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PaperclipPerfector  8d ago (text post)   30216 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of December 9, 2024

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Elon is a True Believer, and that's why he Backs Trump

https://www.thepsmiths.com/p/review-reentry-by-eric-berger

So there's been discussion of why Elon Musk put threw in so hard with Trump. What he gets out of owning twitter. I've long had a pretty simple and parsimonious explanation- he wants humanity to spread throughout the universe, and if democrats get in his way he will have to back republicans regardless of his other political opinions. Democrats got in the way.

This review of Reentry is, functionally, a better sourced argument for my intuition. I suppose as a religious fanatic myself I can recognize a fanatic of a different creed by instinct; I guess indifferent PMC types need to be reasoned into the conclusion. As an aside, this is why I'm less worried about woke than some of our other social conservative posters- I don't think I can point to it, but everything about them just screams 'these people sort of believe, in the sense that they don't really disagree, but not in the sense that they'll take licks for their ideology. Like, they're willing to ruin other people's lives over it, sure, but not their own'. Regardless, the actions of SpaceX point to being run by true believers:

when SpaceX is preparing to move their Falcon 9 rocket from its test stand to the launch site for the very first time, they hire “the second largest crane in Texas” to first stack the pieces of the rocket on top of each other, and then lower them onto a waiting trailer. Halfway through the operation, they realize it won’t work because of the wind and that they’ll have to assemble them on the ground. But the piece currently dangling from the crane and blowing like a sail in the wind isn’t designed to bear its own weight, so they literally can’t put it down.

The guy in charge of the operation joined the company a few weeks ago as a rocket engineer in California, and he is now watching the future of the company dangling in front of him from the second largest crane in Texas. Darkness is falling. What does he do? He does what he has to do: calls a few dozen welders to come the next morning, then stays up all night designing a custom “cradle” that the rocket can be lowered into while anxiously watching to make sure the crane doesn’t start leaking hydraulic fluid. He notes: “At Northrop [Grumann], building a custom cradle would have become its own mini-program with design reviews, taking months to build rather than hours.”

Once the rocket is down, they need to move it. To Florida. NASA and other rocket makers generally move their rockets by sea, but that’s slow and expensive. SpaceX doesn’t like to do things that are slow and expensive, so they decide to drive it there. Unfortunately, when lying down on its cradle, the rocket can’t fit under a standard freeway overpass. This is the point at which, if you did not follow the Haywood Algorithm, you would rent a barge and allow the rocket to arrive a few months late. But SpaceX always acts as if any delay at all will kill the company, so they instead set off on “the road trip from hell,” finding an absurd and tortuous route down backroads from Texas to Florida.

Their route has no overpasses, but it does have power lines and traffic lights. So some of the world’s best rocket scientists drive in front of the trailer with a flexible, 17-foot pole taped to the bumper of their car. Whenever it hits something, they jump out, use large sticks to lift the power line enough that the rocket can pass under, then jump back in their car and drive off the road and around the rocket (it’s too wide to pass) so they can intercept the next obstacle. The average speed of the trip is 10mph, and they drive continuously through the night, sleeping in shifts when they’re able to. They have a hard deadline of 5pm on November 24th, because Florida closes its roads to oversized loads for a week around Thanksgiving, and they roll into Cape Canaveral on November 24th, at 3:21pm, after ten days of continuous driving.

That's one example. It's also not just about SpaceX being lean and nimble. It's about being true believers. Elon Musk literally actually believes that humanity spreading through the entire universe is the most important thing... ever, with no exceptions. And he's managed to convince the company that that is correct. Obstacles to this will need to be overcome or removed, such as by sending a guy with a flexible pole to lift up overhead power lines when your rocket engine passes through backroads in the rural south because a barge would take too long. NASA would have accepted the cost. Why? At the end of the day, they believe in going to space, sure, but they're not, like, fanatics about it. SpaceX are fanatics.

And SpaceX just consistently decides not to cash out and take easy money for the rest of their lives. Instead they plow the profits from that easy money into moonshots that push the possibilities of space exploration forwards by developing new technology. Why? I'll quote the review again:

No! It’s actually very simple: remember all that stuff about how SpaceX is less of a company and more of a religious movement, with a goal of making life multi-planetary? Elon and SpaceX behave the way that they do because they believe that stuff very sincerely. A version of SpaceX that merely became worth trillions of dollars, but never enabled the colonization of Mars, would be a disastrous failure in Elon’s eyes.

It's actually pretty simple. He's not a perfectly rational money-maxxer because a perfectly rational money-maxxer would not be betting the entire company on moonshot technological progress no matter what the math says. People are risk averse when all they care about is purchasing power.

So how does this tie in with politics? Well, he bought twitter to back republicans because democrats were doing things like making him kidnap seals and record their emotional reactions to recordings of rocket launches, and other such stupid delays. It's extremely rational for Elon to conclude 1) a cooperative government will enable him to get to mars faster and 2) republicans will give him a cooperative government in exchange for support, democrats will never give him a cooperative government. Yes, he condemns woke, but a) woke doesn't have, like, an actual definition, so it can easily refer to the socialism-by-bureaucracy wing even if that's not totally standard b) I get the sense that a lot of the turn of opinion against him relies on woke-ish methods, with things like cancel culture allowing a corralling of left public opinion, and it's pretty reasonable to think he does too c) there's lots of wokeness or woke ideology involved in holding him back(especially with environmental stuff), and plenty of potential attacks on him from a woke perspective(I'm kind of surprised nobody's already tried to metoo him). Yes, he's conspicuously worried about birthrates, but space colonization essentially requires high human capital high tfr populations.

