RE: The Threat is Real. Can the DOJ Defend DOGE?
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First, I want to say I really appreciate you making the effort to point out these objections or questions, because I really had no idea we had such divergent understandings. Some things seem to have been poorly expressed by me, and has prevented my meaning from being understood. I am really surprised by the divergence between our understanding of tech advance, and am encouraged by this, because I know we are both reasonable people that, were we to honestly make the (substantial) effort it would take to thoroughly discuss each of these areas of divergence we'd be able to agree on much.
But, I do understand these issues aren't within your range of interests, and this is revealed by that divergence in our understanding. I am not particularly interested in a variety of subjects, and while I can nod politely and make attentive sounds during a lengthy discussion of them, I do understand just how interminable such a discussion can feel like it is.
So I won't do that to you. None of this is anything you have to consider. You have a full and rewarding life and I don't need to disturb any of it to enjoy discussing things with you and learning from your perspective. But realize that Earth is a large aquaponics system in space. We live in space right now.
I'll just touch on a couple things so you won't have to keep considering me completely irrational on the subject. First, I don't mention a time frame, and there's a lot of different time frames, from decades to centuries. When Mercedes was constructing his horseless carriage in the late 19th Century, he may have waxed prosaic on a future in which such carriages were common - and even those familiar with the device he was constructing would have been extremely dubious such impractical devices, as his early experiments surely were, would ever be popular at all.
That's about where we're at with table top manufacturing, maybe a little bit further, since there are hobbyists and enthusiasts in the space, but not much further than that. The home manufacturing industry has certainly not approached the comparative point in it's development as automobiles reached when Henry Ford standardized precision parts and invented interchangable part manufacturing, assembly lines, and the like. For a non-hobbyist to have a vision of a Model T in every barn before then just from having seen some of the bespoke prototype automobiles that were available would be comparable to you grasping that everything that could be needed by a household could be manufactured by the household, and this would become the rule, rather than the exception.
It's not something you have a level of interest to gain an understanding of how useful it could be, just as people that rode horse drawn buggies before Ford produced any Model T's would have no idea they could ever be as useful as Ford (and paved roads) made them. Had someone before Ford described the Autobahn of the 1970s as the certain result of automobiles, it would have caused them to think, as you probably do of me, the dreamer was quite irrational. I will here note that as roads are to automobiles, automation is to home manufacturing. We eventually won't need to run this machinery because AI will. This is the only real utility I think AI actually has, because I don't think it will ever become capable of consciousness.
Also, I agree that not everyone will have that mentality, as you say, to become able to produce what they need, even after supply lines are cut and there aren't markets anymore. Many people can do many different things, and most can do many things they don't want to do, if they have to do them to live, but not everyone can do everything, and there are certainly many folks that just couldn't make the leap. I don't think everyone will. I do think enough will. You mention currency. There is a post-market economy coming. There will not be any way to buy and sell things, and no money. Eventually space habitats either make what they need, or die of unmet need.
Very few will pioneer in space, because at first it will be far more restrictive than prison. Just like pioneers in any major migration or diaspora, the initial conditions for the first are life threatening, and only some of these attempts are even survived. The first attempt to colonize N. America by England failed, and the fate of the Jamestown colonists is still at question, for example.
However, after a couple decades of effort some successful colonies did arise, and soon had quite livable quarters and towns. Space will be like that too, the early efforts incredibly difficult and survival challenging. There may not soon be hikes in mountains as is possible on Earth, but after some development environments will become quite comfortable and pleasant. While montane, riverine, and lacustrine expanses may be many centuries off, I am confident environments with forests, ponds, and shoals, flocks, and herds of animals, much like parks (although trees will be young, herds small, and ecosystems still being established) within a century of the first pioneers. I am sure that is not how you envision space environments, but I am quite confident that people need such environments, and that's what they will live in: large aquaponics systems.
I think at some point I referred to illimitable resources that are available everywhere else but Earth, and used the expression 'off Earth' that may have been understood as 'of Earth'. My meaning was that there is so much raw material to be developed that no one has claimed, no one owns, and nothing prevents the ambitious from developing but their effort, that there will be a lot of pioneers intent on getting some of them first. Asteroid Psyche is estimated to be worth from $1 - $10 quadrillion.
