A lot of the attraction of futurism is actually conflict-avoidance. The belief is that new technology will make everyone's lives better, avoiding the need to confront power or to work through a nonfunctional legal system. How much we invest in trains is a political question, and political questions are unsolvable from their PoV. But that's OK because you can just invent your way out of problems, and everyone will like you because everyone likes scientists and anyone who doesn't is a luddite or an ideologue and not worth listening to.
To say that we already have the solutions to public transit or to climate change or to whatever else, and that they're just not being implemented for political reasons, and that the same political reasons will likely apply to future technologies that attempt to reinvent the wheel - that flies in the face of their whole worldview.
You don't even need to be a communist or an environmentalist to understand that bringing more shit from outside earth with no clear plan to take out shit out of earth will just bury the crust in shit. You just need to understand basic mass and energy balances, but apparently the 1st law of thermodynamics isn't STEM(TM) enough.
A lot of the attraction of futurism is actually conflict-avoidance. The belief is that new technology will make everyone's lives better, avoiding the need to confront power or to work through a nonfunctional legal system. How much we invest in trains is a political question, and political questions are unsolvable from their PoV. But that's OK because you can just invent your way out of problems, and everyone will like you because everyone likes scientists and anyone who doesn't is a luddite or an ideologue and not worth listening to.
To say that we already have the solutions to public transit or to climate change or to whatever else, and that they're just not being implemented for political reasons, and that the same political reasons will likely apply to future technologies that attempt to reinvent the wheel - that flies in the face of their whole worldview.
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People often turn to magical thinking because the reality is we're all fucked.
You don't even need to be a communist or an environmentalist to understand that bringing more shit from outside earth with no clear plan to take out shit out of earth will just bury the crust in shit. You just need to understand basic mass and energy balances, but apparently the 1st law of thermodynamics isn't STEM(TM) enough.
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