I wrote a post a few months ago about Gen Z not having enough grit, aggression and agency and willingness to go all in. In retrospect, I don't think it was my best work. Elon's plenty gritty. There's lots of lack of grit in modern society; the every-other-month-AAQC about how all marriages are gay marriages now is basically decrying that, because in modern marriages there's no going all in, doing whatever it takes, they're in concept similar to 'partnerships' among sexual minorities. I'm willing to make that argument but not making it here. Instead I wonder- is fanaticism a necessary component of grit? That certainly seems to be the difference between SpaceX and NASA. Is today's malaise just downstream of being unwilling to commit to things? The birthrate crisis, the military recruitment crisis- moderners just not wanting to burn their bridges and have no recourse but to see their commitment through?

I've rambled a lot here, but it seems convincing to me at least.

In Poker, they'll teach you that it's usually a fool's errand to try to guess exactly which cards another player has or what he's thinking. Instead, you try to put them on a plausable range. So like, anything from "medicore hand played aggressively" to "strong hand played weakly," but ruling out the extremes.

I think we can do the same thing with Elon Musk and SpaceX. Who knows what he's "really" thinking, we can't read his mind, and he probably changes his mind himself from time to time. But he seems consistent enough to rule out the extremes- he's not a conman who's just lying about going to Mars, because he's put so much money and effort into developing Starship. But I also think he's smart enough to realize that it's very unlikely a Martian colony will ever be established during his lifetime, or that it would ever actually be profitable.

I think his play is:

  • 10% true believer, he really wants to go down in history as being the guy who established the first off-world colony. He already has an insane amount of money, but he still wants to feed his ego and feel like he's doing something more important than selling cars or cryptocurrency.
  • 40% hypeman- he doesn't really care about that, but he's got a lot of super nerdy engineers working for him who care about it a lot. They're willing to work way harder for his companies than they would at a normal job, because they think they're on some sort of grand quest for the human species. I've heard that working for NASA is often like that- everyone is super passionate about what they do, even the most mundane experiments, so they'll work long hours for low pay.
  • 50% conman/salesman- he doesn't care about Mars at all, the real play is LEO here on Earth. Data from Starlink, intelligence data from Starshield, or just straight up selling missiles to the military- all of that has the potential to be insanely profitable. If a major war breaks out and he's got a near-monopoly on that technology, he can pretty much name whatever price he wants to the US government.

If a major war breaks out and he's got a near-monopoly on that technology, he can pretty much name whatever price he wants to the US government.

in minor war, yes

in major war if he overplays then he gets nationalised under some emergency war powers

True, they're not going to literally hand him a check for a trillion dollars. But he can still ask for an awful lot. Lots of military contractors made bank during WW2.

Oh, with that I fully agree (and depending on dates/inflation/what would delivered trillion may be actually on table...)

I agree with your thesis but i think there is a secondary reason that has been largley ignored.

Another reason that i think Musk backed Trump is that senior DNC officials were on the record saying that there would "be a reckoning" for his anti-censorship (read pro 1st Ammendment) and anti-dei (read pro-meritocractic) policies after the election, and that the incoming Harris Administration would be doing everything in thier power "to make his life as difficult as possible" and wrest control of SpaceX, Tesla, Twitter, Et Al. away from Musk.

When someone tells you that they are your enemy, believe them.

Musk had already, in practice, thrown in with the republicans long ago by this point. This is a concerning attitude which points to democrats as actually not the party of democracy, to say the least, but it emerged in reaction to Elon buying twitter more than it precipitated it.

8 minutes in for anyone watching. Although it's funny to watch from about 6 because they flip from "it's outrageous for Republicans to spread doubts about our elections" to

and and also all of the lies uhh Russia and there's more information coming through about Russian disinformation in this election and you've got to- you know I'm not a conspiracy theorist at all and I'm not- by saying Trump was on the phone with Putin and by saying that Elon Musk met with Putin uh you know

Yeah yeah and and Elon I know you're watching us and I want you to know that even if you know trump wins I mean it's not going to happen but even if he wins and if you get a position in the administration I guarantee you I'm going to make life so difficult for you, really so difficult for you so just be very careful of yourself

Just pure fucking evil, they all deserve a very short prison sentence. At the very least every single single party apparatchik deserves to have its wealth seized as proceeds of criminal activity.

8 minutes in for anyone watching.

Sorry i thought i had put the timestamp in the link but yes.

Should be fixed now.

That did it. YouTube copy paste seems to strip the timestamp sometimes.

Hey at least it wasn't a nice hat

I still want to know what causes that

Is today's malaise just downstream of being unwilling to commit to things? The birthrate crisis, the military recruitment crisis- moderners just not wanting to burn their bridges and have no recourse but to see their commitment through?

Yes. Yes it is. I 100% believe this and have vaguely gestured at it before. It's what I observe IRL all the time, every day, in almost every interaction with young-ish urban-ish people. A complete inability to commit to a task, a schedule, a version of the truth, an agreement, a responsibility, a shared model of the world, or even eye contact.

