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Notes -
Circling back around to the topic of space exploration, this article by Palladium on the reasons for exploring space brings up an interesting shift in how geopolitical justifications are made over the last hundred years or so.
The main thrust of the article hypothesizes that there may never be a truly strong economic or political incentive to push space travel. I'm not necessarily convinced this is the case, but I agree that most people that try to justify going to space all those terms are fighting a losing battle. Even if we do stand to gain massively from an economic perspective by pioneering various space initiatives, the timescale for any reasonable returns is in the hundreds of years. Not something that will motivate people to come out to the ballot box anytime soon.
What's really fascinating about the conclusion, however, is that the article points out in excellent pro something I hadn't really grasped before:
While it's debatable whether or not the modern welfare state and social security in western countries really qualifies as a 'vision' of the future, it's absolutely true that the massive social engineering projects we have going on nowadays are far more ambitious and far more expensive than any of the space initiatives that have been proposed so far. This discrepancy is to the tune of multiple orders of magnitude.
The article rightly points out that the only thing that ever motivates people to enact these massive governmental projects are social, religious, or emotional goals. Despite all of our fancy rhetoric, humanity as a whole is nowhere near rational in our large scale decision making. This is a fundamental flaw when it comes to most rationalists or philosophers trying to create policy prescriptions - they lay out a beautiful argument, but failed to give any reasons that will truly motivate people to follow their argument.
I'll let the article conclude itself:
If there is no vision behind the welfare state, that's something new. Whether it's Christianity or the Great Society the promises made were massive and the change was expected to be radical.
"And with your courage and with your compassion and your desire, we will build a Great Society. It is a society where no child will go unfed, and no youngster will go unschooled."
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Space exploration and colonization will happen, but it will be led by machines. Humans are not built for space, not just in the environment needed to sustain ourselves but also in its vastness, both across space and time. If it weren't possible or feasible to build intelligent machines then maybe in a thousand years, we would progress far enough with genetic engineering to create a splinter race suited to the demands of space travel. But it is possible, and we are already in the process of making AI that will chart the path to the stars.
Well yeah I think this is pretty obvious, at least at first. Someone still has to build those machines and send them out into space in the first place though. Or do you think that will be done by machines as well? (serious question)
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I kinda expect it to be an ethno-religious group like the Mormons in the Expanse. Someone rich enough, organized enough to pull it off.
I don't know about the "ethno" part, but I'd be betting on the "religious" part; what you have is basically an ideal society (like a kibbutz) IN SPACE and so you need religion to keep it together for more than three generations.
The Mormons are mostly of English Protestant extraction and almost entirely of Northern European extraction beyond that. They’re wearing the clothes of a universalist religion but the reality is very different.
I suppose, but they're not exclusionary, at least not anymore. I am not sure that the "ethno" part is necessary and indeed don't really think that it is. It's also very possible that there might be new ethnicities or even castes in a generation ship society if it was large or long-lasting enough. It'd be an interesting social experiment, but not one I'd want to live on, and due to island isolation the cultures that emerged from these things would be interesting as hell, given the constraints of having to survive on a fucking spaceship.
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I totally disagree with the conclusion. First of all, we are literally living in the time where one man's vision is about to revolutionize space travel by making a rocket that can lift 100 tons of payload to LEO. Yeah it's interplanetary for now, but why not interstellar next, maybe by the next man with an itch for it?
And second, why do you need to persuade the whole society to migrate? Most of the old world people didn't migrate to America and it was their loss. The few people who did migrate multiplied and prospered. "Indirect evidence of extrasolar planets will never be enough" -- for whom? So we will have bootlicking statists like the author waiting for the government to give them credible evidence and orders to go, while adventurous types will be populating the galaxy.
Ok, who do you think can man a generation ship? Who are the puritans today? You can’t call for help from the mother country on a colony. Unless burkhard heim turns out to be right instead of the German version of the time cube guy, you can’t even have meaningful inputs either. The civilization has to be built on-site. And that means you need high cohesion above replacement tfr high IQ types. The ultra-orthodox Jews aren’t interested and the Mormons have a declining tfr, who do you think can pull it off?
