It seems to me that over a couple hundred year time horizon the new land, resources, technologies and economies of scale added by the new world were clearly a net benefit to europeans as a whole and paid back the initial investment many times over.
How could anyone argue against that?
A people that were interested in raising others around them out of poverty, before setting off to devastate and enslave other continents, would probably have treated the people they found on those continents much more humanly.
If the european colonial diaspora had set out to advance other places, as opposed to exploiting them, we probably wouldn't have global poverty today.
The "return on investment" of colonizing north america was made by exporting tobacco to europe, clear cutting the north american continent, near extincting major mega-fauna and replacing them with invasive species, and shipping africans to the americas for slave labor.
Considering that a net positive is a dubious conclusion. But of course we have to ask: net positive for whom?
And of course, misses the point of the original comment: that there are no resources to be exploited 40 light years from earth! It's a one way trip...
try a broad History of Slavery before asserting that the Age of Exploration was just one big slave-fest, please. Its a bigoted statement to meld them together without the actions of other civilizations taken into account.
Your argument w.r.t. poverty is also the same boring reductive fallacy that people who argue against beautiful architecture and art make ("You could have fed so many people with that money!"). Guess what: you can do both. You don't "solve poverty" by spending a sum of money on food over art. Those people will be hungry soon. That's one. Two, Man does not live by bread alone. Beauty matters. We don't live to eat. We eat to live. And yes, we can both care for the starving and invest in things other than helping the poor.
The idea that Europe is responsible for global poverty is also obtuse, historically illiterate, and devoid of common sense. There was plenty of poverty in the world before the evil European showed up. If anything, Western commerce, whatever its flaws, has lifted many out of poverty. Yes, capitalism, whatever its flaws, has lifted many, especially the West, out of poverty and into a good deal of material comfort. Look at the 20th century alone. It's better to be poor today than poor a century or a few centuries ago. The average man today is far better off today materially than he has ever been, than even the materially better off in previous centuries were.
Our ancestors weren't perfect, and we should not repeat their errors, but it takes a certain kind of ingratitude and blindness to fail to appreciate the cumulative good they did leave us, an ingratitude and blindness seemingly particular to snarky, ideologically infected oikophobes in the West. Believe me: Africans aren't generally seething with hatred at the good of the West the way people in the West do. If anything, they are more likely to despise the malaise and decadence they see in the West today, that the West is trying to force down the throats of everyone else. They are looking to replicate what is actually good in the West in their own countries.
And more importantly: diverting those resources elsewhere would do little to solve those problems. History, politics, dictators, colonialism, economic inequality, greed, ethnic/religious conflict, etc etc. Nothing that eg. NASA or a bag of $$ would fix.
the point the op raised is relevant from a historical perspective, as probably the firsts who will populate the moon and Mars will think they are living the future; meawhile people die of dehydration this night
also we barely can't grow lettuce at space and that's missions at millions of USD... i think a society which is well stablished and care for everyone's welfare is more likely to collaborate and build technology to get away from the solar system than our shit greed of today, despite the great amount of good and intelligent people who sometimes can't even do stuff because academia conflict etc.
Perhaps it’s pessimistic, but I have little faith that even a single country will eradicate suffering within its own borders, let alone all countries coming together to cooperate and eliminate it globally. If we wait until all earthly problems are solved before going into space, we’ll simply never go to space. At some point something will happen that will stop launches entirely, we’ll lose our institutional knowledge of rocketry and spaceflight, and putting things in orbit (let alone people on the moon) will become an impossibility again.
settlement on Mars/Moon is a multi-disciplinary act! figuring out efficient and safe geothermal or nuclear or whatever technology to improve Earth's life, definitely translates to future settlements... so why not do it here? it isn't about eradicating suffering, as it's part of the existence (probably) but it's about providing a decent life for everyone
(I assume, but have no hard numbers, that it's also cheaper to send hydroponic systems to Mars than to ship food regularly: conditional on that, also to ship an autonomous food factory).
Going to Mars long term also requires the shipping cost to space is reduced so much that the cost to LEO is competitive with current airline rates, so when I say "drop an autonomous pod anywhere" I really do mean anywhere — Sudan, Malawi, Nepal, Everest, Antarctica, are all much easier than Olympus Mons.
Human spaceflight in the US today is 100% driven by the desire to militarize space.
See Gateway: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lunar_Gateway
This is all about supporting military habitation of the moon.
This reply seems to assume the argument is against space exploration in total, when it's actually against human space travel.
The idea that inter-stellar human space flight should be funded is pretty far out there...
Going to space IS politics. It is, essentially, a vanity goal for a whole society. The resources diverted are, essentially, mindshare and political.
It is only fair then that people ask why we as a society look to space when we have so many problems here, just as it was fair to ask why so much attention was given to the race to the moon rather than, say, civil rights [1].
1. There are people who live the way they do by choice. Folks who got that education and opportunity and rejected it. Your perspective of "mud huts bad" is very centric to how you were raised. It's one step removed from handing the natives a bible and having them build a church to civilize them.
2. No matter how we organize the word, there's always gonna be a line, and someone will be at the back. Sending that line in a new direction might be the next evolution of the species. Your iPhone is magic to someone 200 years ago, should we wait till everyone has a iPhone till we make any more advancement.