No idea why though. What went wrong?

  1. More options means more ways to unwittingly screw up by committing to something bad or by denying new opportunities.
  2. A liberalised world means you don't get anything for committing. If you commit to a person, there is no legal recourse for forcing them to honour their own commitment in return. If you commit to a job, they are no longer required to take care of you from cradle to grave. Likewise babies. Likewise responsibilities: what responsibility (rhetorically) do you want me to take, and what are you going to give me for it?

It's what I observe IRL all the time, every day, in almost every interaction with young-ish urban-ish people. A complete inability to commit to a task, a schedule, a version of the truth, an agreement, a responsibility, a shared model of the world, or even eye contact.

From a young-ish urban-ish perspective, and adding a little more cynicism than usual, can you see why a lot of this sounds like a trap? Especially when you hear it from an older person? The specific examples given - solving the birthrate crisis and the military recruitment crisis - require young people to take on significant costs for very dubious long-term benefit. Likewise I bet Musk is underpaying his engineers. I agree with you in many ways but also young people are responding rationally to shifted risk & reward incentives.

No idea why though. What went wrong?

Because life is meaningless now. In the past, kin and religion- real religion, the sort of thing people actually believed- dominated life. You had a role and a part to play dictated mostly by those two things; even if you weren't a subsistence farmer because you were the son of a subsistence farmer, there were pretty good odds that your parents picked your future for you- you were an apprentice blacksmith or whatever because that's who they knew. There was a heft to things, and it's easy to commit to heft. Most parents don't abandon their children to foster care and they'll fight like mad to avoid it, even if they technically have the right. People today don't believe in anything real and they've stopped believing in anything real. Every generation, the blood memory of why you have to pick something to carry through at whatever the cost gets weaker and weaker, and this is the cause of great chaos. Nowadays it takes genuine belief to make that kind of heft exist without already having your bridges burned.

'Men have forgotten God. That is why all this has happened.'

-Alexander Solzhenitsyn

I think it's just because people have much more to lose now. Your normal standard of living is big enough so you don't have to diverge from a safe railroded life path to live well. Why would you commit if by doing so you limiting your own options and open up yourself to failure?

Theory: daycare from infancy.

I think a lot of the problems stem from how we’ve outsourced raising kids almost entirely to caregivers. This has tge obvious effect of essentially destroying the attachment process between family members, and it’s devastating for kids. Kids who grow up in daycares are one of 8-10 kids in a room in which adults ignore them unless they’re getting in trouble or need care. Parents, assuming an 8pm bedtime might get an hour or two on weekdays and whatever time they can squeeze around household chores on weekends to spend time with the kids. Achieving something in a daycare doesn’t mean much, the care giver is simply too busy with other kids to notice them getting good at something. Parents are too busy to celebrate them doing something. And this is for everything they do. The kids don’t matter, and their attempts to do things don’t matter. Eventually they don’t bother..

It's very rare no? Don't most people stay with their kids at home until maybe age 4-5? IRL I know of one person who was in early daycare, and my entire family sometimes (but rarely) talks that she's a little odd bc of that. She herself has said that. Her parents were careerist high flyers and very much in love. 1930s kids, so they considered their parental duties done when kids were fed, clothed and attending school.

Except parents spend much more time with kids now than they did in the sixties.

Can you double check your link?

Not the stupid hat thing again. Replaced.

Thanks I was really confused why it was linking to a deleted reddit comment or whatever.

Except that I’d guess 100 years ago parents spent way less personal ‘emotional’ time with kids, kids were much more independent, were raised by neighborhood older figures in informal crèches until they were old enough to play by themselves, whereupon they did so until they went to school, which they did until they had to work and/or get married. The sentimental, schmaltzy suburban model of parenting where mom actually spends hours every day with her kids above the age of 3 or 4 is the new thing. I think there are a lot of big failure modes when parents spend too much time with their children; they should love them, but not be too close.

What went wrong is that Western society lost its commitment to its founding religion and deepest set of moral principles.

Not only that, but we decided Christianity was uncool and needed to be remade in our image. No wonder we can’t commit to anything.

I'm sorry, but Western society was founded on Greek paganism. Christianity almost destroyed it once, and we only squeezed through after a thousand-year rut by deciding that Christianity as it was is uncool and remaking it in a different image. In fact, we to then continued to tweak away at it further to great effect for some 500 years more. No wonder that, having been left with such a strong cultural memory of this serving us well, we would eventually slip up and remake it again in a way that is bad without even realising how we screwed up.

What do you actually mean by 'Western society'?

Because yes, Greek influence is the substrate for west Eurasian civilization post-Alexander. But that includes Islamic societies and Indian Societies as well. That is, to say the least, a non-standard use of the term 'western society'.

What is typically meant by western society is societies founded on old Rome and Christianity. I assume you're referring to Rome's fall as the fault of Christianity(a very debatable and not supported by the evidence take; I presume you don't believe Roman mythology was literally true and ancient Rome fell because they didn't stay in the good graces of Iupiter, so I'm curious as to the mechanism for Christianity causing the fall of the Roman empire and the evidence for that mechanism because to all appearances Christianity actually briefly strengthened the Roman empire before it resumed its previous rate of decline), which BTW left a dark age of 300 years at most, not a thousand. But Christian institutions are the reason Roman knowledge was preserved. Christian institutions spread technological advances that lead into the industrial revolution quite directly. Christian institutions were the only thing that kept literacy alive in big parts of Europe.

