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by jgord 80 days ago
Regardless of whether this particular mission is perfectly planned, this is precisely the kind of thing that will help humanity outgrow the dark age of war, inequality and climate mismanagement.

It is a noble endeavor - science, engineering and peaceful exploration hold the keys to our survival and prosperity.

It is also important psychologically to our survival - a reminder there is a bigger pie, that we can solve hard problems, that progress can be made, that competence and education counts, as does courage, and that we can work together for a common cause.

This is the best of America, and for a while we can be proud of the human race.

16 comments

I think these space projects are great, can create much good will, and give people dangerous things to do that are worth risking the danger for. But war, inequality, and climate mismanagement are political problems that are not going to be solved (if they need to be solved) by science and engineering (the first two at least).
If AGI stages a hostile takeover of all the governments of the world would that count as a technological solution to war and inequality?

For that matter I suppose the terminator timeline also counts. Can't have war and inequality if you don't have humans.

They can absolutely be solved by science and engineering, people just need to stop being so fucking afraid to break the rules to do whats right.
What does inequality even mean? Everyone must be identical? The idea of removing inequality is dystopian.
Solving inequality starts with everyone gets the same upbringing. Imagine designing a boarding school where kids get placed at an early age, and get all the support that they need to basically learn how to have control of the environment around them, while also how to interact with other humans to act as a force multiplier in accomplishing bigger things).

You could do this right now with a lot less money then it seems, the problem is that you have to break ethical grounds - for example, you have to have police or support staff that forcibly take kids from their homes if the parents resist this sort of education for their kids. If you don't do this, then you essentially are back to square one.

Stopping the world's resources from being controlled and directed by a tiny fraction of its population isn't the plot of Harrison Bergeron
It would be great if everyone felt and was in a major way in control of their life. Equal before the law and not much law. The people who want to create "equality" by preventing people from accumulating wealth also want to accumulate power in the state. A tiny fraction of people will also be running a socialist state.

Aristocrats are going to aristocrat, as they say.

What if I say I don't want to accumulate power in either of those places?
I hope it does. But every day that goes by I feel that the future is just going to be like what's shown in the expanse series
My personal take for a long time has been that the primary driver of most war today is boredom. War today is undertaken for entertainment. It's a special kind of entertainment that taps into deep brain stem circuits and provides a false but deeply resonating sense of purpose and meaning. When you hear that "people don't have a sense of meaning," it means their brain stem is not feeling the tribal loyalty emotions connected to warfare.

It would be cheaper to solve resource shortages in almost any other way. I don't really buy that explanation, at least for most wars. I think most wars today have roots that are far less rational.

Note that this applies IMO to all participants on all sides insofar as they had any role in starting or sustaining the war.

I think the primary drivers of war come from the top--powerful people motivated by greed and ego. Those are the spark that starts wars.

Boredom works from the bottom, providing fuel for wars in the form of soldiers. More specifically, young men in particular are easily appealed to by offering them a part in some great heroic endeavor, and a promise to mold them into someone whose manhood and courage may never again be questioned.

Of course, as many former soldiers have found out, you usually receive none of those things. The endeavor was bullshit, you were only a cog, and there is no badge of honor in the world that exempts you from the human experience of being made to feel small.

> My personal take for a long time has been that the primary driver of most war today is boredom. War today is undertaken for entertainment.

incredible claim, any research or evidence behind this?

Wildly disagree with that. I think the overwhelming majority of people want simple, peaceful existence, and that the 'lack of meaning' can be solved through deeper shared community goals and aspirations.

More prominent figures like Trump, Putin or al-Assad don't wage war out of boredom, but out of ego, or visions of a glorious future that only they can impart (which I guess is still ego).

I also think that the various regional conflicts in Africa are in no way driven by the fact that the various political groups are just sitting there with nothing to do.

That said, I do think that a 'common enemy' provides a great deal of focus to communities, as we're wired for it... but the definition of community (who is 'us') is largely malleable and entirely flexible. But it's only one way of providing that meaning.

