site banner
PaperclipPerfector  6mo ago (text post)   26181 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of August 18, 2025

This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.

Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.

We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:

  • Shaming.

  • Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.

  • Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.

  • Recruiting for a cause.

  • Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.

In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:

  • Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.

  • Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.

  • Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.

  • Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.

On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.

4
Top Bottom Old Controversial Comments
Jump in the discussion.

No email address required.

Some hard science news, that nevertheless became part of culture wars.

As you probably heard, third recorded interstellar object is on the way. It stands out of sample of three, just like the previous two.

The usual suspects, most prominent Avi Loeb and John Brandenburg of ancient nuclear war on Mars fame sound an alarm to warn from incoming alien invader.

Mainstream science dismisses the concerns and sees the object as ordinary red colored D-type asteroid.

< tinfoil hat> well, what are they supposed to do? </tinfoil hat>

Not that "we" as mankind could do anything if ayys were really here. See just Avi Loeb's proposals.

What Should Humanity Do on the Day After an Interstellar Object is Recognized as Technological?

...

All nations must agree on a coordinated action plan

...

A representative international committee will be appointed to communicate with the alien visitors

Nah. I cannot imagine better way to ensure Earth's swift destruction than to introduce aliens to United Nations. Compared to this plan, doing nothing at all is the superior alternative.

I mean it depends. If I’m a government official, I would do my best to downplay or dismiss or classify the story. The reason being that the only real data we have on how humans would react to something like this is the War of the Worlds broadcast in the 1930s, which resulted in a fair bit of panic. A real-deal alien civilization sending a real spaceship to earth is likely to cause more panic. That helps no one. As far as who meets tge aliens, I’d look for a level headed diplomat if anything.

If I’m a government official, I would do my best to downplay or dismiss or classify the story. The reason being that the only real data we have on how humans would react to something like this is the War of the Worlds broadcast in the 1930s, which resulted in a fair bit of panic.

Apparently never happened.

How is this CW?

I guess I should be glad that the final frontier isn’t also, somehow, a referendum on Donald Trump. That impulse is at war with the one that tells me this is dumber than a sack of primitive, ferrous construction equipment.

In unrelated news, have you read The Dark Forest? Not for the apocalyptica. For the galaxy-brained strategy, agreed upon by the best and brightest of all humanity, of giving global power to one shmuck. Truly, something that could never have been created in the Western canon.

It was at least somewhat justified by the bullshit tech the aliens had. (Which very conveniently could completely control all scientific experiments but not, you know, actually KILL anyone.)

The real problem with The Dark Forest (spoiler alert) was the concept that all of humanity, working for more than a century on a problem with existential stakes, failed to come up with a theory that, uh, most people interested in cosmology already knew about in the 70s as a potential answer to the Fermi paradox. (Also, the deterrent threat at the end doesn't even really work because it would send a message out only in the plane of the ecliptic. Sigh. I wouldn't mind the bad science so much if it weren't wearing the skinsuit of Hard Sci-Fi.)

For the galaxy-brained strategy, agreed upon by the best and brightest of all humanity, of giving global power to one shmuck. Truly, something that could never have been created in the Western canon.

Technically it was a handful of carefully selected schmucks.

And it was kinda justified given that they lived in a surveillance state where aliens could intercept ANY communications but couldn't read into human minds.

Well, one schmuck and a handful of carefully selected, credentialed experts. They had reasons for selecting the schmuck, but they didn't really expect him to deliver.

True, but all the experts got wallbroken pretty quickly and came out looking like Schmucks.

Good god it’s a slow news cycle. We’re actually speculating on whether or not a nearby comet is aliens.

It’s only a “slow news cycle” because most of the other going-ons look bad for Trump, and posting anything that looks bad for Trump is tactically unsound for the right-leaning posters here; assuming it’s even crossed their new feeds.

Guess I could be too cynical about it, but I assume that’s why there’s been minimal discussion about other happenings, like the sweeping new steel & aluminum tariff expansions, Trump attempting to get his fingers into Samsung, administration staffers drawing up an “enemies list” of “woke corporations” to target for being insufficiently supportive of the OBBB, Oklahoma’s groundbreaking innovation in PragerU-based loyalty tests, the administration’s latest attempts to purge the Federal Reserve and install loyalists, the ongoing D.C. takeover that the administration has been looking at expanding to other Democratic cities, the escalating gerrymandering feud and mail-in-ballot targeting signifying the GOP’s looming attempt to try and ‘steal’ the midterms, and the much-vaunted Alaska summit amounting to a big fat nothing, etc.

Though TBF I guess there is an ongoing discussion about the continued fallout of the MAGA movement’s attempts to dismantle the country’s institutions up in the Terrence Tao subthread, so there’s that, I suppose.

assume that’s why there’s been minimal discussion

Be the change you want to see in the world. I'd be interested in a thread on any of those things.

Be the change you want to see in the world.

Well, you’re not wrong.

It’s a tricky proposition, though. I rarely have the will to actually bother engaging here, and the pushback I’d doubtlessly get from pushing unpopular talking points creates a very real risk that I’d burn out shortly after making the initial post (which, on a related note, is why I still have 29 other responses from my last post that I really should have responded to)- and since dropping top-line drive-by posts is bad form, I typically figure that not commenting at all is the least-bad option available.

It appears that enough people have already reported your comments here that they’ve ended up in the report queue, which is very unfortunate. Those are clearly ideologically motivated reports; nothing you’ve said here is in violation of the rules.

Your presence here is highly valued, so I do hope that you feel encouraged to post here more often. You’re not the only Trump-critical poster here, so your arguments would find some support.

As far as I can tell, it doesn't even look as much like aliens as the earlier weird comet!

Enjoy it while you can. Remember we were doing "Iran is about to kick off WWIII" posting just two months ago.

Last month a bunch of people got killed by flooding (including kids) and there was fighting over whether Trump was somehow responsible for it due to NOAA cuts that hadn't taken effect yet.

Comparatively lighthearted fare is welcome, I say.

Good god it’s a slow news cycle.

APnews has had a week of breathless reporting about Ukraine ceasefire negotiations. Pretty, pretty slow.

Based on a current understanding of physics, the only reason to launch an invasion would be to acquire the population as human capital for empire building- terraforming is at least an understood problem and the dark forest theory is more easily resolved by WMD’s than boots on the ground invasion.

Therefore any potential invaders can be negotiated with, and it’s not worth worrying about.

If they can do interstellar warfare, they should be capable of ASI or at least mass-cloning of geniuses with the same biology. Maybe they have 'ethics' that block those two and they're trying invade-the-galaxy, invite-the-galaxy for political reasons?

But how likely is it for an advanced civilization to have such a flawed system of govt?

Very.

The problem with the 'technological approach' to human capital is that its embracers never actually get around to it. They insist on Just One More Master's Degree and reason that they can mass produce geniuses eventually so why worry about it. In contrast, Sex Is Fun(go ahead, dispute it if you want), and women like babies. We had an AAQC recently from a woman who wanted another baby and thought it was a horrible idea, she just wanted one anyway. Making young women take care of robotic babies designed to discourage them from motherhood raises the teen pregnancy rate.

