

How to Avoid the Desperate Future of “Interstellar” - dnetesn
http://nautil.us/blog/how-to-avoid-the-desperate-future-of-interstellar

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jfoutz
Space is still expensive. SpaceX is awesome, and they're making things
cheaper.

Really though, the solution is increasing productivity. If all 6 (7?) billion
people's productivity doubles, the cost to go to space is cut in half. Our
infrastructure isn't good enough to make space cheap.

As powerful as Microsoft was for business, Gate's curing malaria will probably
have a bigger impact. millions of people not dying means a larger market.
Millions of minds trying to make the world a better place - at least making
stuff and buying stuff.

In the long run, getting everyone enough food and clean water is probably the
best answer to lowering the cost of going to space (and everything else). If
the billion people that get by on a dollar a day can produce more because
they're not sick and dying, everything gets cheaper.

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lsd5you
It is far from given that Microsoft has had a positive impact on the world's
economy!! It shouldn't have to be stated but you cannot measure contribution
by the economic size of an organisation, or even assume it is a positive one
(counterfactually).

It is all speculative, but in my opinion by being a monopoly provider they
have held back innovation by several years, and effectively taxed large
amounts of money out of the rest of the economy.

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simonblack
Just too many of us. Yet several generations of a 'one-child-per-couple'
policy would quietly reduce our numbers enough for us to cope with our over-
population and unsustainable use of resources.

But that sort of thinking is taboo. 'Interstellar', here we come. But
unfortunately, there won't be that convenient wormhole waiting for us.

~~~
drak0n1c
Forcing developed nations with relatively decent educational systems to lower
reproduction rates is not the answer. We need more problem solvers on Earth,
not less. Malthus has consistently been proven wrong -
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Green_Revolution](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Green_Revolution)

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jostmey
I up-voted this article just because of the video of Neil deGrasse Tyson. His
little rant was that good.

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DiabloD3
Can someone explain to me what nautil.us is? It looks like some sort of Wired
2.0 (if anyone remembers Wired at the beginning, it was kind of well written
and on-topic, now its really trashy).

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jordanpg
Sort of a 25¢ answer to a $1B question, no? Yes, I put together the bit about
reusable rockets on my own.

The author doesn't really close the loop on the imagination problem, also
known as the political problem. How much of the power of this idea in the 60s
was due to the cold war? Hard to say, but I would characterize the interest in
space exploration among the non-technical people I know as _non-existent_ \--
and tweeting the latest pictures from the Hubble doesn't count as interest.

