> I feel like you have cause and effect reversed there. Perhaps you read "reversing cause and effect" on a blog and assumed it was just a very smart way of say

> I feel like you have cause and effect reversed there. Perhaps you read "reversing cause and effect" on a blog and assumed it was just a very smart way of saying someone is wrong. In fact it has a specific meaning. In this case the cause and effect I was positing was that Star Trek et al were a product of techno-utopian optimism. The reverse cause and effect would therefore be sci-fi producing techno-utopian optimism rather than the other way round. This reverse relationship does seem plausible since there is an unmistakable sci-fi influence on the outlooks of Musk, Zuckerberg, Bezos and others. > I think this especially stands out with your example of "techno-elite fantasies of colonizing Mars" as somehow being exclusive from solving problems on Earth, despite both being fairly beneficial to each other. No one is saying that Mars dream-chasing won't have any benefit to real problems on Earth. The objections of scientists, economists and environmentalists are instead based on a concept called "opportunity cost" as well as feasibility and priority. How much work have you done to try to understand the costs and physical quantities involved in terraforming and transporting people to Mars?