<story><title>Let&apos;s Colonize Titan</title><url>https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/guest-blog/lets-colonize-titan/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>banach</author><text>I think that the pursuit of knowledge is a really good way to spend your time, but I do not like when simple solutions to real problems are sidelined in favor of the latest buzzword-oriented technology fetish. In times when the president-elect has announced that he is shutting down NASA&amp;#x27;s climate change research, ostensibly to fund space exploration, I think we need to remind ourselves that any work we chose to pursue has an opportunity cost. I really believe that we can address the main issues facing our society with pretty simple means, but that will not happen if everyone is too busy looking for problems to solve using their favorite tool. In the terminology of Hacker News, I guess what I am arguing is that colonization is bike-shedding for the reforms that I have mentioned in my first comment.</text></item><item><author>pavelrub</author><text>Yes let&amp;#x27;s stop all scientific and technological progress which isn&amp;#x27;t directly related to achieving utopia on earth, until a hypothetical point in the future that will never come.&lt;p&gt;Is everything you do and find important in life directly related to improving our ecosystem and eliminating nuclear stockpiles? Do you think it&amp;#x27;s ok to be interested, for example, in web development, but not in space colonization? Maybe instead of attempting to force artificial goals on human society, you should acknowledge the fact that people care about more things than your notion of &amp;quot;quality&amp;quot;. Denying them those things in the name of some artificial pragmatism is exactly the opposite of pragmatism - it ignores the realities of human society, ignores the actual wishes of people, and replaces them with an artificial ideology.&lt;p&gt;I would much rather live in a world where some people care about clean energy and sustainability, others about colonizing space, others about mathematics, and others about art, etc., than in a world where the majority of those things are shunned because of arguments such as yours. The latter world is a far more miserable one, and a miserable reality isn&amp;#x27;t a solution to anything.</text></item><item><author>banach</author><text>I think that, before colonizing other planets, we should start by realizing that Earth can easily sustain human kind for the foreseeable future, given some pretty modest tweaks to our way of life (compared to &amp;quot;going multi-planetary&amp;quot; that is). If we start valuing quality over novelty, stop eating animal-based foods and re-organize to live closer to where we work, we can stop the consumption and that is taxing our ecosystem and cut energy use to manageable levels. If we re-distribute our wealth, population growth will subside. If we put pressure on our rulers, they will work to eliminate the nuclear stockpiles. There are simple solutions to most of our issues. Once we have solved them, maybe we can start thinking about spreading our species to other places.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>pavelrub</author><text>The problem is that your notion of &amp;quot;real problems&amp;quot; is  artificial. If our society prioritizes space colonization above eliminating nuclear stockpiles, and people are willing to accept the risk posed by the existence of those stockpiles, then there is no sense in continuing to refer to it as a &amp;quot;main issue facing our society&amp;quot;. Maybe you consider it to be a main issue, but society doesn&amp;#x27;t. Or maybe society does consider it an important issue, but not so important that everybody should stop working on everything else until it is solved (and as if Earth won&amp;#x27;t have new, seemingly equally important problems, when that happens). At least the people who are excited about space colonization don&amp;#x27;t propose to start dealing with environmental problems only after we&amp;#x27;ve colonized Titan. You can&amp;#x27;t pretend to care about society when you are willing to ignore the actual things people find important.&lt;p&gt;Your fallacy is the same as claiming that we should care more about car accidents than about terrorism, because car accidents kill more people, instead of realizing that the number of dead simply isn&amp;#x27;t the only thing people care about when considering threats of this kind.&lt;p&gt;It&amp;#x27;s also unclear to me why you choose to single out space colonization when the vast majority of what most people do on Earth has nothing to do with solving the problems you mention. If anything, working on enabling space colonization is far more beneficial to life on this planet than almost every other subject on HN.</text></comment>
<story><title>Let&apos;s Colonize Titan</title><url>https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/guest-blog/lets-colonize-titan/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>banach</author><text>I think that the pursuit of knowledge is a really good way to spend your time, but I do not like when simple solutions to real problems are sidelined in favor of the latest buzzword-oriented technology fetish. In times when the president-elect has announced that he is shutting down NASA&amp;#x27;s climate change research, ostensibly to fund space exploration, I think we need to remind ourselves that any work we chose to pursue has an opportunity cost. I really believe that we can address the main issues facing our society with pretty simple means, but that will not happen if everyone is too busy looking for problems to solve using their favorite tool. In the terminology of Hacker News, I guess what I am arguing is that colonization is bike-shedding for the reforms that I have mentioned in my first comment.</text></item><item><author>pavelrub</author><text>Yes let&amp;#x27;s stop all scientific and technological progress which isn&amp;#x27;t directly related to achieving utopia on earth, until a hypothetical point in the future that will never come.&lt;p&gt;Is everything you do and find important in life directly related to improving our ecosystem and eliminating nuclear stockpiles? Do you think it&amp;#x27;s ok to be interested, for example, in web development, but not in space colonization? Maybe instead of attempting to force artificial goals on human society, you should acknowledge the fact that people care about more things than your notion of &amp;quot;quality&amp;quot;. Denying them those things in the name of some artificial pragmatism is exactly the opposite of pragmatism - it ignores the realities of human society, ignores the actual wishes of people, and replaces them with an artificial ideology.&lt;p&gt;I would much rather live in a world where some people care about clean energy and sustainability, others about colonizing space, others about mathematics, and others about art, etc., than in a world where the majority of those things are shunned because of arguments such as yours. The latter world is a far more miserable one, and a miserable reality isn&amp;#x27;t a solution to anything.</text></item><item><author>banach</author><text>I think that, before colonizing other planets, we should start by realizing that Earth can easily sustain human kind for the foreseeable future, given some pretty modest tweaks to our way of life (compared to &amp;quot;going multi-planetary&amp;quot; that is). If we start valuing quality over novelty, stop eating animal-based foods and re-organize to live closer to where we work, we can stop the consumption and that is taxing our ecosystem and cut energy use to manageable levels. If we re-distribute our wealth, population growth will subside. If we put pressure on our rulers, they will work to eliminate the nuclear stockpiles. There are simple solutions to most of our issues. Once we have solved them, maybe we can start thinking about spreading our species to other places.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>incongruity</author><text>Those &amp;quot;solutions&amp;quot; are only simple in theory, not in practice. Enacting that change would actually be exponentially harder than getting humans to Titan, IMHO. One requires massive social and economic change. The other requires sending a limited number of people to another part of the solar system. We roughly know how to do the latter but the former is on decidedly a longer timescale if it achievable at all.</text></comment>