My current employer is pushing AI HARD. Like “throw out old processes, 10x everything, the singularity is here so we can’t work the way we always have”.

The thing is, the best use case for AI I have found is replacing middle management. The bots are pretty good at summarizing a bunch of PRs and doc updates into weekly bullet point progress updates (which is 90% of how those managers are judged). I’ve flirted with the idea of making an AI team manager to replace the helicopter EMs and PMs and let the devs focus on the dev’ing.

That idea got shut down quite quickly… wonder why.

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Any country involved in a shooting war is within their rights to shoot at any object they have reason to believe is a military target, regardless of where that object is.

Outside their airspace, in international waters, inside another country, on the fucking Moon - the limits are technological, not legal.

If the object isn’t a military target, then they aren’t within their rights to shoot at it no matter where it is. Not that that has stopped attacks on civilians in the past (e.g. Russian ballistic missile attacks on apartment blocks, US drone strikes of fishing boats), only that the laws of war forbid such things.

I think you responded to the wrong comment

Bingo. Can’t do it after an election because it’s too early to matter, have to see how they govern first. Can’t do it during a primary because we need to focus on electability. Can’t do it for the general because we have to win.

Amazing how there will always be time later for self reflection right around the corner…

You choose to ignore the externalities and opportunity costs of such resource expenditure. You choose to ignore and actively worsen the suffering of your fellow man in order to indulge yourself in unscientific fantasies of space colonization.

I choose to focus on helping those who need it.

Somehow, your arguments from the supposed moral high ground fall flat.

Stewards of life? That is delusional.

How many species have we extincted? How many are bred in excess to live short and miserable lives purely to be slaughtered for food?

We aren’t stewards or guardians of anything, we’re just animals that seek pleasure and procreation and evolved an asymmetric advantage over the competition.

But there is no convincing a zealot, and this is your religion. A creed that dictates we sacrifice millions of lives to enrich dozens, demanding to be praised all the while.

Grow up

The OP:

Is it really necessary to send humans to those places just to get the knock-on benefits?

… But sure, this is exclusively a thread to circle-jerk about how cool you are for wanting to burn mountains of resources to feel good about something.

Advancement is not unidimensional, and it is not synonymous with space exploration. If you don’t get it, that’s a you problem.

We are capable of what we do. If the system can’t produce an outcome, then it isn’t capable of it.

Consider why those in power would be willing to spend resources planting flags in space, but unwilling to feed the hungry or tend the sick.

It is only a “problem” if you consider space exploration a moral imperative.

I don’t. There isn’t anything up there that we can’t get easier down here. The resource expenditure is a poor investment. Not to mention how much this would further inequality.

If there will always be problems on Earth, then it sounds like we’ll never be bored staying here.

Wanting to improve the lives of others is ‘obsessing over the bad’ and being a ‘misanthropic troll’?

Go read this chain again, which of us brought out the insults first?

You don’t have arguments, and are upset the platitudes you’ve swallowed don’t stand up to scrutiny.

Even if I concede ‘exploration is in our DNA’ (I do not, but let’s test the argument [btw the Chinese first came to Taiwan in the 17th century at the urging of the Dutch - but I digress]).

Isn’t war also in our DNA? We’ve had a few of those, should we have another? After all, they brought great advancements in technology.

What about genocide? Or whaling?

Doing something ‘because it is in our DNA’ is not noble. It is, in fact, the behavior of beasts and other animals we as a society consider less valuable than ourselves.

Why did the Spaniards and Portuguese colonize the new world? Gold, silver, and cash crops. All economic. The average Iberian peasant wasn’t sitting around pining for a new horizon - the monarchies wanted power and needed funds. It was a top-down effort that tremendously benefited the societal elites for two centuries. The average peasant was no better off until much later, following industrialization.

Why did the English settle North America? In the Caribbean, cash crops plantations. In New England, they were driven from their old life by religious persecution. In the mid Atlantic, the Crown wanted tobacco plantations to finance the State.

Nowhere in here is the story of the Everyman deciding to drop everything and run for the furthest hills. It is economics and the desire of the powerful to enhance their own position.

And here you are, spouting their bullshit, beating on others and airing your superiority like a gilded peacock because you want to hand every bit of what’s up there to the very people making everything worse for those down here.

No thanks.

I cannot comprehend

I believe you find yourself thinking that a lot if you don’t understand why people disagree with you.

Say we put in all that effort, expend all those resources - what do we get for it?

Another place to put strip malls and parking lots. With the added benefits of brain swelling, heart atrophy due to the reduce gravity, and shortened lifespans from the increased radiation.

Or we could just, idk, make Earth a better place to live. If we have all these resources, surely it would be easier to make Earth more habitable given the much better starting conditions than to go to dead dust ball months to years away and try to live in an ant farm.

Just a thought

My answer would be that it isn’t.

There’s nothing inherently noble in exploration. It is, in fact, a conspicuous luxury in a world where needless suffering abounds.

And then he got back and they dismantled all the boats and never did it again. Definitely had exploration in the DNA.

And meanwhile the peoples of modern-day India, southeast Asia, Korea, Japan, Pakistan, Afghanistan, etc. never did this. Curious.

If that one corner of Eastern Africa was the only habitable place on the planet, and getting to the next valley over required generations to live in suffering while available resources are used to make mountaineering gear, and settling that valley would represent a constant resource drain for centuries at a minimum…

Sure, same thing.

People didn’t leave Africa due to the moral imperative to explore, they did not have the resources to support large scale migration on a whim. They left Africa for food.

There’s no food on Mars, or the Moon.

European exploration across the Atlantic was driven by a desire for trade routes with Asia that did not pass through the intervening Islamic civilizations that were often in conflict with the explorers, it was an economic motive. After the European discovery of the American continents, they were, in fact, largely ignored for about a century.

If exploration is so core to the human experience, why did the people of Asia - much more numerous than the Europeans even back then - not undertake any large exploration or colonization efforts? Or those of Africa?

The economic motive for space exploration is rather weak. There are asteroids full of valuable metals, but they are very far away and recovery would be more difficult and expensive than expanding Earth extraction efforts. We evolved to live here, life elsewhere disagrees with our biology - reduced gravity is great for your back and terrible for your heart and brain.

We don’t need the living space, and the population looks set to decline by the end of the century anyway.

While I understand you want to ascribe some kind of moral imperative to exploration, it is a large and completely unnecessary expenditure of resources that could be better deployed to make life here better for far more people.

They were grown cell by cell in a fleshy vat

This just pushes the question up a level. Why explore space? All the things we need, all the things we like, all the problems to solve - they are here.

This just pushes the question out one ring. What do we need to do on other planets that we can’t do on Earth?

The sad answer is there isn’t really anything. Go live on Mars and it will suck compared to Earth - no nature to enjoy, extremely limited variety of food, largely cut off from the rest of human culture and experience. After hundreds of years, it might be developed to look like suburban Ohio - you’ll have some iron mines and some Applebee’s and maybe enough people that the martian memes are fire … but you still won’t have a beach, or anything to see outside, or a blue sky.

It will just be Earth, but worse.