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PaperclipPerfector  2d ago (text post)   7446 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of August 18, 2025

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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.

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