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As long as we become space faring super survivors, I'm fine with that. Good intentions don't make rocket fuel for the vroom vroom. We need to vroom some explorers to other places, just in case.
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Beautifully said and wraps up everything I love about Trek culture.
I saw James Cromwell, the actor who portrayed Zefram Cochrane, on a flight into Albuquerque about a decade or so ago. He was wearing a colorful kufi hat, and he’s so god damned tall I could easily see him from like three rows back. I was 99% sure it was him, and when I saw him again picking up his luggage I became 100% sure. He’s a freaking giant.
I have a very strong introvert aspect to myself. I very badly wanted to tell him how much his portrayal of Cochrane influenced my life and my career, but I chickened out. For the record, I am a research scientist who now works in big tech.
I think what I loved about him was his flaws. I especially loved how his self-awareness of the chasm between the person he saw himself to be and the legend that grew around him caused him to freak out and panic. I also really understood his whole self-destructive and self-sabotaging stage. And despite all of that, he won through, and Starfleet was the end product.
I love what you’ve written and I think it speaks to the ethos Roddenberry built into his universe to show us what is possible, but I really loved the idea that it grew from this flawed human before it blossomed.
That’s not to say the vroom vroom person was correct. Quite the opposite. A mirror universe Cochrane reimagined as Elon Musk would have lead to… probably the mirror universe but worse. It was more about the struggle possibly being worth it, despite how you feel about yourself and even if the end is something you can’t even imagine.
I always love that logic ... our planet is too dangerous and dying, so we have to leave to make sure we survive
At this point in our evolution ... we would ensure our long term survival in our galaxy if we stayed put and maintained our current environment. It's the only liveable atmosphere, environment and planet that we know of that we can live on and have access to.
How are we going to restart life on Mars where there is no atmosphere or resources when we're doing such a terrible job maintaining the existing atmosphere and environment we were born into?
I always like burning house metaphors .... space exploration to save our species at this point in time is like burning your house down, telling everyone you can't live there any more and saying that you're leaving to go live somewhere else where you can decorate a better bedroom. Except your burning house is located in an isolated desert with no shelter for hundreds of miles around.
How bout we stay where the fuck we're at, fix the planet we fucked up, and stop colonizing new places?
The main problem with colonizing places is the displacement of the people already living there. You'll notice that space is notorious for not having people. It's one of the defining traits of space, really.
As to staying where we are, well. That comes with all sorts of issues. The first of which are big rocks. Then there's gamma ray bursts, and coronal mass ejections, and a host of other potentially life ending things that could hit our planet at any time.
We have all of our eggs in one basket. This is the height of stupidity when we could do something about it.
As to fixing our own planet? Why the fuck do you think we can't also work on that? There are billions of humans, we can surely multitask. Especially since actually living on the moon or Mars or whatnot will be a monumentally hard task in and of itself.
The first moon base will need to be 100% science to figure out some pretty important biology, like is it even possible to maintain a population at 1/6 Earth gravity.
That's a huge question that we don't actually have an answer for.
As to fixing our own planet? Why the fuck do you think we can’t also work on that? There are billions of humans, we can surely multitask. Especially since actually living on the moon or Mars or whatnot will be a monumentally hard task in and of itself.
Then where are those efforts? When will the fossil fuel companies be shuttered, and their CEOs executed for crimes against nature and humanity? When can we trust the leaders of the most powerful nations on Earth to actually start trying to restrain the runaway global temperature increases? We just sailed straight past 2C globally; a full 25 years ahead of schedule.
If we can multitask, I'm sure as fuckin shit not seeing it; and it's either naiveté you're speaking from, or downright IFLS-type, bazinga-flavored malice. I don't care about questions we haven't asked about space yet.
I care about "how are we going to not fucking die here for the profit of some gaggle of fossil-sucking sociopaths".
Why survive if we're going to be so wretched? How do people value life itself above the quality of that life?