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.
Nope. Because when I look up into the night sky I don't see anything but the moon when it's out and the beacon lights of passing airplanes. I've seen pictures of stars in museums and the internet, but I've never seen them myself.
Not at night, no. Last time I would have been somewhere I was able to see stars was when I was driving down from Chicago to Miami with my family, but I was too tired from driving 12 hours a day to leave the hotel room to look at the sky.
Edit: I just checked this light pollution map the two places we stayed on the way to miami have red levels of light pollution. I've lived in the white areas my whole life.
Holy shit that light pollution map is eye-opening. I live deep in the red. I have been to places that I thought were more or less free of light pollution where I could see so many stars and it's one of the most beautiful things I've ever seen.
Dark yellow.
I look at the stars and smile thinking of all our space comrades :posadist-nuke:
Yeah our vision of the future has been reduced to basically nothing. That said I don't feel sad looking at the stars. Too pretty.
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).
Personally when I look at the stars I feel relief from the doom-think, its like that quote from LOTR:
“There, peeping among the cloud-wrack above a dark tor high up in the mountains, Sam saw a white star twinkle for a while. The beauty of it smote his heart, as he looked up out of the forsaken land, and hope returned to him. For like a shaft, clear and cold, the thought pierced him that in the end the Shadow was only a small and passing thing: there was light and high beauty for ever beyond its reach.”
Whatever happens to the human race life will go on, the universe will still unfold in its magnificent design. For all the beautiful things that the Musk's and Bezos's of the world have plundered and destroyed there will be a million more wonders that they cannot even dream of poisoning.
all of our futures have been robbed
the trans experience is when your past was also robbed :agony-consuming:
Born too late to explore the world.
Born too early to explore the universe.
Born just in time to shitpost.
I don't get sad. I think it's calming to look up at the stars, or at the Earth as seen from far away in space, and realize that nothing here matters in the unfathomably massive cosmic scheme. Every single human who has ever lived on this planet has been insignificant and meaningless. We live and love and fight and die on this tiny speck of wet dust in the middle of goddamn nowhere in a galaxy larger than our useless monkey brains can even attempt to comprehend, and that galaxy itself is tiny and insignificant compared to the vastness of the universe in which we live.
We are nothing. We have always been nothing. I find that comforting.
yeah I feel this. when I was a kid the books talked about how we'd have a moon colony by 2020
Looking at the night sky makes me quite anxious actually, whenever I think of the scale of the universe I become very uneasy. Sometimes I see those videos that compare sizes of stars or whatever and I have to immediately stop thinking about it.
Humans know extremely little about the universe, we barely know about ourselves even, and I do think about this a lot. I used to be a proponent of antinatalism because of how insignificant we are. Inevitably, if we don't kill each other, I think there will be some truth that will destroy us, although I feel like the fact of our insignificance should have broken the world already.
I get sad that I can't see them because of the light pollution. I never really bought into the space age, so I don't really get sad about that.
