Humanity won't set foot on a world beyond our little solar system. Not ever. We'd do well to remember that our species is far closer to Apes, than Gods.
People have been living withing the exclusion zone for the past 30 years and anecdotal evidence suggests they've lived longer than their evacuated peers.
We are advanced Apes with ambition and dreams beyond our current life. We think of the future, and what will be and what could be. Otherwise things like NASA and people like Elon Musk are simply the anomaly in an otherwise well orchestrated illusoion in a fabricated concrete jungle to keep the Apes from going completely mental in a world filled with uncertainty and fabricated fears of a future that some would like to reject, and forge a new one free from the mindless dregs of swallowing a bitter pill that is the fabricated reality for mass consumption. Lest we forget, we created the Gods, so why not try to attain a quasi Godhood?
Speed - The main characters, at least, were stuck on that bus for the bulk of the film. Sphere - I don't think anyone got out of the ship without dying because they got out of the ship. I haven't seen either of those in a lot of years though. A few groups even got lost along the way and ate each other. That sounds like good space-based sci-fi to me.
Well said, but I rather like the idea of my sojourn as the jester. A footstool for the Gods. Ah, what a fool I am. Poe had it right, I think; All that we see or seem, is but a dream within a dream.
Imagine people's disappointment when Brigham Young said, "Behold, I have brought you through the wilderness to the promised land... Utah. (Just kidding, Utah people. I'm sure it's very nice.)
The thing about analogies is you can't be too concrete with your thinking about them. So it's a 3-dimensional, constantly changing, unsafe if not outright deadly, natural, and incomprehensibly huge highway.
So your saying space is a highway with essential characteristics that are the opposite of everything people associate with highways. Sorry, not buying it.
Do you honestly not see any correlations between a drive between two points and a flight between two points? How literal do you need your metaphors? No, space is not a highway, but in the context of the original metaphor, the journey relates them.
Let's look at the original statement: "I think of Space as a highway. There's nothing in Space just destinations."(Red emphasis added) It's already been demonstrated how wrong that is.
Okay, but you skipped a bunch, including this bit: What space and the highway share in common, in her opinion, is that they are both means of getting where you're going, and neither are points of interest themselves. They don't have to have anything else in common for the metaphor to work in this context. This isn't even a new concept. How many works of fiction have made similar observations about the void of space and it's vast, boring emptiness? Find any book with a kid on a long distance trip through space, and even money says they'll complain about it the first chance they're given.
That fiction was wrong, as this thread has already demonstrated. Let's talk about what's true about space, not what some ignorant fiction authors wrote about it.
First of all, it feels like maybe you're a little more agitated than is warranted. Maybe I'm wrong. I hope I haven't angered you. Forgive me if I sounded condescending. I didn't mean to be disrespectful. Still, the idea that traveling in a straight line through the void for a long period of time would be boring is more of an opinion than a statement of fact, and therefore not something one could demonstrate as either true or untrue with posts in a forum thread. I don't find driving down the highway boring. Some people do, especially kids. It's reasonable for a writer to speculate that some people would find space travel equally, if not vastly more tedious.
To get from place to place in space, you generally do not travel in straight lines. You travel in curves, because of gravity. It seems reasonable to me that people who don't actually know much about space shouldn't make pronouncements about what space is.
I give. I get tired of talking to people after a bit if they can't grasp simple metaphors. They don't get it and there is nothing you can do about it.
Like curves in a road? Yeah, we've all seen movies. We know about sling-shotting and whatnot. That falls a little short of refuting what I said. Long periods of time would be spent pointed in one direction, which is entirely beside the point. I'm not going to argue about this anymore, so I'll go enjoy my grasp of figurative speech, and you enjoy your gold star for being the bestest at knowing space stuff.
I haven't seen that one, but I'm from West Texas. I've driven many miles without a hill or tree in sight. The landscape and topography here make for some of the most boring scenery in the country. I still enjoy a zen aspect of the journey. I wouldn't want to do it all day every day though.
I think Texas wins in this instance. Texas is about 7 times bigger than Indiana. Indiana is approximately 92,895 sq km, while Texas is approximately 678,052 sq km. Source: https://www.mylifeelsewhere.com/state-size-comparison/texas-usa/indiana-usa And well Alaska being the largest beats all states by size, but I don't think anybody beats Russia/Siberia in terms of largest landmass as a country.
It's not the size but the scenery. I would have a hard time thinking Alaska would be boring. I've been to Texas quite a bit, not all of it is a boring ride.
Absolutely. Not all of it is a boring ride, but where I am, you have to drive a couple of hundred miles minimum to find a place that isn't yellow grass with no hills or trees in sight. You won't even see a mesquite tree for at least half an hour, and a mesquite tree is in reality a torn bush. That's how barren it is: we call a thicket of thorns a tree!
Space is like the ocean, except it is so unspeakably vast that the human brain is poorly equipped to understand its scale. 11,000 earths can fit in the distance from the earth to the sun. That's a lot. Each one of those earths contains everything we know. Everyone we've met or talked to. All of the cultures and civilizations that we know about. And not only is space vast, but it is also harsh. A human, unprepared, would go unconscious within 15 seconds of exposure. That human would die in less than a minute. There are sparse resources. In particular, very little air and water. Few sources of energy, other than those giant candles we call stars. It is the harshest environment that we know of, and it's all around us. That's quite a bit of room for conflict. Conflict goes wherever the people go.
