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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   27029 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of February 2, 2026

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I want to talk about space travel, once again. NASA's mission back to the moon, Artemis, is slated to launch in less than a week!

Luckily from my perspective, it seems that space travel hasn't been THAT politicized by the culture war, yet. Yes the left and environmentalists hate it, but it hasn't become a hot button, tribal trigger in the way gun control, or abortion, or other major culture war issues are.

Ideally I think space travel will continue to fly under the radar, and slowly get better and better. I know there are some fascinating scientific projects unfolding around space like algae to produce plastic in space, plans for asteroid mining, various organic compounds that can only be created in zero gee, etc. Also of course we now have Space Force, and a renewed space race with China seems to be heating up, potentially.

I'm curious what folks here think about space - are we optimistic that space travel and research will become a genuine market in the next few decades? What are the political fault lines people seeing potentially being an issue here?

I've never heard a leftist snarl about space IRL, and trust me, it a leftist snarls about something, I hear it.

You may be too young. Around the time after the moon landings, there were protests of the kind "could not this ointment be sold and the money given to the poor?" about it. Space exploration was not seen to be doing anything, sure we'd been to the moon but so what? just sending up more landings was doing nothing, meanwhile we have all these problems on earth of poverty etc. and isn't it better if the budget devoted to useless rocket launches, coming out of taxpayer money, is instead spent on the sick, poor and homeless here in our own countries?

I'd be more optimistic about the New Space Age were it not for having lived through the Old Space Age. We do not have the moon bases and so forth that were the golden dreams post-moon landing. I don't see any reason for it to be different this time round, except that private commercial operators are now up and running. Asteroid belt mining will remain the province of SF.

EDIT: I am extremely bummed out about the space shuttle, for instance. This was meant to be the future, yet it seems to have fizzled out in "too expensive, not really doing what it was supposed to do, back to old fashioned heavy rocket lifts".

I can count one of my ratchet clicks away from leftism when I first heard the performance of the poem "Whitey on the Moon."

From 1970, complaining about the moon landing whilst poverty exists.

Just an insane level of scope blindness. "How dare you move the course of human history and the frontiers of exploration forward while I have to pay more for food.

Which ignores that we can walk and chew gum at the same time, but also represents the kind of envious Luddism that threatens to keep us confined to this rock forever.

(And no, this isn't a feature that is limited to the left).

I can count one of my ratchet clicks away from leftism when I first heard the performance of the poem "Whitey on the Moon."

I had my own ratchet click away in the opposite direction when I read Greg Egan's Oracle. In it, an AI from the future is talking to Alan Turing from a different parallel universe:

Robert was silent for a while, contemplating the magnitude of what she was proposing. Then he said, “It’s a pity you didn’t come sooner. In this branch, about twenty years ago —”

Helen cut him off. “I know. We had the same war. The same Holocaust, the same Soviet death toll. But we’ve yet to be able to avert that, anywhere. You can never do anything in just one history – even the most focused intervention happens across a broad ‘ribbon’ of strands. When we try to reach back to the ’30s and ’40s, the ribbon overlaps with its own past to such a degree that all the worst horrors are faits accomplis. We can’t shoot any version of Adolf Hitler, because we can’t shrink the ribbon to the point where none of us would be shooting ourselves in the back. All we’ve ever managed are minor interventions, like sending projectiles back to the Blitz, saving a few lives by deflecting bombs.”

“What, knocking them into the Thames?”

“No, that would have been too risky. We did some modelling, and the safest thing turned out to be diverting them onto big, empty buildings: Westminster Abbey, Saint Paul’s Cathedral.”

At that moment I did the "raise finger, lower finger" meme IRL. In a good way.

Have you read The Rise and Fall of DODO? It has time travel with multiple concurrent past timelines all contributing to the present. Makes changing the past very complicated. Co-authored by Neal Stephenson. I recommend it.

No, I'll take a look, thanks.

Westminster Abbey

And yet when I argue that it's not all that big a deal on the individual level if the Mona Lisa were destroyed, I get dogpiled.

