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radicaledward's avatar

This is going to look so embarrassing when I found Edtopia of Ganymede in 2028, just in time for Kamala Harris' third term in the White House.

I'm with you, though. I think the only way we inhabit space is if we re-engineer our biology to survive in space. Despite what transhumanists may think, most people do not want to change the human animal into anything else.

But I also think chatbot's final answer is the correct one. Humans have done a lot of wildly impressive things because it's cool, rather than because we need to do it. Them pyramids don't exist for utility, for example.

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Chesterton's Fence Repair 2's avatar

“But people weren’t coming here because Europe ran out of room. They were coming here for economic and political reasons. I believe the biggest question facing humanity is how we deal with shifting away from an economy that requires bodies to work while our population continues to grow. But any political solution to that is going to remain easier to accomplish than people leaving Detroit for the moon.”

I mean… literally at any time Europe theoretically could have solved whatever political problems it had. But it didn’t. Because people are terrible. Which is arguably the greatest challenge humanity faces, and much, MUCH harder to engineer away than something as trivial as oxygen generation. Hence my new motto for NASA:

“SPACE: Let’s explore it so we have somewhere to send all the jerks we disagree with!”

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