Welcome to the age of space scepticism – and a growing revolt against elites

https://theconversation.com/welcome-to-the-age-of-space-scepticism-and-a-growing-revolt-against-elites-231504

38 40 2 years ago

torlok• 2 years ago

While I have the same wonder as everybody else about the universe, the way Musk talks about going to Mars always seemed like he just wants to leave by any means necessary instead of making Earth liveable, even if it's to a planet that's less habitable than the north pole.

It's difficult to argue against the new space race, because it is moving us forward, but to me it has the same vibes as when billionaires fund universities as their charity work instead of helping people here and now. Technically it's good for the future of humanity, but at the same time we're perpetually stuck in exploiting people for cheap labour, and then investing in future generations that will also be exploited and feel miserable, but they'll have an iPhone.

clipsy• 2 years ago

the way Musk talks about going to Mars always seemed like he just wants to leave by any means necessary

Which is amusing, because a whole lot of other people also just want him to leave by any means necessary.

fouc• 2 years ago

I honestly find the skepticism about human activities in space to be annoying. And it's been going on for many decades.

A lot of people seem to be automatically skeptical about space. They somehow think that investing in space is taking away from investing in the planet Earth. I disagree with that premise.

I think we can do both. And we should do both.

Colonizing the Moon or Mars will actually require significant understanding of Earth ecology. We still have lots to learn from Earth.

tetris11• 2 years ago

The article frames it as though everyone who is skeptical in this new space race is also anti-astronomy from the examples it uses.

I think this is a false premise. Plenty of people love astronomy and the insights it has given to other worlds and ours, but are skeptic of what building and expending rockets can do for the world, except launch monitoring sattelites, tourism, and eventually the ability to build starships.

elzbardico4• 2 years ago

The cynical in me thinks this is very suspicious to have appeared organically.

Especially when you consider it is very convenient for the plebe to direct their attentions to this subject while ignoring the other far more nefarious stuff the same elites have been doing to allocate a bigger piece of the pie for them.

It is almost like someone is distracting the Tiers-État with a sacrificial goat.

mlsu• 2 years ago

It stems from a more fundamental misunderstanding about how allocation of resources works.

If a space program costs $10b and you suddenly defund it, you don't get $10b to spend on other stuff. You get a bunch of unemployed people, most of whom are interested in and good at launching things into space.

I believe this phenomenon is responsible for SpaceX's success: a huge group of smart, motivated people, interested in space, being grossly mismanaged. Projects canceled, bureaucracy, etc. SpaceX comes along and says "we actually want to go to space; we're gonna do it for real" and all the sudden those people are breaking their backs working 80h weeks to hit impossible deadlines. You can't just buy that or materialize it from thin air, not for all the pork in NASA.

If these rocket scientists and engineers are doing anything other than rocket science or engineering it's a loss for all of us. Certainly for them as well.

mcmoor• 2 years ago

Everyone have their own rational ratio of how much should be allocated for space (or any blue sky research). For example I'd oppose my country funding a moon landing, not only because my country have GDP per capita 20 times less than USA, also because trust in central government capability is low af.

USA itself may be much much richer and more capable, but it just means there'll still be rational limit, but higher.

jdkee• 2 years ago

Thie article reads like decel propaganda.

10u152• 2 years ago

Claiming the moon is of spiritual significance so nobody is allowed there put me over the edge. Can I just invent a religion and claim all the planets as well? Ridiculous.

oraphalous• 2 years ago

Reminds me a quite a bit of the plot line from Liu Cixin's The Dark Forest. When aliens are set to wipe out humanity in 400 years, the idea of a small number of elites escaping in generation ships is so abhorrent to the masses that would be left behind, that 'Escapism' is deemed a crime and banned.

I wonder if among civilisations generally in the universe, this resentment is so common, it could be counted as a "hard step" in Robin Hanson's grabby aliens model.

https://arxiv.org/pdf/2102.01522

corimaith• 2 years ago

The article points out this is mostly a western phenomenon. In China where the inequality is much more stark, support remains high.

