Is it time for us to start working on leaving the planet?

[Bronzeage]

That would be one of the first things to do next, but I am only at this stage.

Other than a desire to run away from home, what is the need to leave this planet? Is there any kind of economic return at all?

I put the reasons in my OP. Why don't people read it before replying - unbelievable!

I read the OP. You want to run away from home. That is your basic premise.

If you want me to join in this effort, I need a better reason.

 

[ryan]

Those conflicts may fade. THe problem is, you'll have people. People will make their own conflicts wherever they go.

Okay, then to minimize conflict, don't have people - got it - I can't argue with that.

So you've given up on people who don't share your priorities.

What is the alternative, force them to share my priorities?

So much time and effort you put into your lifeboat schemes and your immortality dreams, you never consider maybe some sort of education scheme?

What exactly do you mean?

Promotion of enlightened self-interest for mutual cooperation?

I am not sure what you are talking about; are you suggesting that I find a win-win solution? If so, I agree.

Instead of letting people die off in Afghanistan, Iraq, much of Africa, Palestine, Israel, Ukraine, Mexico (gang violence), Ecuador, Honduras, etc. we should just move them into Canada and the U.S.

So if they can't get along, run away. To Canada or a spaceship.

You have to help yourself before you can help anybody. I would love to help people in distress, starving people, people in pain etc. on Earth more effectively when we have more control and greater technology to do so.

trolling

What? You're saying Earth's headed towards destruction. Lets not solve everyone's problem, let's just solve mine (or ours). Eject and let them destruction away.
Why?
Because they don't think like I want them to.

Is this any different from a Final Solution? If Easterners won't wake up and adopt Western values they deserve to die just like the Jews who wouldn't become Christains?
I don't see any difference, ryan.

This is crazy; it's not like any day I will have a spaceship hovering over the world yelling "ALL ABOARD"! It probably starts off with an extremely small percentage of some of the wealthier nations just to see if it works. Then the world might eventually warm up to the idea. While the new world is ironing out the kinks, Earth will be building the same thing cheaper and with better knowledge.

For even the first colony to work, we will have to be able to convert energy and materials into finished products at the push of a button. 3D printing is closing in on this.

Which still takes energy and other resources.

Exactly what, besides energy, is needed in a society with fully recyclable products? The mass of the colony would be fixed.

And that's just handwaiving away the problem that there won't be room to support or allow any dissent.

I don't expect this to be Utopia.

The idea is that a system will be set in place to deal with these types of issues. It won't be perfect, and they may have to learn a little as they go. But they will try to foresee as many issues as problems and build a system that can deal with them.

Fine.
Show me the system. Don't just appeal to future developments in judicial or administrative developments. Where will this (near) perfect society come from? And why couldn't it work on Earth?

It can't work on Earth as well because of the geopolitics, greed, rooted gangs, terrorism, etc. There needs to be hope somewhere. Countries like the U.S. and Canada have turned into corporations, and the voters are their stockholders We don't care what it takes or what you do - and don't tell us - just make us wealthy again, gimmi gimmi gimmi.

This allows us to gain more control than we ever have before. Just as i said, you'll need to establish a tyranny to keep this control.
Which is kinda counter to the 'western' values of freedom you think need to be in this lifeboat, anyway.

Okay, you want to believe that there would be one less freedom than we have now, fine; I don't know what else I can say.

Come on Keith, I would hope that you would understand that I am talking about geopolitics as being a major problem and not the only problem - you know better.

Then you're packing 'small' problems into a tiny colony. Which magnifies the small problems, right?

I have absolutely no idea what you are talking about.

At some point rights must be taken away.

So much for Western ideology being preserved in your spaceship....

Since when did we have a right to do anything. No rights will be taken away.

Well Keith, you seem to be saying that it is impossible to even try

No, ryan, i have never, ever said that about any of your grand plans to save yourself, all humanity or a special slice of humanity.

What i am saying is that your plan is big on goals and kinda blind on details, including many that you're quite willing to assume will just not be problems, and i think that'll grow to bite you on the ass.

I am saying that THIS plan is a rather expensive way to doom a subset of humanity into having the same problems humanity has always had in conditions where such problems will be lethal to the entire colony.

I'm not saying don't try, but i am saying this is not the way to try it.

The whole point is to learn from the mistakes made. We can't just take land from other people; we can't just crap all over someone's utopia and not expect repercussions (911); we can't just drop a bomb on a city without endless guilt (Hiroshima). It's never ending. We can end their misery by leaving.