Someone ambitious wants to develop it and become the first $Quadrillionaire, and they'll be willing to suffer a lot to earn that distinction. Anyway, that's just one asteroid. There's millions of them pretty close to Earth, and billions of them a little further away. That's the magnitude of resources that are available just in the solar system, so much that the wealth that can come from such development isn't comparable to anything that has ever been possible on Earth. Inconceivable wealth.
But that's all I wanted to address. I don't need to convince you of anything - but very much don't want you to think I'm irrational, because I respect your opinion. It seemed to me you had to think me irrational from the gulf in our understanding. I hope I have at least suggested I am not bonkers, if I've not convinced you to go out and buy a laser engraver right away.
To set aside the feasibility of such a space age, I evaluate it from a different perspective. Which is why I see a fundamental flaw in your conception of it. But I am in no way judging you negatively for this, I would like to emphasize that. Since we learned to respect each other, such debates are much easier to have.
Let's assume that it happens as you say. That once humans have overcome the teething troubles and the loss of human life, they will be able to construct such fantastic ships and make them suitable for space. What would that change about the human mentality? Why should the space age change what causes conflict on earthly territory? Hear me out to the end.
As I see it, humans would carry their existing potential for conflict into space. What man is not able to solve here, man will not solve when he has detached himself from here. Where he fights for resources on earth, he will also do so in space.
From my point of view, the infinity of space leads to the misconception that this goes hand in hand with the infinite utilization of celestial bodies. And that prospecting for valuable resources in our solar system would be a joint cooperative act by the passengers. Which maybe means that it would have to be a single ship so as not to jeopardize the fundamental cooperative spirit.
But where you already have a ship with the quality of life you describe, it can be assumed that in the run-up to this gigantic process not only terrestrial matter has already been exploited for this purpose, but also extraterrestrial matter (such as the asteroids you mentioned). All of this actually requires a very determined cooperation of all people, not just a part of humanity, as I see it. Here, I imagine huge problems.
But let's assume that everything succeeds, that any conflict that arises before and during this project is overcome.
Nevertheless, I am convinced that not all people would be destined for happiness and a perfect existence. I don't assume that you yourself dream of it being perfect in all respects.
People, because they are people, would continue to harm and kill each other. Space existence would not free them from expressing their hostile nature (next to their friendly one). Nevertheless, the infinite nature of space would not hide the fact that every space - even the galaxy - will always be subject to limitations. Namely a technical and distance-related one. So what a ship urgently needs may be available in abundance out there and yet whatever happens will happen: That the technical factor - or others - gets in the way.
So you can have detected a planet of gold on your long-range sensor and yet the distance is too great and your ship is not sophisticated enough to reach it in time and that is the limit to absolute freedom that I mentioned at the beginning.
There would be discussions on this ship, some would say it's no use, you have to think of alternatives, others would be angry about it and want to try it at all costs and ultimately you would have this conflict on board, like countless others - people would be harmed and murdered. To think that jumping into the universe would remove the limitations of freedom experienced on earth is a misjudgement in my eyes. It is a beautiful thought, no doubt.
You may think that at least man would not blow up the very mothership he lives in, but I would argue that it would not be only one ship but several (giving the highly advanced tech). Or, you breed disturbed souls that act on self sabotage etc. - man does not escape conflict, otherwise he would be a total other creature.
So, I think that my premise
"Every circumstance you find yourself in, comes with certain limitations and restrictions, without exception..."
still stands. Why shall it not? You need not to eliminate it, because firstly, you can't and secondly, that is life. You win, you lose. You live, you die. If you're lucky, the main part of your life granted you joy. But in every lifetime there comes the situation to face its tough nature.
Nevertheless, I would like to conclude by saying that your dream is certainly also that of other people and that I would not actively oppose it per se, because such projects cannot be prevented by their very nature. There will always be pioneers and visionaries. Along the way, they will inspire many people and make them happy and just as many desperate and unhappy.
I want to pick out one of my sentences and elaborate on it.
I say it is a fact that people on our planet will always have a discrepancy that makes some people rush ahead and others resist. I am transferring today's efforts to equalise the human condition for all to a space age.
