I don't quite agree though with the "go to space VS help homeless people, on the margin" part of the frame.
Marginalist thinking is useful for understanding the dynamics of many economic phenomenon. I don't think it tends to describe the trade offs in this case though. Neither homelessness nor space take up a big enough piece of the pie to trade off against each other meaningfully. IMO, these are kind of disingenuous rhetorical cliches.
It's a spectrum, obviously. "Infrastructure or defense" as a dichotomy has more reality attached to it. These are both actually significant government expenditures. They actually require big chunks of available, and competitive resources. There's a real history of diverting resources from infrastructure to defense during wartime, and building infrastructure after wars as part of the demilitarization.
We're never presented with a "street signs vs waste treatment" dichotomy. It's on the "doesn't relate to reality" end of the spectrum... just like "homeless shelters vs particle colliders" doesn't.
I am so glad i did not post my comment - you put it much better than I could have had. I am really annoyed by this rhetoric false choice as well because I am always feeling like I need to justify not "helping the homeless".
It always baffles me that people seriously bring it up against space exploration instead of at least argue against something sensible like by mail advertisements thats is completely useless and inarguably damaging.
Any public expenditure could be weighed against "helping the homeless" or "feeding the hungry" I don't know why space is about the only thing that falls victim of it.
You could literally throw anything against it i.e., why build an airport/road/hydropower dam/new city hall/park bench/etc when there's homeless here?
It's frustrating. But I think it gives you a good insight on if someone is a long term or short term thinker.
I think you’re taking this a bit too literally - nobody is saying that space exploration money alone can cure homelessness.
The point is that it’s emblematic of all the frivolous, useless things resources get allocated to, instead of curing poverty - which is extremely straightforward to do (redistribute downward) except that rich folks hate redistribution downward but love redistribution upward.
I didn't mean to take it literally. I'm criticising the rhetorical use, and I think it's common enough to consider a cliche.
My objection to your argument is that
(a) it applies everywhere. Public health, defense, education, rock and roll... all take away from poverty eradication efforts.
(b) It's only true in the most abstract rhetorical sense. It doesn't tend to be true in a way that relates to reality. A culture with rock and roll isn't more likely to have more poverty. Closer to actionable reality, rock and roll, space exploration and poverty eradication don't meaningfully trade off against each other. They don't really compete for resources, except in the sense that everything competes with everything else.
Is environmentalism the enemy of humanitarianism? If the frame is extreme marginalism, as it is in the "space vs homeless" cliche, the answer to that is yes. I don't think that's correct. You can have a society that is both. In fact, we do, to some extent.
Also, on the subject of the dichotomy, I'd quite like to actually see the specific details of the plan to end homelessness, costed, with some sort of serious legwork proving that it hasn't been tried and failed before.
As far as I'm aware we've had centuries of rhetoric where people have promised everything from small reforms to big sweeping programs to open revolt and replacing of governments in various well-intentioned attempts to end poverty. So far, none of them have worked.
There is a shortage of evidence that we can end poverty by trading away rich people having interesting toys. There is a surplus of evidence the other way around; the enlightenment was enlightening and has had an outsized impact on achieving the outcomes people want.
Homelessness isn't caused by poverty in the US (or drugs), it's caused by not having enough homes. This sounds tautological, but the homelessness rate in West Virginia is not that high compared to SF, which doesn't match the poverty rates or the opioid crisis.
SF spending even more money on it won't help as long they're willing to do anything except building homes - all they can do is bid up the price of existing ones forever.
>An empty home is what the government refers to as a ‘vacant housing unit’, which, for whatever reason, is not occupied by a citizen. This can include vacation homes but also properties which have sold but are not occupied.
Not sure this implies what you believe it to imply.
If you actually look at the data they’ve mapped out in that article, you’d see that California actually has a shockingly low number of “empty houses” per homeless person - the lowest in the nation. Mississippi has 166, Indiana 151, and West Virginia 128!
A home that has no one living in it because it is in the process of changing hands(sale, looking for a renter) is not something that signifies a distribution problem. Your number overstates the actual number that are habitable by those without houses by a unknown, but likely very large factor.
Additionally, California is HUGE. Housing location isn’t fungible. You can’t address Bay Area homelessness with empty houses in Redding.
The “we already have enough houses” argument is a gross oversimplification, that constantly gets rolled out by people who think the status quo is ok, when it clearly is not.
Vacancy truthers are one of the most incorrect groups around for how much they’re convinced of this. A house could be marked “vacant” if the owner is still moving in, or if the inside is gutted and uninhabitable, or if they just didn’t turn in their census form.