This reminds me of one of my favorite personal anecdotes ever.

In 2022, I was, for about six months, living in a big city on the east coast. I had previously worked in this city, hated it, and moved away. When I came back, I contact some friends and colleagues with the standard, "TollBooth is back in town, who want's to party."

One guy invites me to meet him, his girlfriend, and one of her friend's at a bar. I text him asking if he's trying to slyly set me up on a blind date. He responds cheekily, but the intent is clear (yes). L-to-the-O-L. I get ready and meet them.

Old buddy is outgoing and affable. Somewhat like a human golden retriever. Girlfriend is a great complement. A little more dryly humorous. The straight man to his goofball. Blind date girl is ..... swing and a miss. Although quite pretty, the personality type was immediately offputting - liberal but brittle. Not a loud and proud wearer of pussy hats, but an anxious NPR type who sometimes has a meltdown loading and running the dishwasher. If You've seen School of Rock, think of the female principal (before she turns cool. Whatever. I'm not going to ruin the vibe.

Conversation is happening. Lots of references to memes and The Office. It's not like mentally jerking off discussing topics of high importance on The Motte, but it's not a bad way to spend a Friday evening. I've also been drinking, which helps.

Old Buddy brings up space. I think he'd been watching a document. Starts to really geek out over all the cool stuff SpaceX may be able to do. Nods from TollBooth, girlfriend seems pleased her man has a non videogame passion.

Blind date hits the table with your "Whitey on The Moon" vibe; _"I just think it's kind of insane, actually, that we're spending, what, tens of billions of dollars on these hobby projects while people are LitErallY StARVing out there."

I'm no veteran, but I know a landmine when I see one. Not stepping into this one. Just give a sincere seeming nod...and maybe flag down the waitress for another drink or four.

Old Buddy can't help himself. In the most gentle way, he asks Blind Date if, perhaps, maybe, just maybe, poverty and space exploration aren't zero sum tradeoffs? And that, perhaps, advancing the species' exploration of the cosmos may deliver some auxiliary benefits to the economy as a whole?

Nope. She holds the line. Moderate escalation. Girlfriend finds a way to change the subject. Rest of the evening is pretty much fine. I got pretty nicely drunk without getting sloppy. Old Buddy and girlfriend get their uber quickly after we all pile out of the restaurant. I'm ready to give an awkaward ass-out hug to Blind Date and then stumble to an Irish Bar to finish off the night solo.

"Want to come over to my place?" She asks. I'm stunned, and not only because I'm drunk. I haven't ... talked to her for the past 2 hours. But, years, later, I learn tall, plain guy is a fantastic pickup routine. All of that non-committal non-communication, paired with disinterested heavy drinking was irresistible!

Or not, who knows. I declined the offer, honestly informing her I was pretty wasted. I think I registered a mix of confusion and revulsion on her face.

The kicker to the story is that Old Buddy texts me the next day; "Great seeing you! Sorry Blind Date was such a weirdo"

I declined the offer, honestly informing her I was pretty wasted.

Given her prettiness I would have still went for the smash and dash.

I haven't ... talked to her for the past 2 hours. But, years, later, I learn tall, plain guy is a fantastic pickup routine.

The heightpilled already had a phrase for this since at least the late 201Xs: Just be Tall (JBT).

There's a limit somewhere, though. Do Moon landings benefit humans? Obviously, as a step toward extraction and colonization. Do Saturn probes benefit humans? Maybe, if I squint. Do deep-space telescopes benefit humans? I personally don't see how.

Do Moon landings benefit humans? Obviously, as a step toward extraction and colonization.

Haha, no.

We had humans on that rock 50 years ago. Did fuck-all to step us towards extraction and colonization.

Let's do some math. Let us take the ISS as a LEO habitat. It has a crew size of perhaps seven and weights 450 tons, for 64 tons per person, offering a comfort level in which specifically selected and trained astronauts have survived for a year without going insane. (Yes, you could also go for the Moon or Mars, where you will in theory have more material to build habitats. However, it also takes 5x as many launches to transport anything there. To build a practically self-sustaining habitat would be a massive endeavor -- you would have to copy a good fraction of the supply chains of the world economy.)