My most important argument is this: While on our Earth humans lagged far behind the technological deployment possibilities that others were already applying, the endeavour to make undeveloped societies equal to those already technologically advanced is always subject to a time lag. It becomes even more tricky when the once technologically more developed ones have spread their new way of life and the previously underdeveloped societies have caught up, it can happen that the former are left behind and suddenly find themselves in the same situation as the formerly Third World. And so on.
The great conflict can be observed today: While people from other parts of the world are immigrating to Europe en masse, who have previously lived a fundamentally different culture, and who also come from crisis areas where they have been reduced to survival (war, murder, manslaughter, shortages), they lack the mostly peaceful coexistence of people in the host countries.
They will or do see the locals as weak, as they do not appear to have preserved a genuine culture that is perceived as dominant. Since Europeans have given up on the concept of family and are under the illusion that all people are alike, and they believe that importing foreign cultures would be able to preserve their own, it may well be that these foreigners despise them. If only for the reason that they do not want to be abused as pawns, because it basically characterises the locals as naive racists.
It takes a small proportion of the newcomers to enforce their right to rule and to subjugate the original Europeans. Sooner or later, we will be outnumbered anyway and will die out due to our childlessness. Our geographical proximity to the African continent and the vibrant Islamic culture makes our homeland a new habitat for them. Nevertheless, they will be trapped as well and join us in our crisis. That contains some dangers, to say the least.
While Europe is in all probability heading for long-lasting crises, the East in Russia and Asia has developed out of its former backwardness and poverty. Not only that, they have overtaken the West. In my view, this has mainly happened because the Americans, but even more so the Western Europeans, have been unable to continue to innovate.
These cultures created people who prioritised the cultivation of decadence and promoted incompetence rather than competence. They are at a disadvantage compared to those who have only recently escaped difficult living conditions and have therefore not forgotten both the mentality and determination to make something out of their lives and defend themselves against enemies. Russians, just by the last three years, learned to fight a super modern war. The Russian identity will be positively pushed by that.
What is left of us Germans, for example, is hardly recruitable for both genuine science and a standing army, in my opinion.
I hope though that I am wrong and that crisis may be softened and our foreigners are going to appear more peaceful instead of hostile, and become our allies instead our enemies. But I am afraid that in order to gain respect, we have to change our policies.
A great many intricacies emerge from your considerations that are relevant to the matter. Sadly, I think in trying times subtleties are neglected as obdurate challenges resist clever solutions, and instead are solved with brute force or not at all. History is clear that from time to time trying times come, and they don't go away until the trials thereof are overcome. When facing trials it is easy to falter. Faint hearts full of fear fail, but feet carry us on even when our hearts cannot. The cataclysms of the day are never viewed from a perspective that encompasses the geological history of humanity. Geological catastrophes seem fictional. Pompeii's devastation after Vesuvius erupted is a museum exhibit. The supervolcano Toba, some 75k years ago, laying waste to S. Asia from Africa to Indonesia, burying India under ~6m of ash, is almost inconceivable. The Burkle crater in the Indian Ocean is ~5k years old, and left deposits from tsunamis >1 kilometer high in E. Africa and the Middle East, a doom hardly imaginable to see coming.
People survived these things. People will survive this century in Europe too. Besides geological history, people have geopolitical history. In truth geopolitical catastrophes can be even more devastating than natural disasters, because they can target people deliberately, while chance chooses the victims of volcanoes and meteorites. Samarkand and the Amu and Syr Darya basins have still not recovered their populations from prior to the Mongol invasion in the 13th Century (although this information is unvetted, perhaps hyperbolic or dated, as my research into irrigation on the Amu Darya claims irrigation utilization of over half the river flow presently). Because they resisted conquest, the Kwarezmians were genocided, their fertile soil salted, and centuries of development of irrigation works destroyed.
People came back, the salt washed away in scant rains, but the irrigation works were (claimed) never fully restored, and the productivity of the land never again supported as many people as it had when originally irrigated.
On Earth we are so common that human life is squandered. This will be completely turned on it's head in space, with the scarcity of good company the one thing AI cannot deliver, much less in such abundance any would squander it. Humanity adapts to it's conditions, and the close and unavoidable association we experience today devalues our good company, while such scarcity as interstellar distances between us will create will increase the value of good company incalculably. Appropriately valuing the scarcest thing in the universe, good company, will become an evolutionary hurdle that will eliminate them incapable of it rapidly because society is necessary to a social animal and the extremity of it's scarcity will increase the importance of being good company to survival beyond reckoning.
