• 36 Posts
  • 5 Comments
Joined 3 years ago
Cake day: April 24th, 2023
  • stabby_cicada@slrpnk.netOPtosolarpunk memes@slrpnk.net•i know which one id be prouder of
    14·
    17 hours ago

    I see your argument, but I disagree with it.

    First, “science” does not benefit humanity as a whole. It benefits the rich.

    “Science”, as performed under capitalism, benefits those who can pay for its benefits, and widens the gap between those who can pay and those who can’t. Better weapons technology benefits the people who can buy the weapons, and people who can’t afford them find themselves at the wrong end of them. More efficient food production benefits the people who can buy the chemicals and machines and bioengineered Monsanto seeds, while farmers who can’t afford the new technologies can’t sell their crops at low enough prices to compete with the more efficient farmers and go out of business.

    Every scientific “advancement” by the colonial class - with only a handful of exceptions - has led, in one way or another, to greater exploitation of the colonized class or the colonized land. The climate crisis itself is the purest example, since the impacts of the warming and worsening world are being felt most acutely by the people of colonized nations, the ones who can’t afford to adapt, while wealthy western nations are simply sealing their borders and building seawalls and growing food in greenhouses using the resources they extracted from those colonized nations over the past few centuries.

    And second, I get the idea that the space budget doesn’t matter when the United States government wastes a much bigger amount of money on even worse things.

    And if you were arguing “this is bad, but it’s not as bad as a bunch of other stuff” I would be more likely to agree.

    But the fact that so many on the left have positive feelings towards NASA and space exploration shows the soft power of that line item in the American budget.

    Pretty much everybody on our side agrees that American military spending is a vicious waste. But a lot of us think NASA is “one of the good ones”. That space exploration is something useful and positive the United States does.

    And I think, if we think about what NASA’s budget could be used for instead of a soft power propaganda campaign in the name of “science”, we can start to question the value of space exploration and decolonize our brains a little bit more.

  • stabby_cicada@slrpnk.netOPtosolarpunk memes@slrpnk.net•i know which one id be prouder of
    2565·
    2 days ago

    That’s correct. I don’t.

    As long as a single person on Earth is without food, or shelter, or hope for the future, it is a fucking crime to piss away our finite resources on a barren chunk of space rock.

    The Artemis mission cost four billion dollars. If that money had been used to refund USAID it would have saved, literally, based on the estimates of casualties that will be caused by USAID’s defunding, two million lives. Two million of the world’s poorest people, now dead or dying of starvation and disease and exposure to the elements, that we could have saved for the cost of sending a handful of the most privileged people in the world on a fucking tour of the Moon.

    And it’s happening now as a fucking distraction from the casualties of the war on Iran, and I don’t even have words for how monstrous that is, or how angry I am at the people embracing this propaganda campaign as an “apolitical triumph of the human species”.

    All manned spaceflight is a waste of precious resources, but Artemis is the most repugnant, cynical, brazenly and dishonestly political waste of precious resources in my lifetime, and I am fucking older than manned spaceflight.

    So, yeah, fuck this mission, fuck the entire idea of colonizing the Moon, and fuck everybody who thinks it’s more important to colonize the Moon then heal the sick on Earth.