I presume you all already know about my deep antipathy to Elon Musk’s stupid lifeboat rationale for going to Mars — I’m still getting hate mail for not worshipping Musk. In my defense, though, allow me to pull out Kim Stanley Robinson to say exactly the same thing.
What needs to happen for the Mars colony to live sustainably and give humanity the lifeboat Musk envisions?
It’s important to say that the idea of Mars as a lifeboat is wrong, in both a practical and a moral sense.
There is no Planet B, and it’s very likely that we require the conditions here on earth for our long-term health. When you don’t take these new biological discoveries into your imagined future, you are doing bad science fiction.
In a culture so rife with scientism and wish fulfillment, a culture that’s still coming to grips with the massive crisis of climate change, a culture that’s inflicting a sixth mass-extinction event on earth and itself, it’s important to try to pull your science fiction into the present, to make it a useful tool of human thought, a matter of serious planning as well as thrilling entertainment.
This is why Musk’s science fiction story needs some updating, some real imagination using current findings from biology and ecology.
But I’m not posting this to flog Musk some more. I’ve found a rationale even worse than Musk’s — we’re supposed to colonize Mars to expand the sacred worship of gods. James Poulos uses some ridiculously bad history to suggest that a religious impulse ought to drive our colonization.
The traditions of humanism and religion we’ve inherited from ancient Athens and Jerusalem also treat the natural world as a type of “base reality” against which our collective history can take place. Those traditions allow old myths and social orders to be honored and new ones to be founded — fresh starts, but by no means blank slates, where the best of what came before can be retained and given promise on new soil. In this sweeping journey of civilizations, what was begun with the exodus from Egypt and the founding of Rome continued, more or less, right up through the Pilgrims’ arrival on Plymouth Rock, Abraham Lincoln’s “new birth of freedom,” and on, perhaps, to the present day. You don’t have to be pious to think of human history in these essentially religious terms — as a multimillennial journey that is far from over (perennial panic over the literal End Times notwithstanding), and that in its totality can only be fully conceived of and known by a consciousness beyond what our human nature affords.
I must point out that the Biblical Exodus is a myth — it didn’t happen. That’s a very weird justification for a huge secular enterprise, to cite a self-serving and false story. Rome was founded by bandits and rapists who had a poor reputation among their neighbors, and likewise the religious gloss on their founding myth was added after the fact. The Pilgrims? Jesus. Horrible awful religious fanatics who contributed a deplorable Puritan sanctimony to American history. The Gettysburg Address mentions “God” only once, and even that is questioned — there are multiple drafts and transcripts, and they don’t all include the “under God” phrase, which is a peculiar focus to use to claim that the consecration of a graveyard is analogous to colonizing Mars. This guy is really reaching to claim a religious drive behind all of human history.
And that last sentence — can only be fully conceived of and known by a consciousness beyond what our human nature affords
— total bullshit. You can imagine all kinds of nonsense, their irrationality does not mean that there must exist a cosmic intelligence that can make sense of it all.
The babble continues.
From this standpoint, the exciting thing about colonizing Mars (and tomorrow, the galaxy!) is not the prospect of accelerating humanity past the point of humanity. Instead, it’s continuing the grand journey of humankind, wherein sacred traditions can be imitatively repeated and re-founded. A colony on Mars, then, is not like a personal trainer, pushing us through some artificial but valuable exercises that end up taking us to a higher plane of aliveness otherwise unavailable to us. Humanity’s achievement of interplanetary life wouldn’t allow us to break with the past and level us up into a new reality. It would humble us in recognition of a newfound, enduring mission — to create new ways to honor our human essence and praise what has allowed it to be sustained over time, whether we call that nature, nature’s God, or something else.
You know what? That’s just noise. Religion is really good at generating well-meaning phrases that can be strung together into a happy collection of sounds that resonate because they’re familiar and often repeated to believers, but to anyone outside the belief, it’s just word salad.
He just keeps going!
Such an act of providence would be restorative for humanity — and there’s reason to think we now require a Mars colony to allow for it. What’s clear is that Earth no longer invites us to contemplate, much less renew, our deepest spiritual needs. It has filled up so much with people, discoveries, information, and sheer stuff that it’s maddening to find what F. Scott Fitzgerald called a fresh green breast of a new world — the experience of truly open horizons and an open but specific future. That’s a problem that does suggest a terrible calamity, if not exactly an imminent apocalypse. But by making a fresh pilgrimage to a literally new world — say, red-breasted Mars — we could mark our pilgrims’ progress from the shadows of ignorance and apartness from God.
Oh, he’s done with Earth. It’s got nothing lovely anymore. So let’s go to a place that isn’t ruined for good Christians!
He thinks we might need a religious litmus test for the Mars colony ship — maybe they should all be religious, with no atheists to pollute the contemplative theology of Mars.
That means asking and answering initially awkward questions, like, would we be best off if our first Martian colonists were religious observers? Especially today, nature and freedom won’t defend themselves, and they’re certainly not taken as a given by some of Earth’s more powerful people. But it turns out that even today, and in the far-flung future, many of those who see our cosmos as supernaturally real are still their best defenders. There may not be much to recommend for life on Mars if we don’t clear a path for Christ on Mars.
Now I’m torn. I’m horrified at the idea of spawning a space colony that is a home to religious zealots, but at the same time, I expect the colony to fail, especially if it is entirely crewed by babbling Jesus freaks. And then I’m further torn by the dilemma of whether to cheer at shipping out fanatics to their inevitable doom, or to mourn the loss of human life, or to regret that the tiny numbers of ‘colonists’ will make no dent in the population of idiots remaining here on earth.
Gets me right in the feels, it does.
There could be something in the religious angle. I mean, if we could find a way of persuading all the religious folks to bugger off to Mars, & Venus, & leave the World to us godless heathens, that would be all to the good, eh.