The abundance of resources and automating their development will create circumstances of inconceivable wealth of material goods to us that will be utterly unremarkable to them availed of it. The separation of people by relativistic distances will create practically absolute freedom and security. I fully concede these predictions are centuries in the future, but, in the event these technologies develop, will be the certain consequence. The technological advances necessary are all in process presently, and if we take the survival of the human species as a given, I do not see any reasonable basis for assuming they won't mature to the requisite state.
We are left to assess the several hurdles that must be surmounted to attain to fully automated production, and at will space travel (which I will argue is a product that will be one of those fully automated, in due time). AI obviously exists and the most advanced AI that has been produced to date, Deepseek, has just been released into the wild as open source code. Clearly that tech advance is underway. As to table top, or individually owned and operable means of production, in every field of industry, I also assert have advented, if yet in primitive prototypical form. Since these technological advances are, according to my research, ongoing and are incapable of being prevented from maturing because they are the mandate of the laws of physics, then the state of humanity I predict is only a matter of time and engineering - unless I have grossly misunderstood some factor that puts the kibosh on some critical advance.
I know this discussion is boring to you, so don't expect you to spend effort or time to develop such criticisms, but would not be disappointed if you did. I have written pages of text, and serially condensed to about 10% of it's original extent, so I have diligently done my best to be as brief as possible out of respect for your preferences.
Edit: bah! I neglected to address why humanity would be isolated by space travel and individual ownership of automated means of production, which I edited out some pages of explanation in a brutal quest for brevity. Your description of communal efforts isn't the result of decentralization, but of centralized production.
When humanity is availed automated means of production to individuals, crews will not work together, because that introduces that competition and confrontation wholly avoidable by individually laying claim and developing a resource. Because the means of production are owned by individuals and wholly automated, no laborers, no crew, no corporate structure is necessary, nor would the fractionalization of the wealth produced be very tolerable if accompanied by vicious competition, as we see close quarters produces. Vastly more sites to be developed exist than there ever will be individuals to develop them, so individual, or at most, familial colonies will be developed, rather than communities fraught with potential violence, betrayal, and brutal competition.
I like to begin to say that the two of us will not be on the same page on this matter. Which I do not mind. Since I find you are an astonishing character, one, with which disagreement can be freely expressed without ending in the result of disliking and dismissing each other. I rarely meet people like you. So thank you for that openness of yours.
I hope, that I will be able to sufficiently lay out my train of thought in response to your response.
The immense gift of earthly conditions, i.e. the existing atmosphere, breathable air, flora and fauna, are all geological processes that the planet does all by itself and need no human hand in this great and whole for regulation, since regulation of climate and weather arises through the history of the earth and through ever ongoing events such as ebb and flow - the existence of huge oceans and their currents - mountains and their influences on valleys, natural fires etc. etc. without our intervention.
The very fact that we as humans do not need to do all this enables us to attend to those matters that are applied on a small scale to convert wild land into arable land, to divert water and use it for our purposes, to extract gas and oil from the earth's interior and much more. These earthly resources are the result of millions of years of geological evolution and cannot be produced artificially. These processes are cyclical processes; all living things and matter on this earth are subordinate to such a cyclical existence. To artificially create such a geo-biosphere would require us to constantly and exclusively deal with the regulation of the sphere.
While events that arise on this gigantic planet regulate death and live - under which human beings, just like all other animals and creatures are subordinate to - they will not do so in a closed system of a spaceship. Since a spaceship is not an ancient old geo-biological - in comparison to earth, being in space at the right time in the right galaxy for such perfect conditions - but a technological body and you cannot and will not have the same conditions, not even close.
By not even close, I mean that even small errors in the regulation of an artificial sphere that is trying to regulate organic life can lead to gigantic failures. As humans, we may have a good understanding of the impressive processes on our planet, but the devil is always hidden in the details.
What happens apart from our actions alone, where we neither observe nor intervene, this ‘man is there’ and ‘he is not there’, i.e. events that unfold untouched by us, provides the balance of the terrestrial in my eyes. In a spaceship, no matter the size, you'd have to regulate it 100 percent. Whereas now we need not doing any of the regulation. We just live gifted with a planet, that regulates itself 100 percent.
