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PaperclipPerfector  2d ago (text post)   8578 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.

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.

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