(In the form of Arnold Horshack from Welcome Back Kotter)Ooo! Ooo! Ooo! My turn!
Ahem...
"History and Nature never take jumps forward, but history always takes jumps back"
You have to start any endeavor at some time, and as humans will probably remain borderline to full-blown retarded forever, we may as well start going into space now, and I wouldn't care if the reason given was that solar wind would cure millions from the tragedy that are hemerhoids; vamonos! We'll never be "good enough". There are far better reasons to do The Space Thing than there are arguments against it...well, ok: Creationists have some pretty compelling reasons for not going, but I sort of like the idea of a Saturn 5 up God's butt...
Short of sprouting a second set of arms from the forhead, humans have pretty much run the gammut on evolving physically, so we have to count on invention, innovation and exploration to take us further. And what about "airless planets and moons"? I think that science that could be tested on large scale without harming anything would benefit us in reverse. Go. Learn. Come back. Apply lessons learned. Rinse. Repeat.
"I think we have to learn a few internal lessons before humanity is ready to move on."
"No cookie for you because you've been bad"? Problem with this is that in the millenia of existance as homo sapiens sapiens, we STILL haven't learned our collective lesson; we keep hitting our human snooze button, and justifying it non stop; funny thing is no matter how clever our arguements, we're still always late for work.
"Couldn't that same technology be used to sustain life here? I mean, there are certain gases that could be released in the atmosphere to bind with the greenhouse gas, therby rendering it pretty much harmless. Couldn't we use the resources to fix the mess we have made here? What is to stop us from making a mess from whatever planet is unfortunate enough to have us?"
I always hear these things argued as a one or the other thing. Why is that? There is no reason both wouldn't/couldn't be done at the same time. If we can lump people together as a large organism, we can say that leaving home (Earth) might give us the perspective we need to finally grow the fuck up and stop obsessing over the same ol' same ol's just because they're easier. You can't "just change" how you think, but you CAN change what you do, which is similar and could eventually lead to a better way of thinking. And if what we're doing as a species isn't working (i.e. we're still slaughtering eachother over politics, race and religion) then we sure as hell better change what we do and try something else. Those things will probably stick around in some fashion, but we may increase our options to combat them.
And as far as not being able to vacation on Mars, I agree with Doug; I'd like to sue the 1950s. All those promises of a Buck Rogers future by 1999 in old Popular Mechanics have NOT happened to my expectations. Grrr. What a mean thing for a generation to do to another.
My question is this: are we moving forward or are we all just waiting for someone else to do it for us and fighting them when they try? Armchair revolutionaries: GET UP!
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timeasmymeasure
Vamonos!!
Date: 2003-12-07 10:54 pm (UTC)"History and Nature never take jumps forward, but history always takes jumps back"
You have to start any endeavor at some time, and as humans will probably remain borderline to full-blown retarded forever, we may as well start going into space now, and I wouldn't care if the reason given was that solar wind would cure millions from the tragedy that are hemerhoids; vamonos! We'll never be "good enough". There are far better reasons to do The Space Thing than there are arguments against it...well, ok: Creationists have some pretty compelling reasons for not going, but I sort of like the idea of a Saturn 5 up God's butt...
Short of sprouting a second set of arms from the forhead, humans have pretty much run the gammut on evolving physically, so we have to count on invention, innovation and exploration to take us further. And what about "airless planets and moons"? I think that science that could be tested on large scale without harming anything would benefit us in reverse. Go. Learn. Come back. Apply lessons learned. Rinse. Repeat.
"I think we have to learn a few internal lessons before humanity is ready to move on."
"No cookie for you because you've been bad"? Problem with this is that in the millenia of existance as homo sapiens sapiens, we STILL haven't learned our collective lesson; we keep hitting our human snooze button, and justifying it non stop; funny thing is no matter how clever our arguements, we're still always late for work.
"Couldn't that same technology be used to sustain life here? I mean, there are certain gases that could be released in the atmosphere to bind with the greenhouse gas, therby rendering it pretty much harmless. Couldn't we use the resources to fix the mess we have made here? What is to stop us from making a mess from whatever planet is unfortunate enough to have us?"
I always hear these things argued as a one or the other thing. Why is that? There is no reason both wouldn't/couldn't be done at the same time.
If we can lump people together as a large organism, we can say that leaving home (Earth) might give us the perspective we need to finally grow the fuck up and stop obsessing over the same ol' same ol's just because they're easier.
You can't "just change" how you think, but you CAN change what you do, which is similar and could eventually lead to a better way of thinking. And if what we're doing as a species isn't working (i.e. we're still slaughtering eachother over politics, race and religion) then we sure as hell better change what we do and try something else. Those things will probably stick around in some fashion, but we may increase our options to combat them.
And as far as not being able to vacation on Mars, I agree with Doug; I'd like to sue the 1950s. All those promises of a Buck Rogers future by 1999 in old Popular Mechanics have NOT happened to my expectations. Grrr. What a mean thing for a generation to do to another.
My question is this: are we moving forward or are we all just waiting for someone else to do it for us and fighting them when they try? Armchair revolutionaries: GET UP!