[wozniacki]

It pays to keep this in the context of the events in our recent history which some argue have lead to a certain stripe of ideological stagnation in America, not just in the way we perceive modernity but in also their debilitating influence on how we perceive actual technological progress itself.

Peter Thiel has been steadfastly vocal on this :

  I think one of the … you know, the counter-cultural in the '60s
  was the hippies. You know, we landed on the moon in July of 1969.
  Woodstock started three weeks later, and with the benefit of 
  hindsight, that’s when progress ended, and the hippies took over
  the country.

  Today the counterculture is to believe in science and technology.
  You know, our society, the dominant culture doesn’t like science.
  It doesn’t like technology. You just look at the science-fiction 
  movies that come out of Hollywood — Terminator, Matrix, Avatar, 
  Elysium. I watched the Gravity movie the other day. It’s like you
  would never want to go into outer space. You would just want to be
  back on some muddy island. And so I think we’re in a world where 
  actually believing that a better future is possible that you can 
  have agency and work towards a better future, that is actually 
  radically counter-cultural.[1]

[1]

Peter Thiel and Glenn Beck discuss what the counterculture looks like.

http://www.glennbeck.com/2014/10/21/could-this-be-the-new-co...

(or if your political persuasion forbids you against patronizing Beck)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IER50pX-FuM

[trgn]

IMHO, the space example is bad. I have no interest in space travel. Not because I don't believe in technology, but because I don't think there's anything appealing about going to space. Yeah, I think living on some cool Star Trek planet would be fun, but we're talking about the moon or Mars. They are, well, rocks. For a lot of people, like Thiel, space is like Plan B, where we go to after we blow up the earth. I don't think that's going to happen anytime soon. And should it happen, the earth during a nuclear winter will still be infinitely more hospitable than some plastic pod on Mars.

Space-stuff is a cerebral pleasure. As an astronaut you can feel in awe as you experience the sum total of human technological prowess. But space is a horrible sensual pleasure. Mindnumbingly dull, ugly, and most of all, shackled. No personal freedom, fully a slave to the overlords in Houston.

Let space to the robots. They can go mine ores, take pictures, and putz around in the dust. But that sounds like a terrible way to spend time as a human.

[VLM]

"Mindnumbingly dull, ugly, and most of all, shackled. No personal freedom, fully a slave to the overlords"

So the experience of 99% of humanity ... on Mars. The "on Mars" part sounds better enough to sign up for.

I suppose there's an aspect of personal taste. I think Mars and the Moon are very beautiful. Imagine what a landscape photographer like Ansel Adams could have done if unleashed on the surface of the Moon...

Someday we'll have a colony up there and I think its important that before we start bulldozing and building a human settlement up there, we should have a real artistic landscape photographer run around for awhile.

[AstralStorm]

Given what we know about the asteroid probabilities, space, preferably very far space, should be a quite big priority. Or at least a sensible asteroid defense system, but colonies are potentially more resilient if self sufficient.

[peterwoo]

The odds of a medium sized impact in the next few thousand years are very small. Still, an advanced asteroid defense capability should be prepared, since even the small-ish bolides that we expect to hit with greater frequency should be eliminated. This should reduce the risk from catastrophic impactors even further.

Settlement of e.g. Mars will never be needed in the time frames we should be thinking about. If asteroid defense is developed, then for thousands of years that will not be a concern at all. And if in 2,000 years they need a settlement on Mars, the people in 1,800 years can prioritize doing it.

In other words I don't see it as a priority. Material conditions on Earth are not great, and we are threatened by catastrophes in the atmosphere, oceans, and tectonic plates. Earth and its cities are infinitely more responsive to our efforts and investment than Mars or elsewhere. There is so much that we can do here in this century, while settling another planetary body in this century seems basically impossible.

[wst_]

People would not go to Mars because they need to. They will go because they want to. We always were an exploring types.

I may not happen within this century, maybe even not this millennium. But I believe it will happen. And for the time being it would be great adventure just to try and make the Mars more friendly.

[AstralStorm]

I like the base rate fallacy committed there. In recent history, there have been at least 5 sizable asteroid impacts, each of which would evaporate a big city. Just lucky those didn't hit any. In longer term, two of those triggered mass extinctions.

[PeterisP]

If a "evaporate a big city" or "kill all humans on Earth" asteroid strikes, the existence of a Mars colony doesn't help my personal survival or well-being in any way whatsoever unless I'm there.

And if I'm there, odds are that it made my personal survival chances worse, since they're mostly determined by the many "normal" causes of death and being a pioneer in a world not really suited for humans is likely to be worse than Earth.

You could make an argument that it's not wise to put all your eggs in one basket, and it has some merit in this discussion, but when all I have is one egg, the only thing I can do is to pick the safest basket I have - and for now it's Earth.

[peterwoo]

Can you elaborate? I do say that we should develop the asteroid defense capability, to eliminate those smaller more frequent impacts and others. My terminology was not standard or precise and I apologize for that. I mean by "small" those which are akin to an atom bomb or a hydrogen bomb explosion, and "medium" those which would cause catastrophe over a large region but not global annihilation.

[peterwoo]

It's a strange idea that progress was arrested by anti-war, civil rights, feminist, and environmental activist movements, while epitomized by men walking on the moon. The counter-cultural movement of the 60s was not anti-science it was anti-exploitation and anti-hegemony.

Human spaceflight only coincides with "progress" in as much as it improves material conditions on Earth. That is what we think of as progress. Technological progress must be recognized as distinct from technological advance.

[faktorialas]

As for movies, I think it's about what makes a good plot rather than what expresses the common ideology. A benevolent AI-god won't exactly make for an exciting movie, nor will just basic progress. One could argue the same point about why crime is so popular in film - it's not an expression of ideology, it's a tool for plot.

I'm not sure I generally agree that technological progress helping people is deeply counter-cultural. People like to wallow in cynicism, but young people are super hopeful about the progress of science. I guess that's partially bias of whom I meet online, but it is well established.

Not that most are deeply interested in science or tech, but they sure do like professing love to it, scrolling through cute image macros about it online, and they're not afraid of using it when it's easy enough. Now they might not be the majority if we count old people in the US, I don't know, but if this is a counterculture then it's one that's huge, and growing.

However where I think our points tie together is how people think about politics. People sure love professing cynicism about politics as a way to relieve responsibility. We can make as much tech progress as we want, but no, we won't get better political institutions or more freedom. Impossible.

Unfortunately, tech people are just as guilty of this one.

[eli_gottlieb]

This is what I completely fail to understand about Thiel: he says stuff like that, and then goes and says that democracy was a mistake, monopolies are the proper way to do business, and we need something more like a monopolist-monarch to run the place[1].

That seems like a very selective view on modernity which tries to embrace "science and technology" for the profits they can bring, while deliberately discounting what the many human sciences tell us about how humans can work and work together. Can you actually believe in, say, "human collective intelligence as distributed Bayesian inference"[2], while also wanting a world dominated by monopolists and dictators? I mean, for that matter, how can you claim to stand by science and technology while also being, quite publicly, an evangelical Christian, who thus rejects naturalism, the broadest worldview-level fruit of the sciences, in its entirety?

[1] -- https://medium.com/soapbox-dc/peter-thiels-plan-to-become-ce...

[2] -- http://arxiv.org/abs/1608.01987