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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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My point is not to condemn thrill seeking. I'm more interested in way people seek *particular* thrills, especially when a particular thrill is extremely expensive. Maybe in this case a cigar is just a cigar, but it sure seems like a smoke!
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I disagree. That's a wishful reading. I think there's genuinely a space renaissance underway, that we should actually go ahead and do the mars missions and settlements, ignore the current political imaginary epiphenomena, and see where it takes us. Am all in on this narrative tbf
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To me the critique sounds like the exact dual of rough-and-ready frontier types dismissing using the right forks, at the right elite dinner parties as cheap theater, when in fact it steers the fates of trillions of dollars and billions of people.
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The "how can you go to space while there are starving children?" morality theater is almost as old as space travel itself, but this coincidence with high inequality and large masses of underemployed social media chatterati is new. The 1950s-70s were more equal/socialist.
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