I’m less bothered by that than him pretending to be a fecking cowboy. Take off the damned hat when you’re indoors you insolent space clown.
Space Race
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In the latest episode of the United Hour Podcast, Nik (@Rood) is joined by CEO Duncan Drasdo and Financial Director Andy Green from the Manchester United Supporters Trust for a special episode on all things behind the scenes at Old Trafford including a brief history of MUST and their aims today, views on INEOS and Sir Jim Ratcliffe so far, and the Old Trafford regeneration.
That was funny as well. I'm in texas y'all so let me put on a hat .
Genuine question - would it not be better for humanity in the long run to solve problems like world hunger and lack of education in third world countries? Even from a scientific/technological advancement point of view.
I wonder how many geniuses and gifted kids there are in Africa and Asia whose potential is being wasted because of where they're born.
I mean feck, look at all the poor kids we have in the UK who don't get enough to eat.
Or do we think the only way for humanity to evolve further is if a few rich western dudes horde money and "fund" science by essentially having a giant dick measuring contest?
I wonder how many geniuses and gifted kids there are in Africa and Asia whose potential is being wasted because of where they're born.
I mean feck, look at all the poor kids we have in the UK who don't get enough to eat.
Or do we think the only way for humanity to evolve further is if a few rich western dudes horde money and "fund" science by essentially having a giant dick measuring contest?
No. It can be both. Amd I don't know why exploration is such a bad thing, or something we can only do when something else iin the world s perfect (is never) , none of us would be here without it. And I'm not sure how rich guys can simultaneously be accused of hording money AND wasteful spending on dick measuring contests.
There is some Billionaire Willy measuring going on for sure but I agree with you
if we are to halt all exploration be it in space or on our our planet until everything in society is perfect and world hunger is solved…..we’ll never explore again
as mess up as that is
but the planet is just never going to club together like that, ever, unfortunately
there enough money in the world for us all to live balanced starve free lifestyles….doesn’t happen though
One of the worst arguments for anything. Advice for despots everywhere.
Trouble is, humanity is splintered among 200 nations who speak hundreds of languages. Therefore there will never be any unanimity about anything. Ultimately, humans are driven to explore so I would guess that both exploration and dealing with resource scarcity can be tackled simultaneously (along with many other things).
No. Our advancement as a species depends on exploration, it always has. From cavemen exploring beyond their tribes to crossing oceans and discovering continents. For us to survive and prosper we have to get off this planet.
What is happening now probably won't bear any real fruit whilst any of us are alive, but generations to come simply need to have access to space. For resources, for research, for expansion, for protection, as well as improvements to life on earth. Pre-billionaires, the cost to put 20 tonnes into the lowest orbit was around $150 million. Significantly more the higher you want to go, or the bigger the payload you want to send. What Elon Musk is doing is making that access easier and cheaper than ever before. Jeff Bezos' rocket is a test bed for a future bigger, more capable rocket that will make it easier and cheaper. His joyride was a bit self indulgent, but somebody needed to be in it to prove its capability.
What we've had up to now are the space equivalents of the Wright Brothers and Charles Lindbergh. We're now at the stage of trying to build the first airliners, with the aim of eventually getting to the 747s and beyond.
The only one that is genuinely pointless is Branson's effort. That's just a very expensive theme park ride.
And why should there be a unanimous view before explorers can get permission from the rest of us? People are free to do what they like, and if some of those people want to go to space, and can do so, and in doing so they build infrastructure for others to follow more easily, then I'll fecking take that.
It's not surprising that giddy, pants-wetting cheerleaders for these tech despots are unwittingly using arguments straight out of Machiavelli to justify their monstrousness.
Daddy will save you, or enslave you both serve your fantasy.
I'd quite happily wave these super rich feckers off into space forever.
No, they aren't. There are laws in place preventing people from doing whatever they like.
People are free to do what they like, so long as they are rich enough and powerful enough to get away with it, is the tyrant's charter. And these amoral cretins are gushing their drawers at the thought of this unchecked power in the hands of these tech sociopaths.
What can you even do against such callous sycophancy?
What can you even do against such callous sycophancy?
Dunno, maybe calm down? You seem to be enjoying yourself with all the hot air, let me know when you have a point.
Free societies vs authoritarian ones, is the obvious point I was making, or at least I thought I was. But I’ll ask again, if governments (ie voters) aren’t investing in space, but someone with the means and a vision wants to fill the gap and sees a future in it, and employs thousands of engineers doing do, why shouldn’t they? Let them get on with it.
