"muh space" t. every liberal ever

Why do people talk about space exploration like it's some extremely important priority and that NASA is underfunded and needs more money for dem rockets. Surely problems here on Earth need to be addressed first? Half of the US on food stamps, literal slave factories in the third world, broken financial systems… and SPACE TRAVEL is a priority?

Other urls found in this thread:

youtube.com/watch?v=g1Sq1Nr58hM
web.archive.org/web/20120322183158/http://www.futurehi.net/phlebas/text/cultnote.html
archive.is/O4Kcz
thebaffler.com/salvos/the-meme-hustler
jacobinmag.com/2016/02/cory-doctorow-boing-boing-homeland-little-brother-snowden-poitras/
currentaffairs.org/2017/04/the-regrettable-decline-of-space-utopias
theconversation.com/infographic-how-much-does-the-world-spend-on-science-14069
businessinsider.com/charts-show-the-political-bias-of-each-profession-2014-11
verdantlabs.com/politics_of_professions/
people-press.org/2009/07/09/section-4-scientists-politics-and-religion/
thenewinquiry.com/essays/manifesto-of-the-committee-to-abolish-outer-space/
archive.is/s9Yrl
twitter.com/SFWRedditVideos

How else are all the rich people supposed to fly away to escape the planet they helped destroy?

youtube.com/watch?v=g1Sq1Nr58hM

also, space mining so we can build our socialist robot army to overthrow world governments.

Well, just in case shit hits the fan here on Earth.

I mean some humanity is better than no humanity, even if only porky gets to survive.

And now I feel dirty.

Remind them that NASA is only underfunded due to government inefficiencies due to the capitalist market crash of 2008. Capitalism if anything hinders space travel, and in worst cases puts it in the hands of techo-czars like musk

Because it is underfunded. I don't know about you but I have big plans for my species and our immortality needs to be achieved via spreading beyond earth and advancing technologically in order for us to even start working on them.

Because the sooner that rich white American suburbanites can colonize Mars and leave behind all those poor blacks and foreigners, the better.

Well, there's always China and India.

...

...

Explains why you post with that flag, you've watched too many soviet propaganda films

They realize that only primitive accumulation can buy them some more time before capitalism finally collapses.

Because fleeing the Earth's problems, or knowing you can, is a comforting problem to people who don't want to be shamed for participating in exploitation.

NASA does serve a very useful purpose though, it is civilian control of satellites that are used by scientists as well as GPS and other services. Defunding NASA means no more data on global climate change.

because its a nice metaphor about scientific advancement. we're in deep shit but it's ok because the guys at nasa are doing cool shit and inventing/discovering stuff everyday. you might as well ask why people like sports. it's no coincidence that both these things were used as propaganda during the cold war.

I would like to see space colonization, but anyone that knows anything about it knows it is a distant prospect and not an alternative to saving the planet. I also think the anti-NASA attitude ignores the technology we have as a result of their research. I may also be biased because several of my family members worked for NASA and contractors on shit including the Apollo program.

normies in general tend to blindly worship technological progress, like they think Elon Musk is a honest to god hero and not just another capitalist war profiteer. The singularity stuff is quickly becoming a pseudo religion of sorts, even among the reasonable educated liberal upper classes, who believe even mild social democracy is an unrealizable utopia, yet are utterly convinced tech companies will grant them eternal life.