Take the Falcon 9, one of today's best rockets. It gets 22 tons tons to LEO, so we need about three launches to get a one person habitat up there.

The commercial price for a launch of the Falcon 9 is 70M$. Even if internally, SpaceX could launch at 10%, that is still 21M$ per colonist for the privilege of spending years encased in a habitat which would concern animal rights activists.

The fuel of a Falcon 9 is about 400 tons, which yields about 300 tons of CO2, generously assuming that Musk invents a catalytic converter (!) for his rockets so that CO2 is the only thing which we need to worry about. That is about the CO2 an American might produce in a lifetime. If you want to colonize space, getting controlled fusion power is the first (and one of the easier) steps.

Now, if there was Unobtainium in space, that might still be worthwhile. If Moon rock was the perfect material to build tension cables for a space elevator for, then I would be all for mining Moon rock (preferably by robots) and shipping it to Earth. Sadly, the rest of the solar system contains nothing we don't have on Earth for cheaper. This includes He-3: Earth price is 20M$/kg. If Moon regolith was 10% that stuff, that would be great. As it is perhaps 15ppb, so you need to go through hundreds of thousands of tons to get a kilogram.

The sad fact is that we will all die in the gravity well we were born, PRNS.

I think having the ISS to study the effects of microgravity on humans (and do all kinds of other experiments) is a great idea, if we find a material for a space elevator tomorrow, it would be embarrassing not to have done our homework beforehand. I also generally like space missions advancing our scientific knowledge, but that is a matter of taste, if someone wants to argue that the JWST will never teach us anything relevant for human life and we should therefore not fund it, that is a perfectly coherent position.

I was thinking of orbiting habitats with spin gravity, as set forth in The High Frontier: 3,000,000 tons of radiation shielding, using Moon regolith launched by an electromagnetic mass driver to reduce lift costs, for a 10,000-person cylinder. But I haven't done any research into the topic beyond reading that book.

My general response to that is "the market would sort it out" under normal conditions.

We just can't let the existence of human suffering, somewhere, be an excuse to shut down human advancement everywhere.

If we are productive enough to have excess resources lying around after we feed, house, clothe, and entertain ourselves, some of it can probably get thrown at speculative science projects or pure pursuit of knowledge sans profit motive.

Is there demand for it? Probably not that much... but the people that would demand it also happen to be pretty rich.

Some of that also comes down to how you answer the Fermi paradox. If there's a small but nonzero chance of happening across other intelligent life (or the remnants of same) that's a potentially massive payoff, so buying a few lotto tickets 'makes sense' if survival isn't compromised (lol Dark Forest Theory).

Deep Space Telescopes in particular seem to be relatively cheap to deploy and have a small but real chance of discovering something really, really cool... even if not immediately valuable.

If we were moving rapidly towards space industrialization, they'd also be useful for finding ripe targets for Von Neumann Probes.

We just can't let the existence of human suffering, somewhere, be an excuse to shut down human advancement everywhere.

If we allowed the human advancement for advancement's sake, then our enemies would gain political power.

In an environment where the socioeconomic power for the average member outside the current dominant bloc has done nothing but shrink, a society governed by that bloc is going to be fiercely resistant to change.

This is the root cause of why China (and a few other countries that have high human capital potential) can build and advance; while everywhere else [allows itself to be] buried under heckler's veto without end.

If we allowed the human advancement for advancement's sake, then our enemies would gain political power.

Ironically, one of the better reasons to get space-based industry going is to try and outrun these Molochian incentives for a while.

My dream is to have a nice little O'Neill Cylinder of my own, tucked inside a nondescript asteroid, powered by fusion, so that I can genuinely just live life in peace, such that there's no major incentive to try and exercise political authority over me and mine.

Unless we think that the drive of the collectivists will not permit them to leave someone alone who could be forced to come into the fold. At which point I'd rather fight them to the death before we get off-planet.

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