

There is no good economic reason to colonize other planets. We have plenty of space here on earth, with conditions already much more hospitable than that of mars - deserts, for example. The resources needed to turn these into habitable land is so much less than the resources required to make even a tiny part of Mars inhabitable (i.e. establish a colony that relies on life support systems) it’s insane to go for Mars first. The reason colonizing Mars is talked about at all is because a rich white dude wants to go to Mars, since deserts are too boring for his spoiled ass.
I actually agree that it would be cool if we went to Mars, not to colonize it but just to be there. But comparing it to white pillaging of the Americas is just incorrect. Mars is not inhabitable by humans, the Americas very much were. The external resources needed to colonize America were zero, in fact pillaging local lands meant a lot of resources for the Empire. Mars is going to be a much more expensive and much less profitable endeavor.
Actually I replied to you before, pointing out the very same fallacy: https://lemmy.ml/post/33824723/20134917
This doesn’t really tell me anything, I’d have to compare it with other charts. E.g. what does the chart for agriculture look like? Airplane manufacturing? Internet in early 2000s?
I’ve not read the article, but if you actually look at old code, it’s pretty awful too. I’ve found bugs in the Bash codebase that are much older than me. If you try using Windows 95 or something, you will cry and weep. Linux used to be so much more painful 20 years ago too; anyone remember “plasma doesn’t crash” proto-memes? So, “BEFORE QUALITY” thing is absolute bullshit.
What is happening today is that more and more people can do stuff with computers, so naturally you get “chaos”, as in a lot of software that does things, perhaps not in the best way possible, but does them nonetheless. You will still have more professional developers doing their things and building great, high-quality software, faster and better than ever before because of all the new tooling and optimizations.
Yes, the average or median quality is perhaps going down, but this is a bit like complaining about the invention of printing press and how people are now printing out low quality barely edited books for cheap. Yeah, there’s going to be a lot of that, but it produces a lot of awesome stuff too!
Not an exact alternative (it’s missing reviews and photos are relatively rare), but I use OsmAnd for this. Most “official” trails (e.g. those maintained by the park administration, etc) are mapped on OpenStreetMap already. There’s also support for “Travel Routes” (I think they come from WikiTravel? Not sure); this covers the most popular “unofficial” routes. Once I ran out of those, I started just looking at mountains without trees but with a path to the summit marked on the map. This way, I’ve been able to find hikes for almost every weekend for three years now (definitely over 100 at this point) in a tiny country (Georgia); I’ve obviously had some misses (paths being overgrown, trails being meh, etc) but overall I’ve found it really nice.