A while ago, I posted about the time I first left home. I moved, cold, from the city in which I grew up, to a city about 2,500 miles from it. I was kind of happy, for a while, but my troubles caught up with me. In the intervening years, I moved to four different cities, each time starting fresh. All ended up in disaster. This was, ultimately, because I brought my issues with me.
Currently there is a push to go to Mars, and I think it’s a stupid idea. And much for the same reason.
I believe there is a reason why the Universe is so vast. I think that it is ultimately to keep us from being able to explore it until we have evolved to the point where we don’t need to use physical means of traveling. At least with current technology, the speed of light in a vacuum is the ultimate speed limit of the Universe, and our life spans are just too short to make such travel worth anything. Plus, and worse, we’ll take our mental illnesses with us. We’d end up conquering the galaxy and then making as big a mess of it as we have this planet, just on a much broader scale. I wish people would understand – space operas like Star Wars are a cautionary tale, not something to aspire to.
This planet is our womb. Wombs are there for an entity to grow and develop, in preparation for being introduced to the wider world. And until we learn to do something like teleport – something which I think is possible but requires a purity of spirit that we are not capable of at the moment – doing something silly like going to Mars is simply going to bring our problems to Mars. We could terraform it, maybe. But then we’d create countries, eventually Mars and Earth would go to war, and we’d end up right where we left off… just with much higher human casualties.
We have to solve our problems before we try to conquer the galaxy. Because human nature isn’t going to change, no matter how much we try to run from our problems.
But then, who’d listen to me anyway…
Our curiosity has driven us for thousands of years, and at each technological revolution and paradigm, there’s always been little regard for our ability to handle what’s to come. Whether it’s inventing cars and not considering the massive tolls car crashes would have, or splitting the atom in disregard of another long standing human tendancy, war. For us to, now, step back and consider the impact of these (objectively amazing) developments in sci/tech, would be inhuman. And that’s not to say I disagree with your sentiment, in fact I err on the side of caution with contemporary technology. But there will be no tapping on the pandoras box of human imagination unless we become, in one sense or another, inhuman. This may come from a neuralink-type evolution, or perhaps we again learn the value in spiritualism. But until then, expect the rich to be popping our stratosphere, and champagne too for their achievements.
Hi. Thanks for commenting. It’s absolutely true that setting lofty goals such as this pushes the technological envelope and lead to benefits for the earthbound. And that’s all fine and good. But it’s the idea of colonizing the solar.system with the idea that getting off this planet will.solve any problems that is, to me, the fallacy. I guess we just let the billionaires compare their willies and get it out of their system, and move on from there.