I also think conflict is largely glorified through American media, which is aggressively pushed on a lot of the English speaking world. The videos of the SF soldiers talking about killing people in Iraq and Afghanistan, and how cool it was with no remorse for the taking of life in a conflict that none of the local population asked for. Of the people I've talked to that have been through armed conflict (specifically Angola, and Serbia), and so strongly against conflict that the reactions are almost scary.

So no, I don't think conflicts are started or sustained out of a sense of boredom.

"deeper shared community goals and aspirations"

When one communities deeply shared goals and aspirations conflict with another's (or subgroups) is when you get war and violence. The eras of relative peace is when you have one empire imposing its will.

> but out of ego, or visions of a glorious future that only they can impart..

Obviously. Why would any one do anything at all if not for this very reason, let alone world leaders...

For world leaders, that is their whole point of their authority.

I think this is skewed by your perception of how frequent wars actually are. If your idea of a typical war is Trump bombing Iran, well, I disagree with your assertion, but it's at least a colorable argument. But those kinds of wars between clearly defined states are actually incredibly rare.

Your typical war, however, looks more like the M23 rebels (backed by Rwanda, though they deny this) fighting the Congo state. Take a more expansive definition of war to include armed conflict in general, and the typical case looks more like the ELN in Colombia. Almost all of these kinds of conflicts can be fairly analyzed as fighting for control of resources, chiefly land and the people or the rents that can be derived from de facto control of that land.

I agree that its not rational, but it's also not boredom. Its simply stupidity and ignorance.
The expanse future isn't that bad - even at the start of the series we've already made it to the asteroid belt and Jupiter moons, and the civilization consists of several sovereign self-governed entities with individual entrepreneurship and private enterprise allowed. It means we didn't annihilate ourself in a nuclear war, nor our civilization collapsed into allways-fully-connected ant colony (or one global fascist/communist/religious regime).
Agreed it’s a tolerable vision, it could be worse. But it’s also a vision of humanity mostly living in enormous disenfranchised structural underclasses - corporate-authoritarianism in the asteroids and subsistence-UBI for all those unnecessary humans on Earth.

It’s a vision of incredible technological progress without any growth in our ability to justly and humanely govern ourselves or move past violent conflict.

I agree with GP this is our current trajectory. I’d live in that world and hope I’d get lucky, but what a disappointment if that’s all we can manage.

I don't know that there was a lot wrong with Earth under the Expanse though.

The problems there were kind of organic: they just didn't need that many people, but they did have UBI, but even if you wanted to better yourself and were exceptional at your job... You could still be 50,001 in the queue of the 50,000 they needed.

Earth in the expanse desperately needed places to expand too and send people, but the solar system just wasn't that habitable.

One of the reasons I love the Expanse so much is how deftly it wove subtle economic and resource dynamics into the plot, while also integrating so many other themes, genres, and styles.

I agree with your analysis of the cause of Earth's troubles, though I'm not sure that adds up to not much being wrong with it. The Earth in the Expanse never figured out how to deal with "excess humans" and the result was planet-Baltimore, that seems pretty wrong to me. And I don't think it's too soon for us to be taking a hard look at how this is likely to work out on the real Earth.

uh I would argue that at the beginning of The Expanse things are middling to bad and at the end things are pretty fucking bad. The epilogue of the final book is the only thing that's unabashedly optimistic.

The main series takes place over about 30 years during which several billion people die system-wide as a result of various wars and terrorist attacks, and uncountably many die in the immediate aftermath of the finale. I love it but it's not really a feel-good story!

> this is precisely the kind of thing that will help humanity outgrow the dark age of war

Just a reminder that even the Utopia of the 23rd century and beyond envisioned by Gene Roddenberry for Star Trek - the Federation and Starfleet are still at their core military institutions. Even war was very much still a thing in his utopic vision, despite the fact that scarcity basically no longer exists so what hell was everyone fighting over anyway?

Starfleet is only a few steps removed from the regime in Heinlen’s Starship Troopers. At least Heinlen didn’t pretend that they were enlightened post-imperialists. He was honest about what it was.

Wasn't war on Earth not the issue but war with other species in the galaxy the issue? Sure, there were some sympathizers trying to sabotage peace, but that's because they wanted to continue warring.
There is the Maquis which are basically insurrectionists/terrorists and Starfleet also has Section 31 for doing wet work.

