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It's occurred to me that a rocket is perhaps the perfect metaphor for a pessimistic reading of the fermi paradox. It's a device that perfectly encapsulates how

It's occurred to me that a rocket is perhaps the perfect metaphor for a pessimistic reading of the fermi paradox. It's a device that perfectly encapsulates how much easier it is to destroy society, than it is to pull society out of a gravity well. In the first instance, by blowing up on the launchpad. In the second, by providing the means for competing societies to nuke the whole world into a mass extinction. The problem is the same for all of the ideas like space-elevators, or asteroid mining, or spacetravel as a normal thing - given our current politics, there's no way you'd avoid occasional rock-droppage with catastrophic consequences for people still stuck on earth. It would just be too easy. If you start thinking along the lines towards nuclear-fueled rockets, the problem just gets worse. Non-weapon rockets are high-energy, fiddly devices - and their dumb purely-destructive siblings are far simpler. If launching rockets became cheap enough to put people on Mars, that would also mean they'd be cheap enough so even small states could afford ICBMs. Because rockets are ICBMs.

neolefty 8y ago
how much easier it is to destroy society Lots of modern technologies do that. Like a child growing up—at what age do you use sharp knives? a lawnmower? a car?—humanity has matured ethically alongside our technology. I agree we have to be careful not to Great Filter ourselves.
- pasabagi 8y ago
  >humanity has matured ethically alongside our technology That's exactly the problem. I don't think we have at all. We do no serious study of ethics in our schooling, and frankly don't devote serious thought to the subject. It's very uncommon to meet somebody who has read even a single book about ethics. We're a society of meat-eaters who consider people who harm animals to be scum, a society that simultaneously considers the protection of children fundamental, and where the most likely age to die on a world scale is in childhood. These are reflections of a deep lack of ethical maturity. Regardless of all of the inconsistency, I think it's hard to look at the times in which the world came to the brink of nuclear catastrophe in the cold war, and state confidently that this is a society with the maturity to hold nuclear weapons.

neolefty 8y ago

how much easier it is to destroy society Lots of modern technologies do that. Like a child growing up—at what age do you use sharp knives? a lawnmower? a car?—humanity has matured ethically alongside our technology. I agree we have to be careful not to Great Filter ourselves.

pasabagi 8y ago
>humanity has matured ethically alongside our technology That's exactly the problem. I don't think we have at all. We do no serious study of ethics in our schooling, and frankly don't devote serious thought to the subject. It's very uncommon to meet somebody who has read even a single book about ethics. We're a society of meat-eaters who consider people who harm animals to be scum, a society that simultaneously considers the protection of children fundamental, and where the most likely age to die on a world scale is in childhood. These are reflections of a deep lack of ethical maturity. Regardless of all of the inconsistency, I think it's hard to look at the times in which the world came to the brink of nuclear catastrophe in the cold war, and state confidently that this is a society with the maturity to hold nuclear weapons.