Roman paganism(and you do know that Roman and Greek paganism were different religions despite the similarities, right?) was a dead man walking at the edict of Milan. An impartial observer in 300 AD probably would have expected Manichaeism or some kind of mystery cult to supplant it as well as Christianity. The fusion between Christianity and Roman culture built the greatest civilization the world has ever, or will ever have, known. Constantine's conversion came at a time when the crisis of the third century had essentially discredited Roman paganism and dealt a mortal blow to the empire. It was Christianity that brought the Germanic tribes into Roman culture; the early scientific texts weren't written in Latin as a tribute to Iupiter, but because of the influence of the Christian church. There's Christian stampings all over this stuff; even timekeeping is due to the Christian church needing to hold religious services at a particular time.

Without Christianity the Germanic tribes would have settled into their conquered Roman territory and acted like Arabs today(and indeed the Arabic golden age had outsize contribution from Christians and a decline in the Christian percentage is at least a reasonable contributing factor).

There was no thousand-year rut. Christian Europe in the High Middle Ages had already overtaken Rome in terms of technological sophistication, with notable inventions in the period including spectacles, the windmill, mechanical clocks cheap enough to be installed in every village church, sandglasses which keep accurate enough time to be useful, and the architectural techniques needed to build the Gothic cathedrals. (Neither the Romans nor the Chinese could build anything like that). The translation of the key Greek and Arabic works into Latin had been completed by 1200, and at that point Western science and maths started to move ahead (most obviously in astronomy with Oresme). The fall of the Baghdad caliphate and Song China to Genghis Khan allow the West to move into first place, but we never look back and continue to forge ahead through the Renaissance, Commercial Revolution, Age of Exploration, Industrial Revolution, and American Hegemony. If we are not the same civilisation that built Notre-Dame, it is because of some loss of faith in the last hundred years, not because the Renaissance was a RETVRN to an older continuity. (And in any case, the implausibly effective rebuilding of Notre-Dame is strong evidence that we are the same civilisation that built it.)

I am less confident, but on balance believe based on Tom Holland's work, that the key ingredients of the thing that grows into Western Civilisation come together during the Ottonian Renaissance (950-1030), the Cluniac Reforms of Christian monasticism and worship (910-c.1130), the Gregorian Reform of the Church which grew out of Cluny (1050-1080), and the Peace of God movement (989 onwards). Those ingredients are Christianity, the example of Rome, and some kind of customary law or oligarchic cultural trait of the ascendant Germani that counteracts the worst aspects of Romanism. Greek paganism is only essential to the extent that Roman paganism is an offshoot of it (a point of great controversy among classicists).

@hydroacetylene curious for your response?

See above.

Well yeah I saw but you’re not responding to the pagan accusations. :(

I really don't think this is true. To the extent that Greek paganism contributed to Western society (that is, the actual society of people living in Europe and America) it is primarily by allowing us to regain lost scientific and engineering knowledge. The only reason that the Iliad is relevant to us is in the West that upper-class elites thought it was a pretty neat story. Democracy is nice but I don't think you can really call it foundational when most people in the West have only had the franchise for a hundred years at best.

To be provocative in my turn, Western society was founded on God, landowning aristocracy, and weirdoes (landlors or clergy) tinkering in their backyard.

What I don’t understand about Elon is his push for Mars colonization, given his views on AI. AI is either going to kill us or greatly accelerate technological progress. If it kills us, it will find us on Mars. If it accelerates technology, it will make getting to Mars much easier than it is today. Given the likely progress of AI over the next 15 years, why is Elon bothering with trying to colonize Mars in the near future?

There are some "mutual kill" scenarios where we kill Skynet but Skynet unleashes something that kills all Earthbound humans (e.g. Operation Dark Storm, or an alga that isn't digestible, doesn't need phosphate and has a better carbon-fixer than RuBisCO). Not high-probability, though.

There's also the AI-pessimist view: "neural-net alignment is impossible, so if neural-net AGI happens we're all doomed". No point planning for worlds where you're dead anyway; you want to play to 1) stop near-term AGI, 2) succeed in an AGI-less world. This a) negates your point, but also b) means you probably want to have "building things" projects that aren't AI, in order to pull the smart, driven people out of the AI field (where their talents are an outright detriment to humanity).

Plus Elon poured blood, sweat and tears into his rocketry well before near-term AI looked likely. How could he think about it rationally, SpaceX is his baby! It's got X in its name.

Even if the purest rational move is to go all in on AI and drop the Mars mission, he's already invested so much into the latter it's too hard to give up.

Yeah but based on the past two hundred years of human history, you will always have an easier time doing anything if you wait fifteen years. In fifteen years time the ai will be good at getting us to Mars, but if we wait another fifteen years on top of that the ai will be even better at getting to Mars! You can always find a reason to wait, the 'any delay is death' philosophy allows Musk to do things we didn't think possible.

Elon might be able to get humans to Mars before someone creates a computer superintelligence, but it seems very unlikely he could create a self-sustaining Martian colony before superintelligence is created.