Sisko poisoned a planet’s atmosphere, allowed political assassinations and even Picard did things that could be considered questionable once or twice, even Kirk.

Earth is peaceful because well…in a show about exploring space nobody really wants to see conflicts on Earth (there are a few exceptions where it worked though). And they have enough big guns and secret assassins to keep up appearances.

Earth is peaceful because they went through the horrors of WWIII already
I hope so, but if this goes awry in any way, especially if – god forbid – they lose the crew, my fear is it’ll be a blow to the American hegemony that will be very hard to recover from. Orange man is bad, but I think something like that would add a whole other dimension to the US’s loss of face. I’m as anti-american as they come, but despite everything Pax Americana must be acknowledged and I shudder at the thought of it shattering.

Godspeed!

As far as I am concerned "Pax Americana" ended (if I understand what it means correctly) when they mixed up the best picture at the Oscars!

But may be things have improved since...

> Pax Americana must be acknowledged and I shudder at the thought of it shattering.

Shudder away! We've already had both Carney and the finance minister of Singapore essentially declare Pax Americana to have ended. Everybody else is just being polite.

[EDIT: prime minister of Singapore, not finance minister]

The prime minister of Singapore said something similar. It’s worth a watch, he is very well-spoken.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=NXSI4cCm3BM

My mistake, I thought it was their finance minister.
Until nukes are going off, Pax Americana stands strong.
That's just deterrence. Pax America (used to) mean something much more than that.
When the US stops being the main topic on the internet then you'll know it's over. As it stands everyone is still fully obsessed with America. Their cultural dominance is far from over.
That too is a thing but distinct from what Pax Americana has meant for the last 70 years or so.
I'd expect the US to be the main topic on the English speaking internet far after its global dominance ends. I highly doubt that Canada or Australia (let alone the UK) are going to take English speaking dominance any time soon.
> if – god forbid – they lose the crew, my fear is it’ll be a blow to the American hegemony that will be very hard to recover from

This has zero impact on American hegemony. That mission is being prosecuted in Iran and with respect to NATO.

> this is precisely the kind of thing that will help humanity outgrow the dark age of war, inequality and climate mismanagement.

Is that irony or plain naiveness? historically and technically, conquest of space is inseparable from warfare. As for climate change, one can argue that technology is one of the primary driver: aviation alone is estimated to 4% of global temperature rise.

Energy use is the driver. Fossil fuels happen to be cheap. It's effectively a coincidence, nothing inherent to technological progress itself except insofar as something like aviation would never have been a commercial success without an exceedingly cheap, dense, and portable method of energy storage. Solar-syngas and solar-battery would have eventually gotten there but we'd all have been taking trains and ships for the past 80 years while riding electrified public transit.
Energy and tech are two sides of the same coin
Not really. Most tech doesn't use much energy at all. It's not uncommon for advances to reduce energy usage.

Granted that as something becomes cheaper and easier we tend to scale it up but that's not really a tech thing it's more like a natural force that applies in equal measure to literally everything. It goes beyond humans; all living organisms will exploit available resources to the extent possible provided that doing so increases fitness.

This is a new space race. From a geopolitical level, a nation that has a better presence on the moon will have a better strategic advantage.
What about the mineshaft gap though?
What about it makes you think it is important?
we of course need the strategic advantage?
Can you explain anything about what you are talking about in more than one sentence?
This is satire. Based on the movie Dr. Strangelove. I'm sarcastically responding to the space race comment. There is an explanation in multiple sentences.
I believe the biggest benefit of going to space, particularly in building space stations, is making humanity focused on building a bigger pie.

This is one step towards this. But once we can build (effectively) infinite land, we will be in true abundance.

I think it's rather the opposite. That space exploration can only possiblly inspire a nation when there is peace, prosperity and justice for all.
Did someone skip 1968-2026 in their history books?
On the contrary, Whitey on the Moon still rings true.
Yeah, that's the take I have been looking for a spot to drop.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=goh2x_G0ct4

I believe that folks in the US are, by a large margin, the most highly propagandized group of people in history. It's hard to watch stuff like this.

