"NASA and space exploration makes our lives better" isn't an axiomatic truth; it's an orthodoxy you've had inculcated in you from childhood that you've personally worked to reinforce via forming a sense of identity of oneself as Smart and Sensitive, Different From Those Jocks.
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Replying to @Nymphomachy
I really like the space program, but the whole "they give us crumple zones, Tang, and coffee machines" argument never really made that much sense to me. If your goal is a kind of multipurpose Bell Labs, shooting stuff into space seems like an inefficient way of going about it.
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Replying to @IsaacBetty @Nymphomachy
The best argument for the Space Race is that it was an accidental -- or, for some of the people in it, quite deliberate -- offshoot of the Cold War Arms Race to try to have the same effect without pushing the Doomsday Clock forward so enthusiastically
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Like yeah, could we do blue-sky research just for its own sake without some big cool project designed to publicly own other countries at its heart? Absolutely Should we do it? Most definitely Do we do it? No Will we do it? Almost certainly never
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It is this extremely played-out joke in the world of Big Tech that if you want federal funding for something you have to phrase it in a way where it could be used to kill communists (or, after the end of the Cold War, terrorists) It's an incredibly well-known political truth
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It's actually cool
@Nymphomachy brought up sports because sports is a very powerful analogy here when it comes to "human irrationality" It's very hard to say what some alien observer would find beneficial about playing high school sports1 reply 0 retweets 5 likes -
People say sports are good because they get people to exercise Okay, but exercising could be much more easily accomplished by just, like, jogging and doing push-ups
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*Good* exercise is supposed to be about pushing your body to its natural personal best, and then gradually pushing past that threshold to expand your capacities *Sports* is a *competitive* process where you push your body to do whatever it needs to do to beat that other fucker
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This frequently leads to *injury*, which is very *bad* for your body in a very direct way that counteracts the ways exercise is good Sometimes the injury leads to *permanent disability and death*
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You could ask -- is this a necessary price to pay to get people to exercise? And for tons of people the answer is fuck no -- tons of people hate sports and only get into exercise by getting into it in a non-competitive context
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But for plenty of other people if you try to ban sports they will fucking fight you They will actively destroy their health with PEDs to get better at sports and beat the other fucker The sports wasn't to enable the exercise, the exercise was to enable the sports
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Fundamental human drive and all that People who have, themselves, never worked out in years will pay tons of money to watch "their guys" own those other guys on the field and it has nothing to do with abstractly wanting more people to exercise
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And I really do feel like at least in our benighted world international competition of various kinds -- actual war, and the military-industrial complex buildup that serves as saber-rattling proxy for war, and performative fake stuff like the Space Race -- is the sports
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