/sci/ - Science & Math

>>8580465

>>7196840
Meh, the answer to that problem is easy enough to explain in a half-hour.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ojEq-tTjcc0

We've got much more immediate global extinction concerns, however, and given that this whole board, and most of humanity is against manned space travel, it seems more likely we'll be wiped out by one of those first.

>>7066573
Our lives are threatened, right now. There's thousands of threats, both internal, and external, that could wipe us all out with little to no notice - and those are only among the ones we know about, we discover more all the time.

Yes, it wouldn't much matter if it happened *today*, but the longer we put it off, the more apt we are to regret it - if whichever inevitable cataclysmic event that wipes us out first gives us the chance to. We know this, yet we sit like deer transfixed by a truck's headlights.

I'm not saying we can expect to have colonies or seeds on mars or people flying to distant stars in my lifetime, and maybe not even yours, but we aren't even making the baby steps in that direction that we once did. We aren't even really thinking about our collective future, beyond what will improve our iPhone coverage. We aren't interested in reaching as a people anymore.

That future where we survive isn't something that's just going to magically happen as some sort of inevitability. For us to have any future at all, it'll require forward thinking pioneers working on tech that they will never see put to use in their lifetimes. People thinking beyond themselves. It'll at least take the sort of risky pioneering spirit we saw that brought Europeans to the new world, risking millions in investments, and hundreds of lives.

...and people sitting there and saying "Nope, can't be done - too expensive - no reason", flying in the face of all we've accomplished and all we've learned thus far, are likely going to be the death of us all.