It's not that I don't understand that comparatively space exploration is small compared to the associated costs of the boots that might hit the ground today.

Space Force would disagree.

The talk of taking the Moon would belie.

Old is new again! :)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Horizon

Next stop - defending the base with claymore sticks! :-)

https://www.sandboxx.us/news/featured/project-horizon-nukes-...

Well said. I'd be lying if I didn't get that little flutter inside watching the launch. It felt like "oh, there's still a flicker in the soul!"
>Regardless of whether this particular mission is perfectly planned, this is precisely the kind of thing that will help humanity outgrow the dark age of war, inequality and climate mismanagement.

You watch too much Star Trek. This is precisely the kind of thing that will benefit the military industrial complex, enrich billionaires at the expense of everyone else, and justify the government raping natural resources like it's a little girl locked in a cage.

No one cares about space any more and no one engaging in space travel is doing so for science anymore. Those days, if they ever really existed, are over. NASA has been cleansed and gutted and purged of wrongthink and now only exists to further the cause of American propaganda and be parasitized by SpaceX and intelligence agencies.

I guess we should collectively give up on space. The people at NASA are all doing hard science for that notoriously bloated government salary.
We actually should. By "we" I mean just Americans, though.

Leave the hard science to cultures that still have an educated populace and a government that believes in it. Americans are going to need that money to fund the holy war in Iran over the next decade and to build out Trump's Epstein Memorial ballroom. All that gold filigree is expensive.

If I were a Real Scientist working for NASA I would have seen the writing on the wall and packed my bags for greener pastures once Elon let his pack of groyper skiddie goons slash the department's budget because there were too many brown people on the payroll.

The United States is no longer a serious nation worthy of scientific endeavor, and it won't be again for a very long time. The next person to set foot on the moon won't be an American. These are just the consequences of the choices the American voters have made.

Meh, sounds like you are not American so telling people in the US to just give up on everything is boring and self serving.

If you do have a vote in the US, then you have options to try to make things better. Complaining about pedophiles and people on ketamine in the government is a valid (but extremely small) form of affecting change, but the doom and gloom of everyone should just give up helps no one.

I am an American, I do vote to make things better. I have a whole life outside of Hacker News. But if it's valid to express naive, wide-eyed optimism about how space travel will usher humanity into a utopian era of peace and love it's valid to express the opposite. This is an internet forum so neither the cynicism nor the optimism really helps anyone. Pointing out that that doing so doesn't lead to meaningful change is tautological. No one here is affecting change about anything. I'll get downvoted and flagged, the optimists will get upvoted and cheered, the invisible internet points will be tallied and our accounts weighed in the balance and everyone will move on to the next shiny thing.

But yes, for me, all of this is tainted as it must inevitably be seen against the backdrop of the current administration. American space travel, American science and technology, the "American spirit." I can't feel anything but disgust about it and pity for the astronauts and scientists trying to do real work in the context of an administration that only sees them as tools for propaganda.

There was plenty of (I think valid) cynicism about Apollo at the time and JFK had his faults God knows but he didn't rape children as far as I know.

> this is precisely the kind of thing that will help humanity outgrow the dark age of war, inequality and climate mismanagement.

How do you figure? The previous Moon missions certainly didn't accomplish that.

The key phrase is "kind of thing". It certainly does matter what kinds of things we focus our attention on as a species. I think you would have to be quite cynical to think that progress in spaceflight over the past 60+ years hasn't had a positive impact.
> I think you would have to be quite cynical to think that progress in spaceflight over the past 60+ years hasn't had a positive impact.

Spaceflight aside, how exactly has humanity started to outgrow war, inequality, and climate mismanagement? Call me cynical, but I'm not seeing it.

Global rates of poverty are 83% lower than they were in 1969 when we landed on the moon.

So actually, millions of lives have massively benefited from science and technology. To be cynical in the face of all that is a personal take, not a reflection of the facts.