We should be especially careful about phone-transmitted viruses. Apart from that, I don’t really see a downside.
Well.. Can see two real problems with this – they go conquering death cult, as things fall apart on them, instead of suicide cult, and attack us (either to take back what they where “tricked out of”, or to “purge the unbelievers”, or some similar nonsense), assuming they a) survived long enough, and/or b) went nuts in the right way, as the end was coming.
The second issue is less probable, but… presuming we ever did find a way around the whole, “It takes a long dang time to get places.”, problem of space travel, there is the risk, how ever faint that “they” would stumble over it first, somehow, and we would have let a bunch or Origin like crazies loose (Stargate SG-1, the Christian-like followers of ascended ancients, who opted to use some sort of energy transfer, from those be worshiped them, to become super powerful), or.. at minimum, we would still have to contend with them, and the possibility of someone sneaking them this new tech.
But, sort of doubt shoving such people, all by themselves, to plot and scheme, without outside opposition, is.. particularly healthy for anyone.
The Robinson quote is very similar to an article I was reading last night in Scientific American (and is that becoming an oxymoron?). That article has similar comments about Musk and the ridiculousness of the “lifeboat Mars” idea.
In the article, the author mentions that trips to Mars might be tough on our microbiome, which is interesting because of all the current gab about microbiomes these days. I’m sure that will give the new age folks pause before signing on to the Musk ship.
Poulos is clearly mistaken from his first sentence. The humanist and religious traditions we inherited came from all over the place. There is no reason to single out Athens and Jerusalem except the author’s prejudices.
James Poulos
:spits: Speak for yourself, you poisonous, flaming fucking dipshit colonialist. A whole Mars full of fuck you isn’t enough. I’d be happy enough to launch you into space, it’s white assholes like you who have destroyed so much of our earth, and continue to do so, and are ready to dump it in the trash in pursuit of a new manly man frontier, because by gosh, you want to be a raping, pillaging pioneer. Yeehaw.
Never heard of James Poulos before, so I had to do a search.
Found this: … James Poulos (the Post Modern Conservative), …
/search
I wonder what would happen if we tried to colonize Mars with religious wackos who were climate change denialists. Would they insist that human activity could never teraform Mars because God wouldn’t allow it? Or would they proclaim the whole endeavor pointless because the rapture was coming any day now?
The idea of sending biology into space is insane. It makes no sense. Sure, we can do it and it’s fun and all that, but look at the baggage. I complain when my family hauls around more than one bag, but what if we had to haul our own oxygen, water, food, etc.
Even the explorers of the 16th century could only carry enough for about 6 weeks at sea. After that things got pretty bad. They had to make landfall to survive. There is no landfall in space.
So, why not send something into space that doesn’t require biological supplies. Robots. All they need is electricity and inorganic bits and pieces. Our robotic overlords will be putting us in zoos, anyway, might as well sent them out to explore the solar system and beyond.
I know, I just bruised mankind’s ego. Sorry.
I’m put in mind of the scene in Chronicles of Riddick, where the Necromongers arrive to take over the planet. “Convert or Die!” Yeah, no.
We’ve seen a lot of fundamentalist, religious right-wingers from the USA work really hard to expand their brand of religiosity in Russia (anti-gay campaigns as well), Europe, and countries like Korea, etc..
I guess that wasn’t enough. Now they need other planets
“What’s clear is that Earth no longer invites us to contemplate, much less renew, our deepest spiritual needs.” Well, yes, that is correct in a way. You are no longer welcome to spread your deepest waste-stream all over planet earth.
That is, not enough that he ought to colonize Mars (or be allowed to do so?), and not just religious but specifically soaked in the Jesus juices. Is the problem that Martian rocks need somebody to evangelize to them? What else is there to do? If the Martian colonists aren’t Christians and don’t want to be, is the claim supposed to be that they should have someone to evangelize to them? Or that some token Christian needs to be there to take credit for it, plant a flag, some nonsense like that?
I don’t know. For some reason, Poulos thinks he has to warn his conservative Christian friends that they should establish a religious test before this whole thing is out of their control, maybe just because everything should be under their control. Colonists gonna colonize, I guess. But I don’t get what it has to do with “freedom” or “nature” or creating “new ways to honor our human essence and praise what has allowed it to be sustained over time,” whatever the fuck that means.
Uh…. How do you know how “it turns out” in the far-flung future? What if it turns out that you will still be full of shit for some indeterminate amount of time?
What? It’s a whole planet. You could live a hundred lifetimes without experiencing more than a tiny fraction of what it and the living creatures on it have to offer. If you’ve managed to become jaded about the entire freaking Earth, why would Mars be any more inspiring?
UGH! Everything is easy if you don’t know anything about it.
Assume that the cost to get 1 lb to Mars is going to be $1M-$2M, which is probably conservative as it is what I remember from my Sr. Engineering project with Lockheed. So, if you take small people, that means that an average weight of 140Lbs is going to cost you around $140M-$280M each not including supplies. Keep in mind that they are going to need food, clothing, medicine, and anything else a person might want for the rest of their lives. Not to mention regular transport of spare parts, materials, etc. So you are talking several billion dollars just for one person. The question I keep coming back to is WHY? Launching people to mars now is just plain DUMB.
If you really want to go, start by launching some sort of terraforming package to start bacterial growth and change of the environment, everyone knows we’re good at that. Then in a few hundred years, you might be able to sustain a small colony. But, as it is now, a colony would never be self sustaining and would just die out on a cold ass rock in space.
Caine, I’ve just read an excerpt of a book that went into a lot of detail about how the (initially friendly) Apache were treated by “pioneers”. I couldn’t have stomached any more than the brief excerpt.
Yeah, Poulos is trumpeting out of his own ass.
I wonder to what extent the historical normalization of sadism explains the American political ethos today? Is Trump the inevitable consequence?
