I’ve definitely turned into the paranoid nutcase within my friend group in recent years, I hate that everything is “smart” nowadays requiring an app/internet connection & account, just to do basic things that didn’t require any of that before.
What’s some things currently making you ramble like an old man?
Anti-space/science rhetoric on the left.
A lot of it comes from people who are anti-Elon and are against everything he touches. So they become anti SpaceX. Then they become anti-aerospace.
They don’t understand, or even want to understand, the science and importance behind it’s advances. The thought process just goes Musk Bad>SpaceX Bad>Aerospace Bad.
Remember how in Interstellar, there’s that teacher who was casually teaching that the moon landings were fake? Like, society had reached a point where they cared so little for space, that they actively turned a blind eye towards its accomplishments or just straight up dismissed them? I feel like that’s the path we’re on. Because of people’s blind hatred towards a rich douche, an entire EXTREMELY IMPORTANT industry is becoming reviled through sheer ignorance.
Depending on what you mean by “left”, i think its more of a “whitey’s on the moon” position, than Musk. Space exploration has led to many scientific advances, the USSR’s space program and the modern day PRC’s shows the left has been and still is commited to space exploration.
But in the US in particular its another example of money going to anything but dealing with the ravages of capitalism in the population: homelessness, hunger, lack of medical care, poor education, etc.
We’re going to make ourselves go extinct, outer space exploration fantasies can go on hold.
No, they are making us go extinct (while ironically living their outer space exploration fantasies)
Communists love tech, Soviet culture was dominated by futurists and despite being destroyed 3 decades ago still hold the world record for most space launches.
The disgust towards SpaceX is also based on a love of technology. Mediocre Internet isn’t worth rendering our observatories useless and polluting prime orbital lanes.
Chinese socialism is also obsessed with tech, megaprojects everywhere, highly resilient public GMO crops massive investments in green energy and novel production techniques. Most of the CPC leadership have engineering degrees. Xi specifically engineered an off-grid bioreactor for winter heating (using animal waste no less) during his volunteer service at the countryside, he was in his 20s and almost got blown up while repairing it.
Tesla is actively making the autonomous vehicle industry look bad as well.
I love astronomy and astrophysics and the academic side of space research. However I am anti-space travel because we’re already surrounded by artificiality: everywhere there’s roads, power lines, introduced species, houses, wayward trash, the constant roar of traffic in the distance (and I live in a rural area!). Even the forests are not real: they’re monoculture tree farms. Many stars are not real: they’re satellites. But at least the moon is real, until we start building moon bases and mining facilities and stain its surface with light pollution. How can I be “pro-space” when everyone from space agencies to corporations seem so giddy to colonize the one mostly-untouched beautiful thing left–something that anyone anywhere on earth can gaze upon–and besmirch it too with humanity’s influence?
Yeah I also think that during the climate crisis we need to be more focused on keeping earth habitable than finding a way off. Like I really do think that long term goals should include space colonization! And I support going to space more from time to time to better understand things. But I see space tourism and attempts to use space as a dick measuring contest and attempts to use space as a backup plan when our ecosystems collapse and no. I love space, I’m glad we did so much space research and I want some of it to continue. But how could we ever hope to build the long term space flights we’d need to get past earth when we can’t stabilize environment on the planet we evolved on. We can’t terraform mars until we can prevent the destruction of earth.
I guess it’s not that I oppose spending money going to space it’s that I think we need to be diligent with it and treat it as the scientific venture it is, not the capitalist and tourist venture many want it to be.
Exploring space will help with those problems. The way I see it if we can figure out how to settle Mars or the Moon, we will figure out better solutions for settling our own planet.
We are not going to colonize all of space, at least not anytime soon.
I don’t think it’s just Musk, there was a lot of pushback towards the moon landings in the 1960s-70s as well. People then felt that funds used in these programs would have been better spent on stuff like social programs and improving infrastructure, criticisms that fit pretty well today too. But we could probably have been to mars and back twice if NASA had like even a quarter of the military’s budget too 💀
Whitey on the moon
For anyone here looking for “anti-Musks”, here’s a list:
-Zhang Kejian: the current directior of China’s National Space Administration
Li Yue: The president of the China Aerospace Science and Industry Corporation
Xi Jinping to some extent, who’s trained as a chemical engineer
Lê Thị Thu Thuỷ: CEO of the Vietnamese EV company VinFast
Chemical Engineer is the new poet in terms of world leadership lol Merkel was a research chemist.