I think I can. I'd also ask like half of the people I play Blood on the Clocktower with regularly and they will probably agree and we will make it.
I think that if/when there's a call for it, it won't be the average ability of some particular ethnicity/faith/whatever, but self-selected (but also gatekept) people that are multiple deviations above the average in whatever traits you think are good for manning a generation ship. A random 1000 mormons have nothing on the top 1000 <insert the ethnic group you most despise> most excited about colonizing Alpha Centauri.
Are we playing with the same clocktower group? Good lord we would all kill each other day 1!
We manage to cooperate surprisingly well given that one third of the players are secretly demonic entities!
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Mormons would probably pull it off okay, especially since the hardliner Mormons still have steady tfr. Plus I don't think the tfr would keep declining once exposure to the monoculture is cut off.
Genetically, I'd choose the groups that settled the prior frontiers with minimal homeland assistant: the Borderers, Mormons, and certain Germanic groups. Pick some traditionalist subsets and go. How many people does a generation ship really need? 500? 5000? Either way it's so small that you're best off looking for weird small subgroup that is optimal for it rather than selecting people who are good at playing our society. High IQ is somewhat important, but not massively so as long as they're like 100 average at least, with a few especially bright individuals. I'm sure engineering a generation ship requires elite IQ, manning one likely does not. Probably a few solid Asian groups that would fit the bill, but I'd be hesitant given the lack of prior history of frontier-settling.
Beliefs-wise, nearly any cohesive religious group is fine. They do exist. It's not as if we live in a 100% atheist society.
I mean there’s the 50/500 rule for genetic quality, but any cohesive group is going to be more related than average so it’s higher. The more interesting question is ‘how many people are required for the maintenance and supporting the maintainers and passing on necessary skills, and what fraction of the population can be engaged in those things’. Is maintaining the ship the sort of thing largely restricted to able-bodied males, either because of physical requirements or because of radiation exposure precluding reproductively active women? And what’s the necessary precursor and support technologies that need to be brought with, how much redundancy is the minimum, and how many people are necessary to maintain those things? And that comes down to ‘how many people does it take to maintain a technological civilization in complete autarchy’.
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No we're not. It's not going to happen.
So how much money would you put down that Starship/Super Heavy will never work?
I really don't see any reason it can't work, it's a matter of particularly difficult engineering, but there's no reason that can't be overcome.
It's not an engineering issue, it's that interest rates now exist and SpaceX is going to run out of money, and also that the regime is literally trying to destroy them and will get what it wants.
The only space programs that will be tolerated are military satellites launched by the highest bidder, and NASA's artemis program to spend 100 billion dollars to put some black woman on the moon.
Granted, if the regime kills spacex then they won’t pull it off, but short of that, I believe they’ll get it done. Talk about killing the goose that laid the golden egg, though…
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Tree fiddy?
Seriously, it's just a friendly bet, so 50-100$ I'd say. Though you have to come up with a timeframe, because I'm not waiting for eternity to get my money.
I'm not saying the idea breaks the laws of physics or anything, a rocket is a rocket. It's just that it is indeed very difficult, and nothing I've seen from SpaceX shows they're going to crack it anytime soon. Their engines keep eating themselves, it looks like the structure of the ship buckles under the strain of the launch, last time the tore their launchpad to pieces, and the FTS didn't work. Now they're trying to some galaxy-brained water-cooled plate system to prevent it from being demolished like the last time, but it doesn't look like it's going to do much. Things are getting so bad I've even seen devoted SpaceX fanboys starting to get concerned.
Oh shit, I would totally bet $100 that Starship reaches orbit by, say, 2028. Never done an online bet before but this is one I would take in a heartbeat.
5 years is far enough away we can't be sure either of us is still on TheMotte, or that TheMotte will still be here, but sure, if you can keep track of the bet, I'll take it.
Eh too lazy for that. Maybe like end of 26?
Sure.
