> Look again at that dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every "superstar," every "supreme leader," every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there-on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.
I would direct you to another Sagan quote as part of Wanderers - a short film by Erik Wernquist : https://vimeo.com/108650530
For all its material advantages, the sedentary life has left us edgy, unfulfilled. Even after 400 generations in villages and cities, we haven’t forgotten. The open road still softly calls, like a nearly forgotten song of childhood. We invest far-off places with a certain romance. This appeal, I suspect, has been meticulously crafted by natural selection as an essential element in our survival. Long summers, mild winters, rich harvests, plentiful game—none of them lasts forever. It is beyond our powers to predict the future. Catastrophic events have a way of sneaking up on us, of catching us unaware. Your own life, or your band’s, or even your species’ might be owed to a restless few—drawn, by a craving they can hardly articulate or understand, to undiscovered lands and new worlds.
Herman Melville, in Moby Dick, spoke for wanderers in all epochs and meridians: “I am tormented with an everlasting itch for things remote. I love to sail forbidden seas…”
Maybe it’s a little early. Maybe the time is not quite yet. But those other worlds— promising untold opportunities—beckon.
You can scratch this itch by emigrating: I left Normandy for Hong Kong 8 years ago, and it still feels like I'm living on Mars lol
It's true that nothing beats the feeling of being lost, rebuilding a nest elsewhere, to have people around you who cant possibly understand you unless you spend large effort studying their ways and speech, the constant underlying fear it can all end tomorrow kicking your ass into giving your maximum everyday.
If you cant go to Mars, move to a Chinese city, it's the next best thing.
I feel like in the 'cynicism' that's popular in tech circles like this about tech as a career, we tend to forget that many people's passions don't really have a lot to do with wanting to be famous or rich. This is to the point that we apparently can't fathom that someone simply wants to do something without any special stereotypically grand aspirations.
Even in tech, some portion of people chose it for the money and some chose it purely as a passion, such that they would've chosen it even if there wasn't as much money to be made. I know that I would still be pursuing the same career even if I didn't get to work on the things I am currently working on.
Remember that plenty of people work 'boring' jobs like garbage collection, being a janitor, being a soldier or riskier stuff with even worse conditions. Many of them are perfectly content with that as long as that doesn't get in the way of things that are important to them.
So it's entirely reasonable that many people would genuinely be willing to happily sacrifice everything to go to Mars, simply for the sake of being there, regardless of any potential glamourous outcomes.
I don't think non-explorers really understand explorers. There were other people on Captain Cook's voyage and other people on Columbus's. Taking a shot at long odds is about knowing that you may fail.
Lorisks want certainty and knowledge that they may not fail.
Hirisks hope for uncertainty and the chance that they may succeed wildly.
It is built in to a Hirisk's belief system that they may fail. But while a Lorisk might find it cringy to try and fail, a Hirisk won't.
You won't really get it if you're not a Hirisk because you think "well what if I end up taking out the trash in a frozen desert" and they think "well what if I actually find or do something amazing".
Sometimes you end up proving H. pylori or inventing cardiac catheterization and other times you go down in history as the guy who thought he invented the parachute and learned otherwise on the way down from the Eiffel Tower or worse, you don't go down in history at all.
The closest experience to what living in space that can be experienced on earth is living on a submarine. Working with advanced tech in an environment where everything is trying to kill you, logistics challenges to maintain operation, schedule completely dictated for you, etc. But ask many people who want to live on Mars if they would go on a long underway on a submarine, and they don't seem to excited by the idea. I don't think people really think about the day to day operations, but jump on the fame/historical significance being one of the settlers on the moon or mars.
It's kind of a moot issue anyway. I hope that a few human explorers will visit the Moon and Mars in the coming decades (and there will be no shortage of volunteers), but the notion of sending settlers there in our lifetimes is a total fantasy. Even if orbital launch costs come way down, the cost of protecting settlers (i.e. at least several dozen permanent inhabitants) from radiation exposure and toxic dust will be so high that no government or corporation could afford it.
Indeed. It seems to be somewhat independent of political ideology as well.
There’s a couple screenshots floating around of some old Twitter threads: “what would your role be in a Communist society?” - where virtually every single reply was stuff like “valued author of liberation poetry and group leader of mindfulness sessions”
And then on the other side of the compass, you have the hordes of disaffected single young men glorifying the idealized “working the frontier with a wife and kids”, seemingly unaware/unconcerned that the average experience for young men was to die horribly, alone and unmourned.
Everyone is the main character of their own story, I guess.
We can’t stay here forever. This planet is 4.5 billion years old and has 1 billion years left. That’s assuming that our species will be able to survive so long.
The ChatGPT, which will take over from us, according to HN, in 5 years, will find a way to reheat the core, or at least to explain convincingly that cold is cool.
At least I would have a reasonable assumption of breathable air, a fresh water source, flora and fauna I can gather and hunt to eat, and likely arable land that I can use to grow additional food sources from. Space and planets we can visit has absolutely none of these things.
> Space and planets we can visit has absolutely none of these things.
Because of that, you'll be carrying with you sources of better breathable air, fresher water, and food that's much less likely to kill you or escape you. At least early on, before the market pressure reduces aforementioned consumables to lowest possible quality still able to sustain some degree of life.
While this is true, it doesn’t address sustainability of a settlement. Sure, many pioneers carried some rations with them and known good water, but at certain point, you will need to obtain resources from your environment.
The most salient problem here, however, is that the quality of each resource is of little concern if I end up running out of it for whatever reason and there is only a limited exit strategy.
Earth is an island among a vast amount of inhospitable nothingness sprinkled with the occasional dead rock or gargantuan ball of toxic gas orbiting a fireball blasting out photons that degrade our materials and the DNA in our cells. Early earth-bound pioneers of “new” lands could be confident that they could at least breath the air, but this environment is confirmed only to exist on planet earth for now.
Yup, even in person i.e without zooming, the moon looks way smaller when in the middle of the sky; yet on the horizon amongst man made structures it can look bigger... measure it with your thumb and it's the same size - context changes our perception.
We don't know the field of view of the lens (or crop) being used here, so you can't say anything about the apparent size of objects. With a smaller FoV lens, or even just a tighter crop, the Earth could look significantly larger.
If you took a normal snapshot of a scene on Earth with a typical 55 degree field of view lens (e.g. your smartphone's 1X lens) I think you'd be quite surprised by how small the Moon appears in your photo.
When viewed from the moon, the earth's diameter subtends an angle of about 0.033 radians. On the other hand, if the photo was taken from an orbital altitude of 100km, then the lunar horizon is about 600km away from the viewpoint (using Pythagoras' theorem).
So at the horizon, a crater the same apparent size as the earth would be roughly 0.033 * 600 = 20 km across.