Earths regulation of all of its inhabitants and matter results, like you said, in volcanic eruptions and tsunamis and earth quakes, and these very events are one part of its ever changing nature. While it is for us humans catastrophic in the short run, it isn't for the planet, since drastic events are part of the great system and a requirement for the build up of raw materials and the growths of such resources, buried underneath its soils. Humans survive the semi huge catastrophes, if only in tiny numbers (like you mentioned), while they will die when mega impacts will occur. Who will mind that?
I have no problem with such an event since my mind will not live to suffer from it. No ones will.
In my view, all of this is a philosophical consideration. Whether we humans believe that we are rather exposed to misery on our earth, that the ‘narrowness’ of which you speak is not something that we could regulate ourselves or from which we should try to escape, since narrowness or vastness is a phenomenon, a psychological phenomenon that expresses itself in the eternal suffering of the self and human nature and absolutely wants to see this suffering disappear through action. The ‘departure to the promised land’ and ‘better worlds’.
Incidentally, this is an imperialist idea that I do not share, although something of it always resonates in every human being.
The idea that the lack - and not the self-evidence of human good company - makes it a valued asset again is, I think, also born from the idea of being able to control such things. The creation of an artificial lack, which then automatically leads to the cancellation of becoming or being tired of each other.
I think this is a misconception, because being tired of each other needs not have to do with the narrowness and abundance of human conspecifics - as I think - but can, for example, have to do with one's own age and the years that have passed. Young people are not usually tormented by the fact that they get tired of each other's company, although they may have little love for an ageing group that outnumbers them.
Confinement is not a given on our planet per se; those who dislike living in confined spaces (big cities) have options to change this. Even if it's just retreating into your four walls as the simplest of all alternatives. If they don't, they must and will endure it. But there are folks who have chosen living apart from big cities. So they may not perceive such ghastly unwanted company in the same sense.
In general, this confinement - where it exists - will also disappear of its own accord; we have long since initiated the trend towards a low birth rate.
I maintain that the perception of confinement and freedom depend entirely on the mentality and may have nothing to do with the actual conditions, but with the will respective unwillingness to adapt to realities.
So I take the freedom to turn your assumption around and claim that although you have constructed a gigantic space-ship, man, aware of the metallic outer walls of this ship, feels just as confined as on the much larger earth, the far more 'perfect' spaceship. On which one man feels that the earths regulating itself is a very heavy burden, while another man feels at ease towards it and appreciates the fact of not having to be burdened by it. You can feel trapped and become hostile towards other people even though they might be your one and only company.
There, lies the difference between acceptance of creation (apart from mans will) and the will of construction (including that very will). The ever lasting conflict between human beings.
One mind suffers great sadness in the face of his mortality and also bemoans the total disappearance of the human species itself, while another mind finds itself at ease with it and accepts both, his own death as well as that of all human beings as the natural cycle of life itself. With no need to escape it.
For the one death is an ego affront, for the other it is liberation. Since death is not seen as "the end" but something other but incomprehensible and un-explainable. Nothing to fear and to escape from. But to give oneself into.
This does by all means not express that such a believer would not fight teeth and claw for his life when directly threatened, I shall add. Or that such person will not want to live when facing illness. It's an acceptance in general but not in particular.
I also appreciate the same qualities in you you appreciate in me, which is our good fortune. Your excellent and well considered response is a kindness to me.
First, it is absolutely true that we are blessed to be on Earth and to have arisen in this paradise. But, the assessment that it cannot be reproduced, at least on limited scales, isn't factually correct. It isn't possible to do these things without appropriate tools, and you nor I have appropriate tools to do these things today. What I am predicting is that tools to do these things arise as tech advances.
The fact that these processes are the products of the physical laws of the universe informs replicating the conditions for life elsewhere. Many of them, such as plate tectonics, tsunamis, and etc, aren't necessary in an artificially reproduced environment, although the cycling of minerals through ecosystems they effect do need to be attended to, such processes can be managed. [Edit: with appropriate sensors and mechanisms, the management of these processes can be automated with AI that is presently available on the market, simply needing adaptation to the specific purpose]
Certain of these processes, such as cycling of CO2, water, O2, and etc, are able to be entrained within biospheres, such that they can be aspects of the artificial environment with appropriate planning. Appropriate ratios of plants to animals, temperatures and pressures, amount of insolation, and etc, generally enable understanding of these processes to inform construction of biospheres and population of them with living things to enable those processes to maintain nominal living conditions to be sustained indefinitely, while some occasional addition or extraction of certain chemicals or species may be required from time to time.
