Since the early 1960’s space exploration has been shilled quite aggressively and for good reason. The Soviet Union and the United States were engaging in an arms race to control the "final frontier” — space. It was a sky territory game much like the one fought on the ground. Although the situation deescalated in the 1990’s and early 2000’s, it seems to have picked up lately due to the climate-change debacle.
Now I am not going to argue that the climate change is real or not. I have explained myself plenty of times in regards to the issue if anyone cares to take a look. What interests me are the arguments of people who think that living on an earth with a slightly altered climate can be compared to living to another planet.
Right after the Paris climate accords, these climate nazis are seriously advocating for abandoning Earth and building a space colony somewhere else. They believe that the situation is fatally irreversible and that the people should get together to fund such an endeavour to save our species. "Overly dramatic" doesn't even begin to cut it.
The ironic thing is that these people are science advocates and they are all for progress and rational thinking. Nonetheless, they fail to put 1 and 1 together and rather demonstrate how humans can act idiotically when they are stubborn about something.
To live on another planet — that is getting off our atmosphere with a packed small colony, sustaining that population in space for months and actually setting up a small village there — would require mastery over artificial environments. If, we could do that then we wouldn’t be needing to leave earth on the first place. We could have solved all the climate, meteorite and solar flare problems.
Any other planet we attempt to venture our asses to, will be riddled with radiation and toxic particulates that will render any technology and biology useless. We can barely get shit working when we send satellites in orbit but we can engineer an entire array of space-colony equipment and sustain living things there? The movie "The Martian" was cool but it comes nowhere near reality.(ps: The Book is much better).
On Earth at least, we know exactly what the problem is and pretty much everything works under our current conditions. We could spend all those trillions to actually find solutions here on earth rather than funding a space meme. Hollywood, cool graphics and cute stories don’t even begin to grasp the magnitude of hurdles that we are facing when it comes to space colonisation.
Having our eggs in one place (aka the entirety of humanity), is surely a recipe for disaster if something unforeseen (like a meteorite) happens to crash our party. Nonetheless, we can barely handle a small change in our temperature so far. Even moving a single human to the moon for an extended period of time would be impossible right now.
I believe that the greatest threat for humanity is the dreamers that do not understand how things work but have an equal voting power to everyone else. Unfortunately, the skeptics are the crippling minority.
“But, but we need the dreamers, because _______(insert unicorns farting rainbows here)”.
No we don’t. We are all dreamers. It is a human quality that comes by default with the package of being a homo-sapien. Also, bear in mind that being a dreamer is one thing and having your head up your ass is another.
Most of humanity’s fuck ups occurred because some people dreamt way too much. I am not optimistic that something will change this time. We are doomed making the same mistakes. Nonetheless, we might as well enjoy debate those who voice them and hope for the best. Undoubtedly, one day we might be able to to colonize space. In our current position though the expectation is rather ludicrous. Cavemen would have had a better chance envisioning and implementing the combustion engine rather 21st century humans trying to sustain a monkey on the moon for a month.
