I would like to point out that if United States won't do it then other countries and large companies will take the lead. And in fact they are already doing it. And while it might not be bringing a lot of tangible returns for US citizens right now, it is projected to overtake practically every single other industry including electronics at some point in the future.
Even without returns, it is simple matter of security. With another country like China taking absolute control over space US would be quickly incapable to take care of its interest here on Earth. Just imagine China deciding to incapacitate all US satellites and US having no way to respond to it.
So it is same old weapons race, it is just trying to score some extra side quests a bit outside of the main quest. Haven't you ever tried to do side quests to get some extra exp to help you with main quest line?
Presumably because somebody pointed to an asteroid somewhere and calculated that it contains a volume of platinum/gold/unobtanium that would be worth a hundred zillion kajillion trillion dollars, without taking into account that if you actually brought that much of a given precious metal into the market the price would crash to zero and we'd all be drinking Coke out of disposable platinum cans.
On the one hand, this is technically true. On the other, this is effectively because the gains to such a large windfall cannot be captured by a single entity: Aluminium becoming so cheap as to become a nearly disposable material is a massively _good_ thing.
It's not inconceivable that having platinum become plentiful might also be such a boon.
Sure, but using aluminum as an example, if we take the modern production of aluminum (as a proxy for underlying demand) and multiply by the price of aluminum in the 1800s (when it was so incredibly precious that it was chosen to cap the Washington Monument), we would expect the modern aluminum industry to have revenues of around $100 trillion, or about 1000x what it actually has. The point is just that one cannot assume a resource extraction industry's future profitability without taking into consideration how increased supply will also lower the price of the product.
Isn't that the goal? If we can get rid of scarcity in materials and energy then everyone's living standards can go up. If we can move metal smelting off world, pollution goes down at the same time. Am I ignorant to think that would be a big positive for human kind?
I'm not saying it's not a potential positive for society, rather I'm saying that the economic calculations shown so far are exceedingly simplistic and merely extrapolate from the current market price of these metals, so we cannot use these numbers to conclude that this will be the most profitable endeavor in human history.
It will costs trillions to bootstrap that industry in space. It would cost mere billions to make that industry on Earth cleaner. The Earth is fucking gigantic. It's literally filled with raw materials. Access to those materials is downright cheap compared to attempting to access the same material in space.
I'd argue that the goals of manned space flight and meeting those goals are what put the USA on the path to be #1, so it seems to be to have something to do with manned flights.
Experience shows that the path to being #1 is usually to some extent doing a lot of stuff around the topic, throwing a lot of darts at the board and seeing what sticks.
If we don't experiment with getting off of this rock, we're dooming the lives of all known living organisms in the known universe.
An entire universe, void of all life, that doesn't get to experience itself deeply saddens me. Though that might just be the fitness-function within me talking.
It's critical that intelligent life on Earth learns to adapt and survive in the greater universe. Staying on this one planet is a virtual guarantee of extinction in the long-term.
Critical for the species on the universal timescale maybe, humans as we know them have been fine without it for ~300,000 years. Horseshoe crabs have been around for over 400 million years.
We might be better off spending the next couple hundred years focusing on making sure we don't destroy our own home before trying to move on to the next (or at least more comprehensive threat detection). There's a very good chance we'll off ourselves before we have to start worrying about anything at even a solar system scale, let alone galaxy or universe.
> There's a very good chance we'll off ourselves before we have to start worrying about anything at even a solar system scale, let alone galaxy or universe.
That's precisely the reason why we will be better off by investing into space exploration now.
Even if Mars or another planet were to survive the destruction of Earth, a stand-alone colony or space station would be doomed. At best I think we're at least 100 years off for any long-term self-sustained space colony... and it's quite possible we'll be sidetracked significantly if the climate causes widespread migration and famine as expected.
If we can't solve exponentially simpler earth-based problems, then I think we have no business in expanding, and would be unlikely to succeed regardless.
I support space exploration and development, but putting more resources outward when we have so many inward problems feels like a fool's errand.
We can work on both, but one's a much more imminent danger.
Your mistake is to prioritize climate change over space exploration and not some other industry. Spending on space exploration is tiny compared to, for example, consumer electronics or entertainment. Imagine how much we can save if phone lifecycle is five years instead of two; or if video games playing time is reduced by half, etc. So many candidates, yet you choose to target space exploration, an industry that has historically been responsible for so many science and technology innovations.
I'm not targeting the industry, I'm assuming that nothing will change when it comes to the space industry's current funding. No one's going to gut consumer electronics for space, it will never happen.
Given the current low-level of funding we should be focusing on defense (climate reliance, threat detection) rather than colonization. I'd be over the moon if space industries were better funded to do both... but more often than not total funding as a percentage of GDP has been decreasing, not increasing.
> At best I think we're at least 100 years off for any long-term self-sustained space colony
We think alike - but IMHO that's going to happen only if we begin now. That's why we shouldn't hold off.
> If we can't solve exponentially simpler earth-based problems, then I think we have no business in expanding, and would be unlikely to succeed regardless.
It's not like there's a single "we" that can keep attention at one thing at a time only. There are a lot of great engineers excited about space stuff, who don't care about ecology/whatever else at all. It makes sense to use their skills and enthusiasm while other engineers excited about that work on solving our Earth-bound problems.
Another point is - whatever helps us survive on Mars and the Moon will help us greatly to reduce harm done to Earth.
> Even if Mars or another planet were to survive the destruction of Earth, a stand-alone colony or space station would be doomed.
> We can work on both, but one's a much more imminent danger.
For sure, but there are also dangers other than climate change - war, asteroid impact, pandemics, rogue AI takeover... It's not that either Earth gets destroyed and the Martian colony will die anyways or nothing has happened and we don't need the backup.
Perhaps there will be another pandemic and the people on Earth will die off but the Martians survive. Perhaps asteroid impact will make Earth uninhabitable for 10-50 years but no more. Etc
I agree - 'critical' is sorta meaningless in this context. But the general response is - because organisms adapt for their own survival and our genes are selfish.
That's easy: because literally everything else is contingent on it. Either we survive and flourish allowing any of our other actions to matter, or we doom ourselves to extinction, in which case literally nothing we do matters.
We're already all individually doomed to extinction, yet this doesn't prevent most of us from finding meaning in our lives. And in the long run, any civilization, no matter how flourishing, is doomed. Conditioning whether anything we do matters on the existence of an infinite chain of future progeny is a losing game.
>infinite chain of future progeny is a losing game.
There's no need to take it to infinite extremes. There are always plenty of values in the slider between short-medium-long term to choose from to find meaning in life… whatever floats someone's boat.
