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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   30054 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of August 21, 2023

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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:

Modern governments are often wrongly derided for lacking vision. In fact, they are already committed to multi-trillion-dollar, multi-decade-long visions that require all of society, technology, and world geopolitics to be back-engineered accordingly. The U.S. government, for example, spends half its budget on social welfare programs, especially for the elderly. We take for granted that this is unremarkable, when in fact it is extremely historically unusual and a reflection of our deep commitment to a certain kind of post-industrial society that existentially values comfort and individuality.

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:

The expansion of human civilization to other stars will not be pioneered by lone adventurers or merry bands of hardy explorers, like we imagine the voyages of Erik the Red or Christopher Columbus. This works for interplanetary space, but not interstellar space, whose travel time will require multiple generations of people to survive a journey, including on the first try. Interstellar travel will need to accommodate not just adventurous young men with nothing to lose, but also women, children, and the elderly. In other words, a whole society. The existence of a society always implies the existence of a government.

More importantly, the sociological challenge of persuading a whole society to migrate into the unknown is very different from that of an explorer’s mission, which needs only the promise of adventure. Like the ancient Israelites, the Pilgrims, or the Mormons, a great migration will only occur when a Promised Land has been credibly found. Indirect evidence of extrasolar planets will never be enough. Whether with colossal space telescopes or ultra-fast nano-probes armed with cameras, we will need to have beautiful images and real maps of alien worlds before human civilization can become interstellar. The purpose of interplanetary expansion is to build the infrastructure and technology to make such scopes and probes feasible. These will be our cathedrals, the legacy which we will leave to our descendants.

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.

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.

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.

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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