The Expanse basically.
Belters. Third class citizens seen as little more than slaves. Treated like garbage.
Ok Elon
I don’t get why we’re all still so stuck on capitalism being a thing even beyond this blue rock. Like c’mon… first, we need to stop having wars HERE and make it so that people don’t have to work to feed themselves or shelter themselves. From there on, worry about the rest of things.
Counter thought: Having a job is not desirable. It’s the income we desire.
No if I was completely set for life I would still wanna be a nurse. I’d do like one shift a month maybe one shift a week at most but I don’t think I could do without the satisfaction of helping someone. I’d also probably pick and choose how I got to do it more. I’d do a lot less stuff that’s more characteristic of the institutional system and take more time to actually talk to people and try to help them with specific stuff instead of just providing three hots and a cot and my main method of keeping them from stabbing each other being invading their privacy. I actually got to sit down and de-mat someone’s depression hair last week and it was soooo nice I almost never have time for that anymore.
Beltalowda!
Will never happen. Human flesh is not meant to live outside Earth. It’s just fairy tales.
Interesting, I’m of the opposite mind: I think it’s inevitable that we will inhabit places outside earth. Time is long, technology keeps getting better, space on earth keeps getting smaller, and there’s only one way we escape the consumption of earth by the eventual expansion of the sun. We just have to make sure not to destroy ourselves here first (a tall order, it seems as of lately).
No way we colonize space or smaller rocks until we invent artificial gravity, which I don’t think is possible. Even spin “gravity” comes with a nauseous Coriolis force unless the station is huge and you’re on the outer edges.
Luna is a death trap, no magnetosphere, radiation soaked, and the fine dust would make asbestos look like lung candy.
Much the same for Mars. No radiation protection, fine dust clogging everything.
Fair points but you and the other commenter are, in my opinion, thinking too near-term. On the scale of hundreds of thousands to millions of years, evolution starts to become a factor. The beings that leave earth to live elsewhere, on that time scale, may have been human once but would have evolved into something different, hopefully more suited to environments on other worlds. And we’re not even close to the destruction of earth by the sun, which is on the order of a billion years from now.
That’s more what I meant by inevitable. Our curiosity brought us to the stars early, but we have the time here on earth to invent, adapt, grow, and change before the hard stop of needing to leave earth…assuming we survive what earth throws at us (and what we do to it) in the nearer term.
I was on same side but then I started reading and watching interviews with astronauts, when you get back from space station you can’t even walk by yourself. It’s not only muscle disappearing problem. There are eye sight problems, brain changes. Brain is made 80% from water. There is no way people can overcome it with current fuel based space flight. And it’s just humans so don’t get me started about food. We’re stuck here for good.
That’s my same thoughts as well, The thought of us currently working together in space is ridiculous. There would be courts in no time claiming borders for areas in time and space. Maybe if we make a Luna base, ill have hope we might one day get to Mars.
Only if you ignore the opportunity cost—i.e., the number of terrestrial jobs that could have been created with the same investment.
Depends on the time frame. In the period immediately following such a venture, sure, but if you actually properly establish settlement off earth, the total resource base and thus carrying capacity of civilization as a whole increases and continues to increase until we either hit the limits of that part of the universe one can theoretically reach (which is so big as to make the entire earth less than a speck of dust by comparison), you decide to just stop space colonization (which gets more difficult the further on you go, because the number of potential polities to launch a new mission increases the more space is populated), or you find yourself boxed in by alien civilizations in all directions (since we haven’t seen any, they’re most likely far enough apart on average for this to still leave an extremely vast chunk of space). A hypothetical spacefairing civilization should be able to reach sizes so vast that it would be physically impossible to create enough jobs on just one planet to equal it, even with just this solar system even.
Job creation by itself is not exactly the best motivation to pursue this though, since the jobs created will after the initial period be generally far away and therefore not likely to be worked by anyone except the people that end up in those colonies, who wouldn’t even exist otherwise.
Yeah—“job creation” only makes sense in the timeframe of making incremental changes to industry to adjust to changes in the labor pool. On the timeframe of decisions that alter future demographics, “job creation” is a distorted and detrimental lens.
Play Hardspace: Shipbreaker if you want to see what that’d probably look like, considering our current trajectory
As every new thing.
AI, for example, has created a a brand new job: Vibe Coding Corrector/fixer, people hire to fix the fuck ups of the AI and vibe coders.
Great, we’re already fucking up this planet let’s go fuck up the rest of the solar system too.
Most of the solid bodies in the solar system are literally a bunch of airless, irradiated, toxic rocks, with either no life at all or potentially some rare bacteria-like stuff hidden somewhere we haven’t been able to conclusively examine yet. They already are in a more “fucked up” state than even the most polluted wasteland we’ve created on earth. What could we possibly do to them to mess them up further?
There are several places that could have actual life. Candidates are Mars, Titan, Europa and Enceladus.
NASA actually have protocols to try to avoid cross contamination to those possible environments.
I imagine there would not be a bigger tragedy that completely destroy an alien ecosystem.
Life… uhh… finds a way
Its current “fucked up” state is also its natural state, relatively uninfluenced by humans for the entirety of existence.
I don’t doubt our ability to act brashly and fuck something up to the point of impacting life back here on Earth or screw things up for others out there in the cosmos.
