Promising discoveries about the potential for life on one of Saturn’s icy moons
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Promising discoveries about the potential for life on one of Saturn’s icy moons
Unofficial Hacker News client; not affiliated with Y Combinator.
I_dream_of_Geni · · focus · HN ↗
Brian_K_White · · focus · HN ↗
Why are you yourself important to people? Certainly nothing I care about relies on your existence. The answer isn't anything you do, even the things you do for other people, because why do they matter either? You don't need any utilitarian justification.
We don't spend $x to attain any specific goal like buying an acre of land or a lathe. We spend $x to find out whatever is the reality. It doesn't matter what we find, whether it has some obvious immediate "can I eat it or F it?" application or not. The goal was to find out whatever the facts are.
The utility of that knowledge is unknown but infinite. For the infinite rest of time it will be part of whatever infinite humans want to do.
You can contrive infinite possible infinitely valuable utilitarian uses but that misses the point and dignifies an assumption that was invalid to begin with.
We spend $x to explore the nature of reality because we are not incurious ants merely following just enough programming to perpetuate.
The only value of utility itself is that it empowers us to pursue whatever goals we may want. Not merely the power to continue existing. We don't need any knowledge or tools or materials at all for that. Utterly brainless plants continue to exist without knowing or posessing anything.
Nothing that you do find useful, like presumably an accessible mineral deposit, is any different than something like this that you don't find useful.