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Exploration in all its forms - technical, geographical, scientific - is obviously a core driver of human progress, and without it probably most of us wouldnt be alive, let alone be having this debate on one of the technical wonders of the world. I’m shaking my head in honest disbelief at the quality of your argument, you’ve got to have a better point than “rich man bad, so rocket is wrong”, surely.
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Sorry, I'm not about to feign a phony debate with someone who's Electra complexing on Bezos in a stetson. You can have the win.
I do agree with you that exploration is important while also being pissed that these people use loop holes to not pay their fair share of tax. To be honest realistically food waste across the western nations is such that we actually already have the capabilities to at least feed the entire planet, but the real issue is that there is no capital gain opportunity to do so. However anyway, you say that we will have to leave this planet in order to survive, so by this do you think that we will find a way to live on the likes if Mars or do you think that we will eventually work out a way to travel safely at speeds good enough to find another planet that is like Earth for us to populate? To be honest I think its more realistic that we know how to save the planet we are on and would cost an awful lot less to do so, but unfortunately that means killing a lot of different businesses in the mean time. They don't want it but surely its more realistic to put these extreme measures in place to save Earth than pin our hopes on finding a way to live somewhere else? This isn't a critique of Bezos or Musk going to space, my only critique is that they have been proven not to pay their fair share of tax, which I simply think they should and would if they were moral.
Basically do you think its more realistic that we find another planet or even universe to live in and save human life than it is to just do what we need to conserve Earth now?
My argument is society shouldn't allow these cnuts to get themselves into a position where an individual person has the money and power to send themselves to space.
There isn't any point in arguing with an ideologue such as yourself, but I'm pretty confident in my belief that if scientific/technologic advancement for humanity as a whole was the primary goal, then there's far better ways for these sociopaths to be spending this money.
I'd go so far as to say these cockwombles would still be engaging in this "space race" if there were zero benefits to humanity as a whole. You don't get to their obscene levels of wealth by having any altruistic or empathetic thoughts. I mean, your whole argument is essentially the trickle down theory of economics, just that it's regarding scientific advancements in this instance rather than actual money.
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It's odd the way exploration and conquest remains this eternal human fetish.
Human exploration and expansion has played a major role in bringing us to the cataclysmic Global Warming predicament we find ourselves in today. Human exploration and expansion has historically been an expression of our innate brutality, whether that be killing, raping and enslaving native populations, or destroying natural habitats, ecosystems and cultures.
The idea that you would trample over great swathes of present day people, in order to keep burning the hope that perhaps someday far in the future some unborn member of your distant lineage might get to ride a real life Space Mountain is the height of hubris.
That Progress myth sure is powerful.
Edit: And I say this as someone who has relatives deeply involved in publicly funded astrophysics; wjo worked directly on Huygens. And so I was raised on this shit and I love it and believe there is a place for collaborative responsibly funded space exploration. But I also suspect that many of those ticker taping Bezos and co are less interested in the discovery and more excited by the dick waving, pioneering onanism of this shit show.
Human exploration and expansion has played a major role in bringing us to the cataclysmic Global Warming predicament we find ourselves in today. Human exploration and expansion has historically been an expression of our innate brutality, whether that be killing, raping and enslaving native populations, or destroying natural habitats, ecosystems and cultures.
The idea that you would trample over great swathes of present day people, in order to keep burning the hope that perhaps someday far in the future some unborn member of your distant lineage might get to ride a real life Space Mountain is the height of hubris.
That Progress myth sure is powerful.
Edit: And I say this as someone who has relatives deeply involved in publicly funded astrophysics; wjo worked directly on Huygens. And so I was raised on this shit and I love it and believe there is a place for collaborative responsibly funded space exploration. But I also suspect that many of those ticker taping Bezos and co are less interested in the discovery and more excited by the dick waving, pioneering onanism of this shit show.
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This seems like a long winded way to say you're a Martian and don't want us to nuke your home planet.
I'm not looking to turn this into yet another Redcafe 'all rich people are evil' thread so i'll leave the taxation and wealth bit alone. It's the technology and exploration that interests me.
What do i think we will do with space? We have always explored to expand society. There are resources on neighbouring planets (and the moon) that we could use on earth. We could put polluting industries on other planets, set up colonies there. The same way we did when we discovered the Americas or Australia. There are also all sorts of things to be learned. Micro gravity is a great environment for experimentation. There are also improvements to life on earth. We all use GPS but what about other communications? And travel - a satellite in orbit can do London to Sydney in under an hour. There are a lot of potential applications we don't even know about yet, the same way the Wright Brothers never could have imagined that one day you could sit in a flat bed seat watching TV and sipping champagne whilst flying across oceans at 40,000ft.
