Whenever I look at the stars i think about how humanity could be united in exploring space, working together on large scale projects like building a Dyson sphere, terraforming planets, making plans and advancements to preserve humanity for millenniums to come. Instead we're stuck on this small ball, still struggling with issues like hunger, poverty, etc that feel like should have been issues long gone by now but aren't because some greedy fucks are deciding to make people suffer for their own personal gain. The planet is dying and its starting to feel things are too far gone at this point. I know I'm being a bit of a doomer but I can't help feeling that all of our futures have been robbed.
I've always been interested in space, since I was a little kid. Like, there's a whole world under our feet full of history to learn, and people who have lived and are living lives of joy and hardship and love, where we try to understand how our world, and the universe we are in, work. I look up at the night sky and I wonder how many other worlds there could be like ours orbiting the stars I see. If someone else, too far away to comprehend, is looking in my direction, wondering the same thing.
We should be setting up outposts on Mars and Deimos by now, not just letting Elon Musk milk the government with rockets based off old NASA designs to fuck around in LEO. The interests of capital put the brakes on space exploration after the USSR was dissolved, because, without Commies to prove you're better than, there's no reason for capitalists to dump money into the sky.
That's why, for most of the space race, the USSR were the clear leaders. You can land a craft on the surface of Venus and take the only pictures of one of the most hostile environments in the solar system, even though it won't make you any money, if your society is not founded on generating profit. And that kind of ambition is what would open the door to the rest of the solar system and, eventually, to the rest of the galaxy.
In 2017, a bunch of old Soviet time capsules with letters were dug up for the centenary of the Revolution, buried around 1967. Most mentioned big, pie-in-the-sky sci-fi dreams of aliens and intergalactic travel. People in the Soviet Union had hope for humanity's future in the stars. And hope for the Union fifty years from then. It's sad reading through some of the quotes people left in the capsules.
I'm excited by China's space program. While they're not doing missions on the scale of the USSR's program (yet), they're the only ones who are actually trying to do research and go to the Moon (unless you count crashing).