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You may very well be right about that, but please put more effort into explaining why you believe what you believe, rather than just staking a claim.
Fair enough, but I kind of want to quote Hitchens here. He's making a wild claim here, and it feels like a bit of a double standard, that he gets to make it with absolutely no backing, but I do have to back my opposition to it.
@official_techsupport offered a counterargument to the article. Their post might have benefited from more details--it's not exactly an "effort post"--but neither is it devoid of substance. It's more than a "no, I disagree." It's a "no, I disagree because..."
Your response has no "because"--not even a little bit. It doesn't have to be a dissertation! But there has to be something more than mere disagreement. Maybe remember that it is not against the rules to be mistaken, and it is not against the rules to make a poor argument. We cannot test shady thinking in a place that forbids shady thinking. But if the only content of your post is a "disagree" light, that's not enough.
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Would you like to make a bet?
Yeah, I'm game. Preferrably to a charity because I don't want to give away my personal info. Either that or crypto. I'll be very surprised if Starship makes it to orbit at all, feel free to set the time frame.
If it is only orbit, I'm fairly certain we might see something by Dec '24, but July '25 would be I feel most comfortable
Sure July '25 is fine. Don't know if we have the remindme bot here.
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I'm 100% onboard with having a magnitudes-richer space program and reevaluating our budget priorities. But I just wanted to raise a minor note of pushback on this specific (very common) rhetoric.
Social security mostly takes the form of 'We take in $X dollars in taxes, we send out $X dollars in direct checks to citizens'.
While it is certainly included in all the charts of the federal budget, I always find it mistaken/disingenuous to call something like this 'government spending.'
It's just a redistribution program. The government isn't taking money from people and spending it on government programs, it's taking money from people and giving it to other people.
It's certainly a huge redistribution program that constitutes major social engineering, but it's not exactly spending in the way that a space program or a military or the FDA are spending. It's paid for by a dedicated tax just for itself.
If the military went away, the government would have a lot of freed up money to spend on different things. And if they lowered taxes by the amount the military cost, the the people would have more money to spend on things than they did before.
If Social Security went away, it would be hard to justify not also getting rid of Social Security taxes, so the government wouldn't have more to spend on other things. And the people wouldn't have more to spend on other things, either, since they were already getting that money back in direct checks anyway.
I agree that we should direct a bunch of the federal budget to space flight and other big ambitious projects. But it feels disingenuous/mistaken to look at things like Social Security when making those comparisons.
That's a fair point, and I can see how the comparison might come off a little disingenuous. As you say though, we are still taxing the money from people. I know at least for many younger generations, the expectation that they will get any rewards personally out of social security is close to nil. I'm sure the vast majority don't even think about it though, and grumble about "taxes" in general.
So it shows that the tax burden can support a great amount. I'd love to replace social security with space flight, but that's definitely a pipe dream.
What other big ambitious projects would you want funded?
Fair enough, although I'd like to see if I can sell you on the idea that if we ended Social Security, the 40 years olds who currently grumble about payroll taxes, would instead grumble about having to support their now-penniless retired parents. We'd still have to pay to support those old people somehow, so it's not 'free' money...
Of course, it could be that they'd just mostly move in with their kids, or we'd find some other solution that's less expensive than the current model, so in that sense maybe we are spending more on them now than we would without SS (but getting whatever benefit we get from old people being more independent... social engineering stuff, as you say).
If we're calling SS-style 'tax people then send out checks' government spending, then I'm a big proponent of a universal generous UBI (handled in the same way, tax everyone using progressive taxation then send out the same amount in checks, so it's effectively downward redistribution). I think we're kind of stuck in a sub-optimal Nashe equilibrium that produces a lot of unnecessary unproductive labor, because the universal 40 hour workweek is expected and people don't have the financial leverage to negotiate any changes to it.
I think we may as well make some big infrastructure improvements, including clean energy (counting nuclear) and massively increasing the supply of housing to drive down costs. Also the types of internet and community infrastructure projects needed to help people capable of doing remote work move out of cities, I feel like the population could be a lot less centralized at this point in our economic development.
