Nice piece in the Star today about Eric Yam’s NASA winning, Utopian space station design: where prescreening out all the violent types, providing free health care and vat grown meat are the societal building blocks! “designed .. to be close to the Canadian society that I live in!” You go, Ayn Rand!
He backed up his design with lengthy explanations of how the operational systems would be feasible now, not speculating on future science. When I was a kid I use to draw huge images of spaceships, spanning several pages in my woefully underused math note books (oh the irony) and Eric’s story hit a personal note. Of course mine weren’t as detailed, just cross sections of rooms inside cool looking post-Star Wars ship knock offs. His belief in a better future was as refreshing as removing a fart-filled spacesuit. After reading the article I ventured into the comments and the first one out of the gate is this fun-killing, steaming pile of bitterness:
Good for him. Lots of thought there. Too bad it’s wasted on space station nonsense. Many people will die in space for man’s vanity while the earth is destroyed. Where’s the mortuary? Will their corpses become more space junk? I don’t see a cemetery.
Dude! Holy shit, it’s a 17 year old kid’s dream of a clean, safe future! I bet you run along side the Santa Claus parade and shout “HE’S NOT REAL!!”
I’m always shocked when I come across this kind of thought that man does not belong in space. The exploration of space is far from “vain”. It stimulates discovery and has made us realize our beginnings more deeply, giving humanity a stronger, humbling identity, instead of relying on a fictitious sky god that smites non-like minded individuals. Yes, we have some cleaning here to do at home but maybe if all of us got to look at the earth from space, we’d have a better appreciation of home. Yuri Gragarin’s first (pragmatic) words in space were: “The Earth is blue. How wonderful. It is amazing.” And later the often quoted/parodied “No words to describe it. Poetry! They should’ve sent a poet. So beautiful. So beautiful…”
And by the way, to answer Mr Bitter McBitterbum: out in space, we’d eat the dead.
5 thoughts on “Cynical Futurists”
You want cynical?
Every dream I have of a space station — and there’ve been many, for 40 years now — goes like this: the program is in place and the first rockets are set to send the initial construction teams up there and… religious whackjobs blow them all up, since the presence of team members clinging to bronze-age mythologies was screened out early in the process.
I think these people fall victim to the more general fallacy that any one cause takes resources away from every other cause. It’s not a zero-sum game, though. We’re not taking away money from poor people to go to space; in the long term, space travel benefits everyone, including poor people. Especially when it comes to technology and science, time and money invested has and will continue to pay for itself many times over.
Hey why is this crystal in my palm blinking?
It always bugs me, whenever there’s any article or blog post about human spaceflight someone has to go on a rant about how expensive it is, how robots can do it just as well, and how we need to fix problems here on Earth first. As if cancelling the ISS would suddenly solve all of Africa’s problems and get troops out of Iraq.
No kid dreams of growing up to be a robot (well, most kids don’t, Ted), they dream about being an astronaut. About seeing the Earth from space, about walking on the Moon or Mars. Robots on Mars are cool, but I won’t be happy until we see a boot in the soil. I don’t even care if it has a big Nike logo on it, if that’s what it takes.
Space exploration should be funded simply because it’s really fucking cool. It should be funded for the same reason art is funded. We need more great things to inspire us.
If he’d really been thinking, all adults should be killed and recycled I to food– at the age of 35 or so.