Lancaster Pennsylvania, lots of folk punk stuff going on over there and LNL is throwing another folk punk flea market in late June.
Europa, Jupiter’s moon.
Not Titan? I think the rings would be worth seeing.
Titan is a terrible place to view Saturn’s rings from; first of all the moon’s orbit is pretty much coplanar with the ring disc so you’re looking at something hilariously thin end-on. Second, thick opaque clouds. On the upside, Titan’s gravity is so low and the air is so thick given an Icarus suit you could fly like a bird. Or pedal power a Cessna Skyhawk.
You’d probably get a good look at the rings on your way in though.
Well, I’d also accept another moon out of the elliptic, but while Jupiter would be awesome, Saturn still has my heart for the next few hundred thousand years.
Titan’s also a proper planet; if it were orbiting the sun, it would be classified as such, giving it all of those great features you mentioned. But, it’s posed as a vacation, not a place to live, so maybe one of the other moons with a better view of the rings.
You know what? Money’s no object, so why don’t we arrange a grand tour? We’ll do Europa, maybe stop at Ganymede and Callisto (I don’t think Io is a very pleasant destination spot), then head out to Saturn and check out Titan and Enceladus, head out to Uranus for a stop at Miranda, and then finish up at Neptune to spend some time on Triton.
Fellow human being, you are awesome. Even with the expectedly years-long journey (money may be no object, but I assume we still have to work with current tech and obey the laws of physics) I’m down. Money being no object, let’s bring a hundred of our favorite people and decrease the odds of going stir-crazy.
I’m thinking, like, a really big Discovery I.
Vietnam looks nice.
I’d buy a small private ship and sail around the globe. I’d occasionally port to pickup a friend or family member or drop someone off.
Monte Carlo, during the F1 championchip race, at that one Hotel there with the best view.
Earth.
Like, the whole fucking thing more or less.
Might take me the rest of my life and I still won’t see it all, but if money is no object…
My gaming PC, my backlog is epic
Fiji seems pretty cool
Antarctica. It’s possible, there are regular tours to the South Pole. In reality I can’t afford €60k+ for such a tour, but if money is no object I’d go
I did a tour to Antarctica. Overrated in my opinion. But if you really want to go for yourself, the cheapest way is to head down to Ushuaia and sign up for a standby cruise. It’s easily €5k or less.
Switzerland. Having grown up in the coastal plains, I just have this fascination with mountains. I don’t t have the physical condition to climb one, but just seeing them up close already makes me feel things. Being on top of one, even more so.
Maybe I can do even better and do a train journey from France, and then Switzerland, then across Austria, all the way to Hungary and Romania, making sure that I cross as many mountains as I possibly can.
I saw the Alps from Germany. That would be such a fun trip!
I bet the views of the Alps are majestic from there!
And yeah! I imagine the trip would be so much fun (though a bit exhausting). It’d be combining two of the things that fascinate me: mountains and trains.
I sometimes fantasize going from the northern tip of Scotland all the way to Singapore on a train. Not non-stop, of course, but maybe going from one city to another, spending some time on a city until I get my fill, and then hop on the train to the next one. All the way until I run out of land. Maybe from there (Singapore), I can do island-hopping across Singapore, Malaysia, and Indonesia. Then road trip in Australia. But that’s really stretching it, not just in terms of logistics and planning. At the pace I do things, do I really want to spend like five years crawling through Europe, Asia, and Australia? Even if money’s no object, I don’t think I can do that.
Sorry for the ramble. Given the scope of the question, yeah, a cross-Europe mountain train trip is perhaps my limit (that’d be like, two weeks? maybe a month if I take my time to really enjoy each place I visit?)
To the moon! If money’s no object NASAs budget just went up 100 fold.
Disappointed but unsurprised to see nobody acknowledging that there might be reasons other than money for not flying business class to the other end of the world.
Wow almost like people don’t feel the need to moralize a hypothetical asklemmy question
Do hypothetical questions automatically have no moral dimension?
If money is no object, then you can find some incredibly expensive way to travel which does not contribute to pollution. So no, there is no moral dimension
This is the closest to a sensible response so far. The problem then is that it is basically impossible to spend lots of money without creating pollution somewhere up or down the chain. Because money is itself a vector of pollution. But your point is taken.
