and the thing is, if they aren't needed, the research is still very useful. The fact that we can't set up a simple self sustaining ecosystem that doesn't devolve to slime indicates our real level of knowledge of ecology.

— Ian Welsh (@iwelsh) August 4, 2020

Yes. Give me a trillion dollars and a great staff, I could organize to build a starship that’d make it to the nearest star in a few hundreds years — a generation ship, of course.

But everyone would be dead, because I don’t think even a trillion dollars would be enough to figure out how to create a self-sustaining ecology resilient enough to maintain the hundreds of people on that ship.