The thing about space enthusiasm is that it's part of an overall strand of techno-utopianism in liberalism that sees a future that can overlap a lot with more technology-friendly socialist visions. Look at Gene Roddenberry, he was definitely more of a liberal than a Marxist, but in Star Trek he envisioned a future moneyless society where "material needs no longer exist". Likewise look at all the liberals who are enthusiastic about the idea of basic income as a solution to automation. I don't think it's necessarily that difficult to get people like that to at least consider ideas like "hey, once all the factories are totally automated, maybe it would make more sense to have them be like public utilities rather than privately owned"–at least, the liberals with this kind of utopian streak are more likely to be persuaded than the ones who just see the future as a kind of eternal continuation of the present where people will always be expected to work for their "fair share".

liberals are rampant pseudo-intellectual bourgeois? what are the odds?

liberal nerds nowadays are often closer to the full nihilist Landian techno death cult position than to the post scarcity star trek utopia one. As the founding editor of Wired magazine used to say, Humans are but the mechanisms technology uses to reproduce itself. The Californian Ideology (ie. technoutopianism), borne out of Silicon Valley, since risen to world dominance, has lots of weird randian right wing baggage.

Liberals welcome the destruction of the planet before they welcome the fall of capitalism.

The liberal utopia of the future is one where the global proletariat is made obsolete through automation and then exterminated en masse. Poverty, overpopulation, class conflict, etc. will be solved by simply liquidating the proletariat. The resulting bourgeois society will then reorganize itself into something approximating post-scarcity high-tech socialism, at least on the surface.

The terrifying thing is this vision somewhat intersects with the "gay space communism" espoused by Reddit tomato socialists.

That strand is definitely strong but I think it's a more even split between that and more left-friendly strands of techno-utopianism. For instance, one of the most popular recent space opera book series was Iain Bank's The Culture, basically a full communist utopia (he talked about the ideas behind it at web.archive.org/web/20120322183158/http://www.futurehi.net/phlebas/text/cultnote.html ). And a lot of science fiction nerds are still big fans of the pre-JJ Abrams version of Star Trek, of course.


It does, but then again you can also find a lot more left-wing variants of the California Ideology–I liked reading my parent's copies of "The Whole Earth Review" as a teenager, by the 90s it had a very California Ideology perspective (Kevin Kelly regularly wrote articles for it, Vernor Vinge's original "technological singularity" article was published there…there's a good history of its evolution in the book 'From Counterculture to Cyberculture') but I also remember its politics being basically socdem or green in the way of a lot of former hippies (the ones that retained their old idealism and didn't do a total flip and become money-obsessed yuppies or neocons or whatever). Also a lot of the "information wants to be free" types are more leftist, like free software designers (like Richard Stallman discussed on a leftypol thread at archive.is/O4Kcz …and there's a discussion of how the idea of free software was co-opted by the more corporate-friendly idea of "open source" at thebaffler.com/salvos/the-meme-hustler ) and "copyleft" enthusiasts, and that kind of stuff often is related to the California Ideology too (in science fiction, an example of this strand would be Cory Doctorow: jacobinmag.com/2016/02/cory-doctorow-boing-boing-homeland-little-brother-snowden-poitras/ )

So just like space enthusiasm, I think the California Ideology includes a lot of people with potential to be won over by socialists–or who would at least have a fair amount of common goals even if they don't go full socialist–even if both also include a lot of libertarian/neoliberal shills.

Also, speaking of techno-utopian sci-fi and socialism: currentaffairs.org/2017/04/the-regrettable-decline-of-space-utopias

It's so we can get away from the niggers

Sounds like Alex Jones tier thinking to me. If funding a basic income wouldn't even cost that much in terms of the tax on people who still do non-automatable work (since entirely machine-made goods would be much cheaper), why would they prefer extermination? Aside from imagining all capitalists as full psychopaths, this wouldn't even be beneficial to them in practical terms since it would greatly reduce the number of people willing to buy whatever they were selling. If you have a country with a million and one rich capitalists, each one would probably be fine with a deal where their own taxes go up by 1000 dollars but this causes 10 billion dollars to go from the capitalist class as a whole to the workers, since rich people tend to spend only a small fraction of their money on consumer goods–most of it is in banks or stocks–while the rest of us spend a much larger fraction. So the typical capitalist would think "this is a good deal, since by beating my competition I can probably earn back more than $1000 in sales that I wouldn't have made if all that money was just sitting in the bank accounts of other capitalists". One of Marx's points about the reasons capitalism tends to undermine itself is that capitalists aren't like the /pol fantasy of the Elders of Zion, they don't have some grand strategic long-term plan to keep themselves in power as class, instead they are constantly doing things that give them a temporary advantage over their capitalist competitors, but over time cause worsening problems for the capitalist class as a whole (like automating out jobs formerly done by humans and gradually reducing the total amount of surplus labor they can extract, undermining profits).