So, I think there's two classes of homelessness: transient and chronic.
Transient is the class that would be fixed by adding more housing. It's when you leave an abusive spouse and have nowhere to go, or you miss one too many rent payments.
Chronic is the class that has some more fundamental concern that leads to them being homeless. That's stuff like chronic physical or mental illness, substance abuse problems, etc. That needs more support than just a home.
Giving someone a home - or actually, forcing them into one - is a good step towards ending their substance abuse habit though. Being stuck outside is depressing and they need something to entertain themselves. I don’t think it’s actually always the case that the drug habits cause the homelessness.
It doesn’t help that the government tends to steal all their stuff in sweeps.
Or have they not been implemented? I haven't seen 'housing for the homeless' programs around here yet, at best it's dubious charities like the Salvation Army doing some work for them.
The thing is, these programs cost money, time, resources and people. And I think that last one is a big issue, because few people want to actually become a carer for recently-rehomed people.
Half-arsed implementations, without real concern for the homeless from politicians, haven't worked, that's true.
Which of them combined free and/or cheap housing, health and mental health services to trouble homeless, community building, job/education plans (for the homeless than are capable), and welfare (for those that aren't, e.g. mentally unstable, or sick, etc), plus innovations in housing, and doing it in non fire-and-forget way that will just build a soon-to-be ghetto?
Instead there are fragmented attempts, that touch isolated aspects of the greater issue, and people are often abandoned after a "here's your housing, now bye!" stage, that only works for a small percentage of cases of homelessness.
"Eradicating poverty" may be a little more opaque than one might think, and context matters a lot. If you live an isolated peasant existence, is poverty nonexistent or is it universal? Is a person living in a shared room tenement "living like a prince" because elements of his material existence are similar to medieval castle life... or does the prince or pauper question have a social/cultural/class element to it
Homelessness is less opaque. If you narrow the discussion to this, than there are possible answer. IMO yes, there are plenty of examples/evidence of homelessness being more and less prevalent. You can find both in poor, rich, urban or rural environments.
Homelessness is probably never literally eradicated, but 0.1X is achievable, and you can find such 10X discrepancies between different cities, countries, decades and whatever else you might accept as existence proof .
I don't think it's possible to "cost seriously" though, at least not fully. These aren't usually the kind of policies that are only or even mostly about direct funding. They also take time, decades, to develop.
> Is a person living in a shared room tenement "living like a prince" because elements of his material existence are similar to medieval castle life...
There is no nuance to the answer. There is no meaningful and sincere way to interpret sharing a room in a tenement as living like a prince.
The author distinguishes solarpunk from 'cozy futurism' but I think both fit largely into a box you'd call 'human scale' sci-fi. It seems like Jane Jacobs urbanism with a science fiction twist.
One thing it reminded me of is how science fiction visions seem to have diverged between cultures. I recently stumbled over a series of digital art called China 2098 by Fan Wennan, a Chinese (nationalist) artist (https://www.artstation.com/nangesfg), the difference to 'cozy scifi' is pretty stark.
It's also a trend when it comes to writers. 'Hopepunk' novelists like Becky Chambers which seem to become more popular strike a different tone compared to something like the Three Body Problem.
It's a bit funny to see that the artist thinks concrete is still futuristic. I wonder if most Chinese think that in the same way we think glass and titanium alloy are the materials of the future.
> I recently stumbled over a series of digital art called China 2098 by Fan Wennan, a Chinese (nationalist) artist (https://www.artstation.com/nangesfg), the difference to 'cozy scifi' is pretty stark.
Heh. Nestled in amongst the megaproject-flavored art, there was this cheeky piece:
> In contrast, cozy futurism, as in the original tweet, starts not with technology but with current problems and human needs and looking at how those could be solved and met.
This should be the definition of futurism period but I get the point the author is making.
Having come back from Dubai I spent a few days walking around the country pavilions. There was a number of technology ideas and demonstrations that you could classify as 'cozy futurism'. Curious if others visited the Expo and what they thought of it.
I think there's room for creating new technology that makes building houses easier and cheaper -- in every sense of the word: not just cheaper to buy, but require fewer resources and time to build.
It's crazy that you need to basically be a millionaire to afford a decent house in a decent city.
Sure, part of the problem might be social/political/economic, but surely if the technology experiences a dramatic (10x) improvement, there's no way that the average person will not feel the effect of that.
