Space Travel: Selling Your Planet to The Devil?

For 60+ years, "space flight" has been held out as a carrot to induce more government spending on space flight research. It has employed thousands of scientists, engineers, technicians and bureaucrats at comfortable salaries. But NASA is but a shell of it's former self, and private enterprise has now entered the fray to appropriate and exploit what Government "created."

"Space" flights like Branson's (or Musk's and Bezos' proposed excursions) are vitally important because they preserve the illusion--necessary, as we DESTROY the life-world on the planet--that we can wreck the Earth, but escape our fate and leave our blighted home behind.

Nagahapun; it's propaganda, of course. But people need "hope."Optimism about space flight is international gospel for the very reason that it keeps morale up. Neil DeGrasse Tyson, all the orthodox, public-minded participants in the discourse, including of course the corporate giants which will manufacture the machinery, are eager that humans "aim for the stars."

I am usually informed that I misuse the label, but I call this the precise realization and reification of Fermi's Paradox, from the inside. Enrico Fermi, one of the proto-nuclear-physisists on the Manhatttan project, was puzzled: "Developed" cultures potentially capable of space-faring should be numerous on the billions of life-supporting planets there SHOULD mathematically be in our galaxy. But we've never contacted any. What are the odds?

My premise, what I mean when I use the phrase "Fermi's Paradox," is that the explanation probably resides in what a society or a culture has to "know"--the science--to venture into space and how that "knowledge" must be "acquired" and "learned," and the fact that, in order to learn the knowledge and develop the technologies to support inter-stellar travel or even communication apparently (in our evidence: n=1) requires an "evolutionary" approach to exploitation of necessary resources, such that in acquiring them, the damage to the life-world becomesw irreparable and sooner or later renders moot the effort to escape it, and the star-gazing cultures expire in the process, before they can find or be found.*

Calling Dr. Faustus...Please pick a Red phone...

(* May be the longest sentence you;ll read today.)

• Optimism about space flight is international. Neil DeGrasse Tyson, all the orthodox, public-minded participants in the discourse, including of course the corporate giants which will manufacture the machinery, are eager that humans "aim for the stars."

  I am usually informed that I misuse the label, but I call this the realization of Fermi's Paradox: "Developed" cultures potentially capable of space-faring should be numerous on the billions of life-supporting planets there SHOULD mathematically be in our galaxy. But we've never contacted any. What are the odds?

  My premise, that I attribute to "Fermi's Paradox," is that, in order to learn the knowledge and develop the technologies to support it requires an "evolutionary" approach to exploitation of necessary resources, such that in acquiring them, the damage to the life-world sooner or later renders moot the effort to escape, and they expire in the process, before they can find or be found.

  Calling Dr. Faustus...Please pick a Red phone...