Most importantly, what are you doing to change the world for the better, next to nothing?

Ah. I can't criticize your attempt if i'm not doing better?
I can't criticize art, either, according to some artists unless my own art is better than theirs. It's an interesting defense. You're not improving your stance or your knowledge or actually providing solutions to any problem i identify, just make your defense an attack on me, personally. Good one.

It is a justifiable attack. Time is important. Sometimes even a bad solution is better than doing nothing which could be a really bad solution.

Don't you see that things are not getting better around the world. North Korea, ISIS, Russia, China (we are soon going to find out what happens when a super power such as China gets a taste of power and then its economy slows), etc.

Your bravery, passion and selflessness is unmatched as a soldier.

Soldier? Wait, i haven't called YOU any names, have i? Why you gotta double-down on the personal attack?

Are you serious? What I said was meant to be positive.

 

[ryan]

Holy sweet IPU's tits on a popsicle stick. You don't like religion, therefore you want to leave the planet?

Seriously?

I see this on a smaller scale all the time. People leave to another city thinking it will solve all of their problems, only to find the same problems in the new city. Why? Because the problem wasn't the old city, they were creating their own problems. You're proposing more or less the same thing here, but on a much more expensive and wasteful scale.

Religion isn't the fucking problem. We are.

Religion is a symptom, not the disease. The real problem is sloppy thinking. Religion isn't the source of our sloppy thinking, it's the product of our sloppy thinking. Plenty of research in neuroscience shows that we're all sloppy thinkers most of the time; the best of us just get a few more moments of clarity than the others. Even when we think we're being cold and calculating, we're mostly just making snap decisions based on instinct, emotion, and a terrifyingly large list of cognitive biases:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cognitive_biases

Even if you gathered up all the atheists, put us on a spaceship, and moved us to another planet, you would still end up with most of the same problems. There might be differences in some of the details, but you'd still have most of the same crap going on. How can I make such a prediction with such confidence? Because we already watched more or less the same thing happen with the Soviet Union.

Religion was almost entirely out of the picture as an influence on the government, and yet as Hitchens pointed out, they turned an economic philosophy into a religion, then proceeded to commit all the same crimes we associate with organized religion including proselytizing and punishing people (sometimes severely) for blasphemy. They had priests and preachers and missionaries and even goddamned prophets. Communism-as-religion had exactly the same ties to the government that many religions once did (and in some places still do). Fuck, at one point they even forbade scientists to work from the assumption that evolution is true.

To me this proves that religion isn't the problem. Human beings are the problem. We are the problem.

How about before running away to another planet, you try to address the real problem: figuring out how to better teach critical thinking to our children? Solve that problem, and your atheist space colony will actually be viable. But then, if you solve that problem, there's no reason to leave the planet, is there?

So let's just barge into Afghanistan and teach their children critical thinking. I am sure that won't start a blood bath.

There is a lot of great things happening educationally because of the internet. The big time philanthropists are all over this.

We seem to be closing in on a global understanding, possibly a global consciousness. But in the meantime, we can start working towards plan B.

 

[barbos]

All it would take is one paranoid or ambitious demagogue to curdle your homogenized colony.

So true

 

[ryan]

That would be one of the first things to do next, but I am only at this stage.



I put the reasons in my OP. Why don't people read it before replying - unbelievable!

I read the OP. You want to run away from home. That is your basic premise.

If you want me to join in this effort, I need a better reason.

It is like running away from home. The house has a history of previous owners, and the bank gave a loan out to all of them. They all rightfully claim it. The weak are kicked out, and they are angry. Unforgivable atrocities have taken place. No group of owners are going to give up their ownership. It will be a bloody mess until only one group is left standing.

Do I want to stay and fight against a group who is also right? I don't. But I am inadvertently fighting these wars when I pay taxes and vote, and I am supporting the slaughter of soldiers, the opposition and innocent casualties.

Maybe this world isn't the world I thought it was. Maybe I am so disgusted that I actually just want to get the f*** out of here - but I love people so much, but they frustrate me so much. It was not me who started all of this, so why should I have to kill or be killed fighting it (there was a draft just 40 years ago - a draft just 40 years ago! It was an offensive; it wasn't even to defend). I don't want to do either; I don't believe in either side. I don't stand for any of this. I despise it all. I could leave and come back when I actually have some power to do something. Yeah, that's what I will do. I will act when I have the power to actually make a difference.