I don't think that's right. Houses in desirable cities are expensive because the land is expensive [1]. And to a lesser extent the permitting and planning processes are onerous. The construction itself for a normal "stick frame on slab" house is actually remarkably cheap. Also, we already have cheaper construction methods: mobile homes and prefab modular homes. A lot of people don't want them because they "feel cheap".
I guess I’ll be the dissenting voice here. While there are definitely historical instances of technology advancement bordering on being a goal unto itself (moon landing as a Cold War propaganda weapon), a useful/advanced engineering dichotomy is patently false. Nanofabrication and fusion reactors are both “cool” and “cozy”, and I don’t see why they should be in separate categories.
As for Bernie’s tweet, I’m not sure he’d really want Musk to use his resources for political purposes. Does he really want him getting involved in tax laws?
I've been thinking about how to phrase how I feel about this topic for a while and it's hard because there are so many nuances and facets to it.
Ultimately I think it is absolutely crazy to think that making earth's life multi-planetary is something we should start now for any other sake than inspiring our young people; because by any other measure, we could do something else to solve the long tail risks multi-planetary life solves starting with living deep underground or under the water and powering everything with nuclear reactors. But nobody wants to do that for obvious reasons. Furthermore, there are many other long tail risks that we can invest in to decrease the likelihood of extinction.
But Elon Musk knows this. In fact one of his other businesses is devoted to helping stop climate change! So what is this really about?
I think it's about history books and status. Nobody will read about the billionaire that funded think tanks. They'll read about the one that got people to Mars first. That's my best guess, anyway. Because it's so clearly obvious that going multi-planetary in 100 years will be vastly cheaper for us and there is no way any of this math makes sense to do it now unless you just want to do it for coolness sake or maybe, MAYBE, inspiring young people will get us to 100 years from now faster.
> I think it's about history books and status. Nobody will read about the billionaire that funded think tanks. They'll read about the one that got people to Mars first. That's my best guess, anyway.
A place in history might be a component of the motivation, but I think the core reason is simpler. In his eyes, nobody was taking the idea remotely seriously or actually trying to accomplish it, which was largely true — the closest anybody ever got prior to SpaceX was a bunch of handwaving around paper rockets. Certainly no company made it their flagship goal, and even if NASA had technically at some point, whiplash from changing presidential administrations and being so married to traditional aerospace contractors whose primary interest was keeping the money flowing tied NASA’s hands and feet on the matter.
> Because it's so clearly obvious that going multi-planetary in 100 years will be vastly cheaper for us and there is no way any of this math makes sense to do it now unless you just want to do it for coolness sake or maybe, MAYBE, inspiring young people will get us to 100 years from now faster.
Not necessarily. Technology doesn’t improve on its own, particularly when it’s highly specialized. For there to be leaps in launch and spacefaring technology, some entity (preferably multiple entities) have to be pushing it, and to make progress at a decent pace not be afraid to stray from the path of the well-known. Crewed spaceflight stagnated for a whopping 40ish years thanks to it getting put on a back burner last time, what’s to stop it from getting stuck for a whole century, or in the worst case getting left behind entirely as the can continually gets kicked down the road?
Musk has spoken about this in the past, with concern that the window we have now may not be around forever, and how without someone pushing progress on making crewed spaceflight and settlements beyond Earth’s surface commonplace, it may end up never happening, and I think that concern is warranted.
Other than research, what is going to be possible on Mars that isn't possible underground for cheaper?
> with concern that the window we have now may not be around forever
Right, but there is the opposite concern as well. By trying to do this too soon we underfund arms control or climate change response at the margin and we suffer extinction or societal decline.
For me it's about resources. It's true technology takes actual effort, but it generally speaking takes less effort over time due to exponential tech. If the folks involved in the manhattan project had just ONE modern computer it probably would have halved the timeline / resources required. My argument is that if the goal is species survival there is much, much, much lower hanging fruit to go after.
> Other than research, what is going to be possible on Mars that isn't possible underground for cheaper?
Mars, or any location well beyond easy reach of the Earth-Moon system for that matter, act as forcing factors for the development of truly independent self-sustainability, and thus also all of the various technologies required to do such a thing. Even on the moon, the presence of a eject lever (ability to return to Earth relatively quickly and easily) and fast and “easy” resupplies greatly reduce the impetus to become self-sufficient.
