It's so strange to see, to get autistic for a moment. Such capacities. We have so much, even a fraction of a percent would send us to the stars. I think everyone knows this. Elon Musk is just a synecdoche for that.
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I think (part of) her thesis in that poem specifically is that embedded within African-American culture is a kind of technology for dealing with fear, isolation, feeling inhuman, + other things. And you can't hope to get to mars without understanding and embracing that technology
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I’d buy an economic argument perhaps, that an unjust society cannot produce the magnitude of per capita surpluses required to sustain programs past a point. But cultural essentialist arguments about lack of specific bits of moral progress holding back specific technologies, no.
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I agree Venkat: it can’t be a universal principle (that a civilization can’t succeed until it fixes its moral failures). Maybe Simon and Giovanni’s argument is that *our civilization,* right now, is doomed unless we rectify ourselves.
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Not sure that's what he is saying, I understood it as arguing that the scale & nature of our current moral shortcomings are preventing us from progressing. And no one in history has been able to obliterate another people sitting at the other end of the globe. Uncharted territory.
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Read the poem, that’s not the point of it all. I understood it as two descriptions of an alien encounter - we either show up to Mars under the same dehumanizing expansionist logic of new world colonization, or with the humility and humanity of the Middle Passage experience
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The former wouldn’t constitute much progress. The latter is probably one of the most sci-fi experiences humans have already had in history, and there’s something for us to learn from it.
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It’s not backed up by history or rational understanding. Werner Von Braun and Operation Paperclip got the USA into space. “It’s all so obvious to me? How can’t people see it??” rhetoric reminds me of an ex girlfriend who couldn’t understand why I didn’t see god in all things.
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Humanists love to try and attach their moral hobby horses to technological advance. It’s both a means of claiming ownership over scientific accomplishment and an implicit threat- that you don’t deserve to advance until you fulfill our demands.
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