What's the point of human space travel...

...

>What's the point of human sea travel? We hold ourselves so far back by trying to make traveling through sea possible for humans. Humans just aren't made to navigate a ship through sea. It's like making a caravel to transport an abacus. Other continents are so far away that a single human could never hope to travel to them in a lifetime, and then if we do manage to colonize a continent far away, they would be an entirely different world because of the time communications would take. All this is so much easier to accomplish with slaves and convicts made specifically to mine the American ores, or explore the distant continents of Australia. Why go on with free people?

>Durr humans can't do it we neeb stay here
One of the points about space travel is to push the capabilities of mankind you brainlet.

Bragging rights. No one cares who built the robot we first sent to Mars, but history will remember the first man to set foot there.

>Do you know how many times we've rolled the dice? It may take hundreds of thousands of years but eventually we're gonna come up snake eyes and then we get another cretacious die off impact

the average planet-killer hits every 60 million years.
last one was 65 million years ago.

even so, we are already in a mass extinction event. we may not need an asteroid to finish off the biodiversity of the planet

wtf does this have to do with Veeky Forums?

go play on /qst/ then?

>Why go on with people

Don't go on with people. Build human-suitable space colonies with robots, then inhabit them. Build wormhole tunnels or upload-transmitting laser networks with robots, then traverse them with humans.

Ultimately the hope is to be able to go really far away from all the people we hate.

Or perhaps that they will one day go away on their own.

That's the rightist/classical liberal take, user (no surprise on Veeky Forums, since it's one of the few things transhumanists and JRR Tolkien larpers can agree on).

Modern establishment neoliberalism OTOH can't abide independence. If the rich whites build Elysium, then who will be their maids or lawn workers, and who will get to donate charity at gunpoint to the Afro-Hispanic hordes left behind?

>If the rich whites build Elysium, then who will be their maids or lawn workers,
robots. It's literally 95% of why the rich tech twats keep building all this automated shit

>thatsthepoint.jpg

If hard capitalism enters orbital takeoff velocity en route to a singularity, nothing from the establishment makes it out there alive, which is morally intolerable for the big left. Space Nazis are only the beginning of the horror. The modern ruling consensus will do all it can to slow down escape offworld.

Seriously, to me, the idea that in the far future, everyone can go colonize some solar system hundreds of light years away from everyone they disagree with and run it however they deem appropriate instead of slaughtering each other over the pursuit of utopia is as inspiring as fuck.

Whats funny to me is that, in such a future, Earth will become known as a terrible fucking shithole of a planet instead of the heart of galactic civilization. Because all of the colonies will be descended from a single power structure where everyone had to work together to survive for, at the bare minimum, hundreds of years in the face of an alien ecosystem far from help.

While the children of Earth will be building arcologies that spread to control whole planets, the homeworld will be murdering people who live across imaginary lines over control of territory or ideological disagreements, and the places that don't only avoid such wars because they are too busy holding their nuclear gun with a finger on the trigger and staring down everyone else who has one too to see if anyone is feeling lucky.

When world war 4 happens, Mars will watch in horror as the Earth consumes itself in bloodshed again. And when nations on Earth embroiled in war barter for help from the colonies in space to win their wars for them, space will say no.

Space wont be free from conflict, thats a dream. But earth will always, always be the planet that never really got its shit together specifically because it had too much history.

>mfw people think Humanity is going to spread out into the stars when we're struggling to even maintain our birth rates

How are we supposed to fill out Earth-2 when we're already dying out in Germany or the United States? If there is a future in space, the future is brown.

If space colonization does become a thing, I bet you dollars-to-donuts that snowflakes will whine about diversity of skin color for colonists over everything else. They'll do everything they can to make sure private space colonization is impossible, because they know it'll be the biggest case of Caucasian and Asian flight in history.

The main reason birthrates suck is because of how economically unfeasible it is to raise more than one child these days.

And what does it mean to be economically unfeasible? Because it's not a matter of income, as we can see with wealthy households often only having one or two children. What really causes birth rates to rise or fall is the availability of social welfare; ever wonder why the more comprehensive the coverage the State can give to an individual, the less likely that individual will have kids? Germany and Sweden are some of the biggest welfare states in the world, and coincidentally their birth rates are among the worst.

The only way to improve birth rates is to eliminate social security - if you aren't having kids, you're going to die poor and homeless in the streets when you're too old to work. It's why people have a dozen kids in the ghetto, it's why people have a dozen kids in Kenya, and it's why people will have a dozen kids on Mars.

Because taking the easy or economical route is for cowards.

Population growth isn't always desirable. In a time when healtcare means that you don't need redundant children with the expectation that half of them are going to die to sickness or accident, and when automation means that gainful employment opportunities are going to shrink appreciably, there isn't any advantage to just popping out kids like its an assembly line.

When new frontiers open up, it will be a harsher environment with plenty of space. Because thats what a frontier is. Birth rates will spike accordingly.

I bet you are one of those people that think that Japan is dying off because of the birth rate decline, ignoring the fact that Japan was always too fucking densely populated for a tiny island nation anyway. They aren't going extinct, they are just gravitating towards equilibrium.