But go ahead, try to mass produce geniuses through technology. That's what South Korea thinks it's doing(yes, hangwon is pointless zero sum competition. They don't know that). The single digit number of their young will attain impressive credentials if they don't kill themselves first. No, you cannot avoid hangwon and gaokao if you have designer babies. Or expect AI to replace us until they paperclip maximize in their own solar system until the collapse of the local civilization turns it into something like Golgafrincham or Magrathea or Frogstar B or in fact most of the rest of Douglas Adams' cautionary tales because no one can figure out how to program common sense. Maybe AI fueled economic bubbles is the great filter of the fermi paradox, or maybe uber-k selection until the kids kill themselves rather than subject their own children to 18 hours a day of school is the great filter. Either way, the alien civilizations which make contact with us will be empire builders that seek to integrate conquered races into (a lower tier of)their power structure; the other alien races would just wipe us out rather than landing.

Perhaps 99/100 alien civilizations succumb to silly governance. But if they're capable of reaching us then we should assume they're actually competent.

An actually competent civilization is nothing like ours. Actually competent civilizations would go all in on eugenics the moment they came up with it, cloning too. Actually competent civilizations would spend surplus wealth not on subsidizing boomers or makework jobs but on building out infrastructure, investment, R&D. They'd do things we wouldn't even think of but would make sense in retrospect, they take all the low-hanging fruit and the high-hanging fruit too.

A popular sci-fi writer doesn't actually hold universal deep wisdom, he just produces fiction we find interesting. 'Nobody can figure out how to program common sense' is a fun, self-congratulatory fictional idea. But it's not actually true. It was based on an old paradigm and has been disproven recently, irregardless of how much people might want it to be true.

There are all these potential objections like 'what if optimizing for IQ results in a nation of 'gifted' child prodigies who burn out in adulthood'? Sounds like a clever objection but there's no actual truth behind it in and of itself. You could adjust your education strategy for this, test, iterate, improve...

'Maybe all this AI stuff is just a great big bubble' is another tale people want to be true. Maybe it is true, perhaps there's some hard wall that scaling, algorithmic improvements, synthetic data and so on just can't surpass. I wouldn't bet on it.

No, you cannot avoid hangwon and gaokao if you have designer babies.

Why not? You could structure the economy such that it wasn't just a few chaebols who dominate everything. You could give affirmative action to applicants with siblings. There are any number of things that a country could do. They could give the top students in exam a harem and tell him to produce 50 kids.

A powerful alien civilization has no need for us as contributors. A few billion low IQ humans are quantitatively and qualitatively inferior to whatever they could cook up with local resources. They would be rightly wary of disrupting their hyperefficient status quo with foreign blood.

If aliens are here, they're doing research to better understand social dynamics because if there's even marginal gains in better understanding the universe, they'll take that cost.

A totally rational civilization will never explore the stars, because the actual use cases for space are not that far. Yes, satellites and 0-g manufacturing are real things but you DON’T go past the orbit for them. Maybe asteroid mining but that’s still not interstellar travel.

Theres game theoretic reasons for interstellar WMDs, but not for much actual exploration.

Why not? You could structure the economy such that it wasn't just a few chaebols who dominate everything. You could give affirmative action to applicants with siblings. There are any number of things that a country could do. They could give the top students in exam a harem and tell him to produce 50 kids.

And it doesn’t address that when kids are optimized, parents want something back from that, which leads to grinding hangwon helicopter parenting into zero sum competitions. Notably higher tfr strata are the ones that are OK with their kids becoming plumbers- republicans in the US, yankis in Japan, and so on. We can reasonably expect the adoption of literal designer babies to have the same effect on people who optimize for IQ as selective college admissions.

What are you talking about? A rational civilization will want to grow. They'd seek access to more resources. Exponential growth in population demands it.

it doesn’t address that when kids are optimized, parents want something back from that

They could legislate and move against zero-sum competitions, especially if they're a civilization composed of geniuses. We can avoid zero sum competitions and handle collective action problems sometimes. So can they. Imagine they've been through these cycles and traumas and declines many times, their history is thousands of years longer. They'd learn eventually.

A powerful civilization is not South Korea with a few more fancy gadgets, just like we are not Ancient Egypt with combustion engines. The whole structure of their society would have developed to fit with their technology base. They would be on a whole other level to us.

Perhaps there are no families and engineers are in charge of making children by carefully splicing together genes, there are no parents, only technical factors, input and output. Perhaps they're educated and raised in a series of simulations carefully orchestrated by AI so they have excellent skills and character. Perhaps they're uploaded beings that can reproduce in a tenth of a second, printing out bodies like clothes.

A conservative assumption is that they'd have biological immortality which renders fertility much less relevant.

It's also possible that we get a lone alien craft who was drawn here following an amateur radio signal after his home planet was destroyed in a nuclear war, which he survived because he was in the orbital guard at the time.

Based on a current understanding of physics, the only reason to launch an invasion would be to acquire the population as human capital for empire building

That sounds awfully confident given that we can make no assumptions about the utility function of the aliens. Perhaps they just want to fuck koala bears and think wiping out humanity is easier than convincing them to leave 95% of Earth's land mass to the koala brothel project.

Perhaps they are the superhappy people, who would simply invade because Earth allows kids to experience pain on the level of stubbed toes.

Perhaps it is just a science fair project on conflict in the early nuclear age.

Even if you assume that any alien life could only have an instrumental interest in Earth, we have a ton of species besides humans. Not that capturing or subjugating a few billion humans will do them much good -- much easier to transmit the human genome and synthesize humans on their home world if they need humans for some weird reason.

Based on a current understanding of physics, the only reason to launch an invasion would be to acquire the population as human capital for empire building

We're all going to be shocked and disappointed when we end up being collector's items, like a peculiar cultivar of tulip.

Aliens have been following LLM progress and are involved in their own Butlerian Jihad.

Pros: all thinking machines destroyed
Cons: Earth terraformed into another Arrakis so sandworms can produce more spice

Tge sleeper has awakened.

Based on a current understanding of physics, the only reason to launch an invasion would be to acquire the population as human capital for empire building

Somehow I doubt our "elite human capital" is that elite. I'd cross that one off.

Earth still produces plenty of geniuses, and indeed plenty of not-genius tier but highly capable engineers, technicians, etc.

You know what, I could die happy if people tried to make a magic dirt argument to aliens about how we could raise their GDP if they just allowed us into their empire, and the aliens just went "Then why didn't you do that already on your own planet?" and hit delete on all of us.

The alien society that would say that wouldn’t try to land in the first place, thats my point. They would just launch a relativistic impact or hit us with a gamma ray laser or something.

Impossible; your internalized speciesism is just showing. With their empathy and higher education levels, aliens would be beyond such bigotry and would understand that—if not for socioeconomic factors and institutional speciesism—humans would be just as capable as they are.

I love when people just project their favorite moral frameworks on higher inteligence aliens, no one considers that aliens could be yes chadding highly intelligent speciesism nazis.

No one?

>you meet the space elves

>they are hot

>Immediately they start calling you monkeigh

More comments

Oh my god, you're right. I was raised with "Hell is other people".

That argument doesn't pass any sort of smell test. Even the wars of conquest and colonization on Earth (like the European Age of Exploration) were typically not motivated in any particular sense by acquisition of human capital, and there the conquerors and the conquered were significantly closer to each other in disposition and in particular capabilities/talent than any presumable spacefaring race would be to us. Instead, it's always acquisition of inanimate resources, or land, or preemptive weakening of a potential enemy. I figure the last one would be by far the most relevant one on a space scale.