Mars would also serve as a great stepping stone to vastly larger and more ambitious spacecraft. Its reduced gravity and aerodynamically insignificant atmosphere along with the raw materials available on Mars along with a relatively temperate climate and Earthlike day-night cycle make it a good candidate for use as a shipyard for building and launching extremely large interplanetary freighters and the first permanently spaceborne non-orbital crewed crafts — something that’s not feasible in Earth’s orbit due to the need to tow all the raw materials in, and less suitable for the Moon due to its greater extremes and deficiencies in readily available resources.
So in short, Mars is really more of a starting point in humanity’s permanent inhabitance and traversal of space with potential for huge gains in science and technology applicable to problems on Earth than it is a goal in and of itself.
> Right, but there is the opposite concern as well. By trying to do this too soon we underfund arms control or climate change response at the margin and we suffer extinction or societal decline.
> For me it's about resources. It's true technology takes actual effort, but it generally speaking takes less effort over time due to exponential tech. If the folks involved in the manhattan project had just ONE modern computer it probably would have halved the timeline / resources required. My argument is that if the goal is species survival there is much, much, much lower hanging fruit to go after.
The resources being sunk into space right now are couch change relative to practically everything else, and a company like SpaceX pursuing long-term settlement of Mars would only increase that to pocket change (at least in terms of usage of taxpayer funds). Vastly larger sums are spent on the military and even wasted on utterly broken government contracting and procurement, like the $20,000 routers that were purchased for hundreds of tiny libraries in WV[0] where $60 consumer grade routers would have sufficed.
There is no lack of resources, only rampant mismanagement, waste on titanic scales, and lack of will.
I agree with a number of the comments here that this is a false dichotomy in terms of the technology itself (as mypastself says, Nanofabrication and fusion reactors are both “cool” and “cozy”), but understanding that people's motivations probably are dichotomous is important – if we can find technology that is both "cool" and "cozy", the incentives for both groups to work on that technology are increased, and I would guess this increase is probably multiplicative, rather than additive. Bernie isn't going to persuade Elon not to build his cool stuff and work on cozy stuff instead, but if he can find applications for what Elon is building to help with his cozy motivations, then more people will benefit.
The core idea the author never quite grasps is the issue of "society will", or "society ambition". The simple fact that all of this civilization is only possible through massive cooperation, and that is only achieved through majority approval of society's values and behaviors.
At some point in time, if the wealth inequalities are not addressed, "society's will to cooperate in a shared civilization" will cease. At that point in time, the entire planet could become a welfare state, with fossil resources expended and no society will for anything beyond survival of a population holding on.
Space travel and the space industry generally speaking play the role of a new religion for the technical middle-classes that are not old-time religious anymore (for lack of a better expression). As such it's doing a pretty good job.
This new insistence on "saving the planet" might replace it, especially as it also comes with apparent "technical demands" (should we choose hydrogen? how could we make nuclear faster to build and cheaper? fusion!!) that play right in the hands of the technical middle-class, but imo there's still an open battle between the two world-views. I slightly wish for the "space travel" new theology to have the upper hand, but that's just a personal preference of mine.
What? I think you're living outside the norm in America. The new religion is very much political parties rather than any kind of tech fandom for the large majority of Americans.
I was not talking about the regular citizens, but about people like the ones in here, on HN, i.e. the people that form and support the technocracy that actually sits behind the decisions being taken at a macro level.
Can anyone recommend any writing/graphic novels/etc. that work in this genre? I’m struggling to find solid story examples that contain a positive version of the future (though I read a lot of solarpunk adjacent musing and ideation without much to see in fully fledged writing).
It always frustrates me when people make false equivalences between techno-economic and socio-political tasks as though they are zero-sum. Let's take homelessness in California as an example. It's a problem that requires zero new technology and zero new expenditure to largely solve, but does require the social and political willpower to actually build more affordable housing to the point where cost of living is reasonable and temporary loss of a job doesn't force people onto the street. But Californians overwhelmingly don't want this. NIMBYs vote against new high-density housing all the time. Cities in California are actively fighting tooth and nail against Newsom's housing bills. How exactly would spending less money on scientific or exploration pursuits solve this? They are activities in entirely different worlds.
This is an excellent point. I think the point that the article is trying to make is that people's motivations are divided and we can't expect to change them. If we can find ways to harness the products of scientific or exploration pursuits to help with the socio-political tasks, then the motivations of those seeking to solve techno-economic tasks can also help solve socio-political tasks.
Many Californians believe that the housing crisis is best solved with public housing. I suppose that this approach may be feasible if accompanied by massive disinvestment in techno-economic tasks, among other things.
