Do you know the name of the book by chance

I don't even travel anymore. It's more economically viable to email my friend and ask them to impersonate me when I'm thinking about visiting them.

That was an exotic new blend of tech hopium right there.

In order to colonize other worlds, it's more economically viable to not go there in the first place. Even if you wanted to send just machines to another planet, it would take decades or even centuries to get there.

Unless you have a massive energy source, it's going to take our current speeds over 100,000 years to make it to Alpha Centauri. If you harvested all the fossil fuels on earth, you could probably get a space shuttle near 98% light speed. You'd need to harvest the energy of a supernova to get to 100%. At 100% lightspeed, it takes four years to travel to our nearest neighbor. .

In other words, you're using up all the energy on one planet to travel to another planet so you can harvest all the energy on that one to send an empty shuttle back to earth. The only way it's going to be economically viable to travel to another star system is if we figure out something where our current understanding of physics is limited. Otherwise, our sole purpose for going to other systems should be for scientific exploration and research. It will be a money sink regardless of what we do.

I mean, there's just one person out there constantly talking about going to Mars and it's the Muskrat. Anyone who talks about ”colonizing planets” as if it's something that's actually going to happen is deeply unserious.

I'm positive the soviet union didn't posit space exploration as the key solution to ecological overshoot, depleting energy and mineral reserves, demographic collapse, and climate apocalypse. This is what is central to bazinga theory. You don't need to solve any contradiction. You don't need to make choices. Just, uh, genetically engineer robots who will terraform random planets for us. Yeah. That's the plan.

Fuck off with your Reddity concern trolling.

You're buying into billionaire marketing pitches and drawing conclusions based upon your defensiveness toward such escapist fantasies.

Scientific inquiry is not the same thing as hopium huffing about magically self-sustaining space colonies while the planet we're currently on and the only inhabitable place we can reach is being devastated by the status quo.

Even biodome experiments on Earth have consistently failed so far. You're the one with the unreasonable fantastical position here, and you clearly don't like when it's challenged.

Fuck off space colonizer

Tech doesn't exist in a vacuum, and in the west especially, it's an increasingly grifty publicly funded private enterprise that bullshits more than it delivers, and what it delivers is often for military ends.

It's neither particularly pro-Marxist nor anti-Marxist.

Did you even read the comments there? It's bootlickery and running interference for billionaires there, which lines up with the privatized and grifty condition of space inquiry in the west.

terraform earth

This is the go-to answer lol. If we can't even terraform earth to stop climate change, we sure as shit are not going to terraform a place with no atmosphere or water and is years of travel distance away from us. AFAIK right now it would take about 5 years to send humans to Mars and back.

The movie was called Titan A.E. It's a post-apocalyptic Don Bluth movie in space. It's neat.