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PaperclipPerfector  3d ago (text post)   12483 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?

That's the point. People act like "not forbidden" equals possible and technically it does, but only technically. Physics doesn't prevent me from slaughtering my way through Parliament and Buckingham Place with a slingshot and declaring myself Emperor of England, but it's not going to happen.

Being a population frontier has to mean being realistically somewhere will populate. The Americas were unpleasant in many respects, but they were on Earth and people believed they contained pretty good farmland, which often did turn out to be the case. They were also breathable, and full of lumber etc. Finally, people weren't really able to communicate with them, leaving space for hope.

Space just doesn't compare in that regard. If you can't make space at least as comfortable as the Americas then or e.g. the Congo now, people aren't going.

Physics doesn't prevent me from slaughtering my way through Parliament and Buckingham Place with a slingshot and declaring myself Emperor of England, but it's not going to happen.

Sure, but I don't invoke the laws of physics to say you can't do that.

Space just doesn't compare in that regard.

Making it that way is not particularly difficult as a physics challenge. Building underground domes on Mars or the Moon or a spin ring in orbit is physically doable, no question about it. I agree that it remains to be seen if human desire to do these things outweighs the difficulty to do them, but they're not laws-of-physics sorts of problems, and most of them have been on-paper solved for 50 years or more.

But you’re still broadly conflating ‘doable’ with plausible and rewarding.

The point is that physics precludes space being a frontier by making it so unpleasant to go and live there that nobody will. The same way it precludes underwater settlements - it’s not that we can’t build on shallow waters but that physics makes it less pleasant than the alternatives.

But you’re still broadly conflating ‘doable’ with plausible and rewarding.

No, I am not, not in this conversation thread. Insisting that something is physically possible is not the same thing as insisting that it is plausible and rewarding. It is physically possible to eat gravel; it's not plausible that I had it for dinner and it would not be rewarding for me, had I had it for dinner (I didn't), but if you said it was physically impossible I would dispute the claim – unless you were a child. Then I might encourage your naïveté on the grounds that enlightening you as to the possibility of lithophagy at such a tender age might not prove conducive to your continued health and well-being.

The point is that physics precludes space being a frontier by making it so unpleasant to go and live there that nobody will.

I think it's quite possible that space travel will indeed be so dangerous, dull, and expensive that no one will attempt space colonization! That's well within the realm of possibility! But I think it's unusual to describe this as downstream of the laws of physics. Indeed, one might argue that the laws of physics dictate the opposite: a sufficiently large object traveling in space can be so comfortable that the vast majority of people who live on it would never dream of going elsewhere.

If there are any laws that dictate what you're claiming, they are almost certainly economic.

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