They've fucked this planet and now they want to fuck off and live happily on fucking mars I wouldn't have it. Fucking pigdogs.

a shameful Holla Forums

whipped this up real quick for you fam

Communist astronauts are all good boys.

If space travel takes off, in a thousand years, every "big" political issue of the past century will be obscure trivia, akin to petty religious and feudal squabbles in Europe completely overshadowed by the dawn of the Age of Exploration, but on a vastly greater scale.

The 20th & 21st centuries will be known as the end of the age of earth, all history before that lumped into an infantile category, because that's exactly what it is.

And complaining about such a tiny expenditure as spending on space, as though nearly every single example of the technological progress for the last century that has actually catapulted forward human standards of life from richest to poorest, hasn't been the byproduct of "blue sky" research done for space exploration.

The amount of money spent not just on space exploration, not just "pure" blue sky science as a whole, but all scientific research, is barely 2% of the global economy:
theconversation.com/infographic-how-much-does-the-world-spend-on-science-14069


This. I'm always astounded at people who gobble about how ancap Silicon Valley is and how conservative grownup Hippy Boomers are compared to our oh-so-leftist Millenials who will surely be so much more leftist when they grow up. Fact is, scientists and technologists are still overwhelmingly leftist, just as they always have been:
businessinsider.com/charts-show-the-political-bias-of-each-profession-2014-11
verdantlabs.com/politics_of_professions/
people-press.org/2009/07/09/section-4-scientists-politics-and-religion/

The entire meme, to me, stinks of bitter humanities department pomos using SJW rhetoric to project their resounding failure in the 1990s Science Wars into the less knowledgeable venue of political struggle, since they were laughed out of any scientific legitimacy in the world of peer review.

...

Humanity must leave earth behind.

thenewinquiry.com/essays/manifesto-of-the-committee-to-abolish-outer-space/

Liberals fucking love Musk though. He's like the new Steve Jobs, updated with a hint of soc-jus ver 2.0 and a stealth update of fuck_proles.exe

Capitalism hinders a lot of stuff. Pic related makes me want to shoot down a rocket full to the brim with porkies. If I can't get off this blasted rock, neither can those who made it that way! Not to be!

I'm calling BS, where is the source on that?

I'm torn here.
On the one hand I want to tell you to kill yourself because space travel is essential for long-term human survival and "deal with our problems on earth first!!!" is usually the opinion of stupid normalfags who don't comprehend how comparatively inexpensive it is.
Disregard it, and your communism will be as much a flash in the pan as mixed-market social democracy before the glowing sun of neoliberalism melts it all. You want post-scarcity? Guess what: The only infinite source of resources we've got is space.

On the other hand I don't think communism is coming, nor do I think mixed-market social democracy is coming. I believe it's
Malaise Forever!
So conversely, your opinion is ideal - because then it won't be malaise forever with fully automated luxury porkyism (in space!) - but the extinction of the human race, and with it, finally, neoliberalism.

Tough call.

Ultimately, I'm going to revert to my SocDem roots and say NASA are great and funding should never have fallen from Apollo levels, but Elon Musk should be fired out of a cannon into the sun. Fuck the private sector.

Because there is wasted energy and resources just in our solar system. A advancing to a K2 civilization would drastically increase what we can do as a civilization.

It's adjusted for inflation.

Why do liberals love "tech" ceos so much? Fucking oil extraction is a complicated process but liberals pretend to dislike oil company ceos

One type is (on the face of it at least, from Henry Ford to Bill Gates, many got success by kneecapping technologically superior competition through dirty capitalist tricks) dedicated to the advancement of human civilization.

