SpaceX also has also filed a lawsuit against them claiming 5-800 million in damages for fraudulent billing and contract violations, and has made their own statements.
Does that count as evidence?
Do you hate reading most science fiction? Because the ratio of dystopic to utopic scifi is pretty unbalanced.
Sometimes people want to talk about science stuff without talking about human fallout and political implications. It’s perfectly fine to want an occasional break from those types of discussions.
Everything is human and everything is political. To pretend that it is not is, in itself, a political stance.
1. Everything is political
2. Talking about something without mentioning political and human implications is "pointlessly incomplete"
Topic: "Anyone wanna go swimming?"
Normal people: "Sure."
You, apparently: "Are you aware of how water is unequally distributed throughout the world? How can we possibly discuss swimming if we aren't willing to discuss the political fallout? This is pointlessly incomplete."
Next panel, you're just researching local water table rights while everyone else is swimming and having fun
If your position isn't that everything is political, don't say it is. If it is your position, this is perfectly in line with what you stated.
Why should we be silent over the obvious political aspects of giving Musk more government contracts? Just to please you?
Oh, you don’t really do that? You’re just being performative online?
Got it.
Yeah for sure, science fiction used to be optimistic and utopian, like Planet of the Apes, Brave New World, Frankenstein, 1984, Earth Abides, The Martian Chronicles, A Canticle for Leibowitz, The Time Machine, War of the Worlds, and Island of Dr Moreau, We, Farenheit 451 ...
But it does more generally reflect how society views technology as a whole too. People are generally a lot more pessimistic about new tech now, myself included, we've seen time and time again how its used to control or squeeze us. There actually was a Star Trek episode, "The Game" (season 5, episode 6) about an addicting device you could compare to smartphones (though the device in Star Trek doesn't spy on you to sell your every move to advertisers, missed a trick there), and that certainly wasn't supposed to be an optimistic look at technology, so you can see why things have gone the way they have.
It's on sale now :).
Recently I have read fiction where someone discovers a spaceship/artifact/portal/alien/mcguffin/etc and then they... get the mcguffin, get more stuff, get the girl, win. The plot is just a straight line.
they're boring.
Although not a straight line, any superhero movie. they're predictable and therefore, boring.
So I found the stuff that used to fill me with wonder, I shy away from. I don't want to watch another marvel hero.
I kind of wonder if non-utopia scifi, with reality and struggles and character development... is that the good stuff? doesn't have to all be dark forest or enshittification++ though.
I liked district 9 for instance.
I just turned it all off, though it makes me fear for the future. Feels like the early stages of societal collapse.
He could switch off and stick to building rockets and electric cars. It's very easy (notionally) to just not post on Twitter.
Strongly agree, there is hardly any intelligent discussions with diverging opinions left anymore. People are too deep into their own propaganda, agenda, and echo chambers. Peak bullshit is near.
What is reductive in the richest man on Earth not paying his dues on time? What nuance, what depth do you think is needed here?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manifesto_of_Futurism
It's always been political
Go find some Soviet space art, or mid century American “space age” stuff, or less dark forms of cyberpunk / cyber culture from the 80s and 90s. None of that is fascist yet all of it is popularly called “futurism.” I’ve even seen the term associated with solarpunk.
As popularly used it means more or less the idea of trying to use human intellect to build or create something fundamentally new, or roughly that. It’s not a precise term more of a vibe.
I was responding to what seemed like the implication that futurism was fascist.
https://www.booksontrial.com/mussolini-and-marinetti-a-timel...
This was a very predictable outcome given the curcumstances.
You forget to mention the guy who was the posterboy for futurism literally decided to turn himself into a political machine circa 2018 or thereabouts against half of the country, apparently triggered by his inablity to cope with his child transitioning and the bruising of his ego when NPCs on the internet made fun of him for failing where they succeded (the scuba diver pedo incident is one example).
Prior to that, he was the second coming of Steve Jobs to the same cohort (pg even called him "Steve Jobs with no taste" on this forum at the time).
