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> Indeed, the idea that technological developments will solve all of our problems —eventually allowing us to leave Earth — is instrumental to political mobiliza

> Indeed, the idea that technological developments will solve all of our problems —eventually allowing us to leave Earth — is instrumental to political mobilization on behalf of the powers that be. It helps to perpetuate the current socio-economic system that is designed for the one percent to stay in power and the working class to stay working. Sorry to say, but almost EVERYTHING big that happens on this planet helps to perpetuate the current socio-economic system that is designed for the one percent to stay in power and the working class to stay working. > After all, it’s easier to sell American citizens on space exploration — and the $22.6 billion dollar budget afforded to NASA in 2020 alone — when there is a promise of a future utopia. What future utopia? They're selling Americans on future American prestige in the world, during an election cycle. You're reading far too much into this. > American citizens need to decide what they prioritize. Is it space exploration or is it a decent standard of living at home? Is it the moon, Mars, or Earth? All three. They have the capability, just not the equality.

brundolf 6y ago
I agree that they made some big leaps when turning this into a narrative, but I think there's truth to the basic premise that focusing too much on a hypothetical future amongst the stars - which at best would be harsh, difficult, and miserable - serves as a distraction against the very real and very urgent and very solvable problems facing our species and habitat as it exists right now. Even if we managed interstellar travel (and that's a big if), it's highly unlikely we would ever find anything remotely as good as Earth, when it comes to being tuned precisely for our human needs. Evolution has geared us for this world. We might be able to cobble together a survival elsewhere, but I doubt we could ever thrive. Beyond that: space exploration and research obviously still has value. It's just that it's a very long-term and theoretical value, and at this particular moment in history there are much more pressing concerns.
- laverya 6y ago
  > Evolution has geared us for this world. We might be able to cobble together a survival elsewhere, but I doubt we could ever thrive. People on Earth thrived in the Arctic, which is incredibly far from the savannas of Africa, and did this with the technology of 10,000 years ago. Saying that people with the technology of 1000 years from now can't possibly thrive on an airless rock is a little pessimistic to me. And that's ignoring space habitats, which would plausibly be better tuned to our human needs than Earth is.
  - pizza234 6y ago
    > People on Earth thrived in the Arctic Can you define "thrive"? Because according to my definitions, I wouldn't "thrive" if I lived there - I would actually "cobble together a survival" like the parent wrote, and think I'm not in a minority that thinks so.
    - criddell 6y ago
      Thrive: Exist over many generations developing unique and rich culture and society.
      - eindiran 6y ago
        Yes, the Inuit quite clearly thrived in the arctic: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inuit_culture https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inuit_culture https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inuit_cuisine https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inuit_cuisine
    - laverya 6y ago
      Wouldn't it be the standards of the people that lived there that mattered? I'd certainly die if placed in such a situation, but cultural knowledge is a technology too.
    - m4rtink 6y ago
      Well, they thrived enough to pose a serious challenge to Vikings in Greenland - and might have been a big part of their eventual downfall there.
  - jcranmer 6y ago
    This is perhaps getting a bit pedantic, but the development of Arctic civilizations (and specifically arctic climate here, not subarctic) seems to actually be more around the third millennium BC, or 4-5kya rather than 10kya. It's also worth pointing out that Arctic peoples adapted to their environment largely by utilizing the capabilities of existing fauna (e.g., hunting existing apex predators, or using reindeer furs to keep warm). And when non-Arctic peoples tried their hands in the region without similar adaptations, the result tended to be "everyone dies," as in the Shackleton and Franklin expeditions. Note that there are places on Earth we haven't been able to successfully inhabit. For example, somewhere around 17,000 feet appears to be the maximum possible altitude for permanent human habitation.
- keiferski 6y ago
  > Evolution has geared us for this world. We might be able to cobble together a survival elsewhere, but I doubt we could ever thrive. "Nothing human makes it out of the near future."
- zanny 6y ago
