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PaperclipPerfector  3d ago (text post)   10554 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of July 6, 2026

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Starship bet update

A few years ago I made a series of bets about Starship making it to orbit with other posters, last rounded up here:

The last one is a real nail-biter. When I heard about the SpaceX IPO I first thought it's time to call it a day. My model for my predictions about Elon was that he has a hype-compulsion, making wilder and wilder promises to get money out of investors, and as it becomes clear he won't be able to reach the hyped up goal, at some point they will get fed up with him. So when the news of the $85.7 billion came out, I figured that even if I do win, it will be on a technicality - maybe they won't pull it off by end of this year, but this sort of money will surely be enough to get them over whatever humps they run into on the road.... Then again maybe not! It also turned out that they have $41.3 billion in accumulated losses since their founding, and have burned $4.3 billion on AI in Q1 2026 alone, so maybe I will lose on a technicality instead, where they will indeed get to orbit by end of year, but will be dragged down by the unprofitable parts of the company.

I now believe that such a "loss on a technicality" is a pretty likely outcome, precisely because of the IPO. Like I said last year, if my bet was with Elon, he probably could have ordered the damn rocket to be put in orbit, just to prove a point, and while I'm lucky enough to have made my bet with internet randos instead, the IPO changes the dynamics such that he will be very tempted to do such things just to prove a point. Currently 95% of SpaceX stock held by insiders is locked up and it will be gradually released over the course of the year. Stonks are largely guided by hype, hype is generated with media articles (such as "SpaceX makes history with Starship orbital launch!!!11"), so while a frivolous orbital launch would make little sense before, it could make a lot of sense now. There's already talk of Starship 14 being orbital, and I fully expect them to schedule it just before one of these unlock dates.

That said, it's not over until it's over! Just because they might want to do it, doesn't mean they'll pull it off. This whole bet is starting to feel like an episode of Wacky Races.

This post gets to the heart of what my problem with the space colonization hype train that seems to be popular on this site. What exactly is the profit motive? Starlink seems very useful and profitable. Colonizing Mars? Not so much, unless investors are willing to eat losses for many decades.

From Inadequate Equilibria by Eliezer Yudkowsky:

Visitor: I suppose I can imagine a hypothetical world in which one country screws things up as badly as you describe. But your planet has multiple governments, I thought. Or did I misunderstand that? Why wouldn’t patients emigrate to—or just visit—countries that made better hospitals legal?

Cecie: The forces acting on governments with high technology levels are mostly the same between countries, so all the governments of those countries tend to have their medical system screwed up in mostly the same way (not least because they’re imitating each other). Some aspects of dysfunctional insurance and payment policies are special to the US, but even the relatively functional National Health System in Britain still has failure of professional specialization. (Though they at least don’t require doctors to have philosophy degrees.)

Visitor: Is there not one government that would allow a reasonably designed hospital staffed by specialists instead of generalists?

Cecie: It wouldn’t be enough to just have one government’s okay. You’d need some way to initially train your workers, despite none of our world’s medical schools being set up to train them. A majority of legislators won’t benefit personally from deciding to let you try your new hospital in their country. Furthermore, you couldn’t just go around raising money from rich countries for a venture in a poor country, because rich countries have elaborate regulations on who’s allowed to raise money for business ventures through equity sales. The fundamental story is that everything, everywhere, is covered with varying degrees of molasses, and to do any novel thing you have to get around all of the molasses streams simultaneously.

Visitor: So it’s impossible to test a functional hospital design anywhere on the planet?

Cecie: But of course.

Visitor: I must still be missing something. I just don’t understand why all of the people with economics training on your planet can’t go off by themselves and establish their own hospitals. Do you literally have people occupying every square mile of land?

Cecie: … How do I phrase this…

All useful land is already claimed by some national government, in a way that the international order recognizes, whether or not that land is inhabited. No relevant decisionmaker has a personal incentive to allow there to be unclaimed land. Those countries will defend even a very small patch of that claimed land using all of the military force their country has available, and the international order will see you as the aggressor in that case.

