You should care about "theoretical" future death because, via the inexorable passage of time, the future becomes the present. At which time you have "actual" death happening all around you.
Let's try and stop catastrophic climate change, diabetes, and traffic/pollution related deaths, and also allow some people to worry about nuclear holocaust as well.
I was playing a lot of Kerbal Space Program and wanted to use those UI concepts to explore real missions and orbital maneuvers. I was particularly interested in the Cassini trajectory. But I started the project before discovering Eyes on the Solar System, which is awesome and now I find I'm kind of robbed of my motivation.
New Horizons was launched directly into a solar escape trajectory.
It's going slower than Earth but that is no indication of how advanced the technology is. The whole goal was to get a close encounter with Pluto-Charon. What's the point in flying off into nothingness any faster after that?
If you have better schools the district's property values go up which increases the tax base. Families can and do move across districts to access better schools, so there is competition in that sense. Same with many city services. Firefighters and teachers in Palo Alto for instance are paid well compared to other districts, the schools are some of the "best" in the nation, and property values are high as hell.
Can you elaborate? I do say that we should develop the asteroid defense capability, to eliminate those smaller more frequent impacts and others. My terminology was not standard or precise and I apologize for that. I mean by "small" those which are akin to an atom bomb or a hydrogen bomb explosion, and "medium" those which would cause catastrophe over a large region but not global annihilation.
The odds of a medium sized impact in the next few thousand years are very small. Still, an advanced asteroid defense capability should be prepared, since even the small-ish bolides that we expect to hit with greater frequency should be eliminated. This should reduce the risk from catastrophic impactors even further.
Settlement of e.g. Mars will never be needed in the time frames we should be thinking about. If asteroid defense is developed, then for thousands of years that will not be a concern at all. And if in 2,000 years they need a settlement on Mars, the people in 1,800 years can prioritize doing it.
In other words I don't see it as a priority. Material conditions on Earth are not great, and we are threatened by catastrophes in the atmosphere, oceans, and tectonic plates. Earth and its cities are infinitely more responsive to our efforts and investment than Mars or elsewhere. There is so much that we can do here in this century, while settling another planetary body in this century seems basically impossible.
It's a strange idea that progress was arrested by anti-war, civil rights, feminist, and environmental activist movements, while epitomized by men walking on the moon. The counter-cultural movement of the 60s was not anti-science it was anti-exploitation and anti-hegemony.
Human spaceflight only coincides with "progress" in as much as it improves material conditions on Earth. That is what we think of as progress. Technological progress must be recognized as distinct from technological advance.
A flat rate could cover software fees and advertising. Dispute resolution should maybe be insured for each and every ride, but at nothing close to the ~20% cut currently taken.
It's not about whether the achievement is groundbreaking in a technological sense, but whether this is a reasonable, defensible, sane, or even merely legal, program.
"Whereas recognition of the inherent dignity and of the equal and inalienable rights of all members of the human family is the foundation of freedom, justice and peace in the world,
Whereas disregard and contempt for human rights have resulted in barbarous acts which have outraged the conscience of mankind, and the advent of a world in which human beings shall enjoy freedom of speech and belief and freedom from fear and want has been proclaimed as the highest aspiration of the common people,
...
Article 1.
All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights. . .
...
Article 2.
Everyone is entitled to all the rights and freedoms set forth in this Declaration, without distinction of any kind. . .
. . .
Article 3.
Everyone has the right to life, liberty and security of person.
Theft is when I take property which I have no right to take possession of. It doesn't matter if guns or force are involved, or fraud, or sneakiness, etc. If taxation is theft, then it is theft even if it's unenforced and involves no threats of force.
I'm just saying we shouldn't abandon or postpone progress on Earth to start an impossible colonization project on Mars.
Any opinion you or I have about how long Earth will remain viable is irrelevant. There's nothing else. Mars and every other body are not viable at all and we have no way to make them so.
I don't think we should put any resources into colonization activities right now. In case it's unclear, I'm agreeing with you and responding to blacksmith_tb's suggestion that "it would be better to colonize the solar system before we make whatever developmental leaps could let us transcend suffering".
Humans killing ourselves / extinction events are incredibly unlikely over the time frame that SpaceX will exist for. They're also easier to survive or avoid than it would be to colonize Mars. Except maybe surviving a gamma ray burst -- but who knows, since it looks pretty impossible for humans to colonize a planet.
On the other hand we have a chance to save the tens of billions of people who will live and die in the 21st century and experience genocide, starvation, disease, child abuse, imprisonment, other violence, etc. We're already doing it -- it's achievable. It can't wait for a Mars colony!
Conservationists (or anyone else who objects) will have it easy. Interplanetary missions are sensitive to timing. All you have to do is disrupt the launch schedule for a few weeks, then boom, it's another few years before they can even try again.
If all this is true then why even go to the trouble of supporting opt out?
The support for opt out acknowledges (implicitly) that the choice to upload data is rightfully the user's own prerogative. Then paradoxically enables the feature by default anyway and places the switch behind some esoteric opt out commands.
Let's try and stop catastrophic climate change, diabetes, and traffic/pollution related deaths, and also allow some people to worry about nuclear holocaust as well.