Can you explain more about this? Like what are we going to learn in space that is beneficial to humans living on earth?
How to better treat muscle wasting, osteoporosis, certain eye disorders, force development of hydroponics and other efficient farming techiques, life support, genetics research, advanced materials etc. etc.
Now I’m on board!
This is also the root of why leftists hate bazinga solutions for climate change, it’s seen as a dead end and the obvious fix is at the production level, the root cause of climate change. Communists have a focus on means of production, the hammer and sickle right on the flags are means of production.
I’m genuinely asking… but is this for real?
I should add: What are “bazinga solutions”?
My “anti space” stance has nothing to do with Elon. I simply don’t understand what value it gives when we have so much on earth to fix first.
Folks like you say there are things but won’t actually give examples. If you want to provide some I’ll wholeheartedly listen, for sure.
I’m on board with some space stuff like building JWST or the dart mission. However, sending humans up with rockets just to plant a flag or whatever is totally hedonistic and ridiculous to me.
There is actually a cool NASA page that speaks to this and links to a subpage dedicated to spin-off technologies: https://www.nasa.gov/feature/human-spaceflight-technologies-benefitting-earth/
There is also a wiki article about this subject: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/NASA_spinoff_technologies
This reflects a lack of understanding of the good that comes out of space research. SpaceX exists because Republicans defunded NASA. Space experiments help us solve problems on earth. Not to mention we depend on satellites for everything in our daily lives from weather predictions to communications. Not all of space is “hurr durr I’m Elon musk let’s go to Mars!” In fact most of it isn’t.
For one thing, satellites are necessary for monitoring the health of the earth and ecosystems
For another thing, if all the rich people got in rockets and blasted off to go die on Mars, the world would be much better off
For these reasons I 100% support all space-related research
There is never going to be a time when Earth is perfect and there are no problems anywhere. There is an argument to be made that we should prioritize nonhuman spaceflight but unfortunately robotic missions are not capable of doing a lot of the stuff people can. eg. anything requiring that decisions be made rapidly without the need for mission control to puppet the instruments from Earth. Manned spaceflight also forces the development of technologies like life support, hydroponics, advanced materials science research and the like that would be useful here on Earth as well as medical advances that can be useful for treating osteoporosis, muscle wasting and eye diseases like glaucoma which is the leading cause of blindness. Much of this cant easily be done on Earth due to the need for a microgravity environment. And again, you cant do this with just robots. People have to be exposed to these environments to result in the physiological changes that microgravity causes.
So you do like that JWST went up and that its a benefit.
JWST is childsplay compared to the kind of telescopes we can put up in space with a rocket like starship at a fraction of the cost.
Instead of a complicated unfolding structure, Starship will be the housing for the mirror, so we’ll have a 9m mirror in space with a vastly simpler setup. JWST was 6.5m and will cost more than I believe the entire starship development budget will ever cost.
Next, put a complicated mirror like jwst in starship, and we could probably get it past 20m!
We also get things like starlink or others constellations that provide global internet with a dish, and soon, because of large rockets like starship, global cell coverage.
Global cellular coverage will be incredibly helpful and even save lives.
We can get so much from it, and the cheaper and more reusable it is to get up there, the more we’ll be be able to do and learn to do
What important advances are we talking about. Would be honestly interested, though I have to confess that I feel it might not be that much or big of a practical positive effect for society?
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I have a feeling the “lefties” you’re talking about aren’t actually leftists in any real sense.
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Anyone who supports capitalism is not left, it’s pretty simple
I think there’s (at least) two factors here: the first being that western leftists in general (it’s not even necessarily based on sect, I’ve seen this in most major tendencies) still have brainworms from the (capital-L) Liberal society they grew up in and so have weird views on certain issues (I won’t even deny that I don’t still). I mean, truthfully, most leftists around the world have weird views on certain subjects, not just western ones, but the West has absolutely astounding propaganda networks and techniques, so much so that most don’t even think that they could be propagandized - that’s a thing that non-democratic countries do, and we live in democracies!
