If it’s “everyone should have a chance to go!” then your date is in fact a socialist and probably not worth the time as they’ll be eaten for food in the end days of Earth.

STEM is just the nerdy wing of fascism. I guess.

Since the goal of a date is to explore mutual compatibility (aka “get laid”), it’s best to take approaches that leave room for maneuvering.

Classic self-aware internet dork move. Let's use some kind of formal academic name (that's not even academic it just sounds formal) for a date but then put it in wry layman terms. You know he's smart but also not uptight and is "down with the vibes" of socializing.

Most people don’t really follow space, think of it as some expensive boondoggle paid for with tax dollars, and don’t see the point. So a little inquiry is in order. What do they think we should be doing instead?

Actually they do. There's a whole cottage industry of pop-sci horseshit that just spews utopian science blog posts under a link to a scientific journal self-published on some online journal host. They talk about space all the time and millions of people follow it like a religion. This has been going on for at least a decade. It's not new, it's not unique. It's not a substitute for a personality. You're not the smart guy in the room because you read another graphine tubes article.

It is paid for with tax dollars. It's also always been about giving tax dollars to private companies. NASA didn't make shit, they contracted Boeing or Lockheed or some other private company to make their hardware. The space agency has never had a nationalized supply chain or manufacturing center. The difference is that NASA got to keep the stuff they designed. Now it's the worst of both worlds. A private company is paid and they keep the IP. If they have some amazing new discovery, they keep it. It gets locked away in some R&D bunker until the marketing guys can come up with a proper sales/profit model for it. If anyone tries to take it by force, it gets destroyed in the seizure. Believe it or not, the goal of a company like SpaceX is not to actually share knowledge with everyone. It's to make money sending things into space. Even that is a dubious idea if you do a little inquiry. It really seems like a way to just keep bilking government contracts while doing a worse job than NASA.

If it’s “climate is going to destroy us all”, point out that multi planetary is not a bad fail safe, but in the meantime, cheap orbital launch can put up more sensors to understand climate effect better, and telescopes that find evidence of other planets becoming wastelands through runaway greenhouse effect.

It's a terrible fail safe. Climate change can kill millions before we even get to have 10 people who permanently live on another planet. Let alone enough people to actually keep the species going. Not to mention Mars sucks to live on. You will always be fighting against a planet that doesn't want you there. Your resources will go to just staying alive. Even if build an army of robot workers so the humans can just live underground (to avoid the constant deadly radiation without having to haul thick metal habitats into space) then you couldn't get it all off the ground. You'd have to ship so slowly to meet mass requirements. Technology isn't magic. Some person on reddit gets a job coding or in IT and they think they're engineers.

We can already put climate satellites into space with what we had. SpaceX didn't invent that. They're not even doing it faster than NASA. That's not what telescopes do or how they work. Jesus fuck how does this person get through the day? Redditors love talking about Dunning-Kruger but the site is made for that kind of person. Of course at the end they link to another post on reddit as proof they're right. Just reading posts and thinking it bestows some kind of expertise. He thinks we're going to look through a telescope and have a little video of another planet going through climate change that will tell us something new. We can't even get visible light images of the closest extra-solar planets. Your aperture would have to be absurdly large and even then the angular size of the planets would still be too small.

If it’s “starving children”, point out that investment in space may lead to cheap beamed power, harvesting of asteroids, and internet worldwide for the “bottom of the pyramid” so that all the worlds poor can learn, ask for help, and contribute. All of this helps alleviate poverty.

Even if you're not a communist, how would this make any sense? Okay you're a capitalist. Why do businesses exist? To make money. If you believe businesses exist to make the world a better place you're just as naive from an actual capitalist view as you are from a communist view. By virtue of being a business it has to make money for investors and it has to make enough money to pay for expenses. A private company also gets to keep what it invents. So cheap beamed power would only be given to the world once it had a business model to sell it. It wouldn't be given to starving children for free. It also wouldn't help food production. Children aren't starving because there's not enough power.

Harvesting asteroids also doesn't make sense. If SpaceX gets a big chunk of gold asteroid, why would they give it to starving children? What's the business move there? PR? Clearly they don't need it because internet nerds will make up all sorts of hypothetical scenarios where starving African children get free time travel devices from Elon Musk. What good is internet to starving people? You think they need to look up recipes or how to grow food? Come on. The source of poverty is not a lack of technology.

If it’s just general “waste of time”, point out that the phone they’ve been checking under the table, the satellite connection beaming their sports to said phone, and the GPS directing them to their after-hours bar they are ditching you for all came from the space program.

??? "You have an iphone right? Then why don't you drink Elon Musk's cum? Checkmate." Also the disdain for someone watching sports and going to a bar. Sure isn't seething with social jealousy here, no sir. Only brutish thug animals who "have big penises" and "have lots of sex" hate my precious science. If only they could cast away their wordly vices and become a true polymath intellectual like myself.

If it’s “billionaires argh”, would you rather it be their money or your tax dollars?

It still is your tax money dipshit. No billionaire is going to risk all their wealth on this shit. They know how far off profitability would be for SpaceX or Virgin.

If it’s “everyone should have a chance to go!” then your date is in fact a socialist and probably not worth the time as they’ll be eaten for food in the end days of Earth.

You think you're going to go to Mars? You think you're worthy because you make Java games for some bottom tier app company? You think Elon has your name on a list and will save you? You don't even know how telescopes work you dolt.

I know it's silly to waste time on redditors but this shit is so easy to torpedo it's not even funny. They're all so fucking sure they know everything and have all the answers, if only society would upvote their posts.

If it’s just general “waste of time”, point out that the phone they’ve been checking under the table, the satellite connection beaming their sports to said phone, and the GPS directing them to their after-hours bar they are ditching you for all came from the space program.

Holy self esteem issues lmao

:brainworms:

Lol they think the billionaires aren't using tax dollars?

That we don't have the solutions for climate change, poverty, and world hunger already? All of those things are issues of political will and this dork thinks that a couple billionaires going through midlife crises are the best solution?

Getting your talking points in order before going on a date, extremely normal behavior.

investment in space may lead to cheap beamed power

lol what :brainworms:

:doomjak:

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The red scare has lasted for a century at this point. Is society (forgive the term) going to continue this demonization until the methane clouds ignite and kill us all?