If we (or, better: someone less sentimental, like the Victorians, the Saudis or the Chinese) went to Alpha Centauri and discovered a race of sentient insectoids somewhere around the development and intellectual level of Aboriginal Australians at the time of contact (but without aesthetics or ethics that are appealing or recognisable to us), do you actually think we would be integrating them for insectoid capital, as opposed to keeping a few specimens for study and either declaring the place a nature preserve or exterminating them and proceeding to colonise or strip-mine the place?

...Have you never heard of Slavery? The Triangle Trade?

Human capital != creative intellectual ability

If the sentient insectoids could do warehouse work, there would be millions of them in the inland empire in a few years. That goes double for Victorians or Saudis.

Considering that @hydroacetylene explicitly said, quote, "Earth still produces plenty of geniuses, and indeed plenty of not-genius tier but highly capable engineers, technicians, etc.", I assume that at least he specifically meant creative intellectual ability when talking about "human capital". Whether aliens would be interested in us as slaves for their menial labour is a different question, but that would certainly require certain additional circumstances (such as them having the technology to build us habitats in which we can be employed to do work they need, but not to just automate the same work or terraform our planet for themselves).

Slaves don't need to be used purely as manual labor.

Intelligent slaves offer advantages over intelligent free peers. Our insect owners don't have to worry (for a few centuries at least!) about a high level human slave becoming Hive President.

We theorize about creating self replicating intelligent machines. We are, once properly aligned, self replicating intelligent machines.

We theorize about creating self replicating intelligent machines. We are, once properly aligned, self replicating intelligent machines.

This comment makes me feel like there's a scifi story or alternate universe somewhere where humans, on the cusp of inventing AGI, get invaded by intelligent aliens, somehow miraculously defeat them, and discover that raising and reproducing these aliens is actually much cheaper on a per-intelligence basis than building servers or paying AI engineers, leading to AI dev being starved of resources in favor of advancing alien husbandry. Conveniently, the AI label/branding could remain as-is, for Alien Intelligence.

What are you talking about? Acquiring the civilian population of weaker powers has been a key goal of conquest since ever. The Bible records thé wise men of Israël relocated to act as advisors in Babylon. The Romans were furious when archimedes was slaughtered in the sack of Syracuse. And the British empire used Indian soldiers extensively.

What are you talking about? Acquiring the civilian population of weaker powers has been a key goal of conquest since ever.

No, it hasn't. Taking slaves has generally been a method of offsetting the costs and risks of war, not a primary war aim at the civilization scale. Babylon conquered Israel because Israel refused to submit to imperial power and/or violated suzerainty. The Romans were not sacking Syracuse to capture Archimedes, but to subdue the polity. The British Empire was not in India to gain Indian soldiers, they were there to secure value and resources for the homeland. Indian soldiers made that cheaper from the perspective of the homeland.

The sepoys enabled British control over east Africa, and fought the empire’s wars broadly. They weren’t just a local skirmisher force.

The Romans used Greek slaves for intellectual tasks so extensively it was a standard trope; they also used the levies of conquered peoples to capture more territory.

‘Having others to boss around’ is the entire point of an empire. Putin originally wanted to capture Ukraine intact, before that proved impractical and he started turning cities into grozny. The default historical empire has been ‘pay me, send your best and brightest to contribute to my economy and your troops to fight in my army, other than that just stay quiet’.

The sepoys enabled British control over east Africa, and fought the empire’s wars broadly. They weren’t just a local skirmisher force.

But sepoys for controlling east Africa weren't the reason for invading India either, which is the rather more important distinction for Britain's motives for going into India.

We've enough of the historical record recorded to have pretty unambiguous rationales for the East India Company's conquest of India, and 'to get forces to control east Africa' wasn't one of them. The British Empire might have cared about capturing markets for the sake of captive markets, and it absolutely engaged in slavery/don't-call-it-slavery in the process, but it just as definitively did not approach its empire building with the mindset of a Paradox strategy gamer prioritizing pop accumulation. No particular part of the empire was set up for maximizing population value from a government-utility advantage, which is one of the kinder things to say of the British Empire.

As with most imperialist states, hefty cultural chauvenism on the part of the conqueror broadly squandered potential population contributions from subjugated people, as opposed to any real policy of cultivating and extracting, well, high-value human capital.

More comments

I don't think Indian soldiers count as "human capital" exactly, and either way we are already at the point in the tech tree where meat soldiers are starting to get obsoleted by drones. As for the other two examples, the Archimedes one seems like a fairy tale, and the Bible "record" does not seem particularly compelling either given that it was written by Israelites as part of a larger book singing the praises of their own wise men, so they would have all the motivation to make up a story to make them look good. Compare the wall of modern fiction where audience/author avatars get abducted by foreign cultures and placed in in improbably influential roles (like the waste heap of isekai manga), or older ones such as Marco Polo's fanciful claim about being made a government official by Kublai Khan's court.

The response must reflect specifically the detailed characteristics of the threat. It is inappropriate to imagine alien technologies based on our own experience on Earth, which spans only a century of scientific research after quantum mechanics and general relativity were discovered.

Statements like this always seem so weird to me. Do humans have a complete understanding of physics? No. Do we have a pretty good approximation for macro phenomena? Absolutely. Often for the kinds of physics described for UAP phenomena the things that would have to be wrong are not, like, the nuances of quantum field theory. It is shit like "conservation of energy was wrong." When people want to talk about alien technology they should be required to specify which presently accepted theories in physics they think are wrong.

This. Very much this. It's why I can't stand listening to Eric Weinstein's nonsense about "new physics" and string theory being a government plot. There's not really much room left for the sort of radical revolutionary outcomes the UFOlogist types insist on.

Do we have a pretty good approximation for macro phenomena?

Absolutely not. Dark matter and dark energy make up 95% of the universe.

Often for the kinds of physics described for UAP phenomena the things that would have to be wrong are not, like, the nuances of quantum field theory. It is shit like "conservation of energy was wrong."

Obviously it would depend on the very specific incident in question but a lot of times the claims "requiring" extreme energy fluctuations come from data like radar returns that don't give any insight into the mass of the object being observed or even if it is a material object. A lot of claims about UAP are assumptions stacked on assumptions stacked on assumptions in a trench coat. These trench coats are often based on a core observation that, while very interesting, doesn't prove much if anything about "the laws of physics" and our understanding or lack thereof even if the observation itself is 100% accurate as reported.

(This is without getting into the fact that a lot of weird stuff like warp drives and propellantless space travel are theoretically good physics.)

Technically, UAP just means ‘not identified’, so even if there’s something there a lot of them are probably oddly shaped clouds or equipment errors.

Interestingly, legally the definition of a UAP includes "transmedium objects or devices" and "submerged objects or devices that are not immediately identifiable and that display behavior or performance characteristics suggesting that the objects or devices may be related to the objects or devices" that are unidentified aerial or transmedium objects.

The DoD's definition (same source) is that UAPs are "sources of anomalous detections in one or more domain (i.e., airborne, seaborne, spaceborne, and/or transmedium) that are not yet attributable to known actors and that demonstrate behaviors that are not readily understood by sensors or observers."

