In reality, space travel is utterly claustrophobic, smelly (recycled astronaut funk) & constrained. You’re trapped in an artificial environment. The expanse of space is still “out there”— and if you venture beyond the airlock, your spacesuit is a miniature earth from earth.
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There can be nothing “heroic” in space exploration. There is no escape from technology or the technosphere in it. It is, in fact, the highest realisation of technology—the complete technological environment.
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Even if you terraformed a planet, how would this be done? With nuclear bombs and bombs—certainly not with human hands. You would sit in your monitoring station, like playing a computer game, remaking the planet. The “Alien” films and the TV series “Red Drawf” understand this.
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They understand that working in space would be just another corporate job. Just another manipulation at a distance, like working in a call centre on Earth. You would feel exactly the same need, perhaps more so, to slip on the VR headset and escape mundane life on the spaceship.
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Living on a spaceship would be like living in a car, which—I can tell you—is unpleasant. This is why our fantasies of escape have turned inwards, towards the Internet. Ballard & Burroughs understood. The problem with space isn’t the aliens...it’s that there’s nothing out there.
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