It’s gonna take us generations to completely rule out that Mars has life hidden somewhere already.
Setting any kind of germy human foot on its surface before then could be the biological crime of the millennium.
Kim Stanley Robinson
James Poulos:
I love that word, “Scientism” (as you might guess from my ‘nym) — it’s the epitome of a Humpty-Dumpty word, meaning just what the speaker wants it to mean, neither more nor less. I would bet that Poulos would agree with Robinson that “scientism” is the problem, except that Robinson means it in the older sense of taking a few scientific findings or principles and turning them into a wish-fulfilling faith system that isolates them from further scientific scrutiny (which is exactly the problem PZ and other critics of a Mars colony are pointing out). But its more frequent meaning today is as Poulos would likely use it, as an epithet toward those who would take seriously the scientific evidence for naturalism as the most probable model for reality and the better guide to solving the challenges we humans are facing, which is exactly what Poulos wants to eliminate from his colonists.
It’s almost ironic that what we may have here is two opposing positions each accusing the other side of the sin of scientism.
That’s . . . certainly a new one, and nonsensical. If there ever is a religious attempt for a Mars colony, it’ll be something more like medieval monks setting up monasteries in isolated places for religious worship, or the utopian religious community attempts made in the US in the 19th century (which largely failed, so it’s not a hopeful vision for success). And it won’t be happening in the 21st century, not unless there’s a drastic reduction in space costs.
The Kim Stanley Robinson stuff is good. I’m sure he gets tired of being asked about space colonization, but I don’t get tired of reading his interviews on it. I believe he’s right about the Moon and Mars, too. NASA will shift back to the Moon because it’s closer and easier, and (although Robinson doesn’t state this) because that’s where potential international partners want to go. Nobody has any fantasies about building a self-sustaining colony on the Moon (not anymore at least).
Considering how Space Cadets insist they, and only they, are the Real Rational(TM), Scientific-Minded(C) Men among us unwashed masses of unthinking, hidebound monkeys who would rather go extinct on “this rock” than embrace space colonization, it’s delicious how scientific evidence against that inconsistent fantasy mounts by the day.
Just recently UOC researchers published a study finding that the damaging effects of cosmic rays on mammalian brains are more pronounced and longer lasting than previously thought.
http://gizmodo.com/astronauts-traveling-to-mars-will-have-their-brains-bom-1787617906
This, of course, is but one further dealbreaker on top of a mountain, like the fact pregnancy is impossible in outer space microgravity because apparently embryonal development needs gravity gradients, bone and muscular atrophy, etc. etc.
I am not as pessimistic about a maned trip to Mars, but in large part because I see it as an investment in fundamental scientific research not a colony. Musk may or may not ever actually populate Mars, but his over arching goal of getting there has prompted massive investments in technology that while critical for a Mars mission are hugely advantageous for us on Earth.
As I see it Musk has publically and repededly said he wants to go to Mars and is spending his own money to get there. Along the way, and in service to that goal he has build company after company commercializing the incremental technological steps needed to make it possible. In my view the best measure of our progress towards a maned Mars mission is Musk’s net worth, so long as it keeps going up it is a good indication that the next step is becoming possible andhe has found a way to commercialize the next step as well.
@18 applehead
It doesn’t say in those articles how they administered the dose. There was criticism of the earlier study of cosmic rays on rats because the researchers blasted them with a massive dose over a short period of time, whereas with a real space mission it’d be a cumulative dose over time. That matters a lot for evaluating mission health risk.
@19 stumble
I said in one of Myers’ earlier posts about this that I don’t care about a Mars colony. What I would like is if this led to a research base on Mars, a campus that could potentially house hundreds or thousands of researchers and support staff on rotation from Earth. Like Antarctica, which is the best comparison – both are isolated, inhospitable places.
I’m reading elsewhere that the researchers hit the rodents with a radiation dose about 150,000 times what Curiosity measured on its flight out to Mars, over a short period of time.
stumble@19 “I am not as pessimistic about a maned trip to Mars, but in large part because I see it as an investment in fundamental scientific research not a colony.”
Er, we’re already doing that pretty effectively with some fairly simple and robust robots. Since we do not know if sustaining humans alive on Mars is even possible, and if it is we can be certain that it will be extraordinarily difficult, I think it would be much more cost effective to concentrate on making smarter robots than sending smart humans there to die quickly.
Maybe in a millennium or two we’ll have enough knowledge to let humans visit safely, but in the meantime we have this planetary ecosystem underfoot that we are basically destroying, and we need to make our home sustainable before we worry about sending humans out to visit other planets.
Actually the story of Rome being founded (in 753BC) by outcast bandits and criminals is just a story that later Romans came up with to explain certain aspects of their own society. By the middle of the second century BC they were pretty much in control of the Mediterranean, and this made them wonder what it was about their own society that had led to this. Archaeology has revealed that there was human settlement on the site of Rome at least as far back as 1000BC, and the Romulus story with its outcasts and bandits is attested no earlier than the second century BC. The truth is that the Romans knew next to nothing about where they came from, so they made up a story that fit with what their society was like now.
What was their society like? For one thing, unprededentedly diverse. Rome’s success had drawn in thousands upon thousands of foreigners – many as freed slaves, many as traders – and the Roman people were well aware that almost everyone in Rome had originally come from somewhere else. Most other ancient cities had origin myths that made their first ancestors spring up from the soil of the homeland, Romans saw themselves as immigrants and dynamic, rough-and-tumble warrior types from the beginning. Their critics accused them of stealing their empire and treating other people’s property as their own, and their harshest critics were among their own number. They clearly took this characterisation to heart. Their attitudes towards women and marriage shaped their myths of how the first Romans acquired wives – the Rape of the Sabines – and their deep unease with social disorder, treachery and the political struggles that began to tear the Republic apart led to the founding act of Rome being a fratricide.
Would painting a big letter “B” on the side of the ship offer any consolation?