Visitor: Can you buy land?

Cecie: You can’t buy the sovereignty on the land. Even if you had a lot of money, any country poor enough and desperate enough to consider your offer might just steal your stuff after you moved in.

Negotiating the right to bring in weapons to defend yourself in this kind of scenario would be even more unthinkable, and would spark international outrage that could prevent you from trading with other countries.

To be clear, it’s not that there’s a global dictator who prevents new countries from popping up; but every potentially useful part of every land is under some system’s control, and all of those systems would refuse you the chance to set up your own alternative system, for very similar reasons.

Visitor: So there’s no way for your planet to try different ways of doing things, anywhere. You literally cannot run experiments about things like this.

Cecie: Why would there be? Who would decide that, and how would they personally benefit?

Visitor: That sounds extremely alarming. I mean, difficulties of adoption are one thing, but not even being able to try new things and see what happens… Shouldn’t everyone on your planet be able to detect at a glance how horrible things have become? Can this type of disaster really stand up to universal agreement that something is wrong?

Cecie: I’m afraid that our civilization doesn’t have a sufficiently stirring and narratively satisfying conception of the valor of “testing things” that our people would be massively alarmed by its impossibility. And now, Visitor, I hope we’ve bottomed out the general concept of why people can’t do things differently—the local system’s equilibrium is broken, and the larger system’s equilibrium makes it impossible to flee the game.

The point of going to Mars is to flee the game. To Escape From Terra to a place where the looters and moochers cannot reach us. "Men will endure bitter poverty, cold isolation, drink piss and eat lichen just for a chance to be free from the tyranny of the United Nations." Or, as Heinlein put it:

When a place gets crowded enough to require ID’s, social collapse is not far away. It is time to go elsewhere. The best thing about space travel is that it made it possible to go elsewhere.

Unless our current model of physics is totally wrong, space will not be a population frontier, ever. The real answer is, of course, violence. As national governments reduce violence, they reduce their own capacity for it, which inflates the value. Eventually the value gets high enough and the numbers of people who can produce it low enough that the two meet and a revolution, coup or invasion happens. This is almost always a losing proposition for the country in question, but it offers a platform to try radical new things, and the ones that work get more widely adopted.

The French Revolution was a disaster for France, and most of Europe. Most of their innovations were insane bullshit and were swiftly forgotten. But they did fix a bunch of issues with the legacy legal system and spread that to most of Europe, giving the continent a much better set of legal standards which contributed to trade, diplomacy and the eventual peace and unity of Europe. Just needed a dozen major wars, two world wars, a few genocides and a lot of ethnic cleansing to shake it all out.

Progress is produced in blood, not economics, philosophy or science. In the most anti-progressive and civilizationally corrosive manner. "Creative destruction" as an economist might say. It is by this bloody cycle that humanity progresses.

Unless our current model of physics is totally wrong, space will not be a population frontier, ever.

...what in physics forbids space being a population frontier?

The incredible costs of doing anything in space, the incredible distances and travel times involved, the sheer hostility of the environment of any place that isn't Earth, the complete absence of any economic sense to it.

As they say, colonize Antarctica or the bottom of the Ocean, make those colonies hum and turn a profit, then consider yourself ready for putting humans into near space long-term.

Those seem like engineering constraints, but also, the economic constraint seems obviously wrong. Economics can only exist when there are people or other equivalent beings around to engage in it. We know with pretty high confidence that the Earth won't be habitable by any non-scifi non-fantasy living being within a few billion years due to the expansion of the Sun. So, from an economics standpoint, there's a great incentive to expand our population to space. It just seems like a sufficiently long-enough timeline that very few, if any, people with power and resources want to devote much of those into making it happen. And there's a game theory-type problem where no one wants to be the one to sacrifice all the money and time into the R&D only to have everyone else free-riding off their work.