There is one thing that concerns me though. These companies are also glossing over the dangers of space travel. Spaceships are the most complex and dangerous machines ever built. A lot of people have died in them and a lot of extremely talented pilots have used all their skills to save themselves. When we start putting 18 year old kids and 82 year old nostalgia trips on them, sooner or later some people are going to die and everybody seems to have forgotten that.
Blah blah blah, think your argument through then before wasting my time. I don't give a fcuk about Bezos, and I'm not particularly impressed with his space ventures. But I do care about space and if he's one of the few people building the ladder to get there, then I'll support it.
What a bizarre take.
It also brought us out of living in caves, and saved us from becoming dinner for some bigger and badder species. We'd be long extinct if it weren't for the exploration and conquest fetish.
And next time you see a native population on Mars, please let me know.
It sure is, certainly in a culture that retains an eternal faith in a Manifest Destiny, regardless of the historical rubble this pursuit continues to shovel upon itself.
I'm not particularly ideological in general, it's more that I watched NASA piss billions of dollars away on the Shuttle & ISS, that did a sum total of nothing to advance us in space. They spent decades pointlessly going up and down to a dead end destination on a stupidly over engineered deathtrap - NASA really did send rockets made of gold into space - what not criticise that titanic waste instead?. The best thing they ever did was get out of the launch business, so alternative ideas of what could be done, were given a chance to flourish, and now here we are with really good tech in the pipeline and some really interesting avenues opening up for future development. I think that's a good thing.
Why does it matter whether their motivations are altruistic or selfish, if the end result is in 50 years, say, we have asteroids being mined in close earth orbit and we were able as a result to move heavy, polluting industry off earth? That'd be nice wouldn't it? (It's also worth mentioning that Bill Gates, who you could argue is doing a lot of good work for altruistic reasons, gets criticised because he's doing the sorts of things governments should really be doing not charities... but ultimately it boils down to: does it get done or not.)
Now whether it's right for people to have so much money that they can afford their own space programmes (or global health organisation) is a fair question, but one that in this context interests me less (Branson's hardly counts as a space programme, Musk wasn't Bezos-rich when he founded SpaceX and Bezos... well if he actually had a space programme worth the money he'd spent, that'd be at least something). But Bezos is unprecedently rich mostly because he founded a company that addresses the whole flipping planet (which is a new phenomenon). He's rich because of Amazon's share price, not because of what he's paid. I don't know what you can do about that, that is as simple as the 'big tech bad' soundbites would have you believe.
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What has brought us to the cataclysmic Global warming predicament, is trying to supply energy, food and consumer goods to 8 billion people.
I suppose it bothers me because of the way it's being framed. As if we should be happy about what they're doing because it's going to result in scientific advancements in 50 years time. That may happen, and yes that is an overall good thing, but to me that seems like an unavoidable consequence of their dick measuring contest, not the goal.
I'm a science fiction nerd. I've been imagining and reading stories about space since I was a young kid. This should make me incredibly happy but it just leaves me feeling cold.
Buy a blanket from amazon.
Or you could just start a fire for me
That I can.
Arguably these races have always been a dick measuring contest except it was USA vs Soviet Union dicks in play, with a side helping of nuclear weapons if the loser felt too emasculated. Maybe it's because the astronauts are billionaires this time rather than heroic test pilots but I don't think that's a likely to be a pattern.
There's still awesome scientific missions going on. Mars at the moment has Landers all over the place looking for life. NASA excels at this and long may it continue. None of Bezos etc is taking any resource away from this kind of great work.
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It’s disgusting - this obscene wealth when most of the world barely has enough to get by. But it’s not fair to blame just Bezos, Branson and Musk. It’s this hyper capitalist environment we have created and continue to sustain that creates parasites such as Bezos, Branson and Musk.
Well you certainly don't seem to be unhappy to partake in its benefits, assuming you are typing these thoughts onto a computer from a comfortable house and not sending messages in via pigeon from a cave somewhere.
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Oh dear.
BBC News - Jeff Bezos and Sir Richard Branson not yet astronauts, US says
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-57950149
BBC News - Jeff Bezos and Sir Richard Branson not yet astronauts, US says
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-57950149
I do feel a bit sorry for Wally Funk if that's the case especially after being given the pin after decades wanting it. She deserves it as much as the astronauts who made it to space at the time.
Edit - I reckon she'll be given one on merit as per the end of the article if it came to it.