It's fine if pursuing these things is a higher priority for you than colonizing other planets, but I reject your argument for two reasons.
One, the whole notion that we shouldn't being working on something until someone else's preferred goals have been achieved first is arrogant tot he point of absurdity. I could just as well argue that she shouldn't waste any more funds on what might be a lost cause before we establish an emergency beachhead on another planet for backup purposes.
Two, this position has been expressed so often as to be a cliche. It's not helpful to trot out really timeworn arguments as if they were original, without considering the existing best arguments on both sides.
There are simple solutions to most of our issues.
Just because they're simple doesn't mean they're right. If things were really so simple we'd have arguably taken care of it already. As a general rule, any system that depends on everyone behaving a certain way is doomed to failure because there's abundant evidence in history that people frequently choose to put their individual interest above that of others. You can't just legislate that people will behave unselfishly; past attempts to do so seem to invariably end in totalitarianism. Likewise while I'm all in favor of reducing nuclear stockpiles the probability of a world with no nuclear weapons is close to zero because it's impossible to forget the knowledge that enables the construction of such a weapon, and the impact of nuclear force on an asymmetrical military conflict are simply too large of an incentive to overlook. In a world of billions of people clustered into hundreds of countries (which are semi-conscious aggregate entities imho), it's statistically almost inevitable that you'll have some actors that are militant, relatively weak, and give in easily to temptation.
One, the whole notion that we shouldn't being working on something until someone else's preferred goals have been achieved first is arrogant tot he point of absurdity. I could just as well argue that she shouldn't waste any more funds on what might be a lost cause before we establish an emergency beachhead on another planet for backup purposes.
Two, this position has been expressed so often as to be a cliche. It's not helpful to trot out really timeworn arguments as if they were original, without considering the existing best arguments on both sides.
There are simple solutions to most of our issues.
Just because they're simple doesn't mean they're right. If things were really so simple we'd have arguably taken care of it already. As a general rule, any system that depends on everyone behaving a certain way is doomed to failure because there's abundant evidence in history that people frequently choose to put their individual interest above that of others. You can't just legislate that people will behave unselfishly; past attempts to do so seem to invariably end in totalitarianism. Likewise while I'm all in favor of reducing nuclear stockpiles the probability of a world with no nuclear weapons is close to zero because it's impossible to forget the knowledge that enables the construction of such a weapon, and the impact of nuclear force on an asymmetrical military conflict are simply too large of an incentive to overlook. In a world of billions of people clustered into hundreds of countries (which are semi-conscious aggregate entities imho), it's statistically almost inevitable that you'll have some actors that are militant, relatively weak, and give in easily to temptation.