from Hacker News

Tech CEOs should stop using sci-fi as a blueprint for humanity’s future in space

by AndrewLiptak on 7/14/21, 12:12 PM with 2 comments

• by rbanffy on 7/14/21, 12:49 PM

  That's really a bad take. A Mars colony will most likely not outlast or stay on Earth - Earth had a couple million years of head start. It will, eventually, become a relic of past ambitions, but only, hopefully, after our ambitions - and our ability to act on them, exceed the ones who led us to colonize the solar system.

  There is much to gain from such endeavors. From making a stand and turning dead rocks into our home, we learn what it means to be human, something we currently can't separate from our lives inside a protective layer of air and magnetism. We don't know what it means to be human on the Moon or on Mars. For me it's almost certain we'll make our homes underground and only come up on rare occasions, to wonder at the new worlds around us.

  The Sun will have a finite life. We may be able to save the planets, moving their orbits outside the solar atmosphere as our star expands, maybe even robbing mass from it to slow down its aging, but all that only buys us time - unimaginably long periods from us, thousands of times longer than the ones that separate us from our ape-like ancestors, but, still, finite, and no more than a blip in the lifetime of our universe.

  Only by leaving the solar system and learning to live and thrive in the depths of space and to seed other stars with our life will we be able to realize a grander potential.

• by throw1234651234 on 7/14/21, 12:54 PM

  Article is a rant. Author is uneducated. Using Asimov as example of "unscientific" science fiction is hilarious, even if the author bothered to look through Asimov's auto-biography and found "The Guide to Science" in multiple versions in there. Same goes for Neal Stephenson, etc. Science Fiction is based on science. A lot of the "prediction" have come to pass.