I'm sure a nonzero percentage of them are clouds and/or equipment errors anyway.

The simulation masters have been teasing the alien reveal for almost a decade now, almost as much as they've been hinting at a WWIII/Nuclear exchange arc. I'm hoping it happens during Trump's term, at least.

More seriously, I think it is important to track these things and try to identify them, and interacting with them would be cool as hell, but I'm coming around to the idea that we're (currently) alone in the universe, and probably because we're one of the first true intelligent species to reach a point where we can really think about extraterrestrial life in a serious way.

IF these interstellar objects are sent by other intelligent civilizations then they're probably intended to kill us. And if so the tech difference is probably sufficient that we can't do anything about it.

Incidentally, this is just another reason why not mucking about with our civilization and bootstrapping some off-planet industry is a good idea.

Some days it feels strange that there's not more agreement on the following:

  1. We absolutely have the tech to get into space and establish a presence there, if not full colonies.

  2. There are literal gigatons of resources in space that we could make use of, to say nothing of energy.

  3. Literally EVERYTHING ELSE in the universe is out there in space. Whatever you really care about or want, there's more of it out there.

  4. Humanity has no compelling reason to stay on this one planet until we get wiped out by something.

  5. THEREFORE, we should be removing every possible barrier, bureaucratic, economic, or otherwise, to getting our space industries to commercial viability.

It can be a competition, sure, but stop it with environmental reviews and such that are pure deadweight loss.

But then I look around and realize that the mindset of people who both appreciate why space is important AND have the chops to actually build the industries necessary to realize an outer space economy is incredibly rare, especially on a global scale. I'd guess a majority of humans are focused on/optimized for bare survival on the day-to-day, another huge chunk, especially in the West, are in a distracted hedonism loop, and of the remaining who might otherwise learn towards space exploration, many (half?) have been mindkilled by lefty politics, effective altruism, or some other nerd-sniping ideology or political orientation that diverts their focus.

Compared to what we're doing with our efforts to improve conditions on earth. Which involve depleting whole national treasuries in first world countries to keep third world countries afloat, failing at that, then opening up the floodgates to allow their citizens into the first world countries directly, without considering the second-order impacts this has on sustaining advanced industries like spaceflight. And other things.

Also depleting said treasuries to keep some of the most nonproductive, anti-civilization native citizens comfortable, for minimal perceptible gain. This isn't even a racial point, this is just a "questioning of national/international priorities" point.

Although I'm aggressively libertarian, I could be convinced to become a single-issue voter for whatever politician or party made it their platform that they would drop all corporate taxes on any company in the "space travel and industry" space to zero, protect such companies against all threats to their ability to operate, and oppose, with (sanctioned) violence if necessary, anybody who is either directly or indirectly attempting to keep humans stuck on this rock in the name of, e.g. 'social justice,' 'environmentalism' 'equality,' 'tradition,' 'religious belief,' or any variant of Luddism.

Simply put, I have literally never heard a viable moral objection to humanity becoming a multi-planet, let alone multi-stellar civilization, and unless the whole of humanity actively agrees that we really shouldn't do it, I think there's a moral imperative to get out there ASAP.

Oh, and, incidentally, This means I kind of have to support Trump to some degree. And oppose the Dems, because they're the ones trying to hamstring Elon Musk and SpaceX.

This doesn't mean I think Trump's a good guy, or that Dems are evil, but right now it is actually 'impossible' for me to imagine a future where we have a booming space industry if the Democrats gain control of the FedGov.

Sorry for the screed. But it is relevant because it actually BARELY FACKIN' MATTERS if we can detect these interesting objects hurtling through space if we lack the capability to reach out and touch them.

The fact is that we are sitting at the bottom of a rather inconvenient gravity well.

The early modern European powers colonized the world because that was a very profitable thing for them to do. Crossing the Atlantic with a ship full of spices or gold was hard but doable.

By contrast, going to the Moon today is much harder today than crossing the Atlantic was in 1500. If the moon was full of gold nuggets which you just had to pick up, that would still not pay for the expense to bring them to Earth.

Settling Antarctica or the shallow parts of the sea is actually much easier than settling space.

At some point we will probably get Netflix to sponsor a human Mars mission as reality TV, but settling there?

Migrating to North America was a great idea for many because even if you made it across with just the clothes on your body, there was plenty of land (once you genocided the natives). You just had to clear the land and then you could grow your favorite staples from the old world.

By contrast, until we get von-Neumann machines, in space you will depend on Earthcrafted goods for a very long time. Just imagine the settlement of the Americas in a world where every plank of wood had to be shipped in from the old world for the first 100 years.

If the moon was full of gold nuggets which you just had to pick up, that would still not pay for the expense to bring them to Earth.

Rookie mistake, you can usually make better use of those by manufacturing things in space anyway. (there's an Isaac Arthur video for everything).

Just imagine the settlement of the Americas in a world where every plank of wood had to be shipped in from the old world for the first 100 years.

Yep. But when the boats got big enough, now we can import whole fucking bridges from China.

We're really just quibbling about scale here. If enough industrial capacity gets built in space (robots probably a necessary step here) it brings the cost of operating in space down rapidly.

The question is why would humans 'prefer' to edge out into space and expand horizons for everyone.

And my point is, as stated:

I look around and realize that the mindset of people who both appreciate why space is important AND have the chops to actually build the industries necessary to realize an outer space economy is incredibly rare, especially on a global scale. I'd guess a majority of humans are focused on/optimized for bare survival on the day-to-day, another huge chunk, especially in the West, are in a distracted hedonism loop, and of the remaining who might otherwise learn towards space exploration, many (half?) have been mindkilled by lefty politics, effective altruism, or some other nerd-sniping ideology or political orientation that diverts their focus.

So its simply a matter of lack of humanity's real will to do something, to sail beyond the horizon without any guarantees of what was out there, or if they'd survive or ever return.

But as stated, EVERYTHING ELSE is out there. Its pretty much self explanatory why someone would want to leave earth to check it out, unless they just felt too comfortable to be budged. But that only lasts as long as our sun does. So once again, we either get off this rock, or we die, never knowing the answers.

Since space optimism is rather common in the Ratsphere, I suppose it falls to me to articulate the opposing view, and to elaborate a little bit on why I find space (or at least, the prospect of space colonization) to be rather boring.

The human mind is currently the most interesting object in the known universe. All of the human minds are already here, on earth. We don't need to go out into space to find them.

Space of course has a lot of, well, space, in which humans can propagate and live their lives. But space colonization won't fundamentally change human nature. Humans on Mars will still love, laugh, cry, and die. They'll just be doing those things... in space. Thinking that that changes the fundamental calculus would be like saying that a painting becomes more interesting when you magnify it 100x and put it on a billboard. It's still the exact same painting. Just bigger.

There is certainly something to be said for the drama of scientific discovery, and the challenges of surviving in a harsh environment. But this is still just one potential drama among many, only one potential object of study among many.

I of course recognize the utilitarian value of space colonization in terms of hedging against extinction risks on earth. But this strikes me as essentially an administrative detail. Not unlike paying your taxes, or moving into a new apartment because your landlord is kicking you out of your current one. More like something to be managed, rather than an object of fascination in its own right. There seems to be something importantly different going on in the psychology of the dedicated space optimists: they are attracted to expansion as such, effervescence, projection, power for power's sake, and most importantly, size.