And second, there’s can be a tightrope to walk on some scientific issues. Like, take the coronavirus vaccines for instance - there are people who argued, from the left, that because all these massive pharmaceutical industries are only interested in profit and not really for curing anybody of anything, that we therefore should oppose the vaccines. This is obviously a harmful, crank belief, but one can see how by opposing everything a giant corporation and the imperialist and racist etc American government tells you to do, that you might consider yourself “more of a leftist” regardless of what that thing actually is. In that case, you might even try and adopt crank scientific positions by only paying attention to papers that suggest that vaccines don’t do anything, or even harm people, while ignoring the vast majority that correctly claim that they are beneficial to take and that people should take them. If you’re that person, you might think “Oh, I believe the scientists on all these other issues, but on THIS one I think the influence by X corporation is just so high that all of these papers are biased in favor of vaccines; if anything, I’M the one who’s more strictly obeying the scientific method!” Again, they’re obviously wrong, but if you already disregard (as many of us should) the findings of very official-sounding thinktanks that are actually funded and staffed by capitalist ghouls, then disregarding actual science might be an easy jump to make for some “leftists”.
What “political slogan” might you be talking about? You a climate change denier or an “only 2 gender” transphobe? Because odds are that you are based on your rhetoric.
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I’ve noticed this trend as well. These far-left people hate the ultra rich so much that they are demonizing the whole idea of space tourism. It’s infuriating because just like nearly everything else, development costs are very high and only early adopters can really afford the latest bleeding edge products.
Do these people think that some 50" 4K TV today could be had for just a few hundred bucks, if they weren’t going for many thousands 5 years ago? That’s simply how the breakdown of costs works out. You need rich people to buy into something at low volumes, so the masses can afford those things at higher volumes but lower prices in the future.
Musk and Bezos absolutely are douchebags, but realize that without their space companies, we’d be decades away from regular space travel. I love NASA and all, but their goal is space exploration, not space tourism. We need the ultra rich to pay for the development of space tourism to drive down costs.
This is a horrible take. Absolutely awful, ultra-capitalist drivel. Why does every action or accomplishment have to be viewed through the lense of economic benefit? Not even holistic or utilitarian, just stakeholders and making the ultra-wealthy even wealthier… Who gives a fuck about space tourism? What the hell does that give us as a species?
The original comment about the importance of aerospace and space exploration is absolutely correct, but the idea that the end goal is space tourism is more than enough to make me turn against it also. The end goal is exploration, technological advancements, and a greater understanding of how our universe works. We should be taxing the ever-loving shit out of sociopaths like Musk and Bezos and feeding some of that in to NASA, and ESA, so scientists can make discoveries for us all, rather than businessmen making discoveries so they can exploit, gatekeep, and profit off it.
Exactly what I was thinking. Like what the fuck is space tourism going to do for us?
You can say that about tourism as a whole.
If you weren’t so utterly braindead, you’d understand that if the cost to bring tourists up to space drops, that drops the cost to bring more scientists and equipment up to space as well which would lead to a massive growth in discoveries.
Except that you are so caught up in your tiny little world of hate, that you can’t possibly expand it enough to understand that things cost money, and thus reducing what things cost, makes it that much better for institutions like NASA. One of the single biggest concerns of setting up a new space telescope or sending a rocket to a comet or a trip to Mars is money. It isn’t the only concern, but it is a massive one. Driving down those costs by increasing a launch schedule, trying out reusable rockets and investing a bunch to allow space tourism, helps everything space-related.
You’re not smart enough to come back here and admit how wrong you were.
Obviously things cost money, you patronising jackass, but pining all your hopes on CEOs and the ultra-wealthy to cut in to their own profit margins for the sake of humanity makes you more braindead than I am. It’s scientific innovation that drives discovery, cost reduction, and economic growth, not profit-hoarding conglomerates.
A large portion of our discoveries and inventions in the past fifty years or more are building on top of innovations made during the 60s, 70s, and 80s by NASA’s launches. Electrical engineering, structural engineering, communications and data, materials sciences, all needed to be advanced for space travel. Handing this responsibility off to SpaceX just leads to all the data, discoveries, innovations, and corollaries being patented, trademarked, and locked away to make sure no competitor can take advantage of it.
Shell knew climate change was going to devastate the planet over 50 years ago. Did they capitalise on that opportunity to develop green and renewable energy first and completely dominate that market for the betterment of themselves and the planet? No. They locked down that information, spread misinformation for decades, and made short term profiteering decisions to advance their own individual careers. Now we’re watching the planet slowly burn. So sure, let’s trust the corporate pigs.
I don’t think your conclusion is accurate. Space Tourism didn’t contribute to the first fifty years of technological advancement. You can’t use it as the basis for future unknown advancement.
That is true, the first fifty years are to be attributed to being better and faster than the other side just for the chance to be better at blowing them up.
There’s nothing like the motivation that comes from an actual rival.