3. Warfare? Eco destruction? Unless your very old, its likely primate warfare at scale was well before your lifetime. As for the eco side of things, well you should take some comfort in the rate of change for the positive that your seeing.
Or that they squandered their copious opportunities?
"More than 80 percent of Indians (about 700 million) live on less than $1.25 a day"
Saying that we shouldn't spend money to send humans into inter-stellar space is not the same as saying we should stop all technical advancement.
But really, we'd be better off without iPhone or Android as well. A more democratized technological advancement would benefit many more people, to a much greater degree.
Do you really think if Steve Jobs hadn't been born that smart phone would not have been invented?
But they'd almost certainly be a more accessible s/w development platform...
You should go look at the indigenous protection efforts in the amazon. You should look at what much of Africa has done.
There are plenty of people living in their areas version of mud huts, with cell phones and solar panels. "Mud huts" are in some places very much the local, renewable building material. https://thisisafrica.me/lifestyle/wisdom-african-hut/
And it's all open source!
I'm with you on this, OP is being egocentric and playing a zero sum game which it clearly isn't.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earth_structure
"Mud huts" have lasted for many generations, had multiple levels, have excellent cooling properties for hot climates, etc.
Advancing technology shouldn't occlude proven technology.
You bring up space travel, but the exact same argument applies to sports, movies, art, technology, evenbthe Internet itself. Once distilled as "how can we spend money on x when y" then it behoves us to identify y, and spend on literally nothing else.
Globally not-spending on defence for example would free up resources enough to substantially raise the standard of living for billions.
On the other hand, spending is raising the standard of living for billions already. Movies spend huge amounts, employing the services of hundreds of professions. The money poured into movies doesn't get destroyed, it gets distributed. (Including globally to places like India, Cape Town, and so on.) So it is with spending on space. The bulk of the money is spent/recycled here on earth.
The problems you highlight (poverty, living conditions, health facilities etc) are complex though and seldom fixed simply with money. In some ways money is the easy part, other factors (like human greed leading to corruption) are trickier.
So, I hear what you are saying, but its not an either-or proposition. There's room for both. I applaud your desire to focus on the problems of others. Don't worry about other areas, focus on the people you can help.
Personally I found that there is enough opportunity in areas which improve things, work against poverty, environmental destruction etc, that this is what I focus on.
This quote is outdated.
It's 11.9% (167 million) on less than $2.15/day: https://ourworldindata.org/poverty?insight=the-rapid-progres...
Your quote requires India to have a population of about 875 million, it's currently about 1.4 billion.
> A more democratized technological advancement would benefit many more people, to a much greater degree
What does "democratized" even mean here? This stuff is widely available, do you want governments getting involved?
> But they'd almost certainly be a more accessible s/w development platform
What does "more accessible" mean? The knowledge to learn is given away for free. Making the tools multilingual or blind-accessible is hard but the big players do it anyway. Open source tools have man pages, which always had terrible reputations. Both open and closed source tools have wikis and forums and blogs.
About one million people die of dysentry each year. I doubt that people got the opportunity to not die of dysentry and rejected it. You can have an ivory-tower argument about this hypothetic line, but in this world of ours, it's going to be hard to claim we're past that line.
god forbids we do anything to advance the humanity until we achieve total outcome equality first.
How is this intractable? This is a moral argument. It won't stop anyone from doing it. I am not sure you are using the word intractable correctly. It implies impossible, or unrealistic to be solved even if hypothetically possible, etc.
Whereas from what you say it seems it's possible, you just think it should not be done (due to being in your view immoral).
Very different things.
You're "not wrong", but you're taking a rather negatively biased view on the matter...it is also hilarious, simultaneously.
You might counter my argument with a plethora of “obvious” solutions, but I suspect most of them will be top-down ones, that, unfortunately, that don’t seem to ever work. You might also enumerate instances where top-down initiatives have worked successfully, but I’d argue that in each of the cases there was something about the environment that made it stick - the soil was already fertile.
The amount of money spent on “lofty” pursuits like space exploration is almost orthogonal to the issue at hand, within reason, obviously - it’s definitely possible to bankrupt yourself like the Soviet Union did.
I put “lofty” in quotes because these pursuits are obviously very practical in the long run. I don’t want to repeat the argument you’ve probably heard a million times, but it’s obviously true that if everyone thought like this back when we living in caves - we’d never even get huts. And we were much poorer back then.
2) Probably the biggest improvements in quality of life on Earth came because of America (North, mostly). Those countries exists today because extremely big resources were invested by the kings in Europe to cross the ocean at a time when standards of living there were unimaginably bad. They could have given the money to the poor instead.
A significant portion of the human species doesn't have adequate food or housing, much less modern health care or education. Even populating Mars is a ridiculous waste of resources given this situation.
The whole "sun runs out in 5B years" thing is so disconnected from our present situation, that it doesn't even matter if it's even actually true or not (I'm not doubting it, just it's influence on our current situation).
Does anyone really think our species will still even be here in 5B years?
With the current trends in eco destruction, and primate warfare, it's questionable if we'll make it to the end of the century.
Understanding and dreaming of the stars can certainly continue to intrigue and inspire humanity, but dedicating massive resources so people can live in underground shipping containers on Mars, while billions of people still live in mud huts, is just so outrageously wasteful, not to mention self-centered and selfish, that's it's literally a crime against humanity.
This is all emblematic of the incredible failure of perspective of our place in this world...