Tim's blog

Dreaming of other worlds or places, especially if it is about space, is easy. Literature and movies make it even more easy to fade away into “possible” other ways of life.
The thing is, no place exists as an alternative we could reach. The biggest space off earth is the international space station and this one is in terms of this sort of dreams more comparable to a prison in the subsurface. As a matter of fact, many people just believe without deeper thinking we as humans would be able to have a happy life somewhere else.
Where are we at the moment? We have rough ideas of a possible survival for a limited time. We are far away of a sustainable life somewhere else. Sustainable in the sense of independent of support from earth. But this is about survival. In real, we cannot image how we could be able to have a happy life somewhere else. We just have not found another place with living conditions fit to us humans nor have we any idea of how we actually could make it elsewhere. Again, survival is one thing but a happy life a totally different thing.
I can jump on a bike and drive to any capital in Europe, if I wanted to. I also could walk. Both would be time consuming and exhausting but by far more closer to a happy life as being on a space station. Living there means being in a very limited space and with unbelievable limited freedom. It is easy to drive to a nearby lake and just jump into the water. Having a large space of water you just can go into is for someone from a space station or a station from another planet a totally unbelievable thing. Having a walk in a forest brings an easy to get experience of being alive, freedom and happiness. This is as well a total unreal thing for someone from off earth.
So why so serious about that? Well, imagine you have only soccer ball on earth. How would we treat it? We would restrict the use to a minimum to enable the continuation of the usage to a maximum. Earth is a sort of the same thing. Many things on it we have only in a limited way. The problem is comparable to my philosophical “tooth paste problem”:
If you start using a tooth paste tube, humans tend to use more as needed. That is so because still plenty of tooth paste is there. As closer you come to the end, as more careful the usage becomes. In then end, you are very close to an optimal usage.
This is illogical! If from the beginning the usage would be efficient, the overall usage would be much longer. We know about this. But the psychological way of us overrules the logic.
On earth we do the same thing: as long we – got the feeling – plenty is available, we waste, pollute and destroy. And what has this to do with living off earth? As of now, we simply cannot but we dream too much about it. We dream of a better world and at the same time we act as if we would have tooth paste forever for a tiny price available.
Basically, many politicians are very much aware of this but consciously decide on a daily basis to go along with today and tomorrow for an easy existence despite the future more far ahead is there and waiting for us. Well, not really for us but for the generations after us. Morally speaking, we stink. It is a simple as that. … but we dream of a future off earth we as humans might never be able to have because it is like we confuse our generation with the human existence overall. May be that is a better way to put it: we as a group of individuals are confused. And this with the fact within this group are individuals not being confused.