 

[T.G.G. Moogly]

I read the OP. You want to run away from home. That is your basic premise.

If you want me to join in this effort, I need a better reason.

It is like running away from home. The house has a history of previous owners, and the bank gave a loan out to all of them. They all rightfully claim it. The weak are kicked out, and they are angry. Unforgivable atrocities have taken place. No group of owners are going to give up their ownership. It will be a bloody mess until only one group is left standing.

Do I want to stay and fight against a group who is also right? I don't. But I am inadvertently fighting these wars when I pay taxes and vote, and I am supporting the slaughter of soldiers, the opposition and innocent casualties.

Maybe this world isn't the world I thought it was. Maybe I am so disgusted that I actually just want to get the f*** out of here - but I love people so much, but they frustrate me so much. It was not me who started all of this, so why should I have to kill or be killed fighting it (there was a draft just 40 years ago - a draft just 40 years ago! It was an offensive; it wasn't even to defend). I don't want to do either; I don't believe in either side. I don't stand for any of this. I despise it all. I could leave and come back when I actually have some power to do something. Yeah, that's what I will do. I will act when I have the power to actually make a difference.

At some point in your life, given sufficient intellect, you realize the human species is just as destructive as any other species, no uniqueness there. Ever watch that documentary Tar Creek? It's just one of many that documents the human condition. From a global perspective the best hope humans have rests in having a very limited population, however that occurs. Sad but accurate. It just minimizes the damage possible is all. I'd say having a common boogyman ranks a close second.

 

[Bronzeage]

I read the OP. You want to run away from home. That is your basic premise.

If you want me to join in this effort, I need a better reason.

It is like running away from home. The house has a history of previous owners, and the bank gave a loan out to all of them. They all rightfully claim it. The weak are kicked out, and they are angry. Unforgivable atrocities have taken place. No group of owners are going to give up their ownership. It will be a bloody mess until only one group is left standing.

Do I want to stay and fight against a group who is also right? I don't. But I am inadvertently fighting these wars when I pay taxes and vote, and I am supporting the slaughter of soldiers, the opposition and innocent casualties.

Maybe this world isn't the world I thought it was. Maybe I am so disgusted that I actually just want to get the f*** out of here - but I love people so much, but they frustrate me so much. It was not me who started all of this, so why should I have to kill or be killed fighting it (there was a draft just 40 years ago - a draft just 40 years ago! It was an offensive; it wasn't even to defend). I don't want to do either; I don't believe in either side. I don't stand for any of this. I despise it all. I could leave and come back when I actually have some power to do something. Yeah, that's what I will do. I will act when I have the power to actually make a difference.

The juvenile fantasy of running away from home, is believing the problems of home will be left behind.

I think the biggest problem with your proposal is that no one who has the capability to help will think there is any merit in your argument for doing this.

 

[ideologyhunter]

1. What if Bibles were taken along?
2. What if Oprah gets to come along (with first class accommodations)?
3. Will there be Stand Your Ground laws?
In other words, like Dylan says, we'd soon find the price of going through all of these things twice.

 

[Keith&Co.]

Come on Keith, I would hope that you would understand that I am talking about geopolitics as being a major problem and not the only problem - you know better.

Then you're packing 'small' problems into a tiny colony. Which magnifies the small problems, right?

I have absolutely no idea what you are talking about.

Imagine the problems of a city. The political groups, the religious groups, gangs, people who want to smoke, people who want no one to smoke, vegans, foodies, comics, all the different groups.
If you take away their concern for international politics, the only thing that does for all the other little concerns and problems is increase the percentage of time the people think about them.

If you're not changing people in any way, you'll end up with much the same problems, but in a smaller group.

500 people in an apartment building with one obnoxious punk is a problem.
50 people in one apartment with one obnoxious punk is a bigger problem for those 50 people.

You need to solve the problem of humanity first, before bunging selected ones into a pressure cooker.

 

[T.G.G. Moogly]

Come on Keith, I would hope that you would understand that I am talking about geopolitics as being a major problem and not the only problem - you know better.

Then you're packing 'small' problems into a tiny colony. Which magnifies the small problems, right?

I have absolutely no idea what you are talking about.

Imagine the problems of a city. The political groups, the religious groups, gangs, people who want to smoke, people who want no one to smoke, vegans, foodies, comics, all the different groups.
If you take away their concern for international politics, the only thing that does for all the other little concerns and problems is increase the percentage of time the people think about them.

