> The single most important job humanity has is to get our eggs into more than one basket.
We are very far from a self sustaining society and economy on Mars. Easily a century or more. I'm cheering on SpaceX, but find this talking point of Elon's very tiresome. It's little more than sci-fi fantacism. As just a simple example: no one knows what childhood development is going to be like at 40% of earth's gravity. And that's just one issue among millions.
For better or worse we need to fix the planet we have. And we don't need to invent new technology to do it, though we certainly should pursue new technologies that might help or accelerate the process. What we lack fundamentally right now is political will/unity.
We can arrest climate change. We can end famine. We can extend modern medical care to the entire world. All of these are directly possible, today, with no new invention.
But we have to, to paraphrase Sagan, become a species more prudent than we are today.
Yes, it makes a substantial difference, particularly in child mortality.
Hans Rosling has been dead some years now, but used to do great talks going through the basic data and trends.
I'm not sure why you're adopting a tone of debate/rebuttal. Every problem you mention is something I think we should address exactly under what I said originally, whether its inequitable access to healthcare in the US, or straight up lack of modern facilities in low income nations.
We are very far from a self sustaining society and economy on Mars. Easily a century or more. I'm cheering on SpaceX, but find this talking point of Elon's very tiresome. It's little more than sci-fi fantacism. As just a simple example: no one knows what childhood development is going to be like at 40% of earth's gravity. And that's just one issue among millions.
For better or worse we need to fix the planet we have. And we don't need to invent new technology to do it, though we certainly should pursue new technologies that might help or accelerate the process. What we lack fundamentally right now is political will/unity.
We can arrest climate change. We can end famine. We can extend modern medical care to the entire world. All of these are directly possible, today, with no new invention.
But we have to, to paraphrase Sagan, become a species more prudent than we are today.