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/c/café daily chat thread for 24 August 2023
(self.cafe)
Welcome to our virtual third place, The Café.
Come on in and make a new human connection over a cup of coffee (or Teh Tarik). This is a casual community, do whatever you want, share your oyen pics, your frustrations, and even organize a weekend picnic with the community. The world is your oyster.
Rules are simple, be kind and civil with each other. As with any other café, rude patrons will be kicked out.
@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?