The other are merely profiteers, abusing precious hydrocarbons to be destroyed for energy, content in exchange for temporary profits to leave future generations poorer both in terms of ultimately necessary technological advancement in the energy sector and possibly irreplaceable resources we can never find in space.

A rat done bit my sister Nell
With Bourgie on the moon
Her face and arms began to swell
And Bourgie's on the moon

I can't pay no doctor bills
But Bourgie's on the moon
Ten years from now I'll be paying still
While Bourgie's on the moon

You know, the man just upped my rent last night
Cause Bourgie's on the moon
No hot water, no toilets, no lights
But Bourgie's on the moon

I wonder why he's uppin' me?
Cause Bourgie's on the moon?
Well I was already given him fifty a week
And now Bourgie's on the moon

Taxes takin' my whole damn check
The junkies make me a nervous wreck
The price of food is goin' up
And if all that crap wasn't enough
A rat done bit my sister Nell
With Bourgie on the moon

Her face and arms began to swell
And Bourgie's on the moon

With all that money I made last year
For Bourgie on the moon
How come I ain't got no money here?
Hmm, Bourgie's on the moon

You know I just about had my fill
Of Bourgie on the moon
I think I'll send these doctor bills
airmail special
(To Bourgie on the moon)

Thanks to all the optimist anons in this thread for putting my nerves at ease, but I still sometimes worry about a new technocrat class appearing after the achievement of full automation, and trying to seize power.
If we look at things through the lens of relations to the means of production (class), The modern world is hols the antagonism between owner of MOP and developer of product and worker both employed by owner. Once automation is achieved I fear a new antagonism may arise, between developer and general population who benefits from access to MOP but has been put out of work due to automation. The laborers wont be able to use the fact that they are the producers of all physical goods as leverage in their interest any more, inversely putting more power in the hands of those who do the mental work. My ultimate fear would be a Kabal of genius (but evil) scientists forming and then going on some randian strike, depriving us of their ideas until we offer them concessions in the form of letting them be the new monarchs.

How ever, even though this thought has caused me to lose some sleep, I've concocted some answers to the conundrum

1) Under Communism, we will all spend our lives in academia. The workers would substitute their live of physical work, with lives of mental work. Simply put, we will all be the Kabal of scientists, evenly spreading the mental load. If a few evil geniuses go on world strike, we'll just collectively shrug it off and let someone else take their seat in the university. Mental power will become almost post-scarce, evenly distributing power from the muh privileged few who have enough money to spend their lives in a university, back to the masses.

2) Scientists are important parts of society, but their not the big shit end all. So point 1 fails, and their is enough cooperation in the gigantic field of academia (unlikely being that academia is normally more split then Trots) to organize this atlas shigged'esk strike; well then, in response we have the dark kabal of anime writers go on strike and withhold their creations until the techno-separatists surrender or die due to lack of animu. This could also expand, until the animu kabal and the novelist kabal form some mega entertainment conspiracy that deprives the world of their ideas until the whole thing falls the fuck apart and the pharmaceutical kabal splits from the engineering kabal to join the attack on titan writers kabal to take down the family guy kabal.
I know this was a silly example, but my overall point is, society is a conglomerate of parts that make it great, from art to science to philosophy. It seems hard to believe IMHO that one group of people will, under any circumstance, become so irreplaceable that we give them that much power for withholding their talents.

All and all, If one psychopathy tries to hijack society by withholding his knowledge, it wont be like his research wont already be available in our information commons, and their wont be 1000 other decent human being who are willing to complete it for no societal cost or just for fullfillment and the joy of contributing to their fellow man.

TLDR: bank on humanity not being all psychopaths

The Louisiana purchase was most of the North American continent you moron

sorry
forgot to say thoughts on ?

Malaise Forever!

