satan_n_stuff wrote:Marcuse wrote:I think that the problem with space colonisation outside the solar system is that it's more or less "throw people into the black and hope for the best". We'd have no way of even knowing if they were there, dead, or what for a long time. Even if we gave them tech to be able to speak to us in a reasonably quick fashion we'd be out of range to help or support them. It'd be more or less a suicide mission.
How exactly does this make it different from the rest of human history?
I'd have thought it was obvious how exploring a planet generally conducive to human life is different to exploring something billions of miles away that is distinctly hostile to human life, but okay.
The big major difference between exploring new land on Earth and exploring an exoplanet is that you'd experience significantly reduced opportunity to recoup losses and resource use. Say for example you're a sailor headed to the Indies, and you run short of food. There are options, even if they're unsuitable or slight, for resupply because all the land you might hit would have a very high likelihood of life being there and something, be it plant or animal, being edible. By contrast, an expedition into space has to take basically everything they might need and more besides at the start of the mission otherwise there's a negligible chance they will be able to recoup anything they use, down to breathable air, at all.
Basically it's different because of a markedly higher risk factor, as well as a vastly increased cost to start. Both of those things make it less likely we'd engage in large scale exploration of other planets until the costs came down, the risks were mitigated somehow, and we had ability to span the gap of distance to establish some kind of contemporaneous communication.