  > It's just that it's a very long-term and theoretical value, and at this particular moment in history there are much more pressing concerns. Like blowing up people living in mud huts in deserts going by US economic priorities. A regime largely in place to protect biased trade relations for cheap materials and goods from around the world and more importantly (to those orchestrating the regime) to the line the pockets of select defense contractors. Investments in space represent, what, .1% of the US GDP? Astoundingly the single mother raising her kid in food scarcity in <insert dystopic cityscape here> actually probably really doesn't give a hoot about terraforming in 2500, but would really give a damn about having healthcare and avoiding societal collapse from climate catastrophe in her lifetime. A lot of unreasonably rich people are unreasonably obsessed with space, but thats largely because they are sociopaths. Thats how they got rich in the first place, or were born to such extreme luxury they are psychologically impaired to be unable to relate to anyone outside their class meaningfully. So they go full scifi because they don't think the world we have with all its problems not so easily solved by throwing money at them (that isn't for their own immediate personal gain) is worth it.
  - vagrantJin 6y ago
    > Like blowing up people living in mud huts in deserts going by US economic priorities. A regime largely in place to protect biased trade relations for cheap materials and goods from around the world and more importantly (to those orchestrating the regime) to the line the pockets of select defense contractors. Haha. How on earth did they convince US citizens that indeed sending highly trained soldiers each worth their weight in gold to fight a war of attrition in the desert against sons of goat farmers? At what point did everyone agree and say "this is a brilliant idea Mon general!" and proceed to send their sons to die in the desert?
    - forest_dweller 6y ago
      The same thing throughout history again and again. A country will become wealthy and then they typically will build their military and then go on wars to justify it. It isn't anything that is US centric.
  - 6y ago
Bedon292 6y ago
Yeah, I have never been sold some future utopia here. There are plenty of reasons to fund NASA, and that is not one that is on me mind. Its $22.6B budges is a small fraction of the US total budget. Something like 0.5%. There are much larger portions of the budget that should be addressed first. I think we can prioritize things like space exploration and higher standard of living at the same time. They are not at all mutually exclusive.
- mchusma 6y ago
  22B / 4,800B in spend = about 0.5%. math checks out. Hard to argue we are prioritizing space that much.
bserge 6y ago
"Easier to sell American citizens... the $22.6 billion dollar budget" That's hilarious. $23 billion is nothing. You can add to that all the other countries' budgets and all private investments, it's still nothing. More money is spent on recreating the same consumer products every year, creating brain numbing entertainment, creating military equipment that will be retired before it's used, disseminating misinformation around the globe, keeping people in prisons. The space exploration budgets are tiny, all around the world. Same goes for money allocated for climate change.
forest_dweller 6y ago
> Sorry to say, but almost EVERYTHING big that happens on this planet helps to perpetuate the current socio-economic system that is designed for the one percent to stay in power and the working class to stay working. Sorry this is false. The top 1% owning everything has been since the beginning. Pareto discovered this last century. It doesn't matter what the socio-economic system is. It is just a reality of life. > One of Pareto's equations achieved special prominence, and controversy. He was fascinated by problems of power and wealth. How do people get it? How is it distributed around society? How do those who have it use it? The gulf between rich and poor has always been part of the human condition, but Pareto resolved to measure it. He gathered reams of data on wealth and income through different centuries, through different countries: the tax records of Basel, Switzerland, from 1454 and from Augsburg, Germany, in 1471, 1498 and 1512; contemporary rental income from Paris; personal income from Britain, Prussia, Saxony, Ireland, Italy, Peru. What he found – or thought he found – was striking. When he plotted the data on graph paper, with income on one axis, and number of people with that income on the other, he saw the same picture nearly everywhere in every era. Society was not a "social pyramid" with the proportion of rich to poor sloping gently from one class to the next. Instead it was more of a "social arrow" – very fat on the bottom where the mass of men live, and very thin at the top where sit the wealthy elite. Nor was this effect by chance; the data did not remotely fit a bell curve, as one would expect if wealth were distributed randomly. "It is a social law", he wrote: something "in the nature of man" This is known as the "Iron law of oligarchy". Elites will always end up running everything and collecting everything. If you remove the current set of elites a new set of elites will take their place. Unfortunately these facts forms the basis of fascism. However that doesn't mean the observation isn't valid.

