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I’m not really a fan of the fashionable humanities concept of “imaginaries” but the appeal of space flight truly is unintelligible outside the political imaginaries attached to it
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"In principle, space tourism could be a spiritually shattering experience. In practice, it will merely generate new “rich kid” content for Instagram." newstatesman.com/science-tech/2
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spoken like a humanities person :D I think engineering mindset people in particular crave "physics extreme" experiences as much as humanists crave emotional/sensory extreme experiences. It's much more fundamental and visceral than politics. Closer to food/sex drives.
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though you are technically sophisticated and have some background in the close-to-humanities technology of computing, I suspect at some level this mindset is fundamentally alien for you... I think you get tech intellectually but not in this visceral sense...
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Yes, the political imaginaries matter, especially for explicitly political writers ranging from asimov to le guin who construct them very consciously, but the choice of space and its appeal is neither a casual accident, nor inconsequential...
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the canvas has properties that speak to the visceral technological drive... which I'd define at the primal level as the ab initio urge to see what matter does under extreme regimes... will it burn, will it float, what happens if I compress it like crazy...
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I'd contrast your "political imaginary" angle with a "promethean imaginary" angle. The urge to take the human condition/experience out of the narrow "natural" band it's evolved in, and re-situate it in the context of the full range of weirdness the material universe can dish out
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