Dear exoplanet enthusiasts,
Every planet outside the solar system is far enough away that we’d have to build ships that go between 1,000x and 10,000x faster than anything we’ve ever built to get there in a lifetime, two lifetimes, a handful of lifetimes, whatever. In the last fifty years, our progress has been something less than 1.5x?
All this habitual hullabaloo around how close such and such planet is completely misses that none of this matters without fictional technology. It’s like you’re a starving refugee and someone lists a fortune 500 Company for sale at an unusual discount. That’s neat. But this information is completely irrelevant to you until your income is roughly a million percent higher than it is now, maybe ten million, who knows it’s all rough math, and at that point whatever purported discount you started by considering basically vanishes in the error rate for the primary problem you’d have to solve, which is that you have — whoops — zero money.
Let alone the fact that if we ever wanted to colonize some other planet we’d have to completely chemically remake an entire (probably toxic) atmosphere, starting with zero infrastructure on the ground, develop agriculture out of (probably toxic) local conditions, probably create some kind of water system, terraform an entire planet with nothing but what we can fit in an apartment-sized rocket. Suggesting these kinds of things as some kind of response to the fact that we can’t change a miniscule atmospheric carbon issue with our entire species’ infrastructure already in place here, or figure out how to better manage our current agricultural waste, or water issues here, or whatever the long-term environmental problem you’re speculating about is, is just — no. No, nope, stop. Category error, do not proceed.
Name me any problem on earth that you think could be solved by space, and I’ll name you a solution on earth that’s six or seven orders of magnitude easier to effect here.