Scientismist:
Apparently because you’re the one treating it that way.
Perhaps you could use somewhere to begin, despite the fact that you’ve taken that as your moniker and have pontificated numerous times in the past about your peculiar and personal concept of “scientism.” Read this, more than once if necessary, and maybe the rest of the wiki entry discussing it:
Scientific methods and empirical results are not applicable to all things that you could valuably and meaningfully learn. If you believe so, you’re wrong. Your pseudonym is effectively expressing an anti-intellectual stance that you insist on that particular flavor of wrongness.
This is not the idea, if it has any precise meaning:
There is no need for certain kinds of knowledge to have ever started as a scientific finding, or for it to ever be “isolated” from “further” scientific scrutiny which would not advance it as knowledge were they to be joined somehow. To presuppose that there is some such need, while projecting that belief onto Robinson who was registering a criticism of it, may be part of the reason you’re confused. If you’re not the one who’s confused, you should at least wonder why you’re postulating a vast conspiracy of all sorts of other people who are confused when they use the term in a way that you don’t understand or like.
I’m actually pro-colonial view here, Antarctica style colony. For science, for what robots can’t easily handle, no wintering over on this trip, kiddies.
That said, the trip would be quite unimaginably dangerous, as applehead kindly provided the citation.
Then, PZ provides a great temptation, to be rid of a bunch of freaks…
Put the trout away, I’m joking.
I recall the Pilgrims as a prime example. They thought rye could grow in cleared swampland. That God would magically rain food down upon them.
Seriously, if you’re going to fuck up a good swamp (I have a thing for such places, actually, for most places on this planet), rice should be grown there. Once you learn how to grow the crop, dammit!
I’ve grown food plants wherever I’ve been, from Djibouti through Afghanistan and a lot of places in between, it’s a bit of a hobby of mine. I’ve created viable soil from the local soil, Qatar is a fine example, as my garden was as bountiful as the legendary Eden.
Take the local calcium carbonate laden sand, add in a bunch more “sand” from the local livestock market (realize it’ll take forever to compost, as it’s camel and sheep dung that I was after and hence, fairly dehydrated), add in clay (cat litter for moisture retention), add in a fuck ton of peat moss to acidify the soil, neutralizing the calcium carbonate and give things a chance – just a chance, to support non-native life), a lot of elbow grease (I’m now out of that, osteoarthritis and a herniated disc prohibit such a project today), get a soil analysis and add a shit ton of water (watering was five times a day, due to low humidity and local ambient temperatures, although things did well enough at three, five was optimal).
In six months, I had serious soil. Grew watermelons, US style cucumbers, tomatoes, basil (never place mint near basil, a stupid mistake, it’ll never happen again, although the taste was unique and pleasant – even for my wife, who loathes mint), corn and some local weeds that are succulent and while dense, don’t root crowd other plants, but cover the soil well enough to keep it humid (the latter, a key to success, as I wasn’t able to put a proper sun screen over the plot at the time).
Keys to that success, knowing the chemistry of the soil in advance, assets available locally, understanding basic chemistry, knowing what is required for plants to grow, creative comprehension of indigenous plant life that can help one succeed.
The latter lead to an argument with an Egyptian day worker, who happened to be a farmer down on his luck. He argued against the indigenous plants (“they’ll steal the other plants water”). I asked him to place his hand on the neighbor’s soil (he refused, as it was barren and damnably hot), then under the succulent “weeds”, which was only warm and extremely humid.
Light bulb!
That shit won’t fly on Mars.
Local resources, nil. Locally available components, nil.
Hostile as all hell environment, aplenty.
Way too little gravity and plentiful ionizing radiation, aplenty.
Good for a science station, lousy for trying to live there, unless one wants to explore what being extinct feels like.
We ain’t built for that planet, we’re built for a 1 G planet, with plentiful oxygen to block radiation, an electromagnetic field to protect that atmosphere and an environment where we can grow food.
So, while there’s a temptation to be rid of leeches upon society, I also remember that they’ll bring their children, who don’t have a choice in such a suicidal venture.
I just vomited a bit inside of my mouth just thinking of that.
Although, adults only… Caine, up for some tutoring miseducated children? ;)
That’s an education that I’d give up much of my income to support! Countering bullshit, what a worthwhile investment.
No, wait. That’d simply leave pollution on Mars.
Nevermind.
Right up there with flying about in the Starship Enterprise, “Hey, a new planet, standard orbit, I have to take a shit”.
Sorry, Jimbo, that crap belongs in compost, to treat for the garden.
/silly mode off…
Seriously, such a notion just triggers the silly.
Right up there with a hydrogen economy, thinking fusion side. Run out of water, have a nearly 100% O2 atmosphere and a lot of helium. We all sound silly while we burn, while admiring empty oceans at our current energy hungry rates of consumption.
Oh well, I’ve recorded my apologies to my grandchildren.
I’ve an idea! How about we make massive investments in technology that will be hugely advantageous for us on Earth, and regard anything that would be critical for a Mars mission which happens to come out of those investments as a lucky but far less important bonus?
As I see it, no-one should be as stinking rich as Musk, and the fact that current socio-economic systems allow anyone to become so is a major cause of our current economic, political and environmental crisis.
that statement I think illustrates where a major error in religious thinking originates.
It is a false statement because as religious thinkers earth also known as nature is definitely subservient to god and of much lessor importance than god.
It is false because he confuses god with earth in the statement. It is not the contemplation of earth at all that no longer fulfills our “deepest spiritual needs” because they are not doing that, it is the contemplation of an imaginary god that takes the place of contemplation of earth that is no longer sufficient.
They, the religious and this guy by in reality rejecting earth are thoroughly isolated in the world of human thought alone, where science and the “primitive” are seen as dangerous distractions away from what is in essence an illusion that they so dearly want to be real.