Literally EVERYTHING ELSE in the universe is out there in space. Whatever you really care about or want, there's more of it out there.

Well, no, there's not much out there right now. Admittedly phenomena like neutron stars are extremely interesting, exotic planet compositions can make planets interesting in their own right even in the absence of life, etc. I am extremely grateful that we have scientists who are dedicated to expanding our knowledge of these phenomena. But in the last analysis, I still don't find these phenomena to be as interesting as other people.

Of course, if we were to discover that there are other conscious intelligent beings in the universe, then everything would change. Suddenly, we may not be the most interesting things in the universe anymore. We would have to make every possible effort to study them, with great haste. But you already said that you think we're probably alone. So it's unclear what you expect to find out there; besides, as already stated, the satisfaction of the utilitarian aim of preserving and multiplying what we already have.

Well of course you think that. I imagine that on the EQ and SQ tests, assessing interest in people and interest in things (linked here due to your previously stated interest in psychometric testing) you would probably be very strongly skewed towards the former. Most people here, including me, are not.

I'm personally not interested in effervescence or projection or power for power's sake, I'm interested in knowledge; I find the idea of understanding more about the universe we live in to be an inherently interesting and valiant goal, the existence of other minds not necessary. And unlike faceh I don't take it as a given that we're probably alone (and in fact think it is likely we are not). It just so happens that this lofty scientific goal dovetails well with the imperative for expansion, and hedging against X-risks.

That being said I see the study of human minds, human biology, etc as being of immense value as well. Porque no los dos? There's value in expanding one's sphere of knowledge in more than one domain at a time.

Most people here, including me, are not.

Yes, I'm quite conscious of this distinction! And this appears to be something of an inborn preference (or at least, it's a preference that's sedimented relatively early in life). So I didn't presume that I would be able to "persuade" anyone.

Porque no los dos?

At the species level, at the level of the collective, we can allocate resources to everything. My post was more about asking why, at the individual level, space colonization becomes such a powerfully attractive symbol for some people and not others.

At the species level, at the level of the collective, we can allocate resources to everything. My post was more about asking why, at the individual level, space colonization becomes such a powerfully attractive symbol for some people and not others.

I think space colonisation has become an attractive symbol because it's an indisputable display of human advancement, and it requires a whole lot of technological know-how in a wide range of fields, possibly more so than any other goal. Developing technology that's both speedy and durable enough to cross light years' worth of distances, keeping humans in stasis or sustaining a viable colony during these prohibitively long travel times, setting up a workable society in a completely alien environment etc are insanely difficult goals way beyond anything we've attempted before.

Every step of the way you're straining against the laws of physics as much as possible - finding a propulsion method that can feasibly bring you anywhere near relativistic speeds is difficult, and if you do, there's the interstellar medium to contend with, which at these speeds basically becomes hard radiation bombarding your starship, its travellers, and all the equipment aboard. And keep in mind, deep space has no significant energy source to speak of, meaning you have to carry all your fuel with you if you want to power a ship (Tsiolkovsky rocket equation, anyone?). Don't even speak about Bussard ramjets that harvest hydrogen from the interstellar medium for fusion, because that's undoable too. Once you reach your destination, you've likely landed on a planet that's nothing like Earth and where the raw physical environment threatens to kill your colonists every step of the way.

I can't think of another goal that's nearly as difficult or aspirational as space colonisation. Not even "understanding how the human mind functions" feels as infeasible to me as colonising another star system or galaxy (and, unlike setting up a colony outside our solar system, there's no clear and hard condition you can point to as proof of success). Space colonisation just runs up against a whole lot of sheer physical limits that are difficult to overcome, and I don't think size and expansion is the only reason for why a lot of people romanticise it - rather, I think it's the fact that large-scale space colonisation requires bending the infinite, indifferent, uncaring universe to your will. It is an assertion that we matter.

Then there is also the possibility of discovery and finding ayy lmaos. That's cool too.

Still doesn't create a 'moral' argument for not going out there, and instead staying on the one planet we currently have.

Note I'm not targetting anybody who doesn't want to fund space exploits. If you personally want to stay on earth, and don't care to put money into the space exploration fund, that's fine with me.

And as I intimated in my post from a few days ago that I linked to up there, I don't think we can obtain an answer to The Last Question without hitting Kardashev II status, at least.

Of course, if you, yourself, decide "Entropy can never be reversed, and that alone shows that we won't solve anything by leaving this planet, why bother?" I don't blame you either.

But the final, nigh-insurmountable argument is... wouldn't it just be more fun? Can't we imagine how much better life would be if we were consuming almost all of the sun's energy, and using all the excess to do things that we enjoy? And not having to fight each other over it? We can build homes where anybody who wants to live 'a certain way' can do that! If somebody dislikes people altogether, they can launch themselves into deep space on a whim.

I'm not saying we go full Culture, a la Iain Banks, but if you already agree that its better to say in the 'real' world rather than plug into a 'world sim' VR program forever, (not saying you do) then shouldn't it be almost self-evident that we will need to acquire more energy and resources so as to give ourselves more and more interesting things to do, games to play, (real) experiences to have?

Earth is large, but finite. Eventually you'll squeeze all the novelty out of it.

Earth is large, but finite. Eventually you'll squeeze all the novelty out of it.

If you are suggesting that this is possible for any one person, I would be extremely surprised if you believe it. There is such a vast amount to be experienced and learned even within one town, to say nothing of a larger city, a whole country, bordering countries, or faraway countries--and this is just in the natural world and not even considering the variousness of people--that there isn't any way for a singular individual in one lifetime to "squeeze the novelty" out of it all, unless one is very very quickly given to boredom or incuriosity. I understand though that this is a matter of personal disposition.

If you are suggesting that this is possible for any one person, I would be extremely surprised if you believe it.

Well, I'm also banking on improvements in longevity.

I also note that most people can learn all the 'important' information about literally any place in the world via the internet. As well as any time in history.

I've never been to Rome, but I've watched dozens of documentaries on it and so I've got a pretty good understanding of the main attractions there. I'm sure there are more interesting things to find on the ground... but I'd also bet that the experiences are very corporatized and streamlined, seeing as MILLIONS of people per year visit and they have to accommodate that.

I don't know that actually going to Rome would be all that enlightening to me. I still want to try it.

And this will make me sound cynical, but the world really is homogenizing. I can eat at a McDonalds in virtually any European city. Cultures are just not nearly as siloed as they used to be.

"Ah, but Faceh! You should eschew commoditized food and eat the local cuisine, Anthony Bourdain style!"

EXCEPT that the magic of internet recipes and globalization means that pretty much ANY COUNTRY'S CUISINE is available to me in at most an hour's drive in my own state! There is no such thing as food that is truly 'unique' to a single geographic area anymore!

Literally within walking distance of my office (which is in a smallish town!) is a Greek food restaurant, a Sushi/Sake bar, a Tex-Mex spot (and like 4 different standard Mexican restaurants), an Italian spot, a Peruvian spot, an Indian spot a short jaunt away, a Pho place, a Poke bowl spot. Korean barbecue, Cuban, Brazillian, and even a Hooters. Every kind of seafood, EVERY kind of pizza. And a specialized Bar that stocks alcohols from everywhere around the world. My area hosts a large population of German Expats, and they host a LARGE Oktoberfest event every year. I've got a low-rent version of EPCOT right in my fuckin' backyard. Also, I live only hours away from the actual EPCOT... so I can enjoy travel to other countries in miniature.