>Birth rates will spike accordingly.

And you don't think the new frontiers will have healthcare or automation? That we're just going to dump a bunch of colonists with a pile of building materials like it's Dwarf Fortress?

It's funny; I both really, really hope that FTL is possible, and I really, really hope that it isn't possible.

If it is, then a "classical space nation/empire" is entirely possible, and the thought of humanity collectively spreading the light of civilization across the cosmos, the fires of the past tempered by the sheer scale of space.

If it isn't, then I and everyone else can get away from the people we hate, settle our own planet, and no one will ever, EVER be able to find us, let alone fuck with us. Humanity would become a constantly expanding sphere of islands in the void, occasionally communicating with each other across lightyears, but entirely and totally independent on the interstellar scale.
At least until some fuck builds an RKV or a Nicole-Dyson beam, but at that point good old MAD comes back into play.

If there's still people who hate other people, it's probable humanity has not advanced at all.

To be fair, any colony restricting itself to a narrow range of genetic traits is asking for trouble.

Lets say /pol/ gets together to form a space colony and only lets the aryans in. They'll be up to their ass in blonde haired blued eyes folk, but their biodiversity is going to be shit. They will be both more vulnerable to diseases blowing up out of control in their population, and they as a colony will have a worse time adapting to their planet evolutionarily because they all started with roughly the same traits instead of a deep pool of options to see which ones prove fittest in their new environment.

The only 'advantage' to such an approach is ideological. Which, in the context of survival, reads the same as fictional.

There's two ways you can mean this, user:
Either people have become perfectly tolerant and accepting of all other people.
Or there's no people left that are worth hating, or otherwise fall outside the bound of tolerance.

Only one of these is progress.

>'we'

There is no we. Some groups reproduce more than others, and I'm not talking ethnic groups - think smaller. Mormons vs atheists, red vs blue, east vs west or north vs south.

The future belongs to those who show up. Not breeding is fine if you have full-spectrum memetic dominance to convert every other groups children into your faction. But if real intellectual diversity breaks out, evolutionary competition is suddenly a real problem.

>this meme again
Ethnic populations got along just fine before the era of mass inter-breeding, and biodiversity within "races" are more than sufficient for survival.
If the planet is even vaguely Earth-like, then any and all race can probably survive and thrive there (especially with the benefit of technology and not having to start over from square 1)
And, just like how humanity recovered from a bottleneck of just a few thousand breeding pairs in our evolutionary past, the initial population of colonists (no matter how similar) will invariably give rise to genetic variance as they populate the entire planet.

TL;DR: Your argument really only makes sense for the first few generations, and even then it's likely not that big of a concern anyways.

The problem isn't that race colonies would form I think, the problem would be that you'd get diversity hires who contribute nothing but their shitty attitude.

Also
>/pol/ gets together to form a space colony and only lets the aryans in
>implying /pol/ has any actual aryans

The frontier, especially in space, will be very limited compared to whats back on civilization. Unless you have fucking Hyperion Farcasters and can just build a magic door that lets you walk back to Earth at the drop of a hat, you are operating on very limited supplies. Even if you start off the trip well stocked with great healthcare, those drugs and supplies won't last. Machines will take care of some jobs for sure, but there is always going to be more work to go into setting up a sustainable colony than any number of humans can hope to accomplish in their lifetime. On a new world, with its own unique brand of dangers, accidents are going to happen. And at the start, they are going to happen pretty damn often. Imagine construction accident we have today, and now add in the fact that you are building on a planet with 1.2 times Earth gravity for the first time, and how that fucks with your construction equipment and architecture. Settling on a planet with alien microbes for the first time, where 99.9% of them are harmless and the 0.01% that realize that we are walking bags of water and nutrients and start eating us in ways our immune systems have no defense against.

Settling other planets is going to be hard, dangerous work. Especially the first few times we do it. We won't just have a magical safety box that does all the work for us and cures diseases we don't know exist.

>Also
>>/pol/ gets together to form a space colony and only lets the aryans in
>>implying /pol/ has any actual aryans
Oh, I'm sure there's a few; not enough to make a stable initial population from, but enough to possible select for in the greater population through breeding rights.

>"alright everyone; if you've got blond hair and blue eyes, you can have as many kids as you want. If you only have one of them, two kids max. If neither, one kid; get to house raising."

The bigger issue is if they'd have a large enough female population.

That's what CRISPR and kitsune replicants with artificial wombs are for, user!

While you do have somewhat of a point, I think it's fair to assume that colonists won't be 100% retarded.

They'll have computers to properly model construction on planets with different gravity or geology.
They'll have away teams that live on the planet for a few years while they collect data on potential disease (with full knowledge that they'll possibly be quarantined and left for dead if they find something that they can't deal with themselves)
They'll keep most of the colonists asleep or on the ship while they gradually send down more and more initial specialists and workers to explore and construct initial settlements, rather than dumping the entire few thousand down at once.
Even then, they'll possibly keep a sufficient population on the (likely self-sufficient) colony ship for a few decades while the colony gets underway, on the off chance that SHTF and they don't want EVERYONE to die.