So landing on the moon triggered a reduction in global rates of poverty? do you have any research or citations for this claim?
Vaccines, Mobile Phones, Internet, GPS (How do you think container ships navigate), High yield seeds/fertilizers and the Green Revolution, Weather Satellites, I could go on.

It's really getting tiring repeating this stuff over and over again to the anti-space crowd.

It’s not the anti-space crowd.

You’re arguing against the misanthrops. To them, nothing humans could do would be good enough. We could end slavery in the West and they’d accuse us of not ending slavery enough.

Vaccines were invented during the moon landings? High yield seeds and fertilizers are due to the moon landings? The internet was invented due to the moon landings?

You didn't provide any citations that show any of the above has lifted people out of poverty. Please go on, and maybe tell us how ships navigated the seas before GPS, sounds impossible.

There are no causal connections between going to the moon and lifting global poverty. In fact, the money spent on going to a dried up satellite could have lifted people out of poverty.

> Global rates of poverty are 83% lower than they were in 1969 when we landed on the moon.

Obvious post hoc fallacy

It’s only a fallacy if the purported facts are fallacious.

And in the case of lifting most of humanity out of poverty, two things are responsible: capitalism and technology.

You can argue that China is a communist state, but it’s the allocation of capital to things that matter that has enable China to thrive.

> It’s only a fallacy if the purported facts are fallacious.

These don't appear to be the words of someone who understands what the post hoc fallacy is.

In any case, the subject is not "capitalism and technology" generally but rather manned Moon missions specifically.

Just because one thing happened after another thing, doesn’t mean the first thing caused the second thing.

Happy now?

However, sometimes it is true that the first thing caused the second thing.

Therefore, it’s only a fallacy when it’s fallacious.

My argument is that going to space was an allocation of capital that mattered in driving technology forward and improved the lives of everyone.

> And in the case of lifting most of humanity out of poverty, two things are responsible: capitalism and technology.

You alleged above it was due to the moon landings that people were lifted out of poverty. Do you understand the difference here?

Was not the space race, and the cold war context it happened it, a driving force in pushing technological advances forward?
You don't solve these problems in a single step, but notice how space imagery and analogies pop up every time people try to talk about peace, global problems, mutual empathy, understanding, etc. The Pale Blue Dot, images of Earth from orbit or the Moon, etc. Those are anchors in public consciousness, competing in memetic space with usual divisive, dystopian, hope-draining pictures and soundbites - we need more of them to improve on the big problems, and we absolutely would not have them if not for people actually flying to space.

Or, put differently, space exploration is one of the few things "feeding the right wolf" for humanity at large.

It's crazy to believe that people who believe in one holy book are killing people over another holy book in countries like (but certainly not limited to) Nigeria, while another country launches people to the moon.

But, alas, I agree with you. There's no way out but through I guess.

You seem to be forgetting that the country launching people to the moon is primarily of one holy book and is currently bombing the people of another holy book.
The United States is not a Christian country and is not at war with anyone due to religion. I know you're talking about Iran but Iranian Christians are as affected as Iranian Muslims. Muslim countries in the area have pushed America to continue this war.

I am completely against this military excursion. Just an honest takeaway. A lot of rhetoric in America on religion is due to people's religious trauma. I blame American evangelicals.

And mainly in the name of these holy books too lol. The forgetfulness of people when they see news like this is always funny to me.
That other country has also people killing other people over a holy book.
That this dissonance hurts, already tells you why space is important.
> You don't solve these problems in a single step

Obviously, but there's no evidence that the previous Moon missions were a step toward solving the problems.

> notice how space imagery and analogies pop up every time people try to talk about peace, global problems, mutual empathy, understanding, etc.

You think these problems will be solved with... photos?

How many more photos do we need? Everyone has seen the photos already. I'm sure Putin and Trump have seen the photos of Earth.

Nobody it'll say space exploration will alone solve those problems. But it helps, and can help more - much more, if we go all the way in and establish permanent economic activity and eventually settlements in the space near Earth and beyond.
> if we go all the way in and establish permanent economic activity and eventually settlements in the space near Earth and beyond.

Could you please explain exactly how these would help to stop war and inequality?

As far as I can tell, space exploration is going to exacerbate inequality, for example, by making Elon Musk even more obscenely wealthy than he already is.

