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Humans were once bold enough that the first Polynesians set sail into the open Pacific with presumably no knowledge of what they'd find over the horizon several thousand years ago (Tonga, Samoa), and then, after several thousand years of a gap -- honestly, an interesting historical question -- as far as Hawaii and Easter Island. I don't think I can even really comprehend what would drive people to set sail in wooden ships without a well-defined destination, or how many anonymous brave souls likely disappeared into deep blue waters without a trace in the process.
Space exploration is, as is often observed, immensely more difficult given the lack of breathable air and such, but I can't help but feel that it sounds more technologically comparable with sailing the open Pacific before the Latins even moved into Italy. God-willing, maybe my descendants will look back upon us comparably while they board the equivalent of scheduled cruise ships, or even whatever analog the of air travel that fits into this.
EDIT: I'm not at all certain how I ended up responding to your comment twice. I must be done for the day.
The Polynesians didn’t face any of the obstacles of space exploration and colonization though. The cost? Chop down a couple of trees, tie them with vines, launch with maybe a big container full of water (that you can easily refill with rainwater) and live off the fat of tge ocean by fishing. Once you land, you still have the ocean for fishing Annnd more than likely you’ll have edible food on whatever island you land on. It’s cheap to do, requires few resources to get there and few to survive once you make landfall. You barely need the ability to plan ahead to pull this off.
And space is absolutely not like this. Mars is 9 months of travel away, and you need to take everything you need to survive with you — air, water, food, etc. you need to overcome the negative health effects of zero gravity. And everything you carry is limited by the physics of launching a rocket into space — launching a kilogram of matter costs $1500. You need 9 months of air, water, food, exercise equipment, the crew itself, waste disposal, and so on. A single rocket to mars is pretty resource intensive. It gets worse. You can’t just pluck a coconut off the abundant trees on mars. In fact, not only are there no trees, but it would require pretty extensive work to get to the place where you could plant food on mars. And you need to take that stuff along with you. And extra supplies to support the crew while they set all this up. Point being that space is nothing like the ocean. And at such high cost, it’s going to compare pretty unfavorably to just about anything else in the national budget. We can work on the mars colony that might be at least resource neutral 40 years from now, or we could spend those billions on AI, or education, or anti poverty programs,or cure a disease, or building a big gold tourist attraction statue of Trump. Even the statue might be a net gain simply because people will want to travel to see it and spend money while there. For most of these things, other than prestige, space loses pretty handily compared to most other ways one could spend the money.
Also the sea exploration one is a lot easier to trial-and-error, especially over a multi-generational timeframe. Not that the Polynesian navigators necessarily got purely lucky, but each exploration mission is far less costly on society.
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There's no "there", there, though. The Polynesians were looking for more nesos where they could live, and they found them. We know what's in interplanetary space, and it's all worse than Antarctica. Interstellar space might have something but it's just too damn far away; like the Polynesians shooting for the moon.
The typical retort is that what there is, is a chance of survival for the human race in the event of total catastrophe befalling the Earth, albeit in reduced circumstances. Now sure, this is such a remote concern that it would be unlikely to motivate nations to make the expense. But that may say more about nations than about the soundness of the idea (depending on how much you value the survival of the human race).
This idea seems to come from scifi geeks thinking space is really cool, and trying to come up with some sort of justification for exploring it.
It's not hard to think of a catastrophe that would make the Earth unlivable, but space is already unlivable, unless you can terraform something, and that's a generations long project. Going into space won't be any better than going to Antarctica or the sea floor, or underground.
I don't understand this perspective. I'm not an astronomy or physics expert, but I did study it in school, and as best as I can tell, there is a scientific consensus that the Earth will become uninhabitable to humans due to the Sun expanding within the next 5 billion years. Which means that, if we want humanity to survive beyond that, we will have to figure out some way to sustainably live off of Earth (and likely off of the Solar System) between now and then. This, to me, has always been the justification for figuring out space exploration.
I'm partial to the argument that undertaking this project in the year 10^9 AD or even 10^6 AD might be a better use of resources than in the year 2025 AD. But I'm also partial to the argument that technology doesn't just progress through time alone, that we can always come up with excuses for why this would be easier or more efficient to tackle later, and as such, we might as well start working on it now.
Self-sustaining habitats in Antarctica or the sea floor or underground seem like decent short-term projects for catastrophes in the short term (as well as good settings for steampunk-inspired video games), but I don't see any way around space exploration for long term human survival, outside of even more outlandish things like time travel or portals.
By that reasoning we should have worked on rockets to the moon in 2000 BC.
Very few of either "realistic" hard scifi scenarios, or "realistic" speculative scenarios have us escaping the Earth only in 10^9 AD. The decades of scifi we've had about exploring the solar system have been about much more recent time periods. Sure, maybe we'd do it in 10^9 AD, but 10^9 AD is a long way off. and it isn't what everyone talking about this stuff wants.
And "excuses" is just a spin you put on "reasons".
I mean, if there were people with enough understanding of engineering and astronomy to even understand the very concept of what a "rocket to the moon" meant in 2000 BC, I think it would've been pretty cool if they'd started working on it then.
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