I'd sort of like to see a massive effort to gather the type of data it would take to actually understand and map how modern technology (screens all the time, social media, engagement algorithms, etc) are affecting people and society, and test better options at large scales. Lots of individual researchers are studying those things but generally in small ways in small labs, I think a really big unified effort would be needed to do the type of data collection and analysis necessary to really learn much. I'm not sure the government is competent to do that, but they could at least provide enough resources to gather the data that other researchers could analyze.
I'd argue that this is not because of demanding the 40 hour workweek, but because most productive labor is illegal. If mining things, growing things, and building things were less stringently controlled, then we could have more people actually producing instead of sitting in desks pushing pointless papers for 40 hours per week.
The alternative of cutting the workweek is fine if we just want to rest on our laurels I guess, but I'd rather let people advance.
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It seems like most of them would sell their houses to fund their retirements.
Oh, the dream!!!!! Don't tempt me more with these beautiful visions of Paradise, I don't know if my poor heart can take it....
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Religion. So far, that's the only real thing that we've found that keeps "ideal communities" - like monasteries, nunneries, and kibbutzim - going for more than a few generations. The Catholic Church seems like the likeliest candidate for something like this, although Mormonism and maybe Islam might be able to pull it off. Or maybe some new, modern religion...it would be nice if we had a religion that had been born in and adapted for modern, industrial society rather than something that worked very well for agrarian societies and was ultimately adapted to industrial ones.
The most recent offshoots of the Abrahamics are Ahmadi Islam and Baha’i. I think they’re interesting, but I’ve yet to see anyone try to use them for space exploration.
Well, the Baha'i faith is certainly interesting. Hadn't looked into that one before.
I actually think it could be quite well adapted for space exploration! Apparently divinity gives a series of revelations through prophets - why not have the next prophet tell us we need to go to space?
I'm actually surprised Baha'i hasn't caught on more, given that it seems like a much more coherent and serious distillation of the liberal perennailist Christian churches that I'm most familiar with.
They actually predict life in space. There are exoplanets around other stars and they have life. Which is actually pretty good for 1870.
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Our Ford and Savior
I suppose. Okay, maybe not nice but certainly interesting.
It was one of the things that stuck with me the first time I read Brave New World.
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Eh, could have gone better.
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I agree, and frankly I think that a formal religion with space exploration and/or artificially intelligence as key parts of the doctrine has a good chance to rise up in the relatively near future. As @DaseindustriesLtd has mentioned occasionally, Russian Cosmism is an interest blend of techno-optimism and Christianity.
I somewhat doubt that we can build a new religion entirely from scratch to fit the industrial times, however. The modern equivalent already exists, and it's called Therapy/Psychology. The goal of religion has almost always been to help us understand ourselves and let humans cooperate at a community level, at least from a darwinian perspective. Psychology tries to do this but is extremely committed to 'scientific' atheist materialism, and so is doomed to failure.
Sadly the vast majority, even if they claim to be religious, are actually rationalists/materialists when really pushed. "Well, I'm not sure if Christ actually came back from the dead, it's a metaphor..." and such.
It's a shame how easily Newtonian mechanics destroyed our entire conception of the sacred.
What?! No, I'm pretty sure that disqualifies you from calling yourself a Christian.
You'd think, but heresy has a long history, and the modern versions tend to lean heavily on the "well back in the primitive times when people didn't Know Science and had no idea about how the physical world worked, naturally they literally believed in miracles and stuff, but we are smart modern people who Know Science so we can't believe that stuff". Then they go for the metaphors and the Resurrection didn't literally happen but what did was the 'Christ Event' was the warm fuzzy feeling the followers of Jesus got from remembering Him when He was alive, and they started out to convince others that they too could have the warm fuzzy feeling if they just learned about and decided they liked Jesus.
