Thoughts from Sarah Hoyt. Yes, some empires gave colonialism a bad name, but as she says, all life does it.
12 thoughts on “Why We Must Go To The Stars”
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Thoughts from Sarah Hoyt. Yes, some empires gave colonialism a bad name, but as she says, all life does it.
Comments are closed.
Indeed, anything that doesn’t colonize cannot possibly be alive.
The comments over there underscore how relying on competing for funds from the federal budget can be problematic, to say the least.
But don’t go to Mars.
Should humanity survive? Much of what exists today has very little appeal.
If humanity survives for a long time, it will likely go through a series of transformations that will be at times unappealing to folks around today and at times more ideal. Quitting so as to prevent any change also prevents any change for the better. A toast to humanity’s life: לחיים (which in Columbus’s time meant, “May what you drink bring you life, not harm”.). http://forward.com/culture/146279/lchaim-a-bad-grammatical-error/
Going to the stars is the other side of the technological singularity, it might be fun to speculate but no plans or predictions are worth a damn. Our descendant by then may not even be flesh and blood.
The Greeks colonized the Mediterranean very well. Their culture proved to be beneficial to subsequent cultures (except to the cultural Marxists today) which is why we consider them to be a founding pillar of the Western Canon.
My limited understanding of Indian sub-continental history does tell me that the English Raj had a beneficial influence on Indian culture. Let us not forget that Gandhi used the ideas from Thoreau’s, “Civil Disobedience” as part of his independence movement. Other cultures, such as the Mughal were also important.
All life lives on a planet with an oxygen atmosphere, then by her logic, we should not leave it. All life is in species, all of which die off. So, by her logic, …
I’mna thinking that what we have here is a planet that is lacking in frontiers and wilderness. The inhabitants are starting to turn on each other instead of striking out to the hinterlands, as there are no hinterlands to strike out to, anymore. I believe we have a relatively short window of opportunity, barring technological surprises, to turn the solar system into accessible hinterlands for Heinlein’s ‘yeast’ to head out to. And by hinterlands I mean areas beyond the reach of ‘gummint’. Pretty sure there’s no place on earth beyond the reach of some gummint.
So many commenters at PJM seem to be down on spaceflight. I don’t understand it, myself.
I was born in 1958. A starship will almost certainly not happen in my lifetime, and maybe not even a Mars colony. But I feel incredibly lucky to have witnessed mankind taking its first tentative steps off our home planet. This is comparable to the amphibians moving from the oceans to dry land.
She is using “colonialism” to mean settling an uninhabited area. Most people use the term to describe the exploitation of a native population by another country. That’s the colonialism people get upset about.