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.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
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.
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.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
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.
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.
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.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link