Star Settlers

The Billionaires, Geniuses, and Crazed Visionaries

By: Fred Nadis

Narrated by: Peter Berkrot

Length: 10 hrs and 11 mins

Publisher's Summary

The story behind the elite scientists, technologists, SF enthusiasts, and billionaires who believe that humanity’s destiny is to populate the stars....

Does humanity have a destiny "in the stars"? Should a species triggering massive extinctions on its own planet instead stay put? This new book traces the waxing and waning of interest in space settlement through the decades, and offers a journalistic tour through the influential subculture attempting to shape a multiplanetary future.

What motivates figures such as billionaires Elon Musk and Yuri Milner? How important have science fiction authors and filmmakers been in stirring enthusiasm for actual space exploration and settlement? Is there a coherent motivating philosophy and ethic behind the spacefaring dream?

Star Settlers offers both a historical perspective and a journalistic window into a peculiar subculture packed with members of the scientific, intellectual, and economic elite, and captures the extra-scientific zeal for space travel and settlement, places it in its historical context, and tackles the somewhat surreal conceptions underlying the enterprise and prognoses for its future.

PLEASE NOTE: When you purchase this title, the accompanying PDF will be available in your Audible Library along with the audio.

©2020 Fred Nadis (P)2020 Oasis Audio

He's Not Wrong

So I'll start by saying I am one of those wide eyed believers who believes it's humanity's future to go to space. I found this book kind of disappointing because I feel like he's "raining on my parade" for most of the book. Nadis brings a skeptical, almost cynical, attitude to the whole affair. Is he wrong to do so? Not at all. I value his perspective and taking the time to ask questions about our motivations and the feasibility of space exploration. One of the points i feel like he is making is: taking the time to think about all our responsibilities to humanity, when considering how much resources we want to invest in space exploration. What I mean by that is should those resources be directed towards the more immediate needs of our society and our planet? And I do think this is a more mature way of thinking about our future as a species. That being said, I thought this book was going to be more about the progress we've made in "space technologies" and all the exciting possibilities and projects going on. Even when recent projects and advancements were discussed, it seemed like the author was skeptical, which took the fun out of it. That may have also been because of the way the narrator read the text. But I did finish the book, because I thought it was informative and educational and an important perspective to consider. It wasn't a bad book just not really what I was expecting.

To the Stars!

Fascinating, Fun, Futuristic ideas mankind needs to overcome to settle in the stars! Must have!