They do not seem to realize that we are already riding on a huge, on the human scale , space ship traveling huge distances over incredibly long ,again on the human scale, time periods. That ship has “systems” in place and ready to function that will insure our safety and that of all life’s processes. In fact all of those processes gave rise to life and us in the first place. The profound ignorance illustrated by such a superficial statement as that is really amazing.
Caine’s @6 response is completely accurate and appropriate
uncle frogy
If you think it a good idea to get demented within a couple of months due to cosmic radiation damaging your brains you should go to Mars by any means.
http://www.cbsnews.com/news/mars-bound-astronauts-face-chronic-dementia-risk/
KG:
Tsk, tsk. You’re not supposed to do that. Musk and other Great Innovators In The Sky, may the free market be upon them, are supposed to have the ideas. You should be preoccupied with expressing awe and gratitude when their ideas are offered to you, at the small price of colonizing another planet. These saviors of humankind are, after all, saving humanity with their numinous million dollar gadgets, which we obviously wouldn’t have if we weren’t spending trillions to send handfuls of people to die on Mars.
Not to worry. We currently only have small scientific bases in Antarctica and that’s a magnitude more hospitable than Mars. Think atmosphere. Walk outside even on the coldest day and you can still breathe. On Mars not so much.
@30 consciousness razor
They’re not saving humanity, but if you’re an American taxpayer they are saving you money. Musk can go on about Mars colonies all he wants in his spare time, but the bread-and-butter business of SpaceX is doing cheap launches into space. Those are good for anybody who isn’t a defense contractor tied into the United Launch Alliance.
I’m not certain cheap launches are a boon: they’re really dirty, and if the cost goes down we get more of them.
I actually read Farmer’s Jesus on Mars and found it one of the goofiest stories ever. I don’t know what happened in Philip José Farmer’s childhood, but it must have been pretty traumatizing. His fixation on Jesus generated several stories, including an early one in which the Second Coming is a truly horrific event featuring a vengeful sword-wielding “X” (because actually calling him “Jesus” would have been too inflammatory in those days). Oy. But I guess science fiction and fantasy are the right venues for such material.
I’m a bit of a heretic among the commenters here since I think space colonization may be possible someday, but what Poulos is saying doesn’t make much sense even to me. First of all, the idea that Earth can no longer offer any kind of wonderful or even “spiritual” experience seems frankly ridiculous to me. As Anton Mates @ 12 said, if you’ve become jaded about the entire earth, why would another planet be better?
I also noticed that he starts out talking about humanism along with religion but as he goes along it seems to become more and more about religion. The implication that only religious believers are the right sort of people for settling on another world is pretty disturbing to me.
brett:
Explain how you think this is the case.
That money could be taxed, to be spent on public programs of any kind. If it isn’t being taxed, then we’re “saving money” in the Orwellian sense of not using it to get stuff the public needs. Or maybe you’d say we’re “saving money” in a slightly different bullshit sense, that money coming from sources which are appropriately taxed must be diverted to some projects and not spent on others, since there is a limited supply of such money to “save.”
It sounds distinctly like Musk is saving himself some money, not taxpayers other than himself, to spend it as he likes. You are at least correct that it’s not saving humanity from anything.
This is also a good reminder that we shouldn’t care about money per se, which is intrinsically worthless, but how it is used toward stuff people actually need. My question is why we’d ever be prioritizing “saving money” over having things we need (especially when the savings are for a fucking billionaire, not all of us, since I will definitely see zero fucking dollars in savings).
If you wanted to claim that we have some legitimate need to colonize Mars, which outweighs all sorts of other needs, or one which can even be put into some kind of balance with others as part of a serious budget, then I don’t think you can defend that claim.
So what the hell are you saying?
Was I expressing any generic criticism about the merits of launching things into space? No, I was not.
Of course, as numerobis pointed out, although there is merit to it (sometimes, not always), they do (always) come at a significant environmental cost, so it’s not like we should pretend it’s obviously good to maximize their number or minimize their monetary price. When we launch shit into space, there better be a good fucking reason for it, a reason which doesn’t look like “because I own lots of dollars and have fantasies, so bite me everyone.”
Why are cheap launches something only private contractors do, or only what specific private contractors do as opposed to other private contractors? Why am I supposed to care — what makes it “good” for me?
@36 consciousness razor
The US and other countries do space launches every year. Some of them are commercial launches, but most of them are governmental – either military or scientific. A set of contractors (Boeing, Lockheed-Martin, etc) has essentially had a monopoly on making the rockets and doing the launches under NASA supervision for years, so not a lot of strong pressure to get the costs of launches down from them, and as long as the overall NASA cost isn’t too brutal Congress doesn’t really care (especially if said contractors are political contributors to congressmen).
Then SpaceX shows up, offers to do cheaper launches and sues to get into the bidding for doing governmental launches. If they can pull it off and get some of the business away from ULA, then launch costs go down, the US government pays less for rocket launches, and not as much of your taxes is going into rocket launches as it used to require (or we can do more launches for the same price). Maybe ULA feels the heat and starts lowering their launch costs to be competitive for those contracts again, and so on.
You’d have to really increase the amount of launches to do significant damage. Rockets are something like 1% of the damage done to the ozone layer every year, and a fraction of the CO2 emission that airplanes put out.
brett:
Let’s retrace our steps in the conversation.
1) You claimed the goal of going to Mars has prompted (already??) massive investments in technology.
2) KG had an idea that we could invest in such things with or without the goal of going to Mars. And there was an idea that going to Mars is a far less important concern compared to the technological investments themselves, which just to reiterate don’t logically or physically require any actual mission or goal of going to Mars.
3) I told KG it is not his place to have ideas, and investment-generation due to Mars colonization will not only save humanity but be relatively cheap. I said this because sometimes I’m a fucking smartass, since what you said is obvious bullshit that doesn’t require much of a refutation.
