Quote:
Originally Posted by buddyzen
May i ask where the fasination comes to everyone to live on a planet without the resources for human beings to survive?
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It's an annoying little tendency that became part of our genetic makeup... I'd imagine quite a long time ago.
Imagine your typical prehistoric protohuman hanging out in the African savanna. He's with 3 or 4 of his fellow simpletons in a large tree perhaps wasting the day away practicing how to hit things with rocks. It's a good tree—lots of fruit, good location, fantastic view, everything you'd want in a tree. But, our restless forefather notices another tree a couple hundred meters away. He gets it in his mind that he's going to that other tree. That may not seem like a big deal, but you have to remember the wide open African savanna is chuck full of things that are just waiting for a tasty protohuman to come its way. In a game of rochambeau, sabertooth beats rock
So, our idiot forefather jumps out of a perfectly good home and runs buck-naked and screaming across a deadly minefield of things that want to eat him. And, maybe he makes it. It may not be that hospitable of a tree—it might have a beehive and the bees keep stinging him. But, the point being, that night there's a brush fire that destroys the first tree and everyone in it leaving one lonely bee-stung survivor, and he ends up having kids who also might have the same tendency.
A million years later we're programmed to think the grass might be a little greener on the other side of the fence. We colonize harsh wilderness for the promise of things to come. We see a point of light moving across the sky and think: I'd like to live there. Who knows, maybe one day an asteroid vaporizes the surface of the earth, or maybe a mad scientist sets off his doomsday device, or maybe a Romulan comes back in time and drops some red matter down to the earth's core—we can only hope some idiots took the chance of making a home off-world. It could end up being that our love for exploration and colonization saves us
~modest