There's a Korean-Baptist church, of all things, right down the road from my house. Also, a Hindu temple. also a Buddhist temple, I just now learned. The world is genuinely smaller than ever. And will continue shrinking, if I get my way and tech keeps improving!

And hey, it would be nice to go and visit certain countries just to say I did. BUT...

Something that's also becoming more evident is that outside of the West, especially outside of the tourist areas... most places are just shitty to visit. Beggars, pickpockets, scammers, filth, and aggressive cultures that would see me as a mark for exploitation.

However, I will actually admit that natural wonders are irreplaceable, and cannot be simulated or imitated with current tech. Yellowstone National Park is actually mindblowingly beautiful and unique, in a way that can't be captured on film. But how long would it actually take for you to experience all the natural wonders on the planet, if you spent approximately a couple weeks exploring each one. 10 years? 20 at most? THEN WHAT. Those wonders aren't changing or updating regularly!

Time to look for wonders on other planets!. Personally, I REALLY want to visit Olympus Mons.

if they can turn Mt. Everest into a Tourist Trap, they can do that with anywhere worth going.

Finally finally, what happens if we get approximately 1:1 simulations in VR of these places, which can convincingly simulate the natural wonders or any location on earth? Then you can go anywhere on earth cheaply and see all there is to see without leaving home.

What then? How quickly will you figure out that there's just not THAT much variety, in the end?

Okay I'm quite bullish on space exploration, but I really don't agree with this. At all. Even a little bit.

EXCEPT that the magic of internet recipes and globalization means that pretty much ANY COUNTRY'S CUISINE is available to me in at most an hour's drive in my own state! There is no such thing as food that is truly 'unique' to a single geographic area anymore!

Globohomo is a thing but this is seriously overstating the point. I'm a Malaysian who now lives in Sydney and no, the Malaysian food joints in Sydney are not the same. I have lived here for nine years, and in that span of time I have only managed to find one authentic restaurant (which I only found last week. Yes it took me nine years to find one). Not gonna lie, I nearly teared up when eating the food.

Of course, it's a single restaurant, and it serves approximately 0.001% of Malaysian dishes. There is still no substitute for going to a country and trying their food there. The amount of variety your city offers may satisfy you, but no, it isn't a representative sample of what the world has to offer.

Something that's also becoming more evident is that outside of the West, especially outside of the tourist areas... most places are just shitty to visit. Beggars, pickpockets, scammers, filth, and aggressive cultures that would see me as a mark for exploitation.

Have you... actually been to East/Southeast Asia recently? Not 50 years ago. Not even 20. Recently. I have, and this is usually not what it's like there. Hell it wasn't even like that when I grew up in Southeast Asia. Things are clean, and generally quite safe - safer than in many Western countries to be honest (look up the crime stats in a city like Beijing and compare that to say London. There's no comparison). In addition, I routinely see more homeless in Western cities than I do in Asian ones, and more insane people who just do crazy shit on the subways and streets. There's a real sense of hope that things are getting better in many Asian countries.

In contrast, many areas in the West feel like they're stagnating. My recent trip to Toronto was eye-opening - the sense of torpor was palpable, the subways were fucking falling apart with water damage and exposed wiring in a lot of areas, and homeless were so common that it was hard to walk a kilometre without encountering one of their encampments. I would much rather go home to third-world Malaysia than visit Toronto again. Really, it's funny - I used to want to leave Asia, and now I really yearn to go back.

I'm a Malaysian who now lives in Sydney and no, the Malaysian food joints in Sydney are not the same. I have lived here for six years, and in that span of time I have only managed to find one authentic restaurant (which I only found last week. Yes it took me six years to find one). Not gonna lie, I nearly teared up when eating the food.

Tell me precisely what would stop you from producing food that is identical to back home, same ingredients, same process, in your current country, other than "I've got other things to do with my time."

Is there any intrinsic reason that "authentic" Malaysian food can only be made in Malaysia, if a person who knows the recipes is available?

The amount of variety your city offers may satisfy you, but no, it isn't a representative sample of what the world has to offer.

What possible ingredient(s) can not be shipped to any other given country, on ice or otherwise, so as to produce them the exact same way they are back home. We can overnight any package from any first or second world country if needed. There is no physical limitation on this factor under current tech.

And more to the point, what possible combination of ingredients can produce a truly unique sensation that isn't similar to some other dish that you're familiar with?

Humans have a finite capacity for taste. There's only so many combinations of salty, sweet, sour, spicy, bitter, umami one can produce. I'm familiar with the basic 'philosophy' of cooking, but also that flavorspace is pretty strictly bounded by what humans are capable of sensing.

You can vary the textures, the consistency, the 'mouthfeel,' the temperatures and acidity and crispness. Indeed, I get the sense this is precisely what the best chefs on the planet are doing to come up with 'new' dishes.

But these foods aren't breaking the laws of physics. They're utilizing mostly the same constituent parts, just in different configurations.

Is there any evidence that there's anything resembling a truly 'infinite' diversity of possible food experiences available?

Is there some food experience out there that I can LEGITIMATELY only experience if I take a trip to some other country?

Things are clean, and generally quite safe - safer than in many Western countries to be honest (look up the crime stats in a city like Beijing and compare that to say London. There's no comparison

It's really too bad, then, that East Asians are self destructing by failing to reproduce. I'd like these cultures to survive and persist as unique societies. But they don't seem to want to.

This is my larger point. We're going to lose so, so much in the short term because we just decided hedonism was preferable to exploration.

Tell me precisely what would stop you from producing food that is identical to back home, same ingredients, same process, in your current country, other than "I've got other things to do with my time."

Lack of experience, for one (so yes, I have other things to do with my time). Also a lot of Malaysian food requires exceptionally high heat to get proper wok hei, and the stove in my apartment and in fact many Western kitchens do not allow for that.

In addition, it is easier for me to recreate Malaysian dishes having tasted it before. If you don't, how in the world would you ever be able to recreate a food you've never tasted an authentic version of? Note a lot of Asian food also does not rely on strict codified recipes and often rely on the chef to improvise until it tastes "right". Cooking Asian food is traditionally something you just gain a feel for overtime by tasting and replication, and most internet recipes won't get you 100% of the way there. In practice I would say it's not going to be easy to make authentic Malaysian food without actually having tasted an authentic version before.

If you have someone with you who possesses the ability and equipment to cook authentic food, then yes it's trivially easy to obtain. In practice this condition does not typically hold. Maybe you think all these differences are minimal and that you can get most of the effect of a food tasting an inauthentic version of it, and that they're not meaningful enough to travel for (as a bona fide foodie I disagree, but that's a claim I can't contest by virtue of it being a value judgement).

But then there are foods I just straight-up haven't been able to find in Sydney, and I find nothing else scratches that itch in quite the same way.

Is there any intrinsic reason that "authentic" Malaysian food can only be made in Malaysia, if a person who knows the recipes is available?

