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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:
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.
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.
@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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