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PaperclipPerfector  8mo ago (text post)   29737 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.

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.

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.

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!

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’.

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.

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…

So how much money would you put down that Starship/Super Heavy will never work?

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 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.

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.

No we're not. It's not going to happen.

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.

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.

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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