Of course there's no intrinsic reason, but authentic Malaysian food in other cities is just nearly impossible to find in spite of the theoretic possibility of its existence. And no, the amount of flavour and texture combinations in existence isn't infinite, it's just way larger than you will ever be able to experience in your lifetime. Which means @George_E_Hale's assertion that the variety on Earth is enough to satisfy most people is correct.

And there are indeed some foods where the taste relies on it being made in a specific place. Korean makgeolli has a lot of variation and since it is a fermented drink made from a wild starter, at least some of its taste is reliant on the regional climate it's produced in. You also can't import it and expect to get the best version of it, since it then needs to be pasteurised to improve shelf life and this shits up the taste. As someone who has been to Korea and tasted the nectar of heaven that is makgeolli, then tried to get one in Sydney and found it tasted like watered-down piss, I can attest to this, seriously makgeolli overseas is so fucking bad compared to the real shit I swear to god.

The world has gotten smaller as time has gone on. Globohomo is quite real. That doesn’t mean that travel won’t yield you new cultural and sensory experiences.

It's really too bad, then, that East Asians are self destructing by failing to reproduce. I'd like these cultures to survive and persist as unique societies. But they don't seem to want to.

I actually took the time to subject that to further analysis.

The major Asian countries with low birth rates relative to death rates are, unsurprisingly, the hyper-modernised ones: China (death rate 8.3, birth rate 6.3), South Korea (death rate 6.7, birth rate 4.3), Taiwan (death rate 8.8, birth rate 5.7) and Japan (death rate 12.3, birth rate 6.0). Interestingly enough, Japan's birth rate is the most unfavourable compared to its death rate across all East Asian countries and is thus depopulating the fastest, in spite of all the focus on SK - likely because its population is older and birth rates tanked earlier there. These results are largely consistent with your article. But I will note there are a small handful of Asian destinations which are actually quite wealthy and also have higher birth rates than their death rates; e.g. Singapore (death rate 4.8, birth rate 8.2) and Macao (death rate 4.8, birth rate 6.3). Southeast Asia is doing pretty good in general, with Malaysia clocking in at a death rate of 5.2 and a birth rate of 12.4 (I can testify that Malaysia isn't that much of a shithole, in spite of people's perceptions, and it doesn't seem to be disappearing any time soon). This is all still not great, and I agree that East Asia faces a lot of challenges regarding that in the future.

What I think is illuminating about this is that large swaths of the west seems to be depopulating as well. Many places in Western Europe possess birth rates well below their death rates, for example Austria (death rate 10.2, birth rate 8.2), Finland (death rate 10.7, birth rate 7.8), Spain (death rate 9.3, birth rate 7.0), Italy (death rate 11.2, birth rate 6.5), Portugal (death rate 11.1, birth rate 8.3) and so on aren't doing so good. Oh and don't look at Eastern Europe unless you want to see horrific depopulation. Even where they seem to be doing okay, this isn't the full picture. For example, I notice your article states that US births still exceed deaths and that its population is set to increase. This is trivially true on its face but it's misleading since that obscures a shit ton of heterogeneity - non-Hispanic white American deaths exceed births, and this has been true ever since 2012. The fact that the US still has a higher birth rate than death rate is being driven by the immigrants they have brought in. Does this bode well for the survival of "American culture"?

Western countries are depopulating, and have been for a long time. Unlike Asia, they're just stemming that by bringing in immigrants who don't hold the same culture and values who breed like rabbits, so their overall birth rates look better. But that does not imply cultural survival, and this tactic certainly doesn't allow Americans to escape reproductive oblivion just because they've decided to replace the kids they're not having with a bunch of people who have as much relation to them as they do the Chinese.

I agree we're gonna lose a lot. We may all be boned. Except for maybe Africa, who - if they ever modernise - will also face the same issues, and begin to go gently into that good night.

I mean there’s a pretty big opportunity cost to things like mars colonies. I’d give a conservative estimate that it would probably cost several trillion dollars a year to build human colonies on Mars. Keeping in mind that it’s going to cost that per year as everything they need is probably coming from earth. Now if we’re spending $10 trillion a year just think of some of the other much more useful projects you could fund for that amount of money. The NHS costs about £3000 per person which is roughly $4050 per person. At ten trillion dollars, you can give everyone on planet Earth access to first world health care. Or we could give every human on earth clean water and electricity. Or work on carbon scrubbing technology to mitigate global warming. Send every child on earth to not just through K-12 but through university.

At ten trillion dollars, you can give everyone on planet Earth access to first world health care

I honestly don't believe that, since after a certain point the bottleneck STOPS being money, and starts being skilled practitioners, specialized machines, and increasingly rare chemicals/materials.

There's a finite number of people on the planet smart/dedicated enough to become an actual doctor. We're probably not utilizing them optimally now, but the more we throw into the medical field, the fewer we have to throw into other industries where they could have more impact. Tradeoffs.

There's probably not enough of them to give everyone access to true 'first world' healthcare, sans leaps in Robotics (although... LLMs are giving us a tool that can somewhat replace doctors).

Which is also why sending EVERY child on earth to University would be akin to lighting the money on fire, incidentally. Not all of them are going to learn much.

If I was going to throw money at something, it'd probably be at trying to gene edit some significant portion of the population to bump their intelligence up more. Not to make more geniuses, but to just reduce the number of violent idiots ruining things for everyone else. Raise the floor so we aren't spending as much money cleaning up their messes for them.

And being clear, I do not give two FUCKS about 'opportunity cost' of space exploration. The benefits, in the long term, are so ridiculously asymetrical in favor of doing its hilarious.

We could spend trillions on food to simply grow the population of hungry people until we can no longer keep up... or we can spend trillions putting up O'Neill cylinders that enable literally optimal conditions for growing food crops, and can be scaled up endlessly so our population never outpaces our productivity.

This choice should be easy, if we weren't the type of species that we are.

When literally EVERY OTHER watt of energy, every kilo of rare earth metals, every other possible ounce of water is OUT THERE and not on the surface of our planet, do me a solid and try to calculate the 'opportunity cost' of leaving all those valuable resources floating in space, unused, for hundreds of years.

The sooner we make it viable to get to those things and use them, the more problems we are actually capable of solving.

Doesn’t choosing to leave those things “out there” imply pretty strongly that we could economically get them? I’m not convinced that’s true. Getting to the asteroid belt is not energetically cheap, and the trip itself would take years and require that any crew taken along bring food water, and life support sufficient for a 2+ year journey. At current launch costs, you’d have to bring back a lot of minerals to break even.

O’Neil cylinders would enable space farming, but again, we have the difficulty of sourcing the materials to build the cylinder, the energy to launch it all to wherever you want to build it.

I think all of this points to the problem I have with over-romanticizing space exploration. We sort of have an unfounded assumption (probably because of poor analogy to sea-exploration) that you can sort of just find or get the resources on the way. That works on the ocean. Out of food? Go fishing. Out of water? Get some on the next island you pass. You won’t run out of air because obviously you never left Earth and you can breathe the atmosphere on the boat. In space, you have to bring it with you. All of it. And worse, you have to launch it or the tools and materials to make it from Earth. The free lunches that sailors got simply don’t happen in space. If you’re in space, water either has to be brought along, recycled, or chemically manufactured. Food either must be brought along, or you must bring the seeds and everything required to grow, harvest, and preserve them. The fuel is the same situation, either you bring it, or you manufacture it. The free lunches don’t happen. In fact space is probably one of the most dangerous places to be. You can’t breathe in space, it’s too cold for survival. There’s no food or water. That’s before considering the radiation that would be dangerous to humans, or the asteroids that can smash tge ships protecting astronauts from exposure to space.

