this post was submitted on 04 Aug 2025
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#1 is like tactical nuke tech available for all civilians, #2 would make sense if all the production line and consumers are in space too, #3 would make sense as part of the same.
Earth gravity well is a bitch. We live in it. Sending stuff up is expensive, sending stuff down is stupid when it's needed up there, but without some critical complete piece of civilization to send up at once, you'll have to send stuff up all the time.
It's too expensive and the profits are transcendent, as in "ideological achievement and because we can". Also they may eventually start sending nukes down.
Thus it all makes sense only when we can build and equip an autonomous colony to send at once. Self-reliant with the condition that they will get needed materials from wherever they are sent.
I suggest something with gravity though. Europa or Ganymede or Enceladus. Something like that.
Are you a Space Nutter?
It's not going to happen. No one is going to move to space or send nukes down or mine asteroids.
Ever.
Are you a round earth nutter?
It's not going to happen. No one is going to get past the edge of the world or sail the whole world or find new land.
Ever.
If you don't see how that's a completely dumb comparison, this is hopeless. I'm reality-based, you are not.
Sure, friend. You can see reality thousands of years into the future and know exactly what happens.
My bad.
Do you think physics and chemistry have changed in some significant way over the last thousand years?
Yet somehow, YOU can see reality in a thousand years, and it matches the sci-fi mindrot you watched as a kid...
Yes? Not the principles behind them, but our understanding of them as a species.
You're a boring doomer who thinks humans will never find, create, or invent something we've never done before? Seriously? What kind of boring hill is that to die on?
Uh, it's called "reality" my friend, try it.
You can't "invent" your way out of fundamental physical limits.
A Boeing 747 looks the same in 1969 as it does today. It still flies over the Atlantic in six hours burning kerosene in turbofan engines.
Sure, you can get a few percent here, a few percent there, but do you think suddenly we'll have warp drive?
Come on. Do you know how empty and huge space is?
Nope, you're right. We know everything there is to ever know and nothing will ever change. We've peaked as a species, there is literally nowhere else to go from here.
Oh OK, the only logical counterpoint is we're going to space.
Wheeee!!! Dibs on Neptune!
In practice my comment means that it's far too early to think of space colonization.
Far too late as well. It will never happen.
I disagree. It just won't be fancy. It has to be an enormous project with existential risks. And you have to really send many people at once with no return ticket. "At once" is important, you can't ramp it up, that's far more expensive. It has to be a mission very deeply planned in detail with plenty of failsafe paths, aimed at building a colony that can be maintained with Earth's teaching resources, technologies and expertise, and locally produced and processed materials for everything. So - something like that won't happen anytime soon, but at some point it will happen.
The technologies necessary have to be perfected first, computing should stop being the main tool for hype, and the societies should adapt culturally for computing and worldwide connectivity.
These take centuries. In those centuries we'll be busy with plenty of things existential, like avoiding the planet turning into one big 70s Cambodia.
Um, OK.