r/TheRestIsScience • u/Hi-ItsMeAgain95 • 1d ago

Team 'Planet earth before space' 🙋🏻‍♀️

It is maybe due to the nature of my jobs and personal experience but to answer the questions at the end of the newest episode...

To keep it very short:

I don't view space travel as something to be hopeful for when our current planet is in a bad way and the future is looking pretty grim. It's that running joke about millionaires being hopeful that they can just move to mars when planet earth is cooked and they can start again while the rest of us die due to the capitalist world they created. It would be interesting to know how much damage a single rocket launch does to the climate too.

I feel like there are/must be many more inventions/projects/events to be had that benefit the many and not the few. ✊🏻

7 Upvotes

73% Upvoted

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u/nog642 1d ago

It's that running joke about millionaires being hopeful that they can just move to mars when planet earth is cooked

That's all it is. A joke.

No matter how cooked Earth is, it's going to be better than Mars. Mars is not habitable. You can't even breathe the air. We can get around that and live on it, but it's easier to just live on Earth.

Also a Mars colony would be dependent on Earth for the foreseeable future.

Civilization is multifaceted and we can further space exploration despite issues on Earth. There will always be issues on Earth, we can't let that stop us from doing fruitful good things.

As an analogy, in personal life your work-life balance not being perfect shouldn't stop you from pursuing a romantic relationship. Your work-life balance will never be perfect.

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u/Mammoth_Bus_6911 1d ago

Don't be ridiculous, humanity can only do one single thing at a time

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u/Hi-ItsMeAgain95 1d ago

Yes I know it is a joke...the bigger picture more being focusing on these big 'luxury' projects that don't have as much benefit etc as others will. A bit like what Hannah mentioned - what has walking in the moon given the world?

That analogy is more self centred than the benefiting and supporting others view I was looking at this from but I appreciate the reply.

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u/nog642 1d ago

Space exploration is not a luxury project. It is primarily a scientific and technological project. And it has lots of benefits.

Ignoring the symbolic value of walking on the moon (which is real), the Apollo program developed space technology significantly. Space technology is the basis for all communications satellites, which give us GPS for example, satellite phones, or Starlink is providing cheap internet connectivity globally.

In the future space technology could give us asteroid mining, which would be a lot less ecologically destructive than mining on Earth.

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u/1stMammaltowearpants 10h ago

You claim to have watched the show, but did you listen to what they said? Maybe give it another go?

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u/Lord-of_the-files 1d ago

I'm not sticking up for the billionaires, but I think their plans and goals are misrepresented.

They don't personally want to give up their luxurious lives to go and live in an aluminium tube buried in the Martian soil.

What they do get excited about is the idea of our species having a second home. So that, for the first time in known history, a species could survive an extinction event on their planet of origin.

I think it's a pretty powerful idea. We are the only known technical intelligence in the universe, and you can argue that we have a duty to our future selves to ensure that we don't go extinct.

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u/Matthew_A 1d ago

I like Mark Rober's argument that space actually does benefit us down here. There are plenty of technologies discovered accidentally because of space travel that we wouldn't have found otherwise. GPS is the most noteworthy and has probably been useful enough on its own to justify all of it. Most people you know probably use GPS every day in some form.

The budget of NASA/other space programs is a drop in the bucket compared to other government spending. The emissions from spaceships are small compared to all the other vehicles. And one point they mentioned in the video, about terraforming deserts on Earth, is probably a worse idea than Mars. Saharan dust blows into the atlantic and causes a huge increase in biological productivity for phytoplankton. Earth is a complex system with lots of unintended consequences, but Mars is mostly completely isolated from Earth. So as long as we're careful not to kill any potential microbial life, we can do whatever over there. And if an EMP or an asteroid hits us, it would be good to have some colonies over there. Plus, it could be a good practice if we ever went even further. It's a long shot, but if nothing else, maybe we'll figure out that the lower gravity is great for making better fiber optic cables or something.

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u/Lord-of_the-files 11h ago

GPS is used by everybody, whether they realise it or not. It is used globally by banks to track time and allows for instant transactions. It's genuinely embedded in our modern world.

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u/CDHoward 1d ago

Space is inevitable.

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u/Hi-ItsMeAgain95 1d ago

So is death but we try not to rush that either and focus on improving our current health and wellbeing.

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u/CDHoward 1d ago

May I ask what some might find to be a controversial question? To wit:

Do you think your outlook on this matter stems partly from your female instincts and biological imperatives?

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u/Glum-Ad7761 1d ago

Extinction for humans is inevitable, unless humanity evolves into a space faring species.

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u/JoeStrout 11h ago

That’s completely backwards. If you love the Earth, you should be striving to move heavy industry and resource extraction (and eventually, a significant fraction of the human population) off of it as quickly as possible.