Interesting that strong AI is now taken as consensus? I believe superintelligence is not possible. LLMs hitting a ceiling recently is one sign for that, but I don’t believe LLM can be intelligent anyway.

I believe superintelligence is not possible.

I see no reason to expect that humans are the most intelligent being possible.

I hope that AIs are nowhere close to that. LLM managing to succeed here would be just sad, being outcompeted by glorified Markov chains would be too much.

Strong AI (and strong AI hurtling towards humanity) has enjoyed a lot of general agreement on the Motte for years. So much so that the odd user here and there will express a sudden disinterest in the culture war, the result of a belief that AI will come soon and obliviate every modern-day political concern by turning Earth into a paradise or a hellscape mountain range of paperclips.

One user maybe a year ago posted a big departure comment saying that everyone here was stressing him out talking about AI so much, and how mind-blowingly fantastically utterly unrecognizable the world with AI will be. He couldn't handle it and took the grill pill. A good choice, I think.

To your point about LLMs and intelligence, it doesn't matter what theory of intelligence you use. If it can be programmed to talk, it can be programmed to laugh, or cry, or scream in pain; and then people are going to try to give it voting rights.

It does, but it's about the attitude. Necessity is the mother of invention you know? Behave as if you have no choice but to find a solution and you will likely find solutions that never occurred to anyone before. Ai might kill us in 15 years, or solve everything or hit a cap we didn't previously understand or anticipate. Elon wants to go to Mars now though, so that means throwing everything he can now at it.

Probably better to have our eggs in more than one basket and no one else was making that one happen.

Yes, but building multiple underground bunkers run on geothermal power that have mass food stockpiles would probably do more to increase humanity's survival chances than trying to colonize Mars would.

A sufficient speed differential between Earth and a kilometer wide object would literally destroy the Earth, flipping it inside out and melting it.

Maybe if the goal is solely survival. But there is something romantic about trying to expand the aim of humanity and to raise it to heights it dreamt but never could achieve. Colonizing Mars may not per se by smart but it is human and I hope to see it in my life time.

Right, I just said so elsewhere in this thread. Btw food stockpiles are good but the ability to grow more is a much bigger deal. No telling how long that winter will last.

It is definitely helpful to see Elon’s ambition as religious: he replaces a supercelestial permanent abode in the heavens for an extracelestial permanent abode in the cosmos, for all of humanity. The exaggerated importance of his dogma orders all of his steps in the world. Will Elon, like the Biblical Enoch, ascend through the heavens alive? My issue with Elonic aspirations is that it’s zero-sum. There can only be one Elon, and only one SpaceX, and if they’re deciding the future of humanity then you’re not. This unconsciously reduces the enthusiasm of everyone else on the planet, whose labor fails to have eschatological importance. This is a considerable downgrade from a positive-sum spiritual system that can motivate all of humanity equally, and not just the 0.001% involved in a particular company.

I don’t think there’s any reason to see Elon’s ambition as zero sum. More than one person can reach mars.

Sorry what I mean by zero-sum is that it’s a “telic” zero-sum status game. The motivating force behind Elon Musk isn’t just “humans will inevitably reach Mars”, but that Elon is the one championing this species-significant event. He is involved in it, others are not; the fate of consciousness rests on his company’s shoulders. This is motivating for everyone at SpaceX: they at the company are the ones forever altering the trajectory of humanity, in their daily course of action. But this isn’t grounds for motivation for everyone else. In fact, this narrative kind of reduces everyone else’s motivation for perfecting their life. If they agree with Elon’s narrative, then their own boring “Uber for pet antibiotics” company life is meaningless in the grand scheme of things. They are just some person not at SpaceX.

I suppose you can try to enlarge Elonic ambitions so that it includes all of humanity. The janitor who stays late at Starbucks is doing his part for humanity, because he served the road repair crew of someone who might one day drive to SpaceX to repair a heating system. I don’t think this will be as compelling. I’m not criticizing Elon’s own mindset here, but noting that promoting this mindset is probably not beneficial and enlarging it is probably impossible.

Not everything has to be about status. I think Elon is actually literally a fanatical true believer in the cause of humanity spreading through the universe. I don't think he cares about his status except insofar as it influences his actual goal.

All humans and primates are motivated by status. It’s not something we can opt out of. Whether we decide to care about our status consciously or not, our actions revolve around our status in groups due to millions of years of evolution. If he is a true believer, somehow willing himself into true belief, it’s still a belief that comes with the highest possible increase in status per his worldview. I’m not saying that’s a bad thing for Elon, only that it can’t be generalizable to humanity at large, and in fact may be pernicious if attempted.

I respect the ambition of conquering space, but I think there’s also a clear and unspoken disconnect between what’s promised - which is a kind of romantic, sci-fi version of the age of exploration - and the reality.

There are no planets we’ve ever found that can likely support human habitation without terraforming. Certainly nowhere else in the solar system would support human habitation without terraforming, which mostly involves hypothetical technology and would take thousands of years, just to end up with a worse version of what we already have. What’s more, a multiplanetary species would likely still be at risk of pandemics / MAD / extinction-risk events. Sure, an asteroid can’t destroy us, but most other extinction scenarios would still be viable.