It is known that most of the celestial bodies in the solar system have regions in which the required temperature ranges, pressures, and gravity, or centrifugal accelerations that nominally simulate gravity, are extant, or by creating enclosed spaces, such conditions can be attained with tolerable investments in construction and maintenance. Inside several moons of the gas giants lie oceans of liquid water. While insolation from the sun is insufficient to heat the water to liquid state, the tidal forces exerted on the mass that result from it's orbit do provide sufficient heat. While life requires light to power photosynthesis, we have learned how to create light artificially, and can introduce light to such a region in such a moon to enable photosynthesis to sustain plants. While the chemistry of such environments can be both inadequate in some respects, while toxically overloaded in others, we have expertise in chemistry that enables altering the environment in a closed space that filters inputs to exclude toxic species, and can add those lacking.
It is not yet proved that we can create enclosed environments on a spaceship or asteroid exposed to vacuum that can self perpetuate, but it is proved we can create aquaponics systems on Earth that allow limited nutrient, water, and artificial lighting to sustain habitat for specific desired species to provide food. By virtue of the nature of ecologies, doing so also purifies water and produces breathable air. The Biosphere experiments that have been undertaken were attempts to demonstrate that this was a manageable process, and largely succeeded.
I am not doubtful that this can be successfully done, at all. The technology to enclose a nominal space is not in question. The technology to provide suitable light is not in question. The ability to maintain temperatures and pressures within appropriate ranges is not in question. The ability to provide suitable soil substrate, water, and atmosphere varies from specific site to site, and informs site selection. It would be more difficult and expensive to do on certain celestial bodies than others, but absent certain limitations life and our construction technology has regarding high temperatures, pressures, spin, gravity, and etc., most of the celestial bodies present sites that appropriate construction of enclosures would enable populating with ecosystems that could largely self-sustain with little maintenance and managing of chemical balances thereafter.
We don't need to simulate volcanoes, plate tectonics, or hurricanes to enable life to persist. Insofar as those natural events circulate nutrients or reform habitat, we can do those things another way that is nominal for living things.
Also, the metaphysical reasons, philosophies, and psychology of people aren't particularly relevant beyond some basic assumptions. Economic wealth is desirable, and money is not wealth, but a service that can be useful to commerce, but is certainly not at all necessary to wealth creation. Many people try to define wealth, more or less successfully, as quality of life experienced by the wealthy. A loving family with plentiful resources to enable them to live happily is basically what wealth is. On Earth, social intercourse is a given. Hermits may be able to live in certain wilderness areas without having frequent interactions with other people, but this is not a desirable state of existence for most people.
Off Earth, such society will definitely not be a given, and any social interactions desirable will have to be planned and able to be sustained by the constructed environment in which life is possible. Because of economic constraints, many such habitats will be limited in ability to sustain groups of people, and because of social issues, many such will be deliberately limited in the size of the groups that can be so sustained, and it is likely that due to both considerations, there will be some that are intended to sustain only one or a handful of people.
This is a dramatic departure from the natural conditions on Earth, where people often fight to the death because interactions with other people can be fatal and are difficult to prevent. With artificial habitations dispersed across space, this social interaction problem is not reproduced, and the beneficial social interactions that humanity needs become very difficult to provide.
I am confident that people will survive, that some global technocratic totalitarian tyranny will be incapable of completely preventing independent development, and that some people will manage to succeed long enough to sustain their economic independence to survive any such tyranny, as they have rarely been sustained for long in history. The more brutal the tyranny, the less time they persist, generally speaking.
Whether it happens in the next ten years, or not until a century has passed, sooner or later people will launch spacecraft with the intention of developing celestial resources into biospheres. Regardless of philosophical or psychological considerations either you or I pose, there will be people intensely focused on doing so. The urge to establish colonies, to develop available resources, to escape government, and more generally concatenate into explorers, pioneers, and conquistadors in every human culture historically alluded to, and the fact humans spread across the Earth very long ago shows this also happened prehistorically.
