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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).
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.
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.
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