4) You respond that “they” are saving us taxpayers money somehow. I figured you meant that, compatible with your original claims and in response to my smartassery of #3, “they” are the ones with the goal of colonizing Mars and doing this investment magic trick. Otherwise you are conceding the argument and not disputing the points which were raised, without actually saying so.
5) I ask you to explain this claimed as I interpreted it, while trying to make it explicit what I was figuring about #4 and saying why your comments about all space launches were irrelevant to the discussion you had initiated and seemed to be participating in.
6) You still seem to think that any of us here were ever speaking generally to the value of doing any space launches for any conceivable reason. That is not so.
I doubt NASA will have a good reason to voluntarily cut its already meager budget. (Would you be surprised to learn I think it should increase?) Whether that money goes to more launches or to funding other aspects of NASA missions, I don’t see any likely outcome where I’m actually spending less tax money. The same amount will be spent on more things, which doesn’t save me or anyone else any taxes, not if we’re sticking with the ordinary sense of the phrase “save money.” And that’s the case, even on your weird assumption that this was ever about the amount of money being spent on any type of space program whatsoever, not specifically what is spent (or “saved” somehow) on Mars colonization.
I’ll assume that’s accurate. And if we doubled them, say, then why would that not be a significant negative environmental impact? Do you have any reason why you really want to dispute this point? Can you even wrap your head around 1% of the entire global output? Is there a reason why I’m supposed to be satisfied that it’s not a larger number?
The relative filth of rocketry and aviation are largely irrelevant. You’re not replacing one with the other, or having one improve the other.
I’ll spend my advocacy time elsewhere, but it’s not like I’m going to cheer on the growth of dirty industries that are currently small.
My mistake. stumble did that at #19, and you were #20. But I’m fairly sure you were arguing this in related threads recently anyway. And at #32 you did seem to take exception to criticism of it. So if I filled in the gaps incorrectly, my apologies, but I don’t know if I actually did.
In reply to my earlier comment: Yes, that Scientific American article is by Kim Stanley Robinson. It’s titled, “The Great Unknown.” He’s making the rounds. Good stuff in that article.
I would imagine we should probably start with trying to set up a research colony on the moon before bothering with something like Mars. While the moon is technically less hospitable than Mars, if something goes wrong, help is a hell of a lot closer (i.e. days instead of months or years).
Elon Musk is as big an egomaniac as Steve Jobs was, though to Jobs’ credit he never hatched any cockamamie plan that would actually put peoples’ lives in danger.
@40 consciousness razor
No, I don’t think I’ve argued that any time recently. It will promote technological advances, but that’s not a reason to do it – we shouldn’t do massive engineering projects on the off-hand chance that they’ll produce spin-offs.
I took exception to the slam on Musk. He’s not some Great Savior, but he’s providing a useful service regardless of whether his plans pan out (and I don’t think they will – Musk has come close to bankruptcy before, and he’s a better designer/engineer than he is at fulfilling his aims).
Sorry, to add-
But I do think he’ll end up lowering the costs of space launches, even if he goes broke and SpaceX ends up being bought up by someone else who carries on with it (or if someone else beats him on it).
@43, ironflange,
Well, except contracting production out to Foxconn…
Reason for a colony: “Ark B”
— — — — — — — —
Artor,
“Necromongers” is a terrific name for the religious right/Trumistas/Tea Part crowd.
…and if we do not colonize Mars, the Harkonnen will beat us to exploiting the sand worms.
ExoMars is landing today!
Its mission is to look for evidence that there was ever life on the red planet!
Funny.. Because the word is, no matter how you cut it, a slander against the scientific view, by those that, almost exclusively, practice what, since all the other words one might use (like spiritualism) are already taken – ascientism: The argument that some ideas, or things, cannot be explained scientifically, or examined in such a manner, nor can, in some cases, their effects (so.. one can suppose that, say, gravity would fall into this category. lol), and should be, therefor, excluded from any sort of attempt to study them using the scientific method.
Its a vastly more gibberish point of view, but, as I said, the one directly, or indirectly, proposed by pretty much everyone that uses the term scientism, save those that, as you complain, have expanded it to include pseudoscientists, who don’t want their wish fulfilling science fictions to be examined any more than those espousing pure fictions, and who originally invented the term.
I can think of only one good reason to colonize Mars: because it would be fucking awesome! If we don’t screw up the planet. Which most likely we will.
consciousness razor #25 — Thanks for your comment on scientism. Glad to see that someone is reading my comments, as infrequent as they are.
Over the years, I have read what many of the authorities and critics cited in that Wiki article have said about scientism. While I would hesitate to say that all of them (or you) are dead wrong, I’m afraid I’m a hopeless case, having observed the shifting use of the term over the past half-century from a useful and probably valid criticism of positivistic faith and dogmatic certainty, to an epithet to be used against any scientist who thinks that all claims to knowledge should be entertained on an equal footing, or who takes seriously the scientific case for naturalism and material monism.
You quoted from the Wiki article:
I see nothing wrong with that definition, except that the terms “authoritative worldview” and “exclusion of other viewpoints” can be deceptive when describing a worldview that holds nothing to be authoritatively certain, and seeks to include all viewpoints that do not claim the privilege of special pleading. With those caveats, I proudly claim to be a scientismist, even if I perhaps may be the only one willing to do so.
Kagehi #50 — And thank you, too, for your contribution. I would only question your suggestion that the term was originally invented to shield pseudo-science and wish-fulfilling science fictions from scrutiny. That is largely how it is used today, but back in the mid-20th century, when I first encountered it, it was just the opposite, used as a criticism of just that kind of special treatment for favored ideas. The textbook cases were those of Trofim Lysenko, who used political power to suppress opposition to his biological theories; and Anna Freud’s strong protective attitude toward her father’s legacy, which may arguably have delayed the integration of ongoing advances in biology into psychoanalysis. Perhaps the term has an earlier history and has always had a shifting and self-contradictory meaning.
