Why should a community limit their potential and ambition because another can’t seem to figure it out? This is like the crabs in a bucket thing. There’s no need to solve every social issue before progressing to high tech things.
We would do well to ignore the cynical and misanthropic who contribute nothing but complaints about how the capable people should serve their personal interests first.
Well there is one argument that, in my opinion, is a reasonable one.
We should try to improve and solve some of our cultural, philosophy, and systemic problems -before- we replicate them in isolated pockets of humanity. Otherwise we might suffer a replication crisis, where cultural and societal advancements are not shared by all.
For example, many dystopian media in the past few decades has focused on images of what a hyper capitalistic society could look like in space. Where you may have to pay for every breath, pay for literally existing in a space. A society where every day of your life must be profitable and servicing the corporations you have sworn fealty, a world where the only purpose for the foreseeable future is growth and commerce.
Perhaps having a society that is a bit more communally focused, and less self centered. One where the purpose of society is to nurture and spread life to where complex life does not exist. A society where the primary driver isn't growth for growth's sake.
The argument is that if we ignore our cultural and philosophical short comings, we could replicate them. Why is replicating them bad? Because the stakes are so much higher when you have a space fairing race. Do you know what a small crew of technically literate people could do with the tech a society building a mar colony would require? Capture and redirect an asteroid, and if they were half intelligent they would know that the best way for it to go undetected would be to play the long game and give it a long trajectory out of the solar plane where most of the solar systems mass is. Or they could just as easily purposefully seed a planet's orbit with debris to create an intentional Kessler's syndrome. And you might say that these are outlandish, but any society that lives in space or on an non-terraformed would be a society where the base competency would be vastly higher due to survival pressures.
So, yes we should keep advancing tech but I think it's an obvious deficiency with our silicon valley minded leaders. We don't put any time/money/energy into the fundamental problems of our society because these newage business men have been indoctrinated into the ideology that technology is the one and only savior. It's important, but you can't build a society or a building with only one pillar.
> We don't put any time/money/energy into the fundamental problems of our society
We spend untold billions and trillions on these things. You will never solve every problem for every person. Utopia does not exist. You see, a lot of different people have a lot of different ideas on what the fundamental problems of our society are. Some people think it's because people have abandoned traditional values and religion. Other people think it's because of that. You can't solve all the problem for all the people. You can't care for everyone because you just end up caring for no one.
> Perhaps having a society that is a bit more communally focused, and less self centered.
Your vision, to my judgement, sounds self centered though. It's saying "take care of me first instead of fulfilling your ambitions". There can't be a single "community". It's just not possible or realistic. It will always be plural because to be quite frank, many groups of people do not like each other, will not change for each other, and don't want to waste their lives trying to be accepted by other groups. And that's OK.
> We should try to improve and solve some of our cultural, philosophy, and systemic problems -before- we replicate them in isolated pockets of humanity.
This is saying we should paralyze ourselves until an arbitrary group of people say everything is good now. Again, why would we do that?
Exactly. While I strongly support efforts to improve life for the masses and solve problems on Earth, I also think that there will always be problems. As such, if we wait for Earth’s problems to be solved before venturing into space, we’ll simply never venture into space, and eventually something will happen to cause humanity to forget how to build and launch rockets, potentially for the remainder of the species’ existence.
It’s better to use the capability while we know we have it and have the chance to etch that knowledge into our very existence by way of living all throughout the solar system.
> Why should a community limit their potential and ambition because another can’t seem to figure it out?
I reject that interpretation of the the song completely—theoretically, a nation represents a single community. The issue is that the nation in question (the United States) doesn't seem to give a shit about its own needs outside those of its dominant (i.e. rich and ruling) class. Keep in mind that—although the song in question does present it as a racial matter, because race and class are so deeply intertwined in this country—that the focus on economic dominance over all other concerns leaves the poor in this country behind regardless of race.
And the implication that the poor (especially poor black folks) in this country are poor because they "can't seem to figure it out" is so asinine I'm not going to bother addressing it.
We would do well to ignore the cynical and misanthropic who contribute nothing but complaints about how the capable people should serve their personal interests first.