brundolf 6y ago

I agree that they made some big leaps when turning this into a narrative, but I think there's truth to the basic premise that focusing too much on a hypothetical future amongst the stars - which at best would be harsh, difficult, and miserable - serves as a distraction against the very real and very urgent and very solvable problems facing our species and habitat as it exists right now. Even if we managed interstellar travel (and that's a big if), it's highly unlikely we would ever find anything remotely as good as Earth, when it comes to being tuned precisely for our human needs. Evolution has geared us for this world. We might be able to cobble together a survival elsewhere, but I doubt we could ever thrive. Beyond that: space exploration and research obviously still has value. It's just that it's a very long-term and theoretical value, and at this particular moment in history there are much more pressing concerns.

laverya 6y ago
> Evolution has geared us for this world. We might be able to cobble together a survival elsewhere, but I doubt we could ever thrive. People on Earth thrived in the Arctic, which is incredibly far from the savannas of Africa, and did this with the technology of 10,000 years ago. Saying that people with the technology of 1000 years from now can't possibly thrive on an airless rock is a little pessimistic to me. And that's ignoring space habitats, which would plausibly be better tuned to our human needs than Earth is.
- pizza234 6y ago
  > People on Earth thrived in the Arctic Can you define "thrive"? Because according to my definitions, I wouldn't "thrive" if I lived there - I would actually "cobble together a survival" like the parent wrote, and think I'm not in a minority that thinks so.
  - criddell 6y ago
    Thrive: Exist over many generations developing unique and rich culture and society.
    - eindiran 6y ago
      Yes, the Inuit quite clearly thrived in the arctic: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inuit_culture https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inuit_culture https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inuit_cuisine https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inuit_cuisine
  - laverya 6y ago
    Wouldn't it be the standards of the people that lived there that mattered? I'd certainly die if placed in such a situation, but cultural knowledge is a technology too.
  - m4rtink 6y ago
    Well, they thrived enough to pose a serious challenge to Vikings in Greenland - and might have been a big part of their eventual downfall there.
- jcranmer 6y ago
  This is perhaps getting a bit pedantic, but the development of Arctic civilizations (and specifically arctic climate here, not subarctic) seems to actually be more around the third millennium BC, or 4-5kya rather than 10kya. It's also worth pointing out that Arctic peoples adapted to their environment largely by utilizing the capabilities of existing fauna (e.g., hunting existing apex predators, or using reindeer furs to keep warm). And when non-Arctic peoples tried their hands in the region without similar adaptations, the result tended to be "everyone dies," as in the Shackleton and Franklin expeditions. Note that there are places on Earth we haven't been able to successfully inhabit. For example, somewhere around 17,000 feet appears to be the maximum possible altitude for permanent human habitation.
keiferski 6y ago
> Evolution has geared us for this world. We might be able to cobble together a survival elsewhere, but I doubt we could ever thrive. "Nothing human makes it out of the near future."
zanny 6y ago
> It's just that it's a very long-term and theoretical value, and at this particular moment in history there are much more pressing concerns. Like blowing up people living in mud huts in deserts going by US economic priorities. A regime largely in place to protect biased trade relations for cheap materials and goods from around the world and more importantly (to those orchestrating the regime) to the line the pockets of select defense contractors. Investments in space represent, what, .1% of the US GDP? Astoundingly the single mother raising her kid in food scarcity in <insert dystopic cityscape here> actually probably really doesn't give a hoot about terraforming in 2500, but would really give a damn about having healthcare and avoiding societal collapse from climate catastrophe in her lifetime. A lot of unreasonably rich people are unreasonably obsessed with space, but thats largely because they are sociopaths. Thats how they got rich in the first place, or were born to such extreme luxury they are psychologically impaired to be unable to relate to anyone outside their class meaningfully. So they go full scifi because they don't think the world we have with all its problems not so easily solved by throwing money at them (that isn't for their own immediate personal gain) is worth it.
- vagrantJin 6y ago
  > Like blowing up people living in mud huts in deserts going by US economic priorities. A regime largely in place to protect biased trade relations for cheap materials and goods from around the world and more importantly (to those orchestrating the regime) to the line the pockets of select defense contractors. Haha. How on earth did they convince US citizens that indeed sending highly trained soldiers each worth their weight in gold to fight a war of attrition in the desert against sons of goat farmers? At what point did everyone agree and say "this is a brilliant idea Mon general!" and proceed to send their sons to die in the desert?
  - forest_dweller 6y ago
    The same thing throughout history again and again. A country will become wealthy and then they typically will build their military and then go on wars to justify it. It isn't anything that is US centric.
- 6y ago

Bedon292 6y ago

Yeah, I have never been sold some future utopia here. There are plenty of reasons to fund NASA, and that is not one that is on me mind. Its $22.6B budges is a small fraction of the US total budget. Something like 0.5%. There are much larger portions of the budget that should be addressed first. I think we can prioritize things like space exploration and higher standard of living at the same time. They are not at all mutually exclusive.

mchusma 6y ago
22B / 4,800B in spend = about 0.5%. math checks out. Hard to argue we are prioritizing space that much.

bserge 6y ago

"Easier to sell American citizens... the $22.6 billion dollar budget" That's hilarious. $23 billion is nothing. You can add to that all the other countries' budgets and all private investments, it's still nothing. More money is spent on recreating the same consumer products every year, creating brain numbing entertainment, creating military equipment that will be retired before it's used, disseminating misinformation around the globe, keeping people in prisons. The space exploration budgets are tiny, all around the world. Same goes for money allocated for climate change.

forest_dweller 6y ago

> Sorry to say, but almost EVERYTHING big that happens on this planet helps to perpetuate the current socio-economic system that is designed for the one percent to stay in power and the working class to stay working. Sorry this is false. The top 1% owning everything has been since the beginning. Pareto discovered this last century. It doesn't matter what the socio-economic system is. It is just a reality of life. > One of Pareto's equations achieved special prominence, and controversy. He was fascinated by problems of power and wealth. How do people get it? How is it distributed around society? How do those who have it use it? The gulf between rich and poor has always been part of the human condition, but Pareto resolved to measure it. He gathered reams of data on wealth and income through different centuries, through different countries: the tax records of Basel, Switzerland, from 1454 and from Augsburg, Germany, in 1471, 1498 and 1512; contemporary rental income from Paris; personal income from Britain, Prussia, Saxony, Ireland, Italy, Peru. What he found – or thought he found – was striking. When he plotted the data on graph paper, with income on one axis, and number of people with that income on the other, he saw the same picture nearly everywhere in every era. Society was not a "social pyramid" with the proportion of rich to poor sloping gently from one class to the next. Instead it was more of a "social arrow" – very fat on the bottom where the mass of men live, and very thin at the top where sit the wealthy elite. Nor was this effect by chance; the data did not remotely fit a bell curve, as one would expect if wealth were distributed randomly. "It is a social law", he wrote: something "in the nature of man" This is known as the "Iron law of oligarchy". Elites will always end up running everything and collecting everything. If you remove the current set of elites a new set of elites will take their place. Unfortunately these facts forms the basis of fascism. However that doesn't mean the observation isn't valid.