Is the problem inequality or rather poverty? Because those are not the same thing.

What we've done in space has absolutely helped with poverty. It makes weather forecasts possible, which helps even the poorest farmers.

This can happen at the same time a handful of people become obscenely wealthy from it.

Though in Musk's case, I suspect the wealth is a bubble which will pop before he can cash out more than 8% of it.

That's part of a general meme shift. 60s tech was defined by a mix of fear, awe, and optimism. Apollo had elements of all three.

There was a confidence underlying all of them. From the New Deal to the late 60s, there was a public belief a better future was possible.

2020s tech is defined by fear, pessimism, and dystopia. The utopian edge has either gone or been replaced by horrific anti-utopian tech - surveillance, manipulation, exploitation, and irrationality.

Tech has become anti-science. Musk's DOGE cut around $1.5 of science funding, science education, and NASA exploration.

The naive sense that a better future is possible, and tech will make it happen, has almost disappeared.

Sparked the environmental movement, to name but one major impact.
> > The previous Moon missions certainly didn't accomplish that.

> Sparked the environmental movement, to name but one major impact.

It...really didn't. There was a new wave with a different political orientation (less conservative/elite) in the environmental movement roughly contemporary to the space program from—the 1950s through the 1970s—but it was driven by a variety of human driven (nuclear testing, oil spills, etc.) environmental disasters combined with more modern media coverage that occurred in that time than by the space program itself.

I know there are people who try to ignore all that and pretend that the whole thing was just the Earthrise photo in 1968 but much of the development of the new character of the movement happened before Earthrise, and even what happened after generally clearly had other more important causes.

Regardless of what you think of those first shots from Apollo 8, you have to admit they put things into a different perspective for a lot of people. Seeing the whole of the Earth like that moved a lot of people into realizing this planet is worth saving. That one image was a significant moment causing such a spike in people paying attention that it can be forgiven for being confused as the thing. It's not like John Muir needed to see the Blue Marble image to start his movement. It's just so many more people did
> Regardless of what you think of those first shots from Apollo 8, you have to admit they put things into a different perspective for a lot of people.

“Regardless of what you think about X, you must think Y about X” is a particularly tiresome rhetorical device, but its also being deployed as part of a motte-and-bailey argument here.

> It's not like John Muir needed to see the Blue Marble image to start his movement. It's just so many more people did

Blue Marble (1990) is a completely different image than Earthrise (1968), and Earthrise was only adopted as a symbol of the environmental movement because the movement was already ascendant when it came out, not because it was the trigger for it.

I didn’t say it was the sole cause of the environmental movement, you’re being silly.
Also wrt. "climate mismanagement", pretty much all tools we get to measure climate exist because of space program, and many require it to function.
Okay well we have those already and it hasn't really changed anything.
> we have those already and it hasn't really changed anything

What’s the term for antibiotics having been so successful that we forget all their benefits?

The Montreal Protocol worked [1]. It probably couldn’t have without our satellite data.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Montreal_Protocol

Disagree about the change. Even the fact that you know and care enough to argue this on-line is a change that can be attributed to space missions - and it's even more true about the overall global conversation about climate situation, and all activities taken to help with it.

These things do take time though.

This is absurd. Have you heard of Rachel Carson's 1962 "Silent Spring"?
No, what’s that?

QED

> Regardless of whether this particular mission is perfectly planned, this is precisely the kind of thing that will help humanity outgrow the dark age of war, inequality and climate mismanagement.

More likely, it is precisely the kind of thing that will be managed specifically to keep people distracted, so that the people who have a near term benefit from the dark age of war, inequality, and climate mismanagement can continue realizing that benefit without interruption by people taking action right up until there is no one left to distract or benefit.

The engineering was done in the 70's and 80's. This rocket is built out of leftover shuttle hardware.

The exploration in this mission was done 50 years ago.

I fail to see how this mission is noble. It's biggest accomplishment is keeping the NASA beurocratic apparatus in tact.

This spectacle of a mission is precisely the kind of distraction which enables complacency and allows the "dark age of war" to remain dark.