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Comment by delichon | Hacker News Reader

For good or not capitalism is efficient at incentivizing people to exploit resources. It's easy to project that into guessing that at least our early forays to heavenly bodies will be propelled by that impulse. It's probably the reason that earthly new world cultures are more capitalistic than the old world's. Some ideologies promote exploration more than others. You don't have to like it to predict it.

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The point of sci-fi is to lay off the most obvious and current convictions and impulses and to imagine other possibilities.

But still use your medium as a vehicle for a very obvious and current "understanding" of politics... with the completely natural "I love Science^tm" veneer tailor-made for Reddit, nice Hugo award material, I guess?

Oh, just noticed it's nature.com

Can no one in this thread grasp the possiblity a neutral, non-prescriptive way to tell an inspirational story set in the far future that is not a vehicle for anything?

The point is whatever we want it to be. Pulp adventurism and space exploits was as popular as anything else. Even the ideological books are not necessarily tantamount to "space communism" (see: Neal Stephenson).

Neal Stephenson depicted anti-state turbocapitalism as Mafia corpostates in "Snow Crash". Which is what actually would happen if no one regulated business.

Good thing we have regulation.

I actually had Seveneves and Termination Shock in mind, as more "optimistic" novels.

There are way too many kinds of sci-fi to sum up the genre in one convenient statement like that.

Some sci-fi seeks to lay off the most obvious and current convictions and impulses to imagine other possibilities.

Other sci-fi slightly exaggerates the flaws and assumptions of our world, and tries to logically extend them into a future in which they make even less sense, to demonstrate their absurdity.

Still other sci-fi creates a world exactly like ours except with one significant technological advance, and tries to imagine where we'd go with that.

Still other sci-fi takes what we know of how humans behave, puts them in completely unfamiliar settings, and uses those settings to explore the nature of people, rather than focusing on the technology.

And some sci-fi, arguably the most fun, if not necessarily the most educational merely starts "Wouldn't it be cool/weird/fucked up if..." and just keeps going until it runs out of steam.

Space exploration and scientific missions has always been funded by states, so pretty much the inverse of capitalistic impulses. SpaceX does no scientific missions, focusing on the only somewhat profitable part of the space industry: putting satellites in orbit. Also it receives massive grants of public money. There are no economic incentives to colonize Mars.

>There are no economic incentives to colonize Mars. Perhaps, but much has been said about the vast fortunes asteroid mining could unlock.

That is true, and I also believe there really are vast fortunes that could be unlocked with asteroid mining. However, asteroid mining is absolutely nothing like colonizing Mars, aside from the fact that they both involve space travel.

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