I wonder, is there any human endeavor other than space exploration (and maybe an occasional particle accelerator) that works like this? Sure, a big factor in the history of scientific progress is its structural resilience against localized political and economical kerfuffles, but that's more of an accident of how discovery and innovation are done - in small increments, achieved near-simultaneously by independent people or groups around the world (only one gets to take the credit, though). Meanwhile, it seems to me that space exploration needs to be organized into a competition to survive and thrive. To make things weirder, it's not about regular market competition - it's about staying in public consciousness, through continuously one-upping each other by Doing Something Impressive, which ends up attracting funding to all agencies each time (and conversely, when things get slow on the impressive achievements front, funding starts to dry out).
(We had one dry spell after Space Shuttles were retired, and IMHO this one could've been fatal to the entire field. Thank $deity for NASA's funding of commercial launch services, and SpaceX surviving 2008 and taking advantage of it to get the Falcon 9 to work and effectively re-light the public interest again.)
I imagine this is a transitional period; we're past the times of Cold War - times when everyone poured ~infinite money into weapons programs and space exploration got to leech some of it off - and we're not yet seeing the bootstrapping of cislunar economy on the horizon. I wonder if there's a more sustainable way of getting through to the other end, because relying on public interest feels rather risky. And, again, I can't think of any other field that is in this weird position.
Yes. In the past long-range sea voyages worked exactly in the same way.
They were seen as little more than expensive intellectual curiosities and eccentricities. In fact even once we discovered the New World had Columbus not come back and lied his arse off about riches that existed there only by coincidence (as he'd seen nothing of what he claimed), it's entirely possible that would have been the last journey to the New World for decades if not centuries. And over those decades you'd probably have had more and more of the population believing we never even landed on a New World to begin with.
And it'll be the same in the future. Eventually humanity will become a multiplanetary species and more value will be generated off Earth than on it. And I think we're probably not that far away from such point, but we live at a time when we will happily dump trillions of dollars to fund pointless chaos halfway around the world (that invariably just makes the world less safe for everybody), yet every penny that could take us closer to these species defining events is scrutinized like we're down to our last pennies.
And again - this isn't new. It's been the case for centuries and probably will be the case for the foreseeable future of humanity. It's easy to explain with a tautology - positions of power are held by those attracted to power, and those attracted to power are attracted to power. Once the New World became a means to power, that's when the 'trillions' started pouring in. The same will happen with space.
Yeah I was really looking forward to that alt history where the Aztec Empire reached technological parity with the rest of the world. All hail Huitzilopochtli!
Technology wasn't the primary cause in the genocide of the Native Americans. The initial factor was the introduction of plagues to the Americas from the numerous intraspecies transmission that occurred in the old world as a result of the millennia of large animal domestication alongside high population density that had no analog in the new world (since there weren't the same variety of large domesticate-able fauna, apart form like alpacas or something). This is also why there was no American plague that spread in the other direction.
Western Europe was certainly not so far ahead technologically relative to the rest of the world as people so frequently give them credit for. Not until they had free reign over a new continent and purchased slaves to generate free money (*) and eventually total dominance with the advent of the industrial revolution.
(*) This also led to an arms race between rival empires and kingdoms in Africa and the stagnation of local craft and the eventual the economic collapse and political fragmentation of the wealthy empires that existed throughout antiquity and the middle ages - that have since been written out of history books. When the industrial revolution began spinning up out of the ashes and rubble of Christendom post-reformation, many other regions like the Middle East (for example the palace intrigue and power struggles within the Ottoman dynasties) and China (With the collapse of the Ming and ascendancy of the great Qing from the North) were similarly in crises - in part from indirect economic interaction with the growing powers in the west. It was then the nascent imperial powers found the world ripe for their exploitation and eventual hegemony.
The Aztecs, a millions large extremely militant civilization, were conquered by Cortez and his "army" of 500. Even if 95% of the Aztecs were sick, which they weren't, they would have outnumbered him by many orders of magnitude. The fundamental problem is that the Aztecs were armed with basic bows, and primitive melee weapons like wooden clubs. The Spaniards had rifles, plate armor, and longswords. This is what enabled a group of 500 people who didn't even speak the language to gather "allies" and single handedly destroy an entire empire with centuries of military experience.
There were also plagues that spread in the other direction - the obvious one is syphilis. And the claim that slavery is what caused Europe's success is similarly not well supported. Most of every great empire in the world had massive numbers of slaves. In fact the word "slave" itself derives from "Slav" [2] owing to their enslavement in many empires across the world. Yet these empires, for the most part, failed. While Europe thrived.
Or even take the Americas. Less than 10% of slaves taken from Africa ended up in North America, yet North America would become the dominant power in the world, extremely rapidly. Or even within America, the colonies (come states) that were most averse to slavery would be the ones that would thrive the most. I mean the idea that slavery played some key role just doesn't make any logical sense. It's just the neohistorical self loathing nonsense.
History's full of awful stuff, so is the present, and so too will be the future. Be happy it went as well as it did. There are timelines a plenty, probably the overwhelming majority, that make the terribly flawed society we have today look like a utopia.
I'm happy to. But then, like most people, I'm impatient, so I'll draw a second plan that ensures I get to see at least some of the cool stuff before I die, and then I'll get annoyed when this plan isn't followed.
Galactic timescales are large. Human lifespans are tiny.