It's hard not to trust answers which are superhumanly plausible.
Imagine being offered a choice of two oracles. The first oracle would give you an answer that is inspiring yet mysterious and oblique. The second gives an answer that is guaranteed to be unoriginal but also highly, highly plausible. It also maintains a record of all the questions and makes them available to unknown persons.
I miss being able to spontaneously buy a ticket and travel off to see a friend in another town or city. I did quite a lot as a young man with the help of my 'young person's railcard'. The cost would be prohibitive nowadays because only tickets bought well in advance are cheap.
Yes. There are distinct male virtues, such as courage, nobility and authority. But if a man isn't honest then he's not worthy of consideration. Or, if you like, he hasn't yet matured into manhood.
This is why so much of totalitarianism is about getting men to repeat lies. Or why those check boxes 'I have read and understood the terms and conditions' are harmful.
Doubling down and doubling down on some feeling (or lack of feeling) repeatedly isn't merely a strategy. It is the selling of ones's soul. There's no one left inside by the end of it, just a shell, with no creative power or freedom.
I think you've got it the wrong way around. All ideology is wrong, incorrect and fails in contact with reality. The true purpose of ideology (or 'the system') is to provide its adherents with the excuse they need to act badly. It could be relatively mild attempts to increase social status through hypocrisy and virtue-signalling. Or it could be to commit murder, torture and so on.
As Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn put it:
Ideology—that is what gives evildoing its long-sought justification and gives the evildoer the necessary steadfastness and determination. That is the social theory which helps to make his acts seem good instead of bad in his own and others’ eyes, so that he won’t hear reproaches and curses but will receive praise and honors.
What obscures matters is that evil tends to operate in layers with each layer deceived by the layer above it in the hierarchy (or below it, if you prefer a lowerarchy). So at the bottom there is a multitude of relatively decent people who don't want to kill and really do believe in the system.
I go for a decent walk most days and it doesn't require effort or get boring. It goes well with listening to headphones and relaxing the eyes on the horizon plus seeing a bit of nature and humanity in action.
This does me a lot of good however the only upper body exercise I get is playing the piano! I can't see myself joining a gym or doing press-ups reliably in the long-term. I need to find a suitable hobby which has upper body + other benefits while being fun/interesting and low-risk. Carrying logs has helped but we have enough firewood now.
Some people may be motivated by a wish to escape other people, but many will want to go to space because it's so cool. In other words: for adventure, romance and blazing a trail for other people to follow.
Having the right spirit and the right motivation creates mental well-being, not material or social conditions. By those standards, medieval life was far worse than today, but I don't think the people then were less happy or less motivated than people today. Quite the reverse.
Scouring the article I see no evidence for this claim whatsoever.
> Having the right spirit and the right motivation creates mental well-being, not material or social conditions.
The right spirit and motivation isn't going to help you avoid chromosome & telomere damage, or chronic lack of sleep.
Wouldn't it best to know the risks (and smells) going in? Because that's what the author is laying out. The author isn't stopping you from going into space, just putting the facts out there.
I don’t think anybody who’s serious about off-planet habitation is shirking the risks. They’re just confident that the problems can be solved one way or another and are trying to get the ball rolling so that all the required systems are in place to enable iterating on solutions. That way, when the technology is ready we can just go instead of twiddling our thumbs waiting for tech and systems to arrive.
I have no problem with any of that, though it sure would be cool if we dealt with the worst of our climate, war, inequality and poverty issues before burning money to privatize space.
But clearly laying out the very real risks and discomforts, as the author here as done, doesn't justify accusations of "not being a happy bunny". That's all.
> I have no problem with any of that, though it sure would be cool if we dealt with the worst of our climate, war, inequality and poverty issues before burning money to privatize space.
Sadly, I’m not sure that’s possible. There’s a very high chance that if we wait for those things to be solved before going out, we’ll simply never go out.
That’s why I think it should all be done in parallel.
> There’s a very high chance that if we wait for those things to be solved before going out, we’ll simply never go out.
I think the opposite is true.
Right now, humanity is unable to solve genocide, nuclear proliferation, starvation, incredible inequality; or even airplane food.
If we go out as this privatized mess, there's not a good chance of a positive outcome. Space is too vast - far, far, far, far, far too vast*. And far more dangerous than most people think, as this article scratches the surface of.
If we come together as a species and fix our major problems before we kill the planet, then we have thousands of years to get space right; and when we do, we won't be bringing our massive problems with us.
* - "Space is big. You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is."
> If we come together as a species and fix our major problems before we kill the planet, then we have thousands of years to get space right; and when we do, we won't be bringing our massive problems with us.
That’s the sticking point. I don’t have any faith that this can or will happen. When considering all of the different parties vying for power at any given point, it seems impossible. There’s just too much self-interest from too many powerful forces involved.
There’s a non-trivial chance that we will never come together, even on a millennial time scale. It wouldn’t surprise me at all if we either drive ourselves to extinction or go out along with the inner solar system when the sun becomes a red giant without it having ever occurred.
> There’s a non-trivial chance that we will never come together, even on a millennial time scale
If you really believe that, then why do you think we deserve to infest the rest of the galaxy? We'd be planet killers, bringing death and mayhem wherever we god. Intelligent life would be wise to put us out of their misery before we pop our landers.
I believe our problems are solvable, because our problems all seem to boil back to the same tiny group of people fucking things up for everyone... And some of that group are the people privatizing space.
Because the scale of space means that by necessity, humanity will cease to be a monolith. There’s simply no way for a culture that’s scattered across the Sol system and eventually multiple star systems to move as a single piece.
Instead, it’ll splinter into many groups that all undergo independent cultural evolution, each going in its own direction, many of which will be unimpeded by the others. Just by sheer numbers, eventually one (probably multiple) will find a better way forward that leaves the baggage of humanity’s past behind and allows it to become incredibly prosperous.
The chances of something like that happening on Earth seem much lower. We’re too stuck within our local maxima and too beholden to self-preserving power structures for substantial change to occur.
I'm not even a programmer, but I can tell that dates are ambiguous a lot of the time.
e.g. dd/mm/yyyy (British) and mm/dd/yyyy (USA) can be confused for the first twelve days of every month.
So, given the high volume of international communication, I think we should hand-write months in full, or at least as the first three letters (Jan, Feb, Mar, ..., Dec)
We should also abandon three-letter acronyms (but that's another story).
Imagine being offered a choice of two oracles. The first oracle would give you an answer that is inspiring yet mysterious and oblique. The second gives an answer that is guaranteed to be unoriginal but also highly, highly plausible. It also maintains a record of all the questions and makes them available to unknown persons.