If you're not changing people in any way, you'll end up with much the same problems, but in a smaller group.

500 people in an apartment building with one obnoxious punk is a problem.
50 people in one apartment with one obnoxious punk is a bigger problem for those 50 people.

You need to solve the problem of humanity first, before bunging selected ones into a pressure cooker.

I was going to add that ironically people get along better when they have less to think about. But that doesn't hold up to scrutiny either. Even kids find ways to not get along, aside from the fact that they unknowingly destroy the ecosystems on which they all depend.

 

[ryan]

It is like running away from home. The house has a history of previous owners, and the bank gave a loan out to all of them. They all rightfully claim it. The weak are kicked out, and they are angry. Unforgivable atrocities have taken place. No group of owners are going to give up their ownership. It will be a bloody mess until only one group is left standing.

Do I want to stay and fight against a group who is also right? I don't. But I am inadvertently fighting these wars when I pay taxes and vote, and I am supporting the slaughter of soldiers, the opposition and innocent casualties.

Maybe this world isn't the world I thought it was. Maybe I am so disgusted that I actually just want to get the f*** out of here - but I love people so much, but they frustrate me so much. It was not me who started all of this, so why should I have to kill or be killed fighting it (there was a draft just 40 years ago - a draft just 40 years ago! It was an offensive; it wasn't even to defend). I don't want to do either; I don't believe in either side. I don't stand for any of this. I despise it all. I could leave and come back when I actually have some power to do something. Yeah, that's what I will do. I will act when I have the power to actually make a difference.

The juvenile fantasy of running away from home, is believing the problems of home will be left behind.

I think the biggest problem with your proposal is that no one who has the capability to help will think there is any merit in your argument for doing this.

You don't pay attention to what I say.

 

[Tom Sawyer]

I was going to add that ironically people get along better when they have less to think about. But that doesn't hold up to scrutiny either. Even kids find ways to not get along, aside from the fact that they unknowingly destroy the ecosystems on which they all depend.

But if there's another ecosystem half an AU away which hasn't been destroyed because the occupants managed their resources better and spent their time building environmental regulatory systems instead of warships, you can just take their ecosystem, so that's not really much of an issue.

 

[ryan]

1. What if Bibles were taken along?
2. What if Oprah gets to come along (with first class accommodations)?
3. Will there be Stand Your Ground laws?
In other words, like Dylan says, we'd soon find the price of going through all of these things twice.

Bob Dylan?

It's not going to be Utopia. It will be virtually free of geopolitical issues.

 

[Bronzeage]

The juvenile fantasy of running away from home, is believing the problems of home will be left behind.

I think the biggest problem with your proposal is that no one who has the capability to help will think there is any merit in your argument for doing this.

You don't pay attention to what I say.

I'm probably paying more attention than it warrants. Why do you think a project which is financed by the many various powerbases on this planet will be free of geopolitics?

 

[ryan]

Come on Keith, I would hope that you would understand that I am talking about geopolitics as being a major problem and not the only problem - you know better.

Then you're packing 'small' problems into a tiny colony. Which magnifies the small problems, right?

I have absolutely no idea what you are talking about.

Imagine the problems of a city. The political groups, the religious groups, gangs, people who want to smoke, people who want no one to smoke, vegans, foodies, comics, all the different groups.
If you take away their concern for international politics, the only thing that does for all the other little concerns and problems is increase the percentage of time the people think about them.

This is your weakest argument yet.

If you're not changing people in any way, you'll end up with much the same problems, but in a smaller group.

I don't know what it's like where you live, but here in Alberta and most of Canada, except maybe Toronto, things are very pleasant. I am so happy with how harmonious our northern bubble is.

500 people in an apartment building with one obnoxious punk is a problem.

50 people in one apartment with one obnoxious punk is a bigger problem for those 50 people.

Why is it a bigger problem for 50 people rather than 500?

 

[Tom Sawyer]

500 people in an apartment building with one obnoxious punk is a problem.

50 people in one apartment with one obnoxious punk is a bigger problem for those 50 people.

Why is it a bigger problem for 50 people rather than 500?

Because 2% of the population is a problem instead of 0.2%. That makes it ten times more of an issue.

 

[ryan]

Come on Keith, I would hope that you would understand that I am talking about geopolitics as being a major problem and not the only problem - you know better.