Don't take that blackpill user! Consider the fact that once we get to full automation of manufacturing, so that robot factory complexes can actually self-replicate, it's going to basically eliminate the ability of capitalists to make any profit from production itself, because the price of any goods made by those factories would get driven down by competition to barely more than the cost of raw materials and energy needed to make them. Reposting what I said at –


And like I said in the last post on the thread at archive.is/s9Yrl I think there's a plausible scenario where capitalists, not making any profit from manufacturing but still making profits from "intellectual property" (patents, software, entertainment etc.) offer little resistance to governments taking over manufacturing as a kind of public utility, and also taxing the wealthy enough to give everyone a basic income that allows them to buy plenty of cheap robot-made goods. In the long run this might spell the doom of capitalism since workers who would prefer not to do wage-labor wouldn't be forced to by the fact that capitalists have exclusive control of expensive "means of production" (you can just use a home computer to do most kinds of intellectual-property-creation type work, and other types of equipment you might need would become much cheaper), and they also wouldn't be forced into wage slavery by the worry they'd be destitute without a regular salary, thanks to the basic income.

irrelevant points combro, all of those things can be fixed in the absence of capital AND we can achieve space travel. We're talking about a functioning non-capitalist society not a pack of idiots who can only achieve one thing at a time.

irony, your opinion is painfully liberal. You want capitalists to fix the contradictions of capital by ignoring other aspects of society.

It's originally a book, which quite clearly explains some facets of Mars that make it easily exploitable for human survival. No, it doesn't talk about colonization, but the methods described could quite easily be expanded to support life.

The hard part is getting to Mars. However if you honestly think that maintaining a colony on Mars with out current technology is impossible you are very clearly not knowledgable on the subject whatsoever. And no, I'm not just saying that based on "hurr durr I've read the Martian and you haven't lmao".

We need to undermine NASA while critically supporting CNSA. Make Mars Socialist(with Chinese characteristics)!

If capital can't expand on earth, the space for capital must expand.

Liberals have always fetishized the "new" since it helps them ignore the economic destruction that such "innovation" inevitably creates under capitalism.

Once automation sets you actually think communism will work? You think people will own their production? Nope, instead the richest people on the planet will simply own all production and use it against you at will.

its clearly not possible to maintain a colony on mars. We do not have the technology to live on another planet for 8 years at a time.

Also what is the point? Its a space planet. There are no resources. Why don't you work on colonizing the moon first.

Because liberals think space travel and exploration will resolve the problem of infinite growth of capitalism.

Unfortunately, their rude awakening will take too long.

It is possible to maintain a colony on mars, it would require us to build out the infrastructure but we do have the technology. Already we had people spend a entire year in space in a single mission.

Well as a K2 civilization we would have access the energy and resources of our solar system. We could even theoretically extract resources from a our own star.

Of course it's possible, but in political context, it will take an extremely long time for anything like this to even begin at a rudimentary, experimental level. Mass environmental decay and concentration of wealth will cause space exploration to be an escape hatch for the ruling class to form their own utopian society while everyone else dies.

But from a engineering standpoint the sun is just throwing out energy that we are not using thus going to waste. There is also resources just laying untouched in our solar system which extraction won't harm any ecosystem as there is no ecosystem other then Earth in our solar system. Thus for half a century you had technologists dream of stuff like Dyson swarms and star lifting.

You are missing the point: without anticapitalist politics, these feats of engineering will drag society into an inescapable dystopia while porky genetically engineers themselves into superhumans.

A coronal mass ejection or a large asteroid impact and we're likely done as a species so long as we're all clustered on this one rock.

Intelligence is worth preserving. Regardless of other political concerns, we need to get a sample of humanity off this mudball immediately.

A non-socialist society does not deserve preservation. I would rather the entire human race go extinct that allow capitalism to spread into space.

space programs are responsible for fast technological advances. they just use space exploration as a motivator.

it would be better if this technology was used to better the lives of humanity all together.

But, you know

bump