What's with this recent hopium trend where people seem to think that we'll become a space-faring utopia?
Space race propaganda plus end of history nonsense created a lot of unreasonable expectations. Nerds are gonna have a hard time when they come down to reality.
The worst thing granpap ever did (besides all the imperialism & genocide) was preach these stupid fantasies of moonbases & fully sentient robots next door to a room full of people have to calculate trajectories on slide-rules.
You know why Von Braun & Co's Nazi asses had these dreams of massive orbital habitats? Because they could predict the future of telecoms, but not the existence of transistors. They imagined fully staffed orbital switchboards where your twitch streams would be manually connected by operators.
But somehow this got lost over the last 80 years and now for some reason people keep holding out for Heinleinian dreams of vacation restaurants in Venusian cloud & orgies with incestuous gingers in O'Neill cylinders.
Fuck you. The future of space industry is robot probes and weaponized mirror-shades when global warming gets unignorable. The timeframe for planetary colonization, fusion power, and zero-g gangbangs was 50 years ago and its too late now.
They were not the only ones. We forget how the Soviets were the ones to first popularise and develop these ideas of humanity as a space faring race, with the stars the natural habitat of New Soviet Man. The Nazis stole and twisted them to further their Fascist Imperialism.
Tsiolkovsky invented technological space travel, and Korolev and Glushko were his direct apprentices. Soviet rockets put men in space. Soviets made the first probes and the first long term habitats. While the USA wasted its time and money on grandstanding spectacle the Soviet Union was pioneering long term habitation of space.
We should not cede this arena to Musk and his ilk.
I find it particularly baffling when I run into someone who thinks terraforming Mars is an alternative to solving climate change.
yes, obviously we can severely alter the ecological conditions of a planet we can barely reach far easier than we could ever fix our own. its just science
No, even then. Terraforming Mars would require far more resources than solving climate change. A climate change-esque problem is what you get when you're 99.99% of the way to having finished creating a new atmosphere for the planet.
If humans existing in any form at all for slightly longer than in a different situation is a win them they're correct. The fact that more people could live for much longer if they abandoned escapism for the rich then they wouldn't be capitalists ever seeking more to pillage.
Elon "I'd rather pay the OSHA fines than paint yellow safety lines in my stylish factory" Musk
Elon "sending SWAT to murder a potential whistle-blower" Musk
They also think that every new game, every hyped movie, everything is going to be the most amazing thing ever. Any hint of a scientific breakthrough is meme-ized, exaggerated, and posted to Facebook with a IFLS watermark. Something groundbreaking is always just around the corner. It's called the average consumer who buys into media hype. It makes money, it works, there's plenty of them.
those are the same people who just think "innovation" will solve climate change
Constant territorial expansion is the only way Capitalism can comfortably perpetuate itself. It creates a nice thicc layer of middle income petit bourgeois to keep do the bourgeoisie's bidding, and that middle strata is the basis of the American mindset. It was created out of westward expansion and continued through imperialist expansion but it's reached an end, so moving on to the stars seems like the next rational step. SciFi is brimming with le ebic space colonization narratives because of this settler mindset.
space. the final frontier
frontier.
manifest destiny mindset intensifies
Keep thinking about this thic layer of middle income class thing. There is a popular tweet yesterday quoting a gallop poll saying among registered voters 50% something feel their life is getting better than 4 years ago. It seems absurd, esp. during a fucking pandemic, but, Twitter replies miss the “registered voter” part, which spilled all the secret source: they are the ultimate consumer of the election reality TV show, the culture war, the American Protestantism settler ideology, consuming the American dream until the last drop.
It's always fun to watch pop science channels like Kurzgesagt talk about "humanity's glorious future as an interstellar civilisation" with space elevators and Dyson spheres as if it's a foregone conclusion
They said that in 2000, like word for word as a child I heard "rich people will be able to take vacations in space in the next 20 years" from dozens of people once the y2k ears faded.
tbf they werent wrong. its just that those vacations are like "yay you went up in a spaceplane! isnt space neat!"
I saw a comment today that said space travel will “save the human race” fucking hell.
Survive longer than the planet.
