On the heels of Artemis II, our cultural obsession with space colonization continues, even as we face increasing global resource constraints and planetary health declines. Techno-optimists, including some of the wealthiest among us, dream of a future where we mine, travel to, and colonize other planets – all in the hopes of bypassing the problems we now face on Earth. But from the perspective of physics and ecology, how feasible is space colonization – and are these interplanetary ambitions blinding us to the miracle of the planetary spaceship we already inhabit?
The “largest rocket” also peaked in the 1970s and is now getting smaller. . Rocket fuel is basically made of kerosene.
Fun fact. Notice that on rockets designed to get farther out into space that the actual capsule is tiny and the rocket is essentially an enormous fuel tank needed to carry all the fuel you need to carry all the fuel you need?
So the fun fact is that if planet earth was 1.5 diameters larger, gravity would be stronger. If gravity was just that much stronger, humanity would still be unable to get to space. Right now, we discovered oil, which had just barely enough energy per mass to allow a launch to orbit. But if gravity was a little more, we would not have any technology that could do it. This tells a story about the limits of human ingenuity. We were just lucky to discover the resources ready to go, we did not invent the resources.
It’s so true. Rather than find ways for humanity to sustainably thrive on Earth - the only human habitable planet known to exist in the universe - the techno- optimists would rather use up our precious nonrenewable resources trying to live out their interplanetary colonization fantasies, on worlds that are not only inhospitable to human life, but actively, aggressively hostile to it.
They want to guide humanity to what they believe to be our teleological final evolutionary form (which is not how evolution works!), as some god-like, intergalactic mega civilization. It goes beyond delusion. It’s a complete inability to distinguish between fantasy and reality.
They constantly complain that the future portrayed in 20th century movies and TV shows never arrived, but they’re too thick to realize that’s because those futures were never possible. They’re unmoored from reality and we’re all paying the price.
i live one of the retorts, when Nate says commenters often say “we’ll just science the shit out if it and overcome obstacles” and the reply from the guests is, “if we science the shit out if it, we’d relalise how stupid it was”