I wouldn't say this is resentment as much as classic resource allocation struggles at play here. A zero sum view that X resources put into space is X resources not being put into my goals. They'll do it with other areas too like military spending or foreign aid, but space is more vulnerable.

elzbardico4• 2 years ago

Home ownership rate in China is around 90%. Maybe their billionaires are really fucking billionaires, but your assertion of inequality being much more stark in China is hard to reconcile with this data when most young folks I know are renters or went back to live with their parents and the vast quantities of homeless people I see.

Really, China is not a paradise, but we should be aware of the fact that we are fed copious amount of anti-china propaganda everyday.

aurareturn• 2 years ago

Historically, are there periods in which the wealthy holds an abnormally high percentage of wealth like now? If so, what did society do in response? Can we expect the same patterns to repeat?

For example, are there correlations between wealth inequality and the popularity of socialism? Does wealth inequality increase societal instability?

ipaddr• 2 years ago

Yes anytime before today. In feudal society you had King/Nobel who owned all and serfs who worked their land.

zrn9007• 2 years ago

That's patently false. Feudal law required that the serfs get 33% of the produce from the fields. The economy was mostly tied to farm produce and the serfs could not be kicked out from their houses.

friend_and_foe• 2 years ago

Abnormally high like now? Have you read any history? Slavery and monarchy, that's what most of history looks like. What we live in is an abnormally low wealth disparity.

Nasrudith2• 2 years ago

If anything wealth inequality technically produces societal stability. In the form of a secure ruling class without rivals and thus a more stagnant society. The (god) king or emperor was unimaginably rich but few were stupid enough to try to rob someone who has secured the loyalty of legions. A more equal society results in relatively speaking any Tom, Dick, or Harry being able to influence things and would thus be far less stable.

Note the main point: that societal stability isn't automatically a good thing in itself.

grugagag2• 2 years ago

You’re forgetting the times when the ask from the poor was more than they could handle resulting in riots and revolutions.

elzbardico4• 2 years ago

Well, this theory would be disputed by lots of french aristocrats who had the displeasure of having their heads mechanically separated from their bodies by sharp fast moving heavy blades some centuries ago.

zrn9007• 2 years ago

Historically, are there periods in which the wealthy holds an abnormally high percentage of wealth like now?

No. Even Roman emperors did not control this much wealth. Nor the patricians.

In the middle ages, even less - the feudal law mandated that the serfs get 33% of the produce from the fields, church 33%, and the local lord the rest 33%.

CamperBob22• 2 years ago

They didn't control this much wealth because they didn't have any way to create it. "This much wealth" simply didn't exist.

garciansmith• 2 years ago

It depends the time or place you are comparing (e.g., seventeenth century Britain was a more unequal place than modern day Britain).

And in the Middle Ages, even if you just look at Western Europe, wealth distribution could be extremely variable between places and times. A peasant in eighth century Lombardy would have been subjected to totally different customs and laws than one in twelfth century Brittany, same with other segments of society. There was nothing like a universal "feudal law" anywhere. Even the concept of the "church" being a single monolithic thing that received X% of wealth makes no sense (e.g., bishops could simultaneously be lay lords with vast holdings, a monastery could be rich or poor, etc.).

stevenwoo• 2 years ago

For countries for which there was data, Piketty collected census and tax data for his book Capital and Ideology and my recollection is the worst inequality in recorded history was during pre French Revolution times where he measured using I think 10 percent bins for each percentage of a nation's wealth. He put all the data on his website, but I didn't bother looking into it further. But he noted that as a society got wealthier, the higher inequality can rise, because the non elites have enough to for basic survival in a wealthy society, i.e. rising tide lifts all boats but only up to a certain point.

jc6• 2 years ago

Both sides evolve tactics in reaction to each other just like the parasite and host evolve side by side.

So what you see tomorrow wont look like what happened yesterday.

Welcome to the age of space scepticism – and a growing revolt against elites

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