We ain’t making it another couple hundred years and what are we going to do live in some other part of the universe? We have millions of years before the sun eats us up can’t we just enjoy it here? I mean once your dead do you really care if the human race is alive another 1 million years or 10,000 years?
just thinkin bout the myconid spaceage horny posts...
shootin thick spores into the upper atmosphere 🥵 :nuke:
edit: more serious note, the universe is obviously cyclical. even if the whole thing ends in heat death, the nature of infinity basically guarantees another universe would form at some point, given that one previously has. whatever circumstances that occur to cause that will inevitably happen again
Elon going to bring back shanghaiing but they bring you to Mars to work in the red sand mines now.
Well I personally can’t wait for capitalism to also ruin the climates of other planets like some sort of shitty galactic bacterial infection
Highly toxic soil that needs to be processed to remove perchlorates? Sign me up buddy
Ah, but instead of worthless stuff like food, those perchlorates could be used to make bombs instead
We would if Stalin hadn't died. He was one of the staunchest supporters of Soviet Cosmism.
Yes, but he directly supported Tsiolkovsky and helped publicise his work, set up the early rocket research groups, and in the 1930s Soviet Space Science was arguably ahead of German efforts. Stalin personally had a hand in the career of Tikhonravov, an apprentice of Tsiolkovsky and the inventor of the Katushya launcher.
Stalin had a hand in personally rescuing Korolev from the Gulag after he found out what had happened with the whole purge situation (There's a whole story about German infiltration and a scheming wrecker here, but short story Yezhov had been intercepting Korolev's personal pleas to him. Beria in a rare moment of humanity showed them to him.)
While obviously the primary purpose of the rocket effort was the ICBM, Stalin was clear on the more radical applications, with him having several memos with Korolev on the subject and arranging a presentation to the Central Committee just before his death.
Korolev presented his designs for a satellite in April 1954, and the proposal was narrowly voted down without Stalin's support. However, Korolev leaked info on rocket developments to Tikhonravov, who published a series of national newspaper articles describing the Soviet's intent to dominate space. The USA read these and panicked, the Soviets saw the US panicking and thought giving Korolev his little satellite would be great trolling, starting the initial phases of the space race, which until this moment had been ICBM focused.
cool i didnt know that. i was a big sucker for space exploration history when i was younger.
in the 1930s Soviet Space Science was arguably ahead of German efforts
i didnt even know the germans had a space effort in the 30, since they were a bit worried over the becoming a dictatorship bit
Look up the Verin Fur Raumschiffahrt, which was an amatuer (read: rich aristo-scientists with no day job and a bundle of under-the-table military funding) society that got snapped up in the mid 30s by the Nazi's, but were basically doing the same liquid fuel experiments Goddard et al were doing in the states before Hitler came to power.
emh if it makes you happier if you know special relativity you'd know that if you go real fast in proportion to the speed of light, space contracts so it doesnt look like that much time passes for you (like wise people on earth will see you experience time slower) so while you would still take decades or centuries to get anywhere you wouldnt feel much of that
In a strange way, even our isolation gets folded between space and time by relativity. We're not technically trapped in space, since subjectively we can go as fast as we want.
But if you travel for a few years at high rapidity, you'll probably never see those again who you left behind, because centuries or millenia might pass for them. And when you arrive, you'll arrive at a different place than you set out to, because all that time passed there, too. Maybe twice as much time, if you consider that what you set out towards was a image that has to travel to you first.
So the more we spread out in space, the more we are trapped in little pockets of time, shared only by those travelling together.
this is what happens when people take too many creative writing classes and not one science one,
I've never taken a writing class, and I do general relativity as my day job. What does that say about me?
oh my im sorry i just feel like everyone here is super pumped on philosophy, history, writing etc and so everytime you have to debate soemthing from science nobody is prepared and they get out these fake-deep considerations which make me cringe a bit, i thought you were part of that crowd
what jobe has you have to take in consideration GR daily? other than physics teacher/scientist, what, orbital eletronics?
No worries, I might have gone to hard on the prose there. The issue of desyncronization is a real problem, though, and it puts a hard limit on the coherence of any hypothetical multi-system civilization.
I'm doing a PhD in theoretical physics right now, specializing in numerical general relativity, i.e. black hole/neutron star/gravitational wave simulations. So, nowhere near as useful as orbital electronics.
