Surely there's a self-selection bias going on. The people who are most passionate about space colonization are going to be the ones who are most vocal about protesting objections to it.
As to why anyone is passionate about it, see my previous post. A great many of us were fed a grand dream by you and your colleagues.
It's a writer's job to sell dreams, of course, but, in this case, the sale was made extra compelling by the fact that, for a while, it seemed like it was going to come true.
Any way you slice it, that's a hard thing to let go of. Believe me, there's a big part of me that wants to join in the cat-calling when people come out and say that it's not feasible, even though I agree with the underlying arguments.
]]>I've become a space skeptic, too, but I also grew up with the grand vision of O'Neil cylinders and Lunar colonies. It was in the fiction I read, it was in the shows I watched, and a lot of the boosters for this vision were people that I respect, like Isaac Asimov.
Taking a hard, dispassionate look at that vision and realizing that not only are we nowhere near to fulfilling it, but also realize that there are compelling reasons that it won't be happening for a long, long time, if ever, is a bitter pill to swallow.
It not only hits me on a visceral level, but it also runs contrary to the technological optimism that Science Fiction has been feeding me since I was a kid. The notion that all those grand stories are just stories really is a bit like being told that Santa Claus isn't real.
To be clear, I do accept the arguments, but I don't like them and I fully understand why so many people are reacting so badly to the idea.
]]>That said, I don't know how much energy we can get from our reserves. If nuclear power can supply our needs for the next thousand years then maybe my worries are misplaced.
I'm sure one of the smart folks around here has the numbers and might be willing to share them.
]]>That said, mopeds and motorbikes are very fuel efficient and well suited to hilly environs. You can't use them to transport groceries, but they're excellent for getting back and forth to work.
]]>That means an end to cheap tourism, and an end to most companies sending consultants around the world. International companies will become more and more reliant on telecommuting.
Tourism will return to being a luxury with most travelers going back to train travel and ships to get to their destination and exotic locales returning to once in a lifetime journeys for the average person.
]]>That's why you have marsupials that look like wolves, and (extinct) reptiles and mammals that look like fish.
We need to be careful about drawing Darwinian analogies, however. In a Darwinian system, fitness is a function of reproductive success and nothing else, but corporations don't tend to reproduce, aside from spin-offs. The evolution of corporations has much more in common with Lamark's ideas with corporation able to borrow successful adaptations from other corporations.
That said, I think that you're right to view corporate interests as basically inhuman. Corporations are explicitly not working for the greater good and the theory that the invisible hand of the market will magically and invariably pull the market into a state that benefits society as a whole is little more than a modern superstition.
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