There is no major viable route to other habitable planets; we’d need to send probes to find them first, and we can’t do that at speeds fast enough to make that kind of search viable. Even if one was miraculously found, it would require thousands of years on a generation ship (involving mountains of uninvented and possibly impossible technology) or cryostasis (see above) to make work.

I’m all for exploring space, but I’m also 99% certain that human civilization, whatever becomes of it, will be tied to earth as the center of its story from beginning to end.

Sam Kriss is a notorious blowhard, but on just one thing, he was prescient:

Humanity will never colonize Mars, never build moon bases, never rearrange the asteroids, never build a sphere around the sun.

There will never be faster-than-light travel. We will not roam across the galaxy. We will not escape our star.

Life is probably an entirely unexceptional phenomenon; the universe probably teems with it. We will never make contact. We will never fuck green-skinned alien babes.

The human race will live and die on this rock, and after we are gone something else will take our place. Maybe it already has, without our even noticing.

If your response to this is to post the NYT quote from the early 1900s about man not flying for a thousand years, then I care not to argue.

Space is a black void with a few resources we can mostly find on earth. It can never replace the Wild West, the frontier. It is empty, and it can never be home to us. This is where we have evolved to live, and to die.

Yoda voice: and this is why you fail.

Or if you want to get spicey see that infamous Avatar-40k crossover copy/pasta that seems to make the rounds every few years

Spare us your pity, alien. You gush about your connection with nature, your primal wisdom, but what has it brought you? Where are your marvels of engineering? Your voyages of discovery? Your great insight into the nature of the universe? Even at our basest, when we dressed as you do, dwelt as you do, hunted as you do, lived as you do, we did more than merely survive. We built wonders. We made great journeys. We forged epics. You have not. You speak so proudly of the plugs dangling from your skulls, little realizing that they are but strings and you puppets. What little you have accomplished you attribute to the wisdom of your goddess, who is nothing but the voices of your dead echoing for all eternity. She moors you to the past, serving as a leash that keeps you as little better than apes, sad parodies of civilization that lack that special spark to become something more. We have come to your world in search of resources. Whether your actions drive us back or we take what we want and move on, the outcome is the same. We will depart from your wretched planet, leaving you behind. And in a thousand years, you will not have changed from this contact with another world. You will remain in your trees, hunting your prey, communing with your goddess, until your sun burns out and your world dies. And above your tomb, the stars will belong to us.

In the spirit of playful contrarianism:

‘But I don't want comfort. I want God, I want poetry, I want real danger, I want freedom, I want goodness. I want sin,’ said the sky-person.

In fact,' said the Na’vi, 'you're claiming the right to be unhappy. Not to mention the right to grow old and ugly and impotent, the right to have too little to eat; the right to be lousy; the right to live in constant apprehension of what may happen tomorrow.' There was a long silence.

I claim them all,' said the human at last.

The Na’vi shrugged his blue shoulders. 'You're welcome,' he said.

I liked Semper Victoria if you’re into fic. It’s an Avatar sequel about humanity’s return that’s unabashedly pro-human without overly strawmanning either side. Very well written and very suspenseful.

I’m surprised at your lack of vision here, 2rafa. To me it’s more than obvious we can conquer space. We’ve already got people living in the ISS. If we don’t blow ourselves up it’s only a matter of time imo.

We went from having our home be sub Saharan Africa to living in the entire world. Space is just the next step.

I’m surprised at your lack of vision here, 2rafa.

That seems totally in character. The best rafa posts are a window into the Id of the beancounter, and many heuristics that really really almost always work are found there.

Welcome back.

Also, don’t be a jerk.

This is unnecessarily mean.

But why, though? The US was and is better in a lot of ways than Europe (more arable land, great scenery, natural resources). What does space have over earth? The view?

Habitation on Mars would be in radiation shielded bunkers underground, how is that even comparable to living on earth?

You have to think longer than a few generations. Or course it’s going to be terrible for the first century or two. Everyone on board with the mission knows that.

They are inspired by something far grander than their own small existence. I hope you are able to understand someday.

I think that you will be able to find first generation colonists. I also think that the rage of the second generation will be hideous to behold, and the relative immigration rates will make third-world immigration look like a trickle. I don't want to agree with @2rafa, I fantasised about colonising space when I was younger, but absent huge technological improvements living anywhere except a terraformed planet is going to be basically crap forever.

I also think that the rage of the second generation will be hideous to behold,

I suppose it depends on how much you believe in blank slatism. If the children of those who took the long view and volunteered for hardship, take the the long view and volunteer for hardship, what would they have to "rage" about?

I guess. They wouldn’t really be volunteering so much as being volunteered, and that might make a difference too.

What’s the endgame? I don’t think I’m blinded by my small existence, I think they’re blinded by science fiction; they fantasize about playing golf on an alien world with candy cotton trees, about going on space liners around the rings of Saturn, about going where no man has gone before. They imagine a universe of earth-like worlds with breathable atmospheres, each full of its own mysteries, cultures, fertile soil for new civilizational growth. Is it they who are lying to themselves. Space is a black void. It is strictly worse than earth in every way. Better to be done with the delusion now (which, again, is not to say I’m against exploring it, only doing so honestly).

All of what you’re talking about is possible, relatively easily in my opinion. Do you think scientific advances will stop?

