Congress is making laws about bathrooms and genitals like a bunch of 6th graders running a minecraft server. Of course we can't handle fucking asteroid defense.
It reminds me of how tech companies are all scrambling to use AI. There was a funny article recently where the author pointed out that these companies are struggling to do very basic things, so the idea that they could somehow tackle AI in a way that's useful and profitable is silly.
Actually we DID. Tho' only for a little while. And the results were enormous. The B/Yamgata Influenza lineage appears to have gone extinct. The cool part is we weren't even trying to do anything with those specific efforts to affect influenza. All of which should encourage us to cooperate more.
As a child, once I learned to read, I started to really learn. And naturally shared all the fun facts with most anyone who would listen. I thought I would write a book of fun facts, but then someone invented the Intarwebs. I even thought I would narrow things down and just write 'Bandana, 1001 Uses' , but there was no point. (https://duckduckgo.com/?t=ffab&q=bandana+uses+list&ia=web)
Doctor Ignaz Semmelweiss in the mid-1800s suggested that obstetricians should wash and sterilize their hands before attending their patients to reduce the chance of postpartum infection. He was rejected by the medical community, ridiculed by colleagues, and eventually locked in an asylum where he was killed.
People forget the most important bit. The clapback to Semmelweiss from other doctors was "A doctor's hands are always clean!"
Humans are irrational fucking idiots and we prove it daily. The number of us who are willing to protect our own in-group over things they don't deserve to be protected over is too damn high.
Semmelweiss is also partially responsible for the widespread rejection of his findings. He basically called doctors who did not follow his advice murderers which naturally didn't help his popularity. Antagonising someone who you are trying to convince usually just entrenches their opinions further.
Whenever I dare to hope about the lofty, admirable star trek future, I remember that space is completely unforgiving and we just aren't up to the task for anything more than a token selfie by the best dozen humans we can possibly produce with great effort and training.
As a species, we aren't going to spread out there. Still too primitive, and probably too self-destructive to make it out of this phase of evolution. This might be one of those great filters scientists postulate as to why there aren't signals from innumerable civilizations out there.
We aren't even capable of caring for one another, let alone the EASIEST to maintain, most naturally human friendly habitat we would ever encounter in the cosmos as we evolved to fit it. No airlocks, the air/water/waste recycling was already fully automated, all we had to do was not recklessly grow/metastasize to the point we strain the absolutely massive system out of greed and glut, and stop carelessly shitting where we sleep. We all know how that's been going since we figured out how to make dead animal poison rocket us accross town.
Master space? Master planetary defense? We can't even defend this world from our own habitual consumerism. We'll be lucky if we aren't scattered tribes living near the old hardened structures of the before times for emergency shelter from the new normal weather events in a hundred years. We're already starting to argue over the resources it's taking to rebuild population centers from the current new normal. We have played pretend we were since human civilization began, but we are NOT and never have been this world's owners or masters, and we are still very much its subject.
And Reminder, what we're doing and have been doing in decades won't be undone for millions of years. The Earth is a self-correcting system, and the damage we're doing is inconsequential to its 3.8 billion year old, beautiful story of life growing out of every crevice, just not on a timescale humans can benefit from or even truly appreciate.
It's the part that drives me the most wild. We're all stuck on this shitty rock hurtling through space together, literally the bare minimum we could do to make it bearable is to be kind to one another and supportive of one another. We can't even be fucked with bare minimum.
Same, if we can't even, in actions not rhetoric, start from a baseline of "we're all in the same boat, we all have needs and seek happiness, how do we maximize everyone's well-being to facilitate that?" then we're still just savage animals wrestling in the dirt, but with the dangerous capacity to devise technologies for selfish ends we aren't wise/evolved enough to truly appreciate the consequences of using.
Iirc, it wasn't just that as far as Star Trek goes. Iirc, most world governments and economic systems were destroyed, humanity was a mere fraction of its peak population. Humanity literally physically came together because it was necessary to rebuild.
Its one thing to have a common enemy/suffering without changing anything else as far as governments and social systems goes. It's completely different when you not only have the enemy/suffering but to also need to literally rebuild everything from scratch
That's just not true. WWI had a definitive winner in Europe, but not in the Middle-East. And Turks are still killing people unpunished. And Germany wasn't a definitive loser, despite Entente countries making it really feel that role.
During the 2060s, Cochrane and his team of engineers began developing the warp drive. (Star Trek: First Contact) The challenge of inventing warp theory took Cochrane an extremely long time. (ENT: "Anomaly (ENT)") In 2061, he was responsible for Earth's first successful demonstration of light speed propulsion, though his work was far from complete. (VOY: "Friendship One"; ENT: "In a Mirror, Darkly, Part II" library computer file) His primary motivation for commencing warp technology was financial gain in the devastated, poverty-stricken America that existed in the wake of the Third World War.
