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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   26788 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of August 25, 2025

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Reading an article on why Britain should settle Antarctica from Palladium got me thinking: are there any major, visionary projects happening at the moment that have a plausible chance of success?

I'm still hopeful for SpaceX to at least make operations on the moon more feasible, though I'm skeptical of making a real go at Mars colonization, especially as Elon's star has fallen so far recently.

China seems a likely contender, but I don't know what they have going on. I know that AGI is the thing on everyone's mind, but I'm thinking more about a physical, non-software based major visionary project that's happening in the physical world.

To quote some from the article:

These apparently radical measures will look less radical by the year, but would nevertheless represent a dramatic break from the Westminster status quo. Declining nations can resort to many sensible technocratic reforms that are easy to explain, but they find it hard to come up with compelling political or bureaucratic motives for those reforms. That can only be done with national visions—visions that are not only suited to the capabilities a country could realistically develop, but also a congruent continuation of its history, or at least the best of its history. We can see that these two conditions have been fulfilled with nearly every successful national founding or refounding. Britain’s overlooked Antarctic legacy, and the vast frozen territory it still retains, then, offer us the opportunity for such a vision.

If such a project is pursued with enough vigor, it will make Britain’s claim to Antarctica inarguable. It is easy to draw peremptory lines on an empty map, but it is much harder and more admirable to people that map and to rescue its land from barrenness. For a stagnant or declining nation, it is easy to find this or that technocratic intervention that can solve this or that economic, social, or political issue. What is more difficult is finding a vision that gives the nation reason to carry out such reforms. These visions must be inspiring, but they must also be within reach. Most importantly, they must match the legacy and history of the country.

This is culture war because, well, the decline of nations is extremely political, and from my view the Trumpian Right, for all it's many and varied flaws, is the only party at least nominally pursuing a future vision of greatness, instead of simply ignoring or managing a decline.

Also, this is a very sassy quote from the article I loved:

This unworldly modern Britain is hardly the “perfidious Albion” depicted in the propaganda of its 19th century geopolitical rivals. Not wholly unflatteringly, contemporary Russian state media still portrays the country as the shadowy orchestrator of coups and death squads. A truer depiction, though, is that of the “cash-poor, asset-rich elderly woman who has somehow inherited a portfolio of scattered, high-value properties she doesn’t know what to do with.”

China has started on Biggest Dam (60 GW peak capacity, or about an entire UK's worth of annual electricity production if it works out): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medog_Hydropower_Station

thinking more about a physical, non-software based major visionary project that's happening in the physical world.

Why? The AI buildout is way bigger than anything else that's remotely feasible in the near-term. I'm a fan of nuclear fusion and nuclear generally, I think it'd be great to mine asteroids. Setting up largescale underwater mines would be cool. Doing something in Antarctica would also be good. Anything besides more welfare programs or endlessly increasing health costs, I'd welcome a big investment in anti-aging.

But I also have a sense of scale, AI is the front-page story even if people feel a bit tired of it. People talk about arcologies and they build data centres. The hyperscalers are spending about $200-300 billion on data centres annually. That's about one Apollo program every single year. The Medog hydro station is supposed to cost a mere $137 billion over 8 years. Even with a 3x blowout that's peanuts compared to AI. Microsoft alone is spending more than that.

What could be more visionary than bringing alien minds into existence? Elon made his fame as a hard-sciences guy with rockets, cars, tunnels but he's moved over into AI because of how important it is.

Come on, are Brits really going to pack up shop and go not to the North of England, not to the Welsh countryside or the highlands of Scotland or even the Falkland Islands... but Antarctica? Infamously uninhabitable Antarctica, with a kilometre of ice covering anything important, with seasonal accessibility, icebergs, vast distances to anywhere else? It's not like there's an asteroid's worth of minerals there.

Vision must be matched by cost-efficiency and prospective gains if it's to be anything but a pipe-dream. The cost of AI development is enormous but the potential gains are staggering. The cost of space colonization is perhaps slightly smaller but the gains aren't so great. While Western civilization underinvests in R&D and capital generally, it should be directed at the most high-leverage targets first.

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