We have barely scratched the surface of what is possible. You aren’t thinking big enough, still. In 10,000 years, assuming we don’t collapse our society and technology continues to progress, we will be powerful beyond belief. Space will be a cakewalk to master.

If you want some serious reading on this I recommend Beginning of Infinity.

Do you think scientific advances will stop?

Eventually, yes.

We have barely scratched the surface of what is possible.

How do you know that? How do you know we haven't already accomplished ~90% of what's possible?

In 10,000 years, assuming we don’t collapse our society and technology continues to progress

I, for one, think these are both big, unsupported conjectures.

“Hence, if it requires, say, a thousand years to fit for easy flight a bird which started with rudimentary wings, or ten thousand for one with started with no wings at all and had to sprout them ab initio, it might be assumed that the flying machine which will really fly might be evolved by the combined and continuous efforts of mathematicians and mechanicians in from one million to ten million years — provided, of course, we can meanwhile eliminate such little drawbacks and embarrassments as the existing relation between weight and strength in inorganic materials.”

Heh, nothin personal kid.

There are no planets we’ve ever found that can likely support human habitation without terraforming. Certainly nowhere else in the solar system would support human habitation without terraforming, which mostly involves hypothetical technology and would take thousands of years, just to end up with a worse version of what we already have.

This is true, but the implication isn't that we can't conquer space, just that we should assume we'll have to mostly build our own habitable volumes. There's enough matter and energy in the solar system to support at least hundreds of billions of humans this way, in the long run.

So Musk might be a little off-target with his focus on Mars. Still, at this point we don't really need to make that decision; SpaceX is working on general capabilities that apply to either approach. And maybe it's not a bad idea to start with Mars and work our way around to habitats as AI advances make highly automated in-space resource extraction and construction more viable.

What’s more, a multiplanetary species would likely still be at risk of pandemics / MAD / extinction-risk events. Sure, an asteroid can’t destroy us, but most other extinction scenarios would still be viable.

Many forms of x-risk would be substantially mitigated if civilization were spread over millions of space habitats. These could be isolated to limit the spread of a pandemic. Nuclear exchanges wouldn't affect third-parties by default, and nukes are in several ways less powerful and easier to defend against in space. Dispersal across the solar system might even help against an unfriendly ASI, by providing enough time for those furthest from its point of emergence to try their luck at rushing a friendly ASI to defend them (assuming they know how to build ASI but were previously refraining for safety).

There are no planets we’ve ever found that can likely support human habitation without terraforming. Certainly nowhere else in the solar system would support human habitation without terraforming

I don't think this is true at all. It's possible we never colonize Mars, or wherever, or that if we do it's just basically a scientific research outpost.

But Mars has water. So humans would be able to breathe and grow food. From what I can tell - although I am happy to be corrected - colonizing Mars is much more of a logistical challenge than anything else. The technical challenges seem solved or solvable with current technology.

colonizing Mars is much more of a logistical challenge than anything else. The technical challenges seem solved or solvable with current technology.

Pretty much, in fact NASA concluded that it was largely solvable with 1970s technology, the issue was that it was estimated that (assuming a reliable source of water could be found) a self sustaining lunar colony of 50 - 100 people would require something on the order of 10,000 tons of seed mass. Not all that much in the grand scheme of human endevour, but there was no way congress was going to give budgetary approval for 650 Saturn V launches over the course of 10 years.

That later bit is what makes "Starship" so exciting. If SpaceX actually manages to deliver even half of thier advertised payload capacity and flight rate, an ISS-scale space station will be something a decent sized university or tech company can afford, and a permanent Lunar colony will be within the means of most nation states, not unlike arctic and antarctic stations today.

IMO Mars doesn't necessarily seem like it will be the most interesting destination: It seems likely that once we have the technology for extended in-space habitation to get there, the bottom of a large gravity well seems a relatively boring place to hang out. What does the planet get you? Gravity? Spinning habitations seem easy enough. Meteorite protection? We'll need to have figured that out anyway. Land? Is it really easier for farming than in-space?

The asteroid belt looks a lot more tempting to me because even if resources are scarcer (unclear), they are easier to move elsewhere.

Radiation resistance is a big deal.

Of course, the irony is that radiation resistance works against Mars, because what you want is either a) a thick atmosphere (Earth, Venus, Titan*) or b) low-enough gravity that you can go deep underground easily (for which asteroids and even Luna beat Mars handily).

*Not discounting Venus because its CO2 atmosphere permits cloud cities. Discounting the giant planets because their H2 atmospheres don't.

Do they not? Isn't the hydrogen atmosphere of Jupiter rather dense due to how cold it is? I'm not sure what the math would look like on a Hot Hydrogen Balloon. (Edit: like 2-1 density ratio between 100C hydrogen and -100C hydrogen, you'd only have 1/6th the buoyant force of a hydrogen balloon on earth. But double check my napkin math before trusting it for your Jupiter colony please)

Edit: like 2-1 density ratio between 100C hydrogen and -100C hydrogen, you'd only have 1/6th the buoyant force of a hydrogen balloon on earth. But double check my napkin math

As a less-relevant point, I did double-check your maths and I think you did make a mistake somewhere.

Hydrogen at (old) STP (0 C, 1 atm) has a density of 0.08988 g/L. Assuming ideal gas, that's a density of 0.0658 g/L at 100C and 0.1418 g/L at -100C, for a buoyancy of 0.0760 g/L for your hot hydrogen balloon in cold hydrogen at 1 atm.