He finally built Earth's first warp ship, the Phoenix, in the hope its success would prove profitable and allow him to retire to a tropical island filled with naked women. A historical irony was that, contrary to the fact he went on to use the Phoenix to inaugurate an era of peace, Cochrane incorporated a weapon of mass destruction into its design; he constructed the Phoenix in a silo on a missile complex and used a Titan II missile as his launch vehicle.
(WWIII ended in 2053; First Contact was on 5 April 2063)
Ah yea it looks like I was forgetting large parts, either way I think it still reinforces my main point, we will probably go through a lot more pain and suffering before we can even come close to Star Treks timeline
I remember that space is completely unforgiving and we just aren't up to the task for anything more than a token selfie by the best dozen humans we can possibly produce with great effort and training.
Astronauts aren't superhumans and there is nothing "special" about their training. They are just pilots with stricter physical requirements. The reason why there aren't many of them is because there is no need for more. Our technology is not there yet for cheap and "boring" space travel beyond low Earth orbit (and probably won't be for a century at least). And there isn't anything worthwhile for humanity out there anyway. At least at the current stage in our "evolution". So for now manned spaceflight programmes are just vanity projects funded by politicians (for "national pride" or whatever) or some billionaire celebrities like Musk.
Also I don't think that world peace would be necessary for space colonization. It could be born out of conflict or for economic reasons, like colonization of Americas. It's simply that it will take centuries for us to reach a point when the prospect of leaving Earth will become attractive for regular people (if we survive that much of course).
While everything living grows old and dies, and has its limits, we separate "<T> revolution" from "<T> normal development" for a reason.
I mean, what currently exists (with consumerism, incredibly wasteful production of electronic devices doing mostly useless work, less efficient production and organization being preferable when it allows someone to preserve power, Ponzi schemes of various kinds, ignorance and tribalism) is sometimes just a culture, not basic instincts (which have their downsides, but those are solvable). It's not all cultures.
That culture has brought us revolutions unseen before. Then it stagnated and may die, but the humanity may survive and have more revolutions in the future.
As a species, we aren't going to spread out there.
Well not with that attitude!
Yeah, space is hard and yeah mistakes have been made along the way. But things are definitely changing. Reusable rockets are nearly here... Between spaceX, rocket lab and stoke aerospace, there is real potential for these rockets to work. Hell, SpaceX has already conducted a successful orbital test flight.
With reusable rockets we'll start to see a drastic reduction in the cost to get to orbit, probably by two orders of magnitude, but possibly even more. With the cost down people will reassess the value of space and the resources available there. In other words, people will start doing more in space, and getting more from space. Resource collection, refining and specialized manufacturing are three most likely industries to start expanding into space. Once there is work to be done there it will begin to make sense for people to live there.
As a species, we aren't going to spread out there.
Not today, no. But within my lifetime, I expect we will. Remember, change is usually slow and this would constitute the most profound change in human history.
We aren't even capable of caring for one another, let alone the EASIEST to maintain, most naturally human friendly habitat we would ever encounter in the cosmos as we evolved to fit it.
I would argue that having 8 billion people in the same place makes earth the hardest place to live in some ways.
One of the options that space habitats would allow for is smaller communities. What if you lived in a space station with roughly the population of a city? Your community wouldn't necessarily need to be affiliated with other communities to make up a "country", but it could be. Your community would have that option. And if the community is not geographically connected to the other members of its nation, there's no reason they couldn't change their mind, join a different country if you're views seem better aligned. For the first time humans would have opt-in governance.
Would opt-in governance lead to a more stable society? Would not being stuck geographically near communities with opposing views lead to less violent aggression? I don't know, but I hope so.
In an exercise involving multiple US government agencies during April 2024, NASA conducted a so-called "tabletop" game in which participants plot their response to a 72 percent chance that an asteroid may hit Earth in 14 years.
Underpinning a bewildering number of moving parts is the likelihood that space agencies are not ready to implement the operations needed to find out more about the threat and mitigate it, even with more than a decade to prepare.
The game also found that the "role of the UN-endorsed Space Mission Planning and Advisory Group (SMPAG) in an asteroid impact threat scenario is not fully understood by all participants."
"Sustaining the space mission, disaster preparedness, and communications efforts across a 14-year timeline would be challenging due to budget cycles, changes in political leadership, personnel, and ever-changing world events," the report says.
It recommends "periodic briefings and exercises to continue to raise awareness of planetary defense and increase readiness for preparation and response to an asteroid impact threat."
Speaking to US public radio service NPR, Terik Daly, planetary defense section supervisor at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory, said experts didn't know of any asteroids of a substantial size that are going to hit Earth for the next hundred years.
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