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From Aeon Magazine:
Musk did not give me the usual reasons. He did not claim that we need space to inspire people. He did not sell space as an R & D lab, a font for spin-off technologies like astronaut food and wilderness blankets. He did not say that space is the ultimate testing ground for the human intellect. Instead, he said that going to Mars is as urgent and crucial as lifting billions out of poverty, or eradicating deadly disease.
‘I think there is a strong humanitarian argument for making life multi-planetary,’ he told me, ‘in order to safeguard the existence of humanity in the event that something catastrophic were to happen, in which case being poor or having a disease would be irrelevant, because humanity would be extinct. It would be like, “Good news, the problems of poverty and disease have been solved, but the bad news is there aren’t any humans left.”’
(Score: 1) by glyph on Wednesday October 01 2014, @08:33AM
I think your faith in progress is misplaced. It is said that sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, but that works both ways. Believing that science can solve whatever we want it to is indistinguishable from believing in wizards.
Our civilisation isn't going to be around forever. That's not really that bad, all civilisations fail. We'll have a dark-age (or dim-age maybe, some low maintenance tech may survive, but don't bet on the internet) and then a new civilisation will come along. Only the new one will have LESS high-energy resources available to throw away on mega-projects. We've seen to that.
(Score: 2) by mcgrew on Wednesday October 01 2014, @01:41PM
Look at the last 50,000 years of history and prehistory. Progress ebbed and flowed, rose and sank, but each low was higher than the previous low. As to technology and magic, everything common today from toasters to automobiles would have been magic to anyone from 200 years ago. Even in my own lifetime; look at Star Trek. I was 14 when it first aired, and Uhura's bluetooth earpiece, the "communicators", the doors that opened by themselves, flat screen voice-controlled computers were all fantasy that we never expected to see.
True, we won't last forever. The universe itself won't even. But we'll be around a thousand years from now and the tech will seem as magical to you as a TV set would have to someone a few hundred years ago.
Will we learn everything there is to learn? I'm doubtful. But what we know today is very little compared to what we will learn.
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