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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 5541211" data-attributes="member: 4937">I believe any true space faring civilization will have to come to philosophical terms with the vast darkness and emptiness of space in order to be comfortable enough with the idea of space travel that it will seem desirable to place oneself at the risk of vacuum, cold, and radiation.   A civilization not able to romanticize in some fashion the reality of space as a place utterly inimicable to planet evolved life just isn't going to do it or at least isn't going to value it highly enough to put resources toward it.  Consider for example what happened to our own civilization when the easy childish dreams of a galaxy teaming with friendly life and habitable worlds (even within our own solar system!) fell apart.   We went from a people yearning for space to a people almost completely content to watch highly unrealistic fantasies about a space that doesn't exist and to the best of our understanding cannot exist.  Almost no one left wants space, because in the terms of my hypothetical religion, we never loved or wanted Father Space at all, but the comfortable nest of Mother Earth.  When we found out it might be trouble to get our selves out of the nest, we gave up on the idea.Being comfortable with space travel means at some level being comfortable with the idea of a god of the great open spaces; even if you couch that belief in materialistic terms its fundamentally not a material belief but a normative philosophy.  You have to accept that its ok to be in a place that is dark, empty, cold, and dangerous and see that in at least somewhat positive terms.(At this point, I feel like I ought to either shut up or assert a copyright over the above ideas.)</blockquote>

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