[TeMPOraL]

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.

[somenameforme]

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.

[elliotec]

What a world it would be if he didn't lie his arse off eh?

[somenameforme]

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!

[monadINtop]

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.

[somenameforme]

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.

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atlantic_slave_trade#Russia

[2] - https://www.bbc.co.uk/worldservice/africa/features/storyofaf...

[monadINtop]

>were conquered by Cortez and his "army" of 500

Along with the other subjugated groups who turned on their imperial suzerain, as you briefly alluded to.

>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.

Yes that was certainly an important factor, though obviously entirely insufficient to explain how an entire continent of various empires confederations and cities fell over decades and centuries, and the vast majority of the population wiped out.

>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

Sure in the isolated and specific context Cortez's victory over the Aztecs probably was largely influenced by their technological advantages along with their deception, ambushes, and the "suprise" of their foreign origin etc. (but not totally determined, since by their own account there was like a hundred different times they could have been slaughtered en-masse if their hosts weren't as initially hospitable).

You're gonna have to provide a bit more justification for how the rest of the continent's eventual collapse and depopulation follows immediately from that though. It takes a lot more to justify asserting that a single factor should be solely recognized as the determining historical cause for an outcome. There were many factors and any one of them must be considered carefully and in relation to all others, and my point was to show how neglected the others are in favor of "europeans conquered everything just cause they were better". There's a lot more to be learnt by recognizing and studying details over broad oversimplifications that require no more insight or nuance.

>There were also plagues that spread in the other direction - the obvious one is syphilis.

It seems likely but not entirely uncontroversial though I personally can't speak on it.

https://www.cell.com/current-biology/fulltext/S0960-9822(20)...

https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/oa.802

In any case would you like to count plague for plague? There is an clear asymmetry in the scale of transmission as well as in the immunological defenses of the respective populations in the old world and new, it would seem reasonable the discrepancy could be due to the asymmetry of scale in large fauna to human proximity - which is responsible for intra-species transmission and by extension the major illness and plagues - but clearly none of these biological-historical conclusions are certain.

>Most of every great empire in the world had massive numbers of slaves.

Yes and none of them had the industrial system of slavery extraction and use on a massively depopulated continent in order to extract massive amounts of natural resources on a scale that was hitherto unparalleled historically. Note that I didn't want to talk about the unique social and economic system then emerging in western europe after the reformation since my comment was already meandering and oversimplified enough. I also agree that American slavery wasn't the sole money printing machine that led to European dominance, but a crucial factor in generating capital and material resources as well as a symptom of the more influential underlying mechanism - namely the emergence of the system of trade and economic relations that would later be recognized as capitalism, which proved far more effective in generating wealth and political power than whatever bastard form feudalism you could generally argue it superseded.

>colonies (come states) that were most averse to slavery would be the ones that would thrive the most.

Wow its almost as though financial hubs (especially ones based around centers of commerce linking a region of production with external trade) can generate profit from economic activities not in the immediate locality. Did you at least try to use your brain before you decided to insult me?

>It's just the neohistorical self loathing nonsense

Also self-loathing might be a bit of projection since I personally have no familial connection to the trans-atlantic slave trade or any nation that benefited from it. I'm sorry you suffer from such conflicted feelings on your own heritage but I'd recommend not lashing out at strangers in unrelated conversation.

>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.

Again I'm not too sure why you've decided to read some kind of moral argument into my sweeping over-generalization of history? It's really not relevant to what was being discussed and even if it was I'm not sure that the takeaway is that we should just "happy it went as well as it did" or whatever? I'm not really sure what you think there is for people to be "happy" about or specifically what I've failed to be "happy" about since as far as I can tell I've provided a critical analysis of a historical period independent from any given moral framework. Unless of course you object to any such analysis that doesn't affirm your particular moral perspective.

>Be happy it went as well as it did.

lol for who? Wasn't too swell for the native americans... (nor my own people for that matter, if this is really the discussion you'd rather have). It might surprise you to learn that there are other people in the world with a different background to yourself.

But to be honest I couldn't be more disinterested in that useless conversation, trying to analyze history in a discrete set of "right" or "wrongs" that we must urgently assign condemnation or affirmation to at each point. History has happened and is happening, one should seek to analyze it's material basis either for its own sake or to apply it critically to the present, not paint hagiographies or interpretations to justify whatever belief systems or identities they've constructed.

[geraldwhen]

Your time scale is so small. There are people alive today that witnessed the moon landing on television.

Galactic timescales are large. Plan for 10,000 years out, not tomorrow.

[TeMPOraL]

> Plan for 10,000 years out, not tomorrow.

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.

[lazide]

Notably, 10,000 years is longer than all of recorded human history.

It’s a bit of a pipe dream to think we’d plausibly be able to follow through consistently on anything even 1% that long right now.