I doubt that having children answers the big existential questions anymore, if the planet is probably going on fire during the lifetime of the next generation.
That’s a good point and is a reason why I think it’s no longer true. Is the suggestion that when I have children I will not worry about their fate? I’m existentially worried about my own fate due to climate change (will economy explode in 20 or 40 years?)
This, along with the stress of no family support and wife working, is the main pressure to not have kids for me
It’s a question I would like to ask Musk; some of his words and actions say humanity is the most important thing there is and the rest that comes out of him say he doesn’t actually care. I wonder which it is.
But humanity is a blib on a tiny ball. Easily missed (well, incredibly hard to spot) in our own quadrant of the galaxy.
By scientifically observing the urge of an individual to survive.
> And to whom?
An organism is most important to itself.
> To me?
Yes, you are important to yourself. Your actions speak much louder than your words and the fact that you are surviving means you put importance on your life. Your words really don't matter - you can say whatever you want to say.
Here he makes an emotive argument based on the completely unsurprising fact that our planet, when seen from a very long way away, looks very small. The meaning of the text is somewhat ambiguous. I think it's about 88% crap.
> every human being who ever was [... blah blah blah ...] inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every "superstar," every "supreme leader," every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there--on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.
What exactly is he saying by putting "superstar" and "supreme leader" in quotes there?
> The Earth is ... very small
Yeah, so what. What's the relevance of this observation about distances? Does it have some bearing on important people? Is empty space more important than superstars and supreme leaders, just because there's a lot of it? Granted those people are generally awful, but the explorers and inventors (who didn't get scare quotes, but are spoken of in the same breath) are, I think, worth more than vacuum.
> Think of the endless cruelties ... how fervent their hatreds.
Sure. But in comparison, think of all the things cold empty vacuum doesn't do, because it can't, on account of it being nothingness.
> Our posturings, our imagined self-importance
Look, shut up, Carl, you're beginning to annoy me. If people want to posture as more important than 6 billion kilometers of nothingness, I have no problem accepting that. A movie star may be a jerk, but I still rate a celebrity higher than a distance.
> the delusion that we have some privileged position in the Universe
I mean, "privilege" doesn't really come into it, there's nobody arbitrating this. But in so far as anything matters, we matter. For a start, we are matter, which is more than can be said for mere space.
> point of pale light ... lonely speck ... great enveloping cosmic dark ... obscurity ... vastness
STFU, Carl. Stop boggling your mind just because sizes are big. Yes, it's called "measurement", you should be used to it by now. Exactly what point are you making?
> The Earth is the only world known so far to harbor life. There is nowhere else, at least in the near future, to which our species could migrate. Visit, yes. Settle, not yet. Like it or not, for the moment the Earth is where we make our stand.
See, this is a good point. This paragraph is the only good one in the whole passage, and it deviates somewhat from the rest of it. Here he's telling us to be careful about life-preserving properties of the planet, and, in due course, to colonize the solar system so that we don't have all our eggs in one basket. But everywhere else he's just saying "yah, you're all a bunch of poopy stuck-up big-heads, think you're important, but I got a photo taken from 6 billion kilometers away so that beats anything you can do". But it doesn't.
> ... the folly of human conceits ...
One interpretation is that he's saying that conceited people, leaders and so on, are dangerous, and might wreck the joint due to not considering the "there is nowhere else" fact. I can go along with that. But this is mixed up with a general idea of "human hubris" (compared to who or what other, more humble beings?) and a bombastic, tedious assertion that we just don't matter because we aren't extremely large.
> To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another, and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we've ever known.
I mean, OK. But everybody subsequently has picked up this ball and dunked it into a net marked "humans are terrible", and that's not correct. Humans and their material culture are the only interesting thing we know of, really, in terms of physical objects. Humans and life on Earth, but mostly humans, and definitely not balls of gas or space rocks, or mere space, because there's no knowledge out there that we know of.
It's not a speech on how "humans are terrible". He's putting things into perspective, echoing similar thoughts to some of the astronauts that have seen Earth from above - that we need to work together to preserve our fragile (in terms of human survival) planet. The view of the astronauts is similar to the view of Sagan - a sudden realisation of how small we are. Not because some rocks and space are bigger, but because we're so similar and so close to each other in the vastness of space.
You're ragging on it being emotive as if that's a bad thing, completely and utterly missing the point of what he is saying.
Edit: it's not so much that you're missing the point of what he is saying, but I think you're severely underestimating the power of emotion in argument. I see it constantly on tech-oriented discussion sites.
I don't underestimate the power of emotion in argument, I despise the power of emotion in argument. Well, OK, I use rhetoric myself, it's no use communicating in a robotic monotone, but generally speaking emotive argument is an anti-rational trick to ram home a point of view while evading criticism.
Well, you know, values. What are your values? Whatever they are, probably humanity ticks a lot of the boxes, which are probably not ticked by tapeworms or wombats (even) or icy rocks floating in space. Or maybe you just have one core value, like knowledge: it's still humanity that's best equipped to sustain or further it (until we get deprecated maybe).
Or maybe you don't have any values, in which case, fair enough, good point, fuck it.