Not enough to be “disappointed” that people aren’t talking about the climate implications of traveling, no. I wouldn’t judge someone for taking a single vacation.
Bringing it up just feels like moral grandstanding. Let people have fun answering the hypothetical.
If people really aren’t interested in the impacts of their choices, why should I not be disappointed? Why aren’t you? Surely it’s disappointing. Nobody will be taking any luxurious distant holidays on a planet that’s been made unliveable by the cumulative impact of 8 billion people who don’t give a shit.
Vacations are one incredibly small factor in the overall picture. In order to combat the negative impact we’ve had on our climate we need to fundamentally change pretty much every aspect of our lives from the top down.
And you’re free to be disappointed, but just don’t be surprised when other people think less of you for trying to ruin what little guilt-free fun people can have.
I’m less bothered about being a killjoy than I would be about being a hypocrite.
On an individual level, vacations are not an “incredibly small factor”. For an average person, a single flight will wipe out all their other conscientious efforts in terms of diet, housing etc. For some reason most people are only dimly aware of this fact.
Yes, but the average persons individual efforts mean fuck all in the scheme of things. It’s not individuals that make the difference, it’s the collective effort.
Which, frankly, doesn’t mean shit in this hypothetical situation. Hypothetically you could use your infinite money to create enough carbon offsets to completely fix the climate entirely for everyone everywhere.
Obsessing about small things like that to the complete rejection of all joy in life won’t solve anything. If anything it will drive away any positive influences in your life, making you a joyless curmudgeon who can help no one.
Nobody is taking a luxurious distant holiday period. We’re talking hypothetically
I get that the environmental impacts are pretty significant. I looked it up and it seems like aviation is like ~3% of worldwide emissions and while that’s not really the biggest number I’ve ever seen, it is pretty significant.
I just think it’s equally unreasonable to condemn air travel in general when the alternatives are equally unreasonable. If somebody wants to go on a trip, what should they do? Months-long zero-emission backpacking journey? Never visit anywhere your whole life? Wait for your country to build high speed rail?The 3% figure is going up, up, up exponentially with no end in sight. Because right now, most of the world’s people have never set foot in a plane but they sure want to. And why shouldn’t they? After all, we do (or do we?).
That figure is in fact misleading for the purposes of this debate, because for individuals flying has a huge impact on one’s carbon footprint. That’s not surprising when you think about it: it’s similar to driving (alone in a smallish car) for the same distance, but who drives to NZ and back? The problem is distance and time. And most people in the world have never taken a plane. It’s a completely unscalable as an activity.
About alternatives, the premise of this whole debate seems to be that the only good holidays are ones far, far away. That is very debatable.
If pollution were not an issue, I would visit my sister in New Zealand. I live in the Netherlands.
Since money wouldn’t be an issue, I guess you could charter a sailboat round-trip. Hope you don’t get seasick.
I like that thought.
I’m confused.
how is pollution an issue?
I will answer for them. Because flying from the Netherlands to New Zealand in economy class will emit the equivalent of about 4 tons of carbon dioxide. Roughly equivalent to driving a car every day for a year or so.
A socialist liberal democracy in the entirety of the United States.
Amtrak does the train equivalent of a cruise liner, where you spend about a month on a sleeper car travelling all over America. It’s cheaper than an actual cruise line, and more importantly I think trains are cool.
I’m assuming you’re talking about the All American, as that’s the main one I could find. About fifteen days, and $2400. Which is about as much as a three to five day cruise, depending on cruiseline.
That sounds awesome, and isn’t that terribly expensive, honestly. My wife and I went on a similar route road trip for our honeymoon a few years ago and it was in that same ballpark of cost, between car rental, hotels, and other expenses.
It looks like you’ll still be needing to pay for hotels for the nights you aren’t traveling. Still, not bad especially since you don’t have to deal with the hassle of driving. You just get on the train, sleep, and just appear at the next location.
They say in the What’s Included section that they cover 8 nights of hotels!
Oh, damn. OK. That’s a really good price then!
If money is no object you can buy your own custom-built private car and pay Amtrak to pull it on their lines.
two cars, one for
