Play Hardspace: Shipbreaker if you want to see what that’d probably look like, considering our current trajectory
Beltalowda!
Will never happen. Human flesh is not meant to live outside Earth. It’s just fairy tales.
Interesting, I’m of the opposite mind: I think it’s inevitable that we will inhabit places outside earth. Time is long, technology keeps getting better, space on earth keeps getting smaller, and there’s only one way we escape the consumption of earth by the eventual expansion of the sun. We just have to make sure not to destroy ourselves here first (a tall order, it seems as of lately).
Only if you ignore the opportunity cost—i.e., the number of terrestrial jobs that could have been created with the same investment.
Depends on the time frame. In the period immediately following such a venture, sure, but if you actually properly establish settlement off earth, the total resource base and thus carrying capacity of civilization as a whole increases and continues to increase until we either hit the limits of that part of the universe one can theoretically reach (which is so big as to make the entire earth less than a speck of dust by comparison), you decide to just stop space colonization (which gets more difficult the further on you go, because the number of potential polities to launch a new mission increases the more space is populated), or you find yourself boxed in by alien civilizations in all directions (since we haven’t seen any, they’re most likely far enough apart on average for this to still leave an extremely vast chunk of space). A hypothetical spacefairing civilization should be able to reach sizes so vast that it would be physically impossible to create enough jobs on just one planet to equal it, even with just this solar system even.
Job creation by itself is not exactly the best motivation to pursue this though, since the jobs created will after the initial period be generally far away and therefore not likely to be worked by anyone except the people that end up in those colonies, who wouldn’t even exist otherwise.
Yeah—“job creation” only makes sense in the timeframe of making incremental changes to industry to adjust to changes in the labor pool. On the timeframe of decisions that alter future demographics, “job creation” is a distorted and detrimental lens.
As every new thing.
AI, for example, has created a a brand new job: Vibe Coding Corrector/fixer, people hire to fix the fuck ups of the AI and vibe coders.
Great, we’re already fucking up this planet let’s go fuck up the rest of the solar system too.
Most of the solid bodies in the solar system are literally a bunch of airless, irradiated, toxic rocks, with either no life at all or potentially some rare bacteria-like stuff hidden somewhere we haven’t been able to conclusively examine yet. They already are in a more “fucked up” state than even the most polluted wasteland we’ve created on earth. What could we possibly do to them to mess them up further?
Life… uhh… finds a way
Its current “fucked up” state is also its natural state, relatively uninfluenced by humans for the entirety of existence.
I don’t doubt our ability to act brashly and fuck something up to the point of impacting life back here on Earth or screw things up for others out there in the cosmos.
