see (and there are plenty on Earth, and, if climate change isn't controlled, there'll soon be more). The point is to put just enough humankind on all the places we can easily reach (at that given time) so we can expand from there with in-situ resources rather than only expand from here, using only Earth resources (which WILL run out).
Some humans seem to have evolved a motivation to explore their surroundings. At first we walked, then we learned to ride animals, wheels, boats, airplanes, and, recently, spacecraft. We travel to learn both about other places as we do to learn about ourselves. Some people might feel content with our current reach, but I feel constrained.
I am in no hurry to explore a barren rock in my backyard, but I would be very curious to know whether life exists or existed in another rocky planet and what it'd look like.
You can't answer that from Bouvet Island, can you?
I am going to steal this haha. I think you may need to give them the opportunity to ignite some high explosives upon departure though to satisfy the boy-want-boom component.
I didn't say we had to choose one or the other, I'm suggesting actually the opposite: the clearly superior way to do it is to first do one (ensure we are maximally leveraging all IQ points born to humans on earth) then do the other (now armed with billions more brains that freed from the daily task of avoiding premature death).
If you have an argument for why the reverse ordering, or in parallel, would be better, that's what I'm asking for: what's the argument?
Flesh it out beyond just "imagine if we succeed with no substantial opportunity loss!"
Since the expansion is a far longer term project, I always assumed eradicating poverty on Earth would be a trivial endeavor in comparison. We kind of can do that today, if we really put our minds to it.
The benefit, however, is minuscule compared to what an expansion into quadrillions of highly educated humans could create.
No there wasn't. There was a whole continent of untapped resources.
You can argue that the solar system is a lot of untapped resources too. Harder to extract than sailing a piece of wood across an ocean growing some food, and killing the people who are already there. Harder than colonising Antarctica or the surface of the sea too, but there are resources - not just minerals but solar energy too.
But interstellar space? Beyond the Oort Cloud? There's no evidence of anything other than perhaps some very sparse dust. That is nothing, and (jokes aside) completely incomparable to Ohio.
All life on Earth is going die. Humanity has never been content with staying put, why would we start now? And what do you mean "literally nothing there"? The universe has a loooooot of stuff in it.
By "literally nothing there," I mean there's literally nothing for us. Three stars and a few Earth-sized planets in the habitable zone that are, more than likely, uninhabitable by humans. There's nothing there worth going all that way for.
I like sci-fi as much as the next person but the reality of the situation, it seems to me, is that the universe is mostly empty, vast, and inhospitable to human life.
The difference between a multi-generational interstellar ship and a self-sustaining space colony is the engine. They wouldn’t need inhabitable planets - they would need raw materials to build more ships and habitats.
I’m not sure that after spending a lifetime in an ample space colony its inhabitants would feel nostalgic of the time we spent sitting on round rocks cooking around a star.
Ask ten different scientists about the environment, population control, genetics, and you'll get ten different answers, but there's one thing every scientist on the planet agrees on. Whether it happens in a hundred years or a thousand years or a million years, eventually our Sun will grow cold and go out. When that happens, it won't just take us. It'll take Marilyn Monroe, and Lao-Tzu, and Einstein, and Morobuto, and Buddy Holly, and Aristophanes, and - all of this - all of this - was for nothing. Unless we go to the stars
It would be a different tale altogether - probably engineers discussing how ludicrous the idea is, until it's feasible, and then debating the consequences before pressing the red button.
>Tragula's wife used to complain to him about the utterly inordinate amount of time he spent staring out into space, or mulling over the mechanics of safety pins, or doing spectrographic analyses of pieces of fairy cake. She would often tell her husband to have some sense of proportion, sometimes as often as thirty-eight times in one day. In response to her pleas for him to find some perspective, he built the Total Perspective Vortex.
>Into one end he plugged the whole of reality as extrapolated from a piece of fairy cake, and into the other end he plugged his wife: so that when he turned it on she would see in one instant the whole infinity of creation and herself in relation to it. To Trin Tragula’s horror, the shock completely annihilated her brain...
~Douglas Adams, The Restaurant at the End of the Universe
>Humanity has never been content with staying put, why would we start now?
For whatever reason, humanity's attitude in this regard has changed drastically in the last century. We can't even bother to make the next generations, and a shrinking population eventually (quite quickly, really) shrinks to zero. Not only do they want to "stay put", they want to lay down and die.
The steelman counterargument is that focusing resources on extraplanetary colonies at the expense of the one habitable planet within reach will hasten humanity's destruction. How are you going to make an Eden on Mars if we can't even make an Eden on Earth? The only large-scale planetary engineering in humanity's history is Veniforming its home world.
>The steelman counterargument is that focusing resources on extraplanetary colonies at the expense of the one habitable planet within reach will hasten humanity's destruction.
That doesn't seem like a strong argument to me. It seems like a distraction from the crowd that would save the planet by extinguishing humanity if that's what it took. Though what value the planet might have with all of us gone I leave as an exercise for the reader.
The first priority of any society that wants to continue to exist into the future must always be to make the next generation. If you do not do this, or if you just leave the task to others hoping that someone else will do it, then you are behaving in a way that will in all probability lead towards there being no next generation sooner or later. The "global warming is the apocalypse" movement constantly talks about how the best way to reduce your carbon footprint is to have no children.
>The only large-scale planetary engineering in humanity's history is Veniforming its home world.
So it is claimed, but from my point of view it looks very much as if it's intent on making itself extinct through fertility decline. But at least carbon dioxide levels will return to normal, eh?
There's literally nothing there, why go all that way? The distances are so incredibly vast. It seems like we ought to be content with staying put.