Tech should be considered with its political direction (or lack of) to be deserving of adulation. The Cold War dictated the Apollo program for Christ's sake. The whole thing was saturated in politics. The difference is that most people were united for the cause. Believe me, if the people running the Apollo program declared war on half the country it would have been remembered and popularized quite differently.
I'm sure Jewish German scientists had a reluctant admiration for whatever Wernher Von Brauhn was acheiving with the Nazi space program but it would be completely secondary to the fact that he was enabling the Nazi party to "win". No engineering feat could or should eclipse that fact.
Regarding Tech without taking into account the direction it's pointed at is ridiculously naive, whichever side of the political spectrum you are on.
It's not like Germany would have magically grown out of the Nazi party if only Von Braun kept on building cool shit.
top stories nov 2017 - science updates, asteroid mining allowed, battery advances
top stories now (aug 2026) - Trump is crap, Musk is crap, Obesity drugs are crap
Maybe just everything gradually gets taken over by political moaning over time?
Giga Texas
Giga Nevada
Terrafab
etc
There's plenty of examples of this company building these types of projects and following through.
Why do you think this one would be any different?
>Elon Musk Just Said Something About AI That’s Literally Incomprehensible >Sure, man.
https://futurism.com/artificial-intelligence/elon-musk-ai-in...
Futurism is a known source of easy to correct misinformation
https://www.hagerty.com/media/great-reads/how-darryl-cuttell...
SpaceX makes plumbers millionaires. It's the employer of dreams
tl;dw -- louisiana has a ton of natural resources and wonderful harbors, but has allowed corporations to get away with almost anything without paying their fair share of taxes, cleaning up their waste, or generally being held accountable. And likely related, there is a long history of rampant corruption in the area. With sea levels rising and cancerous pollution filling densely populated areas, life in Louisiana has generally become very difficult :(
No doubt one of the more compelling reasons for SpaceX to do it there (along with their given reasoning).
The plans for the site involve extracting significant amounts of natural gas to make methane to burn for the rocket fuel. If they hit the launch levels they suggest (thousands of launches per year), this is not a small amount of greenhouse gases they'll be emitting which of course helps accelerate melting of the ice caps and rising sea levels, which could threaten the very site they've built it on.
Either that or pay decent wages for American workers that'll drive up construction prices and worsen the inflation which is already crazy due to these criminal tariffs.
It's the only correct one. For proof, consider the inflation that happened when Spain looted gold from S. America, then during the California Gold Rush, then the Yukon Gold Rush.
All driven by an increase in the supply of money.
He said the Falcon 1 launch price of $5MM was unrealistic, which ended up being correct. At the time, Falcon 1 was supposed to launch 600kg for $5MM. It ended up launching 420kg for $9MM. $8k/kg to $21k/kg.
Now obviously there's always a lot of doubt and skepticism around SpaceX, but you can just say "people said this would be really hard but they did it." Or you can say "Musk set a goal to 4x performance and got to an also-remarkable 3x" or whatever.
Even in this video, the smug Ariane guy heaps a decent amount of praise upon SpaceX and what they've achieved. He just said a $5MM launch will not be one of those things, and he was correct.
Yes, thus my posting it.
His underlying tone is that reusability is "a dream" (his words). Without reusability, Starlink as a network of tens of thousands of satellites would not be practical.
He said this in 2013, two years before the first Falcon 9 booster landing.
You can try to read the tea leaves on tone and some creative interpretation of implicature (despite Starlink actually needing fewer than 1000 satellites for its public launch), but they're different claims.
Not sure why there's a need to exaggerate the victimhood of SpaceX lol, super strange.
The Ariane guy was quite clear about what he thought was practical and not. He said $5MM launch won't happen (it didn't). He said reusability is a dream (he was wrong). He said nothing about the impossibility of Starlink, either implicitly or explicitly.
Especially not by 2024
I guess I assumed you meant "people who should have a pretty good idea said it was impossible" since that could be interesting, and not "a random person on the Internet said X", since that's not interesting for any value of X.
