Is it really necessary to send humans to those places just to get the knock-on benefits? Couldn’t we do those things directly, without going there?

It seems to me that, today, those who have the money to spend on these endeavors would only do so if there were perceived short-term benefits to themselves. That means they plan to exploit the resources, or increase their own power somehow.

I know the good engineers that make this happen are doing it for the challenge and in the pursuit of knowledge, and I know that’s why we poors support it, but that doesn’t “pay the bills.” What is the motivation behind the money? Why are they really doing this?

  • CerebralHawks@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
    5·
    7 hours ago

    The cynical answer is “charge for air”.

    So imagine you’re someone like Elon Musk, you’re invested in space exploration and you’ve just told the world you’re going to build a colony on Mars. What’s the benefit? Sure, it’s land, you can charge rent. It’s going to cost a lot to get appliances and other “creature comforts” there, so that will be a service as well. But look at what else Mars lacks that we have? Air. They will charge for air.

    Building a colony on a planet that does not support life doesn’t have many obvious short-term benefits. I think the biggest long-term benefit is, you do it to show it can be done, then when you discover a planet that does support life, you take what you learned from the Martian colony and you send people there. After a couple generations of scientists and engineers and others have made it a place worth living, you can start sending regular people.

    Now if we could get Earth’s population back down to about 3 billion, we might be able to reverse some of the damage and keep Earth much longer. One way to get rid of 5 billion people is to colonise them on other worlds.

    But, all that’s pretty optimistic. What’s to stop these space companies from flying settlers into that planet’s star rather than landing them on the planet? Not the sun because people would notice. But if those people take a decade to arrive, and messages take months to get back to us, well, easy coverup.