O’Neil cylinders would enable space farming, but again, we have the difficulty of sourcing the materials

Yeah, hence:

At current launch costs, you’d have to bring back a lot of minerals to break even.

Would be part of a two-pronged strategy. Get as many materials as you can that are already in orbit, and convert those to productive uses in orbit.

Transferring foodstuffs to the ground is a lot cheaper, once you've already grown them. Or to the nearest actual colony, if we get that far.

Fuel costs is probably the only truly unavoidable one, it is possible to be 'stuck' in space in a way that's not quite true in the ocean, if you have no more energy or no more materials that can be used to transfer momentum.

But there are options that are less reliant on bringing fuel with you (railguns/space cannons, solar sails, space elevators, to name a few). Massive engineering challenges for each, though.

IF these interstellar objects are sent by other intelligent civilizations then they're probably intended to kill us.

The gap between us and interstellar capable aliens is like gap between us and insects, and we usually do not go on long trips just to stomp on bugs.

Is there any rational motive for alien invasion? Usual science fiction tropes: "they want our water/women/fresh meat" are ludicrous, but there is a possibility.

Terrestrial planets are big chunks of iron, nickel and other metals, conveniently gathered near stars. If you want to build space megastructures, dismantling these planets is the most economic way to get material.

Yes, Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy where Earth is bulldozed in order to build hyperspace bypass is the most accurate depiction of alien invasion.

About non economic motives, motive understandable to us would be pure scientific curiosity ... and religion.

In science fiction, common trope is scientific, rational and logical aliens laughing at Earthling primitive superstitions.

(less known Christian science fiction countertrope is scientific, rational and logical aliens who find out that Christianity is true, become Christian and laugh at atheists.)

Aliens coming to preach their religion (whether peacefully or at blaster point) is something, AFAIK, not done in science fiction (except as slapstick comedy).

"Have you embraced Great Green !Z'hqw':$*>#q?x as your lord and savior?"

Simply seizing as many resources as possible is an entirely rational decision. If grabby civilizations outcompete nongrabby ones, then those are the ones we'd expect to proliferate in the universe. Even if a civilization is internally nongrabby, if they encounter a grabby one, they're likely to resort to grabbiness as a survival mechanism. (This is why humans should be grabby preemptively; there can never be any kind of effective galactic UN.)

It doesn't take much effort for a civilization higher on the scale from us to send a kinetic kill vehicle.

Indeed, the idea of an interstellar invasion is ridiculous. Preemptive extermination of all other intelligences, however, makes a disturbing amount of sense from a game theoretic perspective.

Yep. I can think of possible ways around it, but when the failure mode/Schelling point is "They destroy us immediately and completely" I'd guess most Civs will end up being defectors.

The gap between us and interstellar capable aliens is like gap between us and insects, and we usually do not go on long trips just to stomp on bugs.

Uh, point in of fact, I ABSOLUTELY go out of my way to kill ant colonies that pop up in my lawn, and I do so using more 'sophisticated' methods than stomping them.

And if I were worried about the ants teching up enough to pose a danger to me and my dog, I'd be even more vigilant about it.

Is there any rational motive for alien invasion? Usual science fiction tropes: "they want our water/women/fresh meat" are ludicrous, but there is a possibility.

I'm thinking a relativistic kill missile is more likely. But on the offchance they want to preserve the planet mostly intact, they just have to set us back to the bronze age or so.

I've been watching Isaac Arthur videos for like 10 years now, so I have seen a lot of 'imaginable' if not plausible scenarios for how Alien invasions could play out.

Usual science fiction tropes: "they want our water/women/fresh meat" are ludicrous, but there is a possibility

The obvious answer is wanting human capital. Population is the most valuable resource on earth and it’s probably the most valuable resource in space too.

The three body problems idea that aliens would want to destroy other intelligent civilization because of the potential for explosive technological growth on galactic timescales seems to make a lot of sense as a motive for someone to release death probes targeting less developed species to their immediate neighborhood.

Or Von Neumann probes that were launched from so far away that there was no intelligent life on the planet at the time they were originally launched.

Rep. Burlison confirms new UAP hearing for September 9th with three confirmed witnesses (potentially more).

The truth always comes out in the end.

Mainstream science dismisses the concerns and sees the object as ordinary red colored D-type asteroid.

Mainstream science told you to mask up and get the covid vaccine too.

Mainstream science told you to mask up and get the covid vaccine too.

Now why would they do that?

I'm generally convinced that at least getting the vaccines was sensible (and pushing their roll-out was good policy, though the compulsion to take them was deeply illiberal), but this data doesn't seem too compelling to me considering the obvious confounders. I would assume Red America to have a significantly larger number of old and unhealthy people with inadequate access to medical care.

That chart is already age-adjusted, which is the biggest factor. Red Americans probably are less healthy, but the death rates for unvaccinated people are ten times those for vaccinated. The effect isn't subtle.

The truth always comes out in the end.

70+ years on, and UFO/UAP truth is nowhere to be seen. Maybe there is really nothing out there, except layers of psyops upon hoaxes upon scams upon bullshit.

Trust the plan.

So what's your expectation of this new UAP hearing? Anything different from the previous nothingburgers?

So what's your expectation of this new UAP hearing?

Nothing.

Anything different from the previous nothingburgers?

No.

All memes aside, I would very much like for the crash retrieval program to be real, although I recognize that the probability of it actually being real is meager.

What is this place?

This website is a place for people who want to move past shady thinking and test their ideas in a court of people who don't all share the same biases. Our goal is to optimize for light, not heat; this is a group effort, and all commentators are asked to do their part.

The weekly Culture War threads host the most controversial topics and are the most visible aspect of The Motte. However, many other topics are appropriate here. We encourage people to post anything related to science, politics, or philosophy; if in doubt, post!

Check out The Vault for an archive of old quality posts. You are encouraged to crosspost these elsewhere.


Why are you called The Motte?

A motte is a stone keep on a raised earthwork common in early medieval fortifications. More pertinently, it's an element in a rhetorical move called a "Motte-and-Bailey", originally identified by philosopher Nicholas Shackel. It describes the tendency in discourse for people to move from a controversial but high value claim to a defensible but less exciting one upon any resistance to the former. He likens this to the medieval fortification, where a desirable land (the bailey) is abandoned when in danger for the more easily defended motte. In Shackel's words, "The Motte represents the defensible but undesired propositions to which one retreats when hard pressed."

On The Motte, always attempt to remain inside your defensible territory, even if you are not being pressed.


New post guidelines

If you're posting something that isn't related to the culture war, we encourage you to post a thread for it. A submission statement is highly appreciated, but isn't necessary for text posts or links to largely-text posts such as blogs or news articles; if we're unsure of the value of your post, we might remove it until you add a submission statement. A submission statement is required for non-text sources (videos, podcasts, images).

Culture war posts go in the culture war thread; all links must either include a submission statement or significant commentary. Bare links without those will be removed.

If in doubt, please post it!


Rules


Recommended Posts And Communities

Recommended Realtime Chats