But c. razor has a larger point to make, a point which has been made many times by many people, and has changed the practical meaning of “scientism” today into a common and thoughtless epithet and slander against science itself:
So the point is that there exist “other ways of learning”, ways that eschew scientific methods and empiricism, but which can reveal knowledge that is valuable and meaningful. That’s a bold conjecture, but sadly lacking in examples. Perhaps we just have to take that conjecture as a matter of faith, since it apparently is itself one of those pieces of knowledge that defies empiricism and thrives best in the absence of scientific ethics.
Sorry, but I don’t buy it. Biologically, learning begins with motility and empirical observation (chemotropism and shadow reflex for example), and advances by learning to avoid deception and self-deception. The “scientific method” is a collection of practices, developed as part of the scientific social and ethical commitment to a common effort to take some care in avoiding fooling ourselves (while remembering, as Feynman said, you are the easiest person in the world to fool).
Modern critics of “scientism” need to point to and defend some form of “valuable and meaningful” knowledge that is available only to those who will insist that room for a healthy dose of self-deception (or at least an indifference to it) be included in their methodology. Those of us who still think that an ethic of telling the truth (as best we can manage to see it) to ourselves and others is not only the best but the only path leading toward the vicinity of truth, are still waiting for a counter-example.
The Streets of Ashkelon
Scientismist:
I studied music in college. It’s true that large chunks of musicology and music history are and should be studied “scientifically” (in a broad sense), along with obviously acoustics which is of course a topic in physics. Even so, in music there are vast swaths of valuable and meaningful knowledge, which I learned and every music student learns, which are not studied scientifically.
I do not see how they would be helped by trying to jam some science into them somewhere. Do you know a fucking thing about the subject? Probably not, so I predict you’ll either (1) concede the argument totally or (2) conjure up some ignorant bullshit about how that could be done and how it would help. But I very much doubt you’ll come up with a serious, substantive proposal — that would be your third option, if the situation we’re in permitted it.
So this isn’t actually very bold at all, and there are countless other examples in non-scientific academic disciplines. Indeed, just about all I needed to say here is that non-scientific academic disciplines exist. Did you not know that? Were you assuming that I was talking about religions or pseudosciences, and why did you assume anything like that?
You seem to think “don’t fool yourself” or “don’t have unreasonable beliefs” count as properly and specifically scientific methods or principles. I would agree with a claim that any serious academic study should involve a good and well-grounded epistemology, but that’s a very long way from saying they involve scientific methods.
I guess it’s supposed to be ironic or something, that “all knowledge is scientific” is itself not demonstrated (not even provisionally) by scientific methods. Or the claim is just some self-refuting bullshit. But maybe it’s supposed to be a joke. Statements like that do seem to thrive in the absence of not only scientific ethics but also scientific methods and empirical input. When you’ve got no data, no method, no constraints on how you can honestly and reliably come up with propositions like that … well, what do you call it? An article of faith?
Huh.. Well, have to say that I never took anything beyond the so called “music appreciation” in high school, but.. Lets see… Why are some things dissonant? Turns out there is both a cultural and scientific explanation for that – it is, to some extent, how our auditory system is wired, and even if they didn’t have definitions for this, people hundreds of years ago where already using math to work out optimal patterns (during the obsessive phase they had for a while for doing this), but, you can learn to like dissonant patterns, or, much like ancient art, just never “learn” the framework for them (like one culture with no preference), in the same way that people without buildings and structures with straight lines don’t do well with drawing 3D scenery. No, I don’t buy either that you can’t “examine” some things in music without being able to examine it scientifically.
What would a scientific study of literature look like? Or is the study of literature not “valuable and meaningful”?
Kagehi:
I already said that musicology and music history can (but may not always) involve scientific methods.
Explaining how or why people experience “dissonance” (or even defining what it is, according to different theories which don’t agree on a formulation) is not even close to the only thing there is to do in music. Psychological, sociological, and historical investigation is definitely helpful for certain sorts of questions like that — to the extent those use their own sorts of scientific methods (which need not be their full extent), I have no problem calling the project “scientific.” Nonetheless, anything like that also requires a significant amount of non-scientific philosophical work, to make sense of the concepts that are being used, the aesthetic evaluations that are being made, how we can interpret any results to draw interesting or useful conclusions, and so on.
That is not, in any case, the only type of theoretical approach you could take to music. You could be asking entirely different questions about it, and you may get some interesting answers. There is no sort of positivistic rule that anyone needs to buy into, according to which we are stuck with scientific approaches, or that we must only answer the types of questions that scientists are interested in demonstrating empirically by using a specific type of methodology.
There’s also a different side to this, which isn’t so much descriptive or explanatory, as it is practical or prescriptive. What should composers write? How and what should performers perform? How should they even understand what’s written down or what their conductors/collaborators are suggesting they do? What should audiences listen for? What should critics think? What makes something “work” in one setting, as the score of a film for instance, when it doesn’t “work” (however working should be construed) in another, like playing in the background at a bar?
Sciences may be able to help with certain specific questions like those, but in actual fact that’s not the sort of approach people tend to take in the real world. Yet somehow, they sometimes learn interesting, useful, helpful, reliable things with the approaches they do actually take. That ought to surprise you, if you think it’s impossible, or if according to your worldview it’s not supposed to happen.
What’s an “optimal pattern” and how would math tell you that?
This seems like a good time to ask: am I supposed to think math uses “scientific methods”? What specifically are those methods or procedures, as applied to math for instance, and what precisely distinguishes them from those which are not scientific?
You might say math is “logical.” No big problem there, except that I’m not saying certain legitimate disciplines abandon logic or anything like that. So you shouldn’t be planting a flag for science by claiming that the use of logic itself, or mathematical reasoning or some such thing, is enough for a field to count as scientific. I think doing science involves (as it should) a lot more than just that.