Then you're packing 'small' problems into a tiny colony. Which magnifies the small problems, right?

I have absolutely no idea what you are talking about.

Imagine the problems of a city. The political groups, the religious groups, gangs, people who want to smoke, people who want no one to smoke, vegans, foodies, comics, all the different groups.
If you take away their concern for international politics, the only thing that does for all the other little concerns and problems is increase the percentage of time the people think about them.

If you're not changing people in any way, you'll end up with much the same problems, but in a smaller group.

500 people in an apartment building with one obnoxious punk is a problem.
50 people in one apartment with one obnoxious punk is a bigger problem for those 50 people.

You need to solve the problem of humanity first, before bunging selected ones into a pressure cooker.

I was going to add that ironically people get along better when they have less to think about. But that doesn't hold up to scrutiny either. Even kids find ways to not get along, aside from the fact that they unknowingly destroy the ecosystems on which they all depend.

We aren't kids.

 

[Underseer]

Holy sweet IPU's tits on a popsicle stick. You don't like religion, therefore you want to leave the planet?

Seriously?

I see this on a smaller scale all the time. People leave to another city thinking it will solve all of their problems, only to find the same problems in the new city. Why? Because the problem wasn't the old city, they were creating their own problems. You're proposing more or less the same thing here, but on a much more expensive and wasteful scale.

Religion isn't the fucking problem. We are.

Religion is a symptom, not the disease. The real problem is sloppy thinking. Religion isn't the source of our sloppy thinking, it's the product of our sloppy thinking. Plenty of research in neuroscience shows that we're all sloppy thinkers most of the time; the best of us just get a few more moments of clarity than the others. Even when we think we're being cold and calculating, we're mostly just making snap decisions based on instinct, emotion, and a terrifyingly large list of cognitive biases:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cognitive_biases

Even if you gathered up all the atheists, put us on a spaceship, and moved us to another planet, you would still end up with most of the same problems. There might be differences in some of the details, but you'd still have most of the same crap going on. How can I make such a prediction with such confidence? Because we already watched more or less the same thing happen with the Soviet Union.

Religion was almost entirely out of the picture as an influence on the government, and yet as Hitchens pointed out, they turned an economic philosophy into a religion, then proceeded to commit all the same crimes we associate with organized religion including proselytizing and punishing people (sometimes severely) for blasphemy. They had priests and preachers and missionaries and even goddamned prophets. Communism-as-religion had exactly the same ties to the government that many religions once did (and in some places still do). Fuck, at one point they even forbade scientists to work from the assumption that evolution is true.

To me this proves that religion isn't the problem. Human beings are the problem. We are the problem.

How about before running away to another planet, you try to address the real problem: figuring out how to better teach critical thinking to our children? Solve that problem, and your atheist space colony will actually be viable. But then, if you solve that problem, there's no reason to leave the planet, is there?

So let's just barge into Afghanistan and teach their children critical thinking. I am sure that won't start a blood bath.

There is a lot of great things happening educationally because of the internet. The big time philanthropists are all over this.

We seem to be closing in on a global understanding, possibly a global consciousness. But in the meantime, we can start working towards plan B.

So because there are parts of the world that have extremely poor education, we should therefore give up and leave the planet entirely?

 

[ryan]

You don't pay attention to what I say.

I'm probably paying more attention than it warrants. Why do you think a project which is financed by the many various powerbases on this planet will be free of geopolitics?

What race or group is going to claim that they were at the colony first? How would the space that the space colony takes up in outer space affect societies on Earth? How would it be an issue or obstacle for them? So far the International Space Station has not had any aboriginals come forward and claim ownership.

 

[Unbeatable]

If I was in a compassionate frame of mind, I would find this thread somewhat worrying. What is it with you and all of these big ideas? Can you cope with the world as it is, without feeling an urge to save or fix unmanageably large segments of it? Do you ever feel like you're screaming into a void while chaos devours everything around you?

It makes sense for humans to attempt to colonize space as the rape of Earth eventually runs into diminishing returns. Given climate change and the like, it makes sense for humans to be working on this now, to some extent. And AFAIK, they are. It makes no sense at all for progressives to form ideologically pure space colonies to escape terran geopolitical strife. That's an insufficient incentive to motivate sane adults to leave the planet. The risk and expense of space colonization is greater than the risk and expense of continuing to fight over this mudball. Maybe once it becomes cheaper and easier, you'll have some libertarians go gault in space.