Welcome to the age of space scepticism – and a growing revolt against elites | Hacker News Reader

Welcome to the age of space scepticism – and a growing revolt against elites

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Reminds me a quite a bit of the plot line from Liu Cixin's The Dark Forest. When aliens are set to wipe out humanity in 400 years, the idea of a small number of elites escaping in generation ships is so abhorrent to the masses that would be left behind, that 'Escapism' is deemed a crime and banned.

I wonder if among civilisations generally in the universe, this resentment is so common, it could be counted as a "hard step" in Robin Hanson's grabby aliens model.

https://arxiv.org/pdf/2102.01522

The article points out this is mostly a western phenomenon. In China where the inequality is much more stark, support remains high.

I wouldn't say this is resentment as much as classic resource allocation struggles at play here. A zero sum view that X resources put into space is X resources not being put into my goals. They'll do it with other areas too like military spending or foreign aid, but space is more vulnerable.

Home ownership rate in China is around 90%. Maybe their billionaires are really fucking billionaires, but your assertion of inequality being much more stark in China is hard to reconcile with this data when most young folks I know are renters or went back to live with their parents and the vast quantities of homeless people I see.

Really, China is not a paradise, but we should be aware of the fact that we are fed copious amount of anti-china propaganda everyday.

The Chinese save more than Americans do, and they don't trust their stock markets and banks to keep their savings safe, so they tend to put their money into real estate.

And the main reason they save more is that they are trying to make it more likely they will survive the next time their society descends into chaos like it has dozens of times in Chinese history.

you do realize that if you have a civilization as old as China does, “dozens of times” is a small number, right?

Good point. It is better to point out that the last time China descended into chaos was in the 1960s (Cultural Revolution and Great Leap Forward).

In comparison, the last time society was dangerously chaotic for the average American was 1865, and the chaos was less widespread (or at least it was more predictable where the chaos would erupt).

For the average Englishman, unless I am missing something, the last time was 1646 (end of the English Civil War) unless perhaps the Englishman lived on the border with Scotland (and again any informed observer would be able to predict that that was where any chaos would erupt).

1865? What about 1929? For many average Americans the depression was just as bad, and the hunger killed just as bad whether it was due to a war or an economic cycle. You may be underestimating just how bad it was in the 30s.

I don’t know, the World Wars were pretty devastating for much of the West, no?

I honestly find the skepticism about human activities in space to be annoying. And it's been going on for many decades.

A lot of people seem to be automatically skeptical about space. They somehow think that investing in space is taking away from investing in the planet Earth. I disagree with that premise.

I think we can do both. And we should do both.

Colonizing the Moon or Mars will actually require significant understanding of Earth ecology. We still have lots to learn from Earth.

The article frames it as though everyone who is skeptical in this new space race is also anti-astronomy from the examples it uses.

I think this is a false premise. Plenty of people love astronomy and the insights it has given to other worlds and ours, but are skeptic of what building and expending rockets can do for the world, except launch monitoring sattelites, tourism, and eventually the ability to build starships.

The cynical in me thinks this is very suspicious to have appeared organically.

Especially when you consider it is very convenient for the plebe to direct their attentions to this subject while ignoring the other far more nefarious stuff the same elites have been doing to allocate a bigger piece of the pie for them.

It is almost like someone is distracting the Tiers-État with a sacrificial goat.

It stems from a more fundamental misunderstanding about how allocation of resources works.

If a space program costs $10b and you suddenly defund it, you don't get $10b to spend on other stuff. You get a bunch of unemployed people, most of whom are interested in and good at launching things into space.

I believe this phenomenon is responsible for SpaceX's success: a huge group of smart, motivated people, interested in space, being grossly mismanaged. Projects canceled, bureaucracy, etc. SpaceX comes along and says "we actually want to go to space; we're gonna do it for real" and all the sudden those people are breaking their backs working 80h weeks to hit impossible deadlines. You can't just buy that or materialize it from thin air, not for all the pork in NASA.

If these rocket scientists and engineers are doing anything other than rocket science or engineering it's a loss for all of us. Certainly for them as well.

Everyone have their own rational ratio of how much should be allocated for space (or any blue sky research). For example I'd oppose my country funding a moon landing, not only because my country have GDP per capita 20 times less than USA, also because trust in central government capability is low af.

USA itself may be much much richer and more capable, but it just means there'll still be rational limit, but higher.

While I have the same wonder as everybody else about the universe, the way Musk talks about going to Mars always seemed like he just wants to leave by any means necessary instead of making Earth liveable, even if it's to a planet that's less habitable than the north pole.

It's difficult to argue against the new space race, because it is moving us forward, but to me it has the same vibes as when billionaires fund universities as their charity work instead of helping people here and now. Technically it's good for the future of humanity, but at the same time we're perpetually stuck in exploiting people for cheap labour, and then investing in future generations that will also be exploited and feel miserable, but they'll have an iPhone.

> the way Musk talks about going to Mars always seemed like he just wants to leave by any means necessary

Which is amusing, because a whole lot of other people also just want him to leave by any means necessary.

Historically, are there periods in which the wealthy holds an abnormally high percentage of wealth like now? If so, what did society do in response? Can we expect the same patterns to repeat?