Air at (old) STP has a density of 1.2922 g/L (representing an average molar mass of slightly under 29, due to contributions from N2 at 28, O2 at 32, Ar at 40 and H2O at 18, whereas H2 is 2). As such, a non-heated hydrogen balloon in 0-degree 1-atm air has a buoyancy of 1.2023 g/L, which is 15.8x the buoyancy of your hot hydrogen balloon (or 14.5x if your "hydrogen balloon on Earth" comparison is at 25 degrees and 1 atm).

I think you might have divided the density ratios of air/hydrogen vs. hot/cold hydrogen, but the relevant criterion for determining how big a balloon you need is the absolute difference of the densities. You need 15.8x as big a balloon to support a given weight with your setup as you would at STP with a hydrogen balloon in air (actually somewhat more, because the lifting gas has to lift the balloon as well as the payload and the skin of a balloon with 15.8x the volume weighs 6.3x as much for a given material/thickness).

(Jupiter's atmosphere does have about 14% He, which makes the numbers a little better than with pure H2, but not much. And yes, that does bring up the possibility of using a pure-hydrogen balloon without heating, but between the buoyancy per litre being even worse than in your example at ~0.0192 g/L and the thick balloon walls needed to keep He and H2 apart in the long-term (they're both notoriously-difficult gases to contain), I think you again wind up in "theoretically possible and could totally let an atmospheric probe float for a few hours, but not practical for long-term holding up a city" land.)

Thanks. I got as far as 0.076, but not sure where I made the math error after that.

It's theoretically possible, but a) it's still weak (particularly since it's not breathable, whereas a cloud city on Venus counts all the air toward lifting gas), b) it's an active system which kills everyone inside a day if it's turned off, which generally falls under the heading of Bad Ideas.

(On Earth, the slow buoyancy failure of a hot-air balloon usually produces a survivable if bumpy landing. But, of course, that's no help on a giant planet.)

I actually think there's a good chance the moon does very well for exactly these reasons - there's water ice there, there's enough gravity for useful things but barely enough to stop you from traveling, and we could make a space elevator from conventional materials. Basically has most of the benefits of a space habitat but doesn't require space infrastructure assembly.

One thing that I think planets have that space habitats don't is more room for error. If you are building on Mars it's pretty easy to build e.g. a "panic room" for a colony - food stockpiles, an extra reactor, etc. (And if something does go badly wrong you at least have resources on hand that don't have to be flown to you.) You can build redundancy on a space colony as well, but I imagine it as the difference between designing a ship with that versus a land-based colony. Both are doable, but it's probably going to have a marginal impact on the ship's cost moreso than that of the colony.

This isn't to say that space habitats won't be a thing, though - they seem plausible to me.

Space is a black void with a few resources we can mostly find on earth. It can never replace the Wild West, the frontier. It is empty, and it can never be home to us. This is where we have evolved to live, and to die.

The Earth vs. Moon and African Plains vs. far Arctic are differences of degree, not kind. Both the moon and the arctic are inhospitable environments that will quickly kill unprotected humans, and lack easy access to essential resources. And yet, with sufficient adaptation and technology, we've managed to create self-sufficient populations in the far north.

We've gone beyond "where we have evolved to live, and to die" once already. I wouldn't count us out yet.

Some may ask why we aren't building cities in Antarctica now before going to Mars. Building life support systems and growing food is easier there than it will be on Mars. Mars will be colonized first, though, and Antarctica may never be colonized. The reason is because international treaties prevent Antarctica from having sovereignty. But sovereignty can be attainable on Mars. The pursuit of sovereignty is what makes space exploration worthwhile. Sovereignty is unobtainium—the resource more abundant in space than on Earth. Men will endure bitter poverty, cold isolation, drink piss and eat lichen just for a chance to be free from the tyranny of the United Nations.

This looks like one of the cases where being more realistic is not more useful. Even if Sam Kriss is 99% right, what is the use of following his earthly wisdom instead of gambling for the 1%?

If there’s energy, (whether from solar panels, a greenhouse or a nuclear reactor) people can live there. I’m positive star entrepreneurs could find lots of people willing to live in a cage, eating reprocessed gruel facing fearful odds for a hundred generations, because I’m not far from considering it. A lot of polynesians drowned, but in the end they got to most of the pacific.

No need for terraforming, just dig the equivalent of an antarctic base. Who needs fresh air anyway. Modern youth’s predilection for browsing dank memes over going outside will pay off on mars.

Yeah. Elon has explicitly stated that “if it’s not against the laws of physics it’s not impossible”.

This attitude has proven to be enormously valuable.

Mars colonization is not impossible just because we don’t know how to do it yet.

That may be true, but what actually matters is that Elon himself does not believe this.

It's true that designing some kind of vault system to survive a meteor strike would be vastly easier and cheaper than trying to do something similar on another world. At least here we have air and water, and transportation costs are comparatively nil.

A vault system is okay for a meteor strike, but if planet Earth gets taken over by robots, a human colony on Mars has a better chance of escaping extermination.

I think I'm in camp "If the robots can take over earth they can and will probably get to Mars too." Guess one never does know.

IIRC a novel called 'Moving Mars' deals with such a scenario.

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