You apparently don’t even have a clear idea of which pieces of music, at which times and places, are supposed to be examples. It would help to tell me when “the obsessive phase” was, so I’m able to think something about it and maybe identify something in the music that we may be able to associate with an obsession.
I should probably add that this applies to scientific theorizing as well. Yes, sciences obviously use scientific methods, but a “method” isn’t the whole story. Scientists are doing non-methodey things (not running experiments, making observations, collecting data, etc.) whenever they’re doing all sorts of other things that go into an interesting, useful, helpful account of what the world is like according to a theory or hypothesis. And I take it that you can know things like that, about what a theory says and so on.
So if your version of scientism can’t handle that, then it’s not even a coherent way to understand the sciences, much less useful for any other academic field.
consciousness razor #54:
You don’t have to “jam it in” — it’s already there, if you care to look for it.
Yes. And most of them employ science without noticing; or else risk becoming trapped in dogmatic authority.
No. That all reliable knowledge is scientific, is very well supported by the empirical evidence. That you parenthetically add “not even provisionally”, makes me wonder if you might also not accept the understanding that all knowledge is provisional. Science admits this; the most serious problem with “alternate ways of knowing” is that they often pretend to produce an unjustifiable certainty.
It appears we profoundly disagree about the very nature of science and knowledge. I don’t accept the conjecture that some subjects are not open to scientific inquiry, broadly construed; nor that science can reveal a non-provisional final truth about some limited set of subjects to which it might be permitted to apply. These have been my positions during a lifetime in science, and I have not seen any reason to accept either claim for a short-cut to truth.
But thank you for bringing it back to music. I recall Bernstein’s Norton Lectures (“The Unanswered Question”, 1973) as helping me to conclude that music was not immune from scientific inquiry. I’ve just dug out my old vinyl set, and will listen to them again, and see what I think, after all these years, of his case for applying linguistic theory to an understanding of music.
Talk about “dogmatic authority.” You gave no evidence, no reasoning, nothing.
Don’t worry. I wanted to make sure you weren’t going to raise a fuss about a word like “demonstrated,” which can have stronger connotations for some people. Instead, you raise a fuss because I tried to accommodate the fact that it would be provisional, if there were any such demonstration to talk about.
I don’t know about their very natures, but I figure that opening your eyes and looking around doesn’t suffice to qualify an activity as scientific. You haven’t offered any definite criteria, so I have no way to tell if you’d disagree, but to me it seems like a completely uncontroversial position to take.
But if it is being that “broadly construed,” or anything in the neighborhood of that, you’re treating it as something which is almost totally meaningless. I also wonder, if it’s as simple and ubiquitous as you suggest, why being scientific is supposed to be such a virtuous thing, with such high standards and a clear imperative to respect its values and methods. I wonder why it is so challenging to us and why there is so much non-scientific garbage out there. Why do you (or why does anybody) spend any time talking about it, thinking about it, advocating for it, and so forth? If it’s already everywhere (even when reasonably informed/competent people can’t detect it) and does essentially nothing to distinguish itself, why would you bother?
Maybe I need to make clear just how radically broad my “broadly construed” notion of science is.
You are right, that just opening your eyes (or other sensory system) doesn’t suffice. You have to do something with the raw information. Once you have applied that information and taken action, you are getting closer. If you have applied a methodology that reflects the possibility that your first choice of action may be mistaken (that is, that you may be fooling yourself), and so your first action in response to sensory information might not best serve your needs, and then you add in some feedback loops to allow you to change that action in response to additional information, then you have, in my opinion, taken a first step toward applying a scientific method. Opening your eyes may not do it, but even adding to your protocol the extra step of looking around in more than one direction is a good start.
It’s not a sharp dividing line. You don’t need to have a degree to do science; you don’t even have to be human. Humans like to flatter themselves that they invented science and scientific method, but every biological entity that moves has had to invent it. Indeed, much of the method is genetically inherited and is a part of the organism’s structure and physiology.
Earlier in this thread I mentioned chemotropism and shadow reflex. Single cell flagellates will move in the direction of a food source. But they do it by spinning around and picking a random direction. If nutrient concentration is constant or goes up, it will keep going that direction for some time before going back into spin mode. If the concentration goes down, it takes a shorter time before a change in direction. This “method” leads to net movement toward the source. So it is always “looking around” and trying a new direction. It’s well-being is served by the chemistry and cell structure that allows for essentially random motion, tempered by a timed mechanism that in essence asks the question: “have I been fooling myself?”
Similarly, a filter feeder will retract into a shell or burrow if its light sensors detect a sudden change in light intensity. This usually serves the organism well, preventing it from being eaten by predators. But if the moving shadows come at frequent and regular intervals, the shadow reflex is attenuated, and the shadow of the nearby undulating seaweed no longer interrupts feeding. It is well served by a neural feedback, a protocol, a “methodology”, that essentially allows for the possibility that the initial protective reflex is being fooled.
Yes, I know that there are a lot of “reasonably informed/competent people” who can’t detect scientific principles in such examples, and just as many who can’t detect scientific method in the diverse human efforts that are usually taken to be non-scientific. I have roused the ire of, and even been banned by some science blog hosts for pointing out inconsistencies in philosophical arguments that try to erect ideological barriers to keep science “in its place.” Its place is everywhere. Knowledge that is at all reliable requires taking steps to avoid fooling yourself. Formal science simply adds the social responsibility to make it clear to an audience of peers what steps have been taken to do that.
So why is this important? Because dividing the human perception of truth-claims in two, limiting the scope of science to certain subjects, and elevating the myth that there are “non-scientific truths” to be found that cannot or need not be examined with the same kind of care — and using “scientism” as a pejorative to silence the opposition — does real harm to real people. I’ve seen it. You have too, if you’ve opened your eyes and looked around.