Poor Teilhard de Chardin, God rest the man, got tangled up in his notions of the Omega Point and got into a lot of trouble over it, and modern thinkers in the same vein blend up a mix of old Gnosticism with a coat of pseudo-science painted over it. Bishop Spong was infamous for this, but there are a lot still going - we can't believe in the literal Jesus being divine, so we must separate out the idea of the human man from the Cosmic Christ which is more of an idea than a transcendent being.
This links to what I call the lineage problem, which is where the concern is any adjustments to the core creed have a dilution effect that risks effective transmission of the ideas over time and may even give rise to enough drift in the tradition that ideas entirely counter to the original spirit arise.
Buddhism in the West is a good example. Various long-standing traditions were imported into the West and over time things deemed superfluous or esoteric were abandoned. It's an oversimplification but this has culminated in the McMindfulness approach you see now.
The trouble is, traditions also lock in a bunch of stuff that genuinely does seem to be superfluous, and traditions also need to change.
I'm actually a moderniser type of guy- it seems pertinent to me having the belief system of Christianity doesn't necessarily bear any relation to the behaviour of the Christian, and I think theism in the modern age has become a victim of the Cartesian split.
Hah, I love this term! Definitely stealing it.
I absolutely agree with the Buddhism point, and it's something I want to do an effortpost on at some point.
I disagree with this. If you look at the Bible, for instance, every line has been pored over and it has been pruned over and over throughout the years. These texts also typically evolved in an oral setting, where multiple different versions were told and only the ones found the most impactful/useful were kept.
If you read something in a religious text and you don't understand it, odds are you're missing some context or you aren't thinking hard enough. I don't think almost anything in these texts is superfluous, it only seems that way because we moderns seem to think knowledge and wisdom can only be atomized, packaged rational 'facts,' and that fiction or stories can't carry genuinely important truth.
Ah can't claim the McMindfulness so use at will, there's an established critique around this.
I accept that there may be pearls that once the mud is cleaned off are seen as vitally relevant but there's also the epistemic authority problem of interpretation. One particular creed will take X from a story, the other Y. Is it all vital? I'm not convinced there isn't a lot of contingent dross smuggled in from time and place. Perhaps it's not easy to know so you keep it all.
I come at religion from a Jordan Peterson kind of place (pre his official conversion), ie a largely metaphoric journey through our prehistory of what is effective/insightful of the human condition. I think Christianity is vitally relevant here but also appreciate the insights of other traditions.
Has Dr. Peterson officially converted?
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Depends on your circles. The vast, vast majority of 'Christians' I have talked to, literally in the hundreds about this, do not believe Christ actually rose from the dead when pressed. These churches were generally more liberal/perenialist, but still.
You can call yourself a Christian until you're blue in the face, no matter what you believe. There are some weird sects out there. Unfortunately since the Protestant Reformation Christianity has been terrible at policing its weirder fringes.
Definitely circles. As a lifelong Christian I have met exactly one person who called themselves a Christian but didn't believe in the resurrection, and I've met a lot of Christians. Even that guy changed his mind about it and is now an Anglican priest (I'm pretty sure he changed his mind, but being an Anglican priest doesn't exactly prove anything in that regard).
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I honestly don't know about that. Neither of us are probably going to be alive to witness the birth of a modern industrial religion. Hell, I'd argue that modernity is barely a hundred years old or so, for what it's worth. Before then there was a LOT of infant and youth mortality, and I think that that changed things quite a bit. Germ theory was a game changer: African peasants have better health outcomes than Roman emperors and their children.
This seems to be saying that religion was basically just a way of giving people comfort and making people feel better because life sucked in the past. I strongly disagree with that framing, if that's what you mean.
Religion has always been about acquiring wisdom, understanding humans and our relationship to the world and each other.
No, I mean that the environmental context that made traditional religions well-adapted to their environment didn't change all that long ago.
Ahh I see. Yeah I agree with that.
Realistically religious traditions essentially went through centuries and centuries of cultural evolution before they became as dense and full of wisdom as they are today. I'd be surprised if we can accomplish creating a new religion that has actual wisdom before we destroy ourselves with our hubris. Alas.
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