Technological advance will continue to make spacecraft less and less expensive and difficult to manufacture, and eventually making nominal spacecraft, even covertly, will be possible to a single individual. It is today quite possible to a small group of wealthy people, or employees of a wealthy person, and several space manufacturing companies today show this is true. One of the biggest constraints on such craft is the fuel necessary to chemical rockets, and there are already several technologies, such as nuclear power, that dramatically reduce the amount of fuel volume necessary to launch off Earth (despite pollution of nuclear fueled launches, some psychopath may well be willing to do it), and novel technologies continue to threaten to arise that dramatically may change the situation.
It is very difficult to imagine a successful covert operation to launch a private spacecraft today with conventional supercooled liquid fuels, nuclear fuels, or some rail gun type of launcher. In the event something like HAUC that has been recently published, that situation changes radically and promotes extraterrestrial colonies.
It's just a matter of time and engineering IMHO.
Edit:
Space travel takes time. Many journeys contemplated take a lot of time and expense. Hibernation is a real thing many mammals closely related to humans undertake that limits their experience of the passage of time, and dramatically reduces their nutrient exchange needs in that state. I am also confident that hibernation will be able to be used to enable space travel to not require gigantic ships, but much smaller ships containing 'seeds' of life to be sent with people in a state of hibernation that precludes their suffering long duration of confinement within very small spaces.
As with almost everything else discussed herein, automation is a critical aspect of enabling hibernation to be successful in such operations, enabling people to remain unconscious until nominal environments have been constructed and attain a suitable level of operations to sustain tolerable conditions for people.
Let me finish by saying that you know I'm not really invested in this product of human imagination. Therefore, I am not a buyer and although you had a good sales pitch where you have an answer to all my questions and skepticism, that effort on me is in vain.
My counter-arguments may be though a welcome opportunity to have dispelled them to your satisfaction and to inspire you personally rather than slow you down, just as a business idea from my company once prepared us better for buyer skepticism for future sales appointments.
I am sure that people will continue to pursue the idea of traveling to space and that the skeptics in particular will help them to argue articulated problem scenarios out of the way.
It sometimes seems more like a cosmic joke to me that humanity, which you trust to overcome all problems, should not use the same intelligence and good will for a livable existence on its own planet rather than outgrow it.
The cynic replies: “Fuck the earth”, the adventurer says “Off to new shores!”, while both confirm the preserver in his view that they don't care at all what they so willingly leave behind. And although both are completely dependent on what the earth gives them in the form of treasures to get them started, they seem to me like those who quickly run across a bridge whose collapse they have helped to cause and happily shout “First!”. No offense to you personally.
So it's the attitude that - I'm deliberately exaggerating - gives the impression that one is happy to throw something one's used in the bin for something new. As long as the space enthusiasts give the skeptics the impression that both things cannot go side by side - keeping the old intact and starting the new - they will be viewed more like immature and selfish teenagers, as well as from the other side as know it alls and backwards.
You might think that those who wanted to stay at home would then have this earthly home to themselves and would be happy to see the nest-busters finally gone. In this respect, they would have the big living room to themselves.
‘Travellers should not be stopped’ is just as true as not urging those who stay at home to come along. So the leavers must only be allowed to go as far as they do not completely exploit those who stay behind and do not treat the earthly treasure like a disposable good.
In any relationship where the involved wish to part, they would be well advised to go their separate ways in such a spirit that they wish each other every success and do not make the other's living conditions miserable. In other words, to separate in mutual agreement, respecting the different world views, instead of being hostile to each other from now on.
Which then reveals the paradox: If human beings were capable of something like this, of wishing each other well and leaving each other as much as they need for their existence, the question arises: why separate in the first place if you're basically capable of staying together? LoL
Is it even possible to divorce out of love?
The traveller himself will grow old and he may want to have the reassuring feeling of being able to return to his roots at some time. Even if it is impossible in reality, people are wired in such a way that the mere idea that there is a home waiting for them can be comforting. In the same sense, people, who actually never travelled the Earth itself, have the reassuring impression that they could, if they wanted.
I thank you very much on my part to have given me your listening ear to articulate my own thoughts in this respect and having them laid out.
You never fail to engage me, to reveal segues and corners around which I never peeked.
I will say this. The meek will inherit the Earth. The rest of the universe is for the bold.
:) Well said.