For example, are there correlations between wealth inequality and the popularity of socialism? Does wealth inequality increase societal instability?

Yes anytime before today. In feudal society you had King/Nobel who owned all and serfs who worked their land.

That's patently false. Feudal law required that the serfs get 33% of the produce from the fields. The economy was mostly tied to farm produce and the serfs could not be kicked out from their houses.

Where did you get that from? You are talking about millions of people scattered over hundreds of political entities over hundreds of years. There might have been some commonalities, but certainly not anything like this rule.

The feudal laws of mostly Western Europe. Eastern serfdom has been much worse and much closer to slavery, however the serfs still had their house and share from the crops. The eastern European feudal lords, dukes, kings or emperors never had access to this much share of the wealth like ordinary billionaires today do.

Ah yes "Feudal law". Which Feudal law?

English. As mandated by the church. The rest of the feudal domains, while varied and some were much more brutal, also had the same setup in which the serfs were entitled to their share of the crop. So the point was and still is valid: Never in history a minority controlled this much of the world's wealth like the billionaires do today, including kings and emperors.

Abnormally high like now? Have you read any history? Slavery and monarchy, that's what most of history looks like. What we live in is an abnormally low wealth disparity.

If anything wealth inequality technically produces societal stability. In the form of a secure ruling class without rivals and thus a more stagnant society. The (god) king or emperor was unimaginably rich but few were stupid enough to try to rob someone who has secured the loyalty of legions. A more equal society results in relatively speaking any Tom, Dick, or Harry being able to influence things and would thus be far less stable.

Note the main point: that societal stability isn't automatically a good thing in itself.

You’re forgetting the times when the ask from the poor was more than they could handle resulting in riots and revolutions.

Well, this theory would be disputed by lots of french aristocrats who had the displeasure of having their heads mechanically separated from their bodies by sharp fast moving heavy blades some centuries ago.

And what happened after that? People love to cite the French revolution as a pancaea/implied death threat to anybody even slightly richer than them but forget what happened next. They not only had multiple monarchy restorations but got a Imperial dynasty which tried to conquer all of Europe.

The final outcome is irrelevant for the people who got their heads chopped.

I bet they'd rather have kept their cranial assemblies attached to their bodies for a few years more at least.

> Historically, are there periods in which the wealthy holds an abnormally high percentage of wealth like now?

No. Even Roman emperors did not control this much wealth. Nor the patricians.

In the middle ages, even less - the feudal law mandated that the serfs get 33% of the produce from the fields, church 33%, and the local lord the rest 33%.

They didn't control this much wealth because they didn't have any way to create it. "This much wealth" simply didn't exist.

We’re talking ratios here. Second, it wasn’t possible to control it so well as it is currently.

Wealth always exists, and the world's wealth is always 100% at a given point, logically. The share that groups in the society take from that wealth is the topic here as another commenter explained. If the feudal lords could find a way to get 99% of that share like the billionaires do today, they would do it. But it was not possible. It has become possible because we let it happen.

Wealth always exists

No, it absolutely does not. Like civilization itself, it has to be intentionally created and maintained, and it can also be destroyed.

You and I live better than the Caesars did in countless ways. That's what it means to create wealth. Focus more on your own, and less on other peoples'.

> No, it absolutely does not

Of course it does. At any given point in time there is a definite amount of wealth that exists in the world. Back in the stone age at any given point in time, there was a definite value of all the wealth that was controlled by the human species.

> You and I live better than the Caesars did in countless ways

You are confusing the benefits of technological development with wealth. Caesars also lived better than people in the bronze age. Who in turn lived better than the people in the stone age. That does not change what percentages of the existing wealth of their time they controlled, and as a result, wealth inequality.

It depends the time or place you are comparing (e.g., seventeenth century Britain was a more unequal place than modern day Britain).

And in the Middle Ages, even if you just look at Western Europe, wealth distribution could be extremely variable between places and times. A peasant in eighth century Lombardy would have been subjected to totally different customs and laws than one in twelfth century Brittany, same with other segments of society. There was nothing like a universal "feudal law" anywhere. Even the concept of the "church" being a single monolithic thing that received X% of wealth makes no sense (e.g., bishops could simultaneously be lay lords with vast holdings, a monastery could be rich or poor, etc.).

Yes it varied but the main format still stood - the serfs had a sizable share of the economic value and the lords did not have 99% share like they do today.

> Even the concept of the "church" being a single monolithic thing that received X% of wealth makes no sense

Church's own domains and the share that the church receives from the crops of a feudal lord's domain are different.

For countries for which there was data, Piketty collected census and tax data for his book Capital and Ideology and my recollection is the worst inequality in recorded history was during pre French Revolution times where he measured using I think 10 percent bins for each percentage of a nation's wealth. He put all the data on his website, but I didn't bother looking into it further. But he noted that as a society got wealthier, the higher inequality can rise, because the non elites have enough to for basic survival in a wealthy society, i.e. rising tide lifts all boats but only up to a certain point.

Both sides evolve tactics in reaction to each other just like the parasite and host evolve side by side.

So what you see tomorrow wont look like what happened yesterday.

Thie article reads like decel propaganda.

Claiming the moon is of spiritual significance so nobody is allowed there put me over the edge. Can I just invent a religion and claim all the planets as well? Ridiculous.

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