No dessert until you eat your vegetables
This just in from the department of bad ideas:
Stephen Hawking has suggested that humans need to colonize other planets, because "an asteroid collision or a nuclear war could wipe us all out." I do not for a moment dare to suggest that Stephen Hawking isn't just a whole lot smarter than I am. (And that's quite a confession for an INTJ *snork.) He's a fricking genius, people. Bona fide. I'm just saying that maybe he's not thinking through the reality of what he's suggesting--not from a scientific viewpoint, which he clearly knows more about, but from a moral standpoint.
I like people in a generalized way. Individually, people are pretty decent, but they cannot be trusted to do the right thing on a grand scale, because each on thinks he or she is an exception to the rule, and because they invariably choose leaders who are amoral. Leaders who will "get the job done" without consideration for the cost or consequences. What's going on with the planet we've already colonized is a perfect illustration of why we cannot be trusted to colonize another planet.
Remember when you were a kid and you were faced with a plate full of liver and onions with a side of broccoli? You could smell the brownies your mom was baking for dessert, and that was all you wanted, but you couldn't have the brownies until you'd eaten most of your dinner, choking it down past your gorge. That's where we are. We can't have a new planet, because we haven't even acknowledged the extent of the mistakes we've made on this planet.
Or...let's try another metaphor for your childhood. You really wanted that puppy. Please, please, please, Mom, can we have a puppy? Turning to you with a sigh of annoyance, your mom said, "You haven't changed your hamster's cage in two weeks. If you can't take care of a hamster, how can I expect you to take care of a puppy?"
We can't be trusted. We've messed this planet up bad, and we don't seem to have learned anything from it. I still see people driving around in their gas-guzzler SUV's, drinking out of a single-use plastic bottle. They know it's wrong, but they won't stop. (See above: belief that one is the exception to the rule.)
Until we can start treating this planet right, I don't think we have any business trying to colonize another planet. Leave it for some other alien race, or some particularly hardy iteration of the human species that survives the environmental holocaust we're unleashing, and learns from the mistake.
Comments
"Stay the course..." Now where have I heard that before?
Ditto, arbed. I've felt that way for years, but apparently until cnn.com does a poll of how US Citizens feel on the subject, no one will pay any attention.
Kinda interesting to think of us as the "Martians" invading other planets. huh? I can't wait to anal probe some weird critter I meet!
Good article, though. I agree on so many points.
I am one who thinks that the idea of space travel and exploration and, well, just the general pursuit of all types of knowledge are a very good thing, though. It may seem like wasted money, as far as ...oh, the Moon, or Mars but omg when you see pictures taken by telescopes mounted on satellites that can see galaxies almost to the edge of the universe...and when you can see billions of years back in time.....and when you can see how tiny and insignificant we are in this universe, but realize that we can still sit here and wonder about it, and try to fathom it, well, I get all goosebumpy.
Can you imagine if people DID put their power, their money, their energy and their time into noble endeavors, rather than stupid shitty stuff like powermongering and genocide?
Can you imagine of the whole world got TOGETHER and worked towards a certain project that would actually BENEFIT someone? Solar energy? Finding miracle drugs in rainforests and actually GROWING rainforests rather than bulldozing them? Landing on an asteroid and mining essential elements to use for housing, or new medical instruments, or ssssshhheeeet....I don't know, you name it. Cure cancer?
Maybe by giving people noble goals, or something for us to aim for, to make us aim to be better than what we are, the space program at least tried to do some good, even if, in a lot of ways it failed because, well, duh, humans were involved!
Ah, that was a fun rant! Thanks for listening! :)
We have the ABILITY to get tons of cheap, effective antimalarial and antiaids drugs and vaccinations for many other diseases into the poorest of the poor countries.
The money is there. What is lacking is the will to do it. The space program and science and research are NOT taking money away from these things. YOU can be damn sure that even if the government did away with the space program, genetic research, stem cell research, nutrional science and any other project that someone feels is "wasted" money, they would still lack the organization, the motivation, the initiative and just plain the gumption to build people's walls back up. There is no lack of money. They are throwing money all over hell and gone at projects that are a billion times more useless than space/medical research. Oilsand??? How many freaking BILLIONS of dollars are going into finding ways to extract oil from sand in Canada so we can make MORE oil, MORE money, and put MORE greenhouse gases into the air?
Without science I have no idea how many of us would even BE here....well, shit, NONE of us would be HERE...on a damn blog, yakking our brains out at whothehellknowswho.
What I mean is a good majority of us would not even be alive if not for having lots of money spent on science, technology and medicine.
Don't blame science for the evils in the world. If our government WANTED the gulf coast rebuilt by now, it would already be done. They can find the time and the money for what they want done. And, it is usually self serving, petty, and of little use to the greater community.
And I want to say in a friendly way that you are silly :o) If the human race ain't worth saving, then none of our scientific advances are worth having.
As a friend pointed out, they rebuilt the football stadium in New Orleans just FINE.
Ya know, I have the feeling that most of the guys/gals IN the space program are there for a noble reason. Whether the higher ups are or not.