Technologically, almost surely building a self-sufficient base on the sea floor would be easier than doing so on the Moon or Mars, but the latter acts as insurance in a way that a sea floor basis can't. Obviously the Sun making the Earth inhabitable would likely have similar affects on the Moon and Mars, but it still decouples it somewhat, and also it lowers the risk for other planet-wide disasters. In the long run, for the survival of humanity, perhaps instead of capitalism, we'll need to invent a new system of economics that somehow provides a profit incentive to people for doing research and development into space engineering (and possibly time and multiverse travel, if those actually turn out to be possible in any meaningful sense - in the really long run, who knows how much universe in the future there actually is for humanity to expand to?).

Technologically, almost surely building a self-sufficient base on the sea floor would be easier than doing so on the Moon or Mars

It depends on where on the sea floor you're considering. Even the continental shelf is under 10atm of water pressure, though that's relatively tolerable. The sea floor is much more difficult than space when you're instead looking at oceanic crust away from continents. Lower pressure differences are much easier to deal with than higher ones, and structures in tension are much better behaved than in compression. When the ISS hull has a failure at 0atm, they just need to replace a couple pounds of air per day while they analyze it, and "drill through the hull in front of the crack to stop propagation, then quickly epoxy it all" was a serious (well, Russian serious) scheme to fix the problem. When the the Titan hull had a failure at ≈300atm, it probably killed everybody within milliseconds.

Okay, pardon me, but any arugment premised on catastrophes literal billions of years in the future aren't particularly strong in any way. Human civilization is, if you want to be very generous, 10,000 years old. A billion years is one hundred thousand times that far into the future. A hundred thousand times the entire span of human civilization. Forty million generations of baseline humans. Looking that far ahead is just not practical.

The assumption that interplanetary colonization, nevermind interstellar, is just a matter of dumping some cash into R&D, greatly undersells the extreme difficulty of doing anything in space beyond low Earth orbit, especially anything as ambitious as colonizing other planets or even star systems. Skipping the seafloor and Antarctica isn't some pragmatic measure because oh, doing either of those wouldn't protect us against X-risks. It's solid proof of our not being sufficiently capable. Putting a self-sufficient civilization onto the moon, onto Mars or another star as insurance against some cosmic phenomenon wiping out humanity is an undertaking so massive, with costs in money and effort and resourecs and lives, many many lives, that running prototypes on Earth isn't a waste of time but an absolutely necessary step in iterating our way into space at all, nevermind to the stars.

But why am I wasting my time here? You talk casually of time and multiverse travel. I politely conclude that you are not actually serious about this topic.

But why am I wasting my time here? You talk casually of time and multiverse travel. I politely conclude that you are not actually serious about this topic.

I'd contend that casually dismissing such things or billion-year timescales is proof of unseriousness. You're treating the survival of humanity as if it's some sort of fantastical concept not worth thinking about merely because it would happen very far in the future and also require immense, scifi/fantasy-level technology to prevent. When, in fact, neither of those makes the reality of that coming extinction any less real or any more fantastical. When the challenges that reality hands us is so extreme as to sound fantastical, humanity better be ready to step up with technology that's so extreme as to sound fantastical, or else humanity won't be around any more.

Yes, most likely, making a self-sufficient colony on the sea floor or Antarctica or some other Earth-based location as a prototype makes perfect sense, but the need to consistently make a profit is where the idea becomes decoupled from reality. Because the profit potential in any Earth-based colony will necessarily be missing the one BIG part of any space-based colony; the insurance against there being no economy at all due to there being no humans (or human-equivalent beings) at all to engage in economic activity.

If you want to say that now, instead of the future, is not the right time to invest lots of money into R&D into developing technology to insure humanity against the risks of relying on one planet for survival, then there's a good argument you can make there, though most likely I'd also disagree with such an argument. But that's a different argument than that physics prevents humanity from meaningfully populating space or that there's no economic sense in populating space.

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