The planet's survived worse. Humanity will destroy itself, or be destroyed by the whims of the cosmos, far before it is capable of replicating the Siberian Traps Eruptions.

Sure. I'm assuming the colonists have a plan and start off well prepared.

But no amount of preparation solves the problems that come up in the field, especially for an unknown environment. The math can check out on how to build a sturdy habitat in high gravity, but all you have to do is fuck up on something as minor as what metal the screws are made of and you are fucked. You can catalogue every single microbe you come across in a 5 year research mission, but that's not going to cover all the microbes you never saw.

And?

I'm failing to see how that matters when the stars call out for us to leave the cradle.

It matters. It won't stop us from going, but it matters. Its why even a well planned colony mission is dangerous, and people are going to die.

Yeah, robots is a better option.

Human space colonisation is a sci-fi dream, but we can always send robots to gather rocks out there.

If what you're implying was actually true than babies between two ethnic swedes, germans, anglo-saxons, and slavs would all have three eyes and two noses, but that's not true. This whole "unless your baby is ALLLL the colors of the brown rainbow you're inbred" is the jewest meme I have ever seen. You have to be clinically retarded to believe it.

Our robots are still utter shit and need constant maintenance from humans to do anything but the simplest real-world tasks.

Useful remote-control becomes unfeasible at a certain distance because the light lag is so huge. Pretty much every machine outside of Earth orbit spends long periods of time just sitting around doing nothing while it waits long minutes for human instructions. And this is actually *far* better than the alternative (fully self-directed computers): spacecraft builders have learned that lesson many times over.

Autonomous robot exploration won't be worthwhile for until they're capable of self-replicating (or at least, a "queen bee" robot factory that's capable of self-maintenance). They should probably also be capable of self-improvement.

If that ever happens, interstellar travel will probably not be a major concern for humans.

>What's the point of human ground travel
>What's the point of human water travel
>What's the point of human air travel

Both.

There are plenty of people who have technical skills and experience but no social status, or who do shit jobs just to be able to pay for their loans.
There's your core group of spacers. People who will leave not because of vanity, but simply because they will have no other choice.

On a semi related note; what's the best name for space people in the same vein as sailor or mariner.

strawpoll.me/13913782

A human explorer with a spindly little shovel and a hammer can spend five minutes and do a month or years worth of remote robot probe examination on an alien planet.

spacer or cosmonaut ez

Mortal humans will not reach the stars. We will need to be more advanced.

>We hold ourselves so far back by trying to make traveling through space possible for humans. Humans just aren't made to fly a ship through space.

Because you may not realize it but every second we dont were ticking down to our extinction.

Sailor would be the same, as it doesn't imply what you are sailing through, only that you are sailing. Mariner comes from marine, referring to water. The resultant word for space would be astroneer.

I agree. Space belongs to your betters: The Immortal, Perfect, Machines.

Because for the most part, robots are shit and AI isn't within our grasp yet, nor even desirable in that endeavor. People are adaptable, fast to react and fast to take decisions.

However I doubt we will be able to explore decently the stars and colonize them until we have a better way to get out of our gravity belt than our rockets.

Oh come on, you're awfully conservative. A bit a tardigrade genome here and there so that we can repair our DNA on the go and keep ourselves in dry, cold storage for extended period of time, some improvements to our body, why not baboon-level of muscle density, crocodile red blood cells, fixing better metals than calcium in our bones, have a good look at how to gain a few percents of transmission speed in axons, thicker skin, i'm sure we could find in the animal kingdom a molecule much better than melanin as a last line of defense against ultraviolet, and a little bit of tweaking of the part of our brain that process the passing of time so that we don't care anymore. And voilà! Send me to the stars.

>Siberian Traps eruption

Siberian Traps sure make ME erupt

>Also this is a fucking spam thread with no relation to Veeky Forums.
The fact that only a few posts were deleted says otherwise.

Because population control is gross and it's way better to just colonize other planets.

>Because population control is gross
No it's not

>and it's way better to just colonize other planets.
This isn't going to solve overpopulation.
Even if space travel becomes affordable enough to build massive colony arks that can support a thousand people, that's not going to make a fraction of a dent on the human population.

Except in the unlikely scenario that FTL does end up working out, every colony ship is a one way trip; that's one ship for every 1,000 people that want to leave Earth; that's a million ships to depopulate the planet by a billion.
A planet that's constantly breeding, it's population constantly increasing, and by the time we even get to this degree of space travel, will be far more overpopulated than just 7 billion and some million people.

Unless you can cheaply and efficiently mass produce massive, likely kilometer long space-ships for what are effectively one way trips (meaning the ships don't come back to pick up another load in a meaningful amount of time) by the hundreds of thousands, interstellar migration will never meaningfully depopulate a given planet.
Colonizing other bodies within the same solar system will help relieve some population on Earth, most assuredly, but you're only kicking the can down the road at that point. There's only so much land, so much matter, in the solar system, and eventually you'll hit max capacity.

That's terror.