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/c/café daily chat thread for 24 August 2023
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this post was submitted on 23 Aug 2023
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In general expenditure for space exploration (or big ticket stuff) is usually a red herring in conversations about poverty eradication. In part because there's the 1:1 fallacy in administration (tau tau a significant part is state authorities and their taxation revenue) but also in terms of dividends down the line. For sure you can critique the priorities on a matter of principle but it's not like USA was evenly and uniformly rich during their space race years (racial segregation pun was still ongoing apatah lagi how native Americans were actively experiencing cultural genocide).
What is interesting is the long-term impact to their ICT and technical R&D industries. Like it or not, one of their demographical time bomb was having a highly educated middle class and coming with no real pathway to a career outside the service sector and/or migration. Will this be enough of a pull factor? NASA is still operating in Florida because equatorial advantage despite the politics being so shit; many expats would still continue to work in China if they weren't being discouraged to do so. Speaking of China, having manufacturing hubs like Shenzen arguably contributed to improved economic conditions and India has an even younger and dynamic population who may take all the science and engineering they're learning formally and informally and do something. The fact that a lot of space-oriented tech has come back to earth such as it is, and entered civilian life in good ways can't be overstated (titanium and lighter metals = better designed tools and prosthesis for the old and the disabled; better water filtration; carbon dioxide filtration), so imagine what can happen if much of this can be done on a global south economic budget.
In any case, if I want to be genuinely concerned I would think about the fueling needs of such a sector and the fact that both India and Pakistan are nuclear-owning countries 😌 but I remain always hopeful whenever any genie is out of the bottle when it comes to common folk having the access to improve themselves and change the overall condition.
Specifically on technical innovation, a quote:
TBH if anything I don't want to see this be captured by private sector/the rich. Unless they want to do like that submersible lah... 😌
ETA: lol I guess selalu kena justify: https://spinoff.nasa.gov/
@cendawanita@monyet.cc
india has done shit to eradicate poverty, but went on to become a fascist state where minorities can hardly survive > i don't expect any good outcome from india's space adventure - i mean, come on, they have even cut the periodic table from schoolbooks ...
india is a laughingstock of a country
@cendawanita@monyet.cc
to be fair, any country doing shit in space is a laughingstock:
usa ? lmao
russia? wtf
china? please no
japan? better invest in geronto-whatever
western europe? a mess
none of those space adventurers have done anything to make this planet a better place, and each of them have failed their own citizens > india is no exception
It's easy enough to be skeptical and certainly I do expect in the near future the gains to be unevenly distributed but the last statement is so definitive that it's easy enough to disprove, I can't agree with it. Has India failed its citizens? Well, space exploration may just be but one more indignity, especially if you're certain nothing of value will never make its way back to civilian space (untrue) but also yet another indignity that if removed, will not change the traction on any of the other social injustices. There's righteous anger there but I cannot deny actual scientific outputs.
Put it like this: literacy was never a means for making the lower classes educated just "better" workers.
But, they did get educated.
@cendawanita@monyet.cc
i don't care for any scientific output from space as long as so many big issues on earth remain unsolved which could have been solved at a fraction of costs for space adventures
also let's not forget that a great many spaceports have been built in areas which are nothing else but colonies, with french guiana being the most obvious example, or in territories originally belonging to native communities > no spin-off outcome of space adventures has benefitted locals directly, and if there were indirect benefits, they would still have to pay for them ...
the space race is a truly sad thing and nothing to celebrate at all
Certainly, anyone should continue to question the political strategy of any of these choices. I'm still not dismissing the scientific results since I can see wellbeing in my society benefiting from it. I wouldn't want to use these gains to excuse injustice but I have as little interest in using the injustices as rhetorical cudgel because as I said above, the administrative attention still won't be funnelled there even if removed. In the meantime the genie (access to tech and learning) is now out. Will there be a significant reallocation on the govt side? I doubt it and history bears it out. So how to resolve the tension? A foolish person would be the kind to be convinced it can be resolved in an afternoon in favour of one or the other.
Even to use the occupation of land as an example, you can of course then claim the political ideology of the natives suspect but at the same time a lot of advocacy is wanting to be part of the process as part of the reparations rather than completely kicking them out.
And without getting into the rights of theoretical lifeforms on asteroids, the fact that deep space mining might just be possible and might just reduce pressure on many countries such as in Africa which are in turmoil due to this industry as well as as mining for space water, this is all things to be discounted? Let's just be mad because my room (earth) isn't clean. I can't possibly do anything else?