alt Hacker NewsWhen I read stats like this I realize how stuck in this solar system we are. I wonder if billionaires would care for the planet more if they knew that Earth is honestly just it for humans, for maybe forever.
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Nah, the whole second-Earth, terraforming nonsense is pure rationalization for whatever they want to do. If they weren’t using that as a post hoc justification, they’d just land on something else.
It gets even better when you think about all the damage we've done in ~200 years of industrial revolution.
We can't keep our perfect home in working order after so little time but they believe we'll transform dead rocks with no atmospheres in paradise...
Nuclear propulsion is the answer to this problem, but we're too busy with internal affairs to get around to trying it.
The way I see it, it takes a very selfish person to be a billionaire in the first place— one that not only doesn't care about people today, but also doesn't care about future generations of humans, let alone other living beings.
Any billionaire pointing at space exploration as humanity's salvation is, IMO, either really just craving the attention and glory of conquest (much like Caesar, Napoleon, Alexander, etc) or seeking the conditions of the age of exploration (XV to XIX centuries), when companies were as powerful as governments and expansionism was unfettered.
They're not going to be alive in 100 years (barring AGI intervention), so why would they care?
You people should stop demonizing billionaires. You're the ones burning the fossil fuels, not them. If their wealth way distributed among more people then those people would spend it damaging the environment which is what people generally do with their money anyway.
Carl Sagan's reflection on the Pale Blue Dot( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pale_Blue_Dot ) image seem relevant:
"From this distant vantage point, the Earth might not seem of any particular interest. But for us, it's different. Consider again that dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every "superstar", every "supreme leader", every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there – on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam. "