Add one more and it's people.
You can also find plenty of people on the Internet who say that humanoid reptiles live in the earth's core.
Is either one interesting when/if they're wrong?
The level of cynicism, shit-talking, and schadenfreude wish-casting in response to this is crazy. Start cheering on successes. Resist the deconstructionist mindset.
Sure, when success stops being the environmental destruction of every area he sets up shop in for SpaceX launches.
Current launch technology inevitably produces a lot of heat and noise and we don't have any rocket model that wouldn't at least rarely fail (and explode).
That said, extant Cape Canaveral does not seem to be lifeless. Lots of birds. IDK how the precise species composition has changed since 1960, but nature as a whole is a lot more resilient than people seem to think.
1) Political - The ideology/party spreading the doomerism promotes that they're the ones that can "fix it", if only you vote for them.
2) Adversarial countries, primarily China - Using the internet to convince members of western civilization to hate their civilization, hate their economic system, hate their history, hate their compatriots, adopt a no motivation defeatist attitude, etc., etc., and they can get our population to destroy itself from within without having to go to war with us.
Reject the doomerism, reject the negativity. Build. Invent. Create. Do your part to contribute to your civilization, to contribute to humanity, to move us forwards.
Does no one read history anymore?
IBM and the Holocaust
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_and_the_Holocaust
The V-2 rocket
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/V-2_rocket
"The V-2 rocket (German: Vergeltungswaffe 2, lit. 'Vengeance Weapon 2'), with the development name Aggregat-4 (A4), was the world's first practical, modern ballistic missile and suborbital launch vehicle.[4] The missile, powered by a liquid-propellant rocket engine, was developed during the Second World War in Nazi Germany as a "vengeance weapon" and assigned to attack Allied cities as retaliation for the Allied bombings of German cities."
Nazi's are the good guys only when they work for the U.S.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Konstantin_Tsiolkovsky
IBM was a US company, just because the Nazis used their computers doesn't make computers bad.
Just because something was once used by bad people or for bad things doesn't mean that it is bad.
After all, books were written by Hitler and the Nazis and I would hope that you aren't willing to paint all literature as being in the same light.
People hat the troll. From all around the political spectrums (well...maybe not on their far edges), people have been disgusted by what Musk has become and everything around him has became toxic because of it.
You don't have to make it about politics. It's just about being a morally civilised human.
A scenario where Musk builds an interplanetary space company is infinitely better than a scenario where Musk is a warlord conquering some unlucky province of a decrepit empire with sword and fire.
Giving such people an option to succeed economically is probably the safest way how to deal with them. SpaceX > Attila, Amazon > vikings.
Underestimating humanoid capabilities is a mistake; the real challenge will be the economics and the flow of responsibility. But imagine a future where every structure built has a pov video documenting its construction. I don't like the implication for the trades any more than I like the implication of Claude for putting me out of work either.
They have no idea what they're actually building, of course. I just love the comparison of a webhost/telco pop to Manhattan sized gigadcs that require nuclear power plants or blasting gas furnaces.
> even more so than the valley in Texas where Starbase Texas is located.
Probably a great deal of long term economic impact.
Tons of money flowing through the state. Just to a select few people who own the plants for the most part, not for the people working there day to day. I don't see why one would think that would change.
The issue with Datacentres is that you cant model the advantage of lower colo costs on jobs in the area.
The problem is that some people dont want to permit anything unless they can measure the benefits, when the market doesnt always work like that.
>The initial phase of Terafab is estimated to require approximately $16.8 billion in capital investments from SpaceX and Tesla, with potential future expansion phases bringing total investment much higher. This facility will employ at least 3,000 people, many of whom will be from Grimes and nearby Brazos County — continuing the trend of our other Texas sites where between 60% and 80% of new hires are local residents.
https://www.spacex.com/updates#terafab
That Starbase concept (not that the numbers are realistic by any means) is orders of magnitude more ambitious than what SpaceX does today with 22k employees.
That required a double take