alt Hacker News>> I think it's one of the reasons we have to be self sustaining on other heavenly bodies.
This is not a joke. But every time anybody brings it up a mob shows up saying that we must make it work here on Earth, and we should all go to hell if we can't. But we only need a few madmen in power for the rest of us to not matter.
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The point is that making it work on Earth is orders of magnitude easier than making it work on Mars (or wherever). And by that I don’t mean that it’s easy by any stretch, but that establishing a self-sustaining colony on another planet is so much harder. In addition to the extremely challenging extraterrestrial environment (much more challenging than anything we have on Earth, including in the case of terrestrial nuclear catastrophe), all the problems that we have on Earth due to human nature will travel with us to any other planet if we don’t manage to solve them here.
Point is that if we can not behave on Earth how can we do it in other place.
> But every time anybody brings it up a mob shows up saying that we must make it work here on Earth
Yeah, we must. As in: it's not rational to even consider that becoming self-sustaining on other heavenly bodies is an alternative.
It's fun, it's interesting, it's many things. But it's not an alternative.
I imagine that if you can colonize other planets you can also target them with nuclear weapons.
It is like saying that the solution to all problems is colonizing Antarctica.