this post was submitted on 26 May 2024
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I find it very a very romantic notion to have unknown areas on the world. Like some desert in the far south, beyond which might lie anything.
Fittingly, the term romance originally meant “to derive from a romantic language”, meaning mostly Latin which was spoken in the Roman Empire.
The texts in reference were largely about chivalry and such. Hence the modern connotations.
So like, romance refers to a time before the world was fully known. :)
https://www.etymonline.com/word/romance#etymonline_v_15175
We have that today with outer space. For all intents and purposes it is the new ocean, and so far we've only put a few skiffs in it.
Yeah, but it's a lot harder to cross. Like, I could build a shitty boat from wood myself. A spaceship? Not so much. Especially not if it's actually supposed to leave this gravity well.
It'll eventually be more commonplace. Probably not build a raft level of simple, but eventually there will be common access.
I doubt we'll get that far before running out of resources (especially oil, which is necessary for pretty much everything even though not necessarily directly for space travel) and/or climate change ends mass-scale industrial society. Long term space travel is incredibly hard and it has a ton of effects on the human body, and solving those problems will be pretty low on our priority list when shit really hits the fan
Regarding the problem of running out of oil, I look at it a bit like, "we are a plant (biological plant)".
The plant starts in a seed, which provides it with nutrients (energy) as some kind of starting bonus. It can use these nutrients to develop itself and live, but it will recognize that at some point it will run out of calories and die. So it has to do something about it. What it does, is to develop leaves. These leaves collect the sunlight and this way, the plant has a constant and continuous source of energy/calories. So it can keep on living.
Society has a very similar problem. We have oil, but it is limited. We can use it to develop, but eventually we're gonna run out of it. So we have to do something about it. Just like a plant, we develop solar panels to collect the sunlight, so we have a continuous income of energy. This way we can live waaay beyond the time of our starting bonus.
You can't replace petrochemicals with sunlight, let alone convert everything that runs on some form of oil product into eg. electric - not nearly enough rare earths in existence, and hydrogen is not the solution either for the majority for a variety of reasons (starting from ridiculously low energy density to being absolute ass to store)
Crossing large spans of water was very dangerous, because of storms, getting lost, running out of food etc. Nowadays, crossing large spans of empty space is also very dangerous, but the dangers are a bit different. Regardless, I can see many similarities between crossing the Atlantic ocean in the 1400s and going to the moon 500 years laters.
there is an infinite difference between "you can technically do it but you're 99% likely to die" and "you literally cannot even reach the edge of the atmosphere without a vehicle engineered and built by 5000 people"