again, no sense of proportion of the actual issue here. we are DESTROYING the earth, not mildly scratching it etc.
establishing a space society is a hugely intensive operation that dwarfs the hundreds of millions required to put a few folks and some trinkets into a space station etc.
Only for very, very particular definitions of "Earth". There are numerous events in Earth's past that by any objective standard are more destructive than even the worst possible interpretations of man's efforts to date and worst plausible projections of man's efforts in the future. To pick one that probably doesn't even come to your mind, nothing we've done is even within two factors of magnitude of the disaster of the Great Oxygenation Crisis. Probably three, maybe even four. That one was bad. Well, bad at the time, anyhow; certainly none of us would today prefer that it had never happened.
That we're doing various dangerous and bad things is undeniable. That we're "DESTROYING" the Earth is a memetic weapon that has been crafted and fired at you by people who want you to give them lots of power to fix the DESTRUCTION of Earth, and to ensure that you stay in their control by ensure that anyone who disagrees with that assessment has the human instinctual "religious heretic" template applied to them, so you don't apply rational thought. Things are bad, but not so bad that you need that much despair.
That said, I don't expect us to lift industry into space. I expect us to lift an industrial seed into space that grows there, and that ultimately not all that many people will necessarily leave Earth.
I also expect that the current situation will not persist indefinitely. If we have clean energy, and look at how that is developing lately, lifting things into space isn't necessarily that big a deal. A "environmentally neutral" launch platform isn't even remotely inconceivable; it's not terribly out of reach today. The question isn't about the technology of 2019; the question is about the technology of 2069.
These folks appear to avoid current events like the plague. Jeff Bezos is still highly involved in assisting the US government and it's various military and intelligence entities in seeking advantage versus other nations.
Taking nationalist ignorant policies and mentalities with us into space seems... retrograde, stupid, and doomed to failure. Inelegant.
There is a reason that all seriously futuristic sci-fi puts us WELL beyond this petty nationalist nonsense currently causing people to re-re-visit the 1980's yet again...
One currently sees the opposite of top-down coordination of space activities, after an initial cold-war-inspired display of bravado etc. (private ventures contracted to life public sector payloads into orbit) and you can be assured that plenty of both consumption of earths resources and pollution of earths atmosphere and water occur as byproducts. Private enterprise would seem to offer a "willy nilly" approach to anything, as such.
I don't think the lack of a dictator--especially the sort of dictator you would support--is one of our problems!
There's also no story of humanity where there is no ecosystem in the first place.
I think the hazard isn't in stomping on an exo-Earth ecosystem.
I think it's that if we can't avoid damage to multi-billion year evolved, robust ecosystems on our home planet, we might not successfully craft off-planet ecosystems that will sustain us indefinitely.
Not on the first go. So we should start early.
I think that learning how to craft off-planet ecosystems is a large part of what is going to help us stem damage down here. Where would solar power be now without the early adopters in the space industry?
And so...?
Even if true, that doesn't lead anywhere. If you're trying to faintly imply we shouldn't try, you ought to bring the arguments up to the surface, where examination will quite likely show they don't have that much substance.
We need maybe like 100 million or less people total on the planet. And 7 or 70 or heck 700 billion littered through the rest of the solar system. The chances of the survival of our species and life in general on the planet the would be infinitely greater than what we have done in the past 300 years. Population growth outside the planet raises absolutely no questions about the survival of the planet or species. The rest of the solar system is already completely and utterly dead as far as we know. No arguments about pollution or stability or sustainability or survival apply to it.
The rest of the universe as far as we know is our canvas, but please spare the damn planet from where we came. It's rare and nearly impossible to replace.
We are utterly destroying the only known home to life forms in the universe. We are doing it rapidly.
You seem to be living in a delusional parallel reality in which establishing a space society doesn't consume the resources of our ONLY current home planet and doesn't pollute it.
We must change our ideologies, our thought patterns, our cultures, and our entire industrial societies patterns and habits (not to mention energy source) within the next decades to survive, let alone thrive or develop further.
I don't get the sense that you comprehend our actual condition on this planet. There is a very very steep footprint curve with regards to both our population (There was roughly 1.5 billion of us the last time we all tried to kill each other, World War 2. Now there are 7 billion of us. Before, the consumption footprint of a person was rather low, now each person consumes more resources than ever before, and this amount of consumption continues to rise. The Chinese middle class will surely want every accessory their American counterparts have, right?)
How has this entire predicament avoided your scrutiny until now?
If anyone's living in a delusional parallel reality, it's you and your apocalyptic rantings.
On an orbital colony, there are life maintaining systems and it's probable that people will have different ideas how much they would require maintenance.
Likewise, there will be limited resources and probably again people will have different ideas on what to spend on the short term. Ie a kid would like ice cream but the parents know they could starve before the next harvest so better to spend that energy on some more efficient food.
I think it is likely (20% or greater) we will compete for resources against non-terrestrial lifeforms before humans leave the solar system, assuming we leave the solar system.
Earth doesn't contain the majority of all water in the solar system. Earth might not even contain all of the liquid water in the solar system. What are the chances that liquid water exists in Ceres' core, or under the icey surface of Europa or Ganymede or another moon? What are the chances that Martian ice, or Europa ice, or Saturn's ice have microbes frozen in them, possibly able to thaw given better environmental conditions? We might even find life in places without water, such as Titan's methane lakes. Titan has a methane cycle very similar to Earth's water cycle. Methane makes a great rocket fuel. Water makes great rocket fuel and is necessary to life support systems.
We have a history of taking what we want without regards to the consequences or whom it hurts. If we don't compete with other life when we leave Earth it's because other life isn't out there, not because of our strong morale core.
If you want to believe that, fine, but be aware you're believing despite a complete lack of evidence. There's little more than a faint trace of a sign of any life in the rest of the solar system (a few stray whiffs of methane on Mars that aren't that hard to explain geologically), and absolutely no sign of any sort of life that would provide any sort of competition if we decided we wanted their resources.
I am making the assumption that we will have a much stronger preference for water closer to Earth, and we aren't talking about large gravity wells.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:PIA17046_-_Voyager_1_Goes...
If only there was a large spinning habitat in space where the megarich could use their money to create a paradise for its inhabitants...
Though based on my experiences on HN, even some people here need this really bashed into their heads, that we can't hurt ecosystems that don't exist. ("What if some do?" Then by all means worry about them, but by resources, they are a fraction of a fraction of a percent of what the universe has.) There is a major unexamined assumption that people have that life exists everywhere, and therefore we can't put a toe outside our planet without stomping on something, simply because that's our Earth-based experience. Once brought to the conscious level it's obvious that it's false, but it's hard to get it up to that level for some people.