(no subject)

[wispfox]

"As technology developed and the cities were polluted, the nights became starless. New generations grew to maturity wholly ignorant of the sky that had transfixed their ancestors and that had stimulated the modern age of science and technology. Without even noticing, just as astronomy entered a golden age, most people cut themselves off from the sky, a cosmic isolationism that ended only with the dawn of space exploration." -_Contact_, Carl Sagon

Comments

[teramis.livejournal.com]

Ad astra!

I can't wait til we're on Mars.

[opalmirror.livejournal.com]

I hate to rain on your parade, but the 'we', if it is a collective one, makes me pale. Just think of the tremendous system and lifecycle costs to our precious, limited Earth to ship people to another one. We are already doing an excellent job of impoverishing 95% of the world so that the 5% can have unlimited access to entertainment, creature comforts, and resource-sucking transporation. Even putting 1% of the people on this world into space, 6 million people, would bankrupt us. As much as space and people in it are cool, it is something we must practice in moderation. Until we find that magic bullet of antigravity, limitless nonpolluting energy sources, inexpensive matter transmission, or the like. Manned space flight to other planets at this point is a visionary political move designed to aggrandize those who do so. The Kyoto protocol, public transportation, access to basic health care, and hiking corporate average fuel economy are for sharing this world responsibly with all those souls who feel pain and suffering, on average, so much more than you and I do.

Space tourism, immigration, is fine when we have enough, and some to share. And I don't just mean our nation, I mean the world. In the mean time it makes swell science fiction -- the best of which (IMO) being social lessons that make us think about what we are doing to ourselves, today (like so much light pollution that most kids never see a starry night)

[bridgetester.livejournal.com]

Yet, there is a limited amount of resources here. We will run out at some point, and conservation can only do so much.

Everyone needs help, but staying here, this here, is not the only answer.

[wispfox.livejournal.com]

Everyone needs help, but staying here, this here, is not the only answer.

Yes.

[opalmirror.livejournal.com]

Staying here is the only pragmatic answer for now. I am careful not to reach for the stars so hard that I trample on my own flower bed. Enjoy the flower bed. It's here now.

[wispfox.livejournal.com]

You are, BTW, preaching to the choir by saying these things in my LJ...

But you seem to have initially been coming from the perspective of this being an either/or situation. It's not. It's possible to reach for the stars _and_ work on reducing the harm one does to the earth.

They are not, and should not be, mutually exclusive.

[teramis.livejournal.com]

The technology spin off from our space efforts give us the means to deal effectively with a lot of our earth-bound problems, from population issues to agriculture to pollution (whether or not we're *doing* that is a political issue, but much of the means and solutions are there, because of the technology). We wouldn't even be having this conversation electronically were microchips not spin-off from going to the moon.

I think its possible to do space *and* preserve the earth. But then, I'm a science fiction novelist, too.

[bridgetester.livejournal.com]

But we still marvel at the stars

[wispfox.livejournal.com]

Some do. Not as many as I would think makes sense.

It's frightening how many people tend not to look up, because there isn't anything to look up at.