From 1960 to 2010, Americans when polled if someone with pre-existing conditions should be able to get health insurance or government-funded care not only wanted that by a majority, but by an overwhelming majority. Nevertheless it was blocked for half a century in the legislature.
There is a narrative that many of these things don't happen because Americans don't want them, but that is a false narrative.
On the half century theme, the inflation-adjusted hourly wage in the US is below what it was 50 years ago. All productivity gains have gone to the rentiers, to the heirs. Why are the people doing the work and creating the wealth going to support something they see no benefit from?
> From 1960 to 2010, Americans when polled if someone with pre-existing conditions should be able to get health insurance or government-funded care not only wanted that by a majority, but by an overwhelming majority. Nevertheless it was blocked for half a century in the legislature.
But when polled if government should raise taxes, the overwhelming majority said no. You are leaving out the part that really matters.
A perfect example is Trump voters supporting building the wall and Trump voters being against raising taxes to pay for the wall. How can you resolve such a contradiction? You can't. If you are a clever snake oil salesman like Trump, you lie and say "Mexico will pay for it". But that's not how the world works.
People will always be noble and virtuous when nothing is at stake. It's like how elizabeth warren can support mass immigration but asked if she's willing to house a migrant family, she'll say no. It's like how politicians support war but find exemptions for their sons.
Personally, I think universal basic income is the best shot. If the poor, homeless, uninsured, etc were getting a steady monthly check, the markets will find a way to provide housing, insurance, etc for them.
There is also a problem where it’s hard to actually change the price of housing. When the government builds its own housing, it lowers the market value which discourages private businesses from building since its no longer worth while.
Although in the case of California, simply ceasing the practice of blocking private developments would be a huge benefit.
Affordable housing isn't the issue for most of the high profile homeless in San Francisco (ie the ones that defecate in the streets, steal cartloads from pharmacies, threaten you with a knife randomly, etc). But your point mostly holds true for them - we need the political willpower to involuntarily commit them until they are clean from their addictions and learn the skills to function in society.
A very common mistake I see people making is that it is always case that we can trade X for Y, where X and Y are any two random resources. This isn't always true, and the more indirection there is in the trade the less efficient the trade becomes. Every time you fight against an equilibrium you are losing total economic capacity, the size of the pie we all share. Trading rockets for housing and medicine is A LOT of indirection. We'd be giving up a lot of Rockets for a very modest increase in Medicine and Housing.
It's good to see these "ists and isms" and various X-punk movements,
because that means we are _thinking_ about this stuff and that popular
philosophy of science is alive.
"Futur-ism" has it's origins in 1920s/30s European design
aesthetics. It's a strange projection of the values of the wealthier
classes, mixed with some early fascist-industrial values, but also
influenced by the Grand Exhibitions (for example Crystal Palace, or
the World's Fair (Exposition Universelle where the Eiffel Tower was
built)). For America this kind of thing had enormous cultural
influence, for example [1] how General Motors/Chrysler projected a
future to the growth-hungry 1950s USA.
To a large degree this works. We imagine things we desire through
science-fiction and go on to create them. But Futurism has gotten
conflated with Futurology, by the likes of Kurzweil - the idea of
technological singularity - and the modern Cosmists for whom
quasi-religious ideas like "uploading your brain into the cloud" hold
huge appeal. This movement seems qualitatively different in its
departure from desirable "Earthly" goals, toward technological
determinism, cybernetic governance, a sense of "inevitability" and
"uniquity" to everything, and as Neil Postman put it, "abject
surrender to technology".
The counter-movement today is Humane Technology, see for example [2]
which resonates somewhat with the "cozy-punk" theme of the
article. Space travel is at the intersection. It's simultaneously
useful and useless at present - a Kierkegaardian state of man whose
feet are in the mud but head in the stars. We can integrate a very
optimistic view of space technology for peaceful purposes.
However, remember "the future" isn't cozy (by definition), because it's
an unknown we should rightfully have a respectful fear of. Every
technology will bring its benefits and dangers, pleasures and pains.
Leftists will project egalitarian values on to what we can
technologically achieve. Libertarians will uphold the (established in
the West/North) values of freedom, speed, individualism in their
technological vision. Some (evolutionary psychologists like Peterson)
will insist that a-priori we cannot escape the limitations of Pareto
dominance hierarchies, perhaps missing that all technologies are means
by which we escape limitations. However, the limits to growth (see
Meadows etc) will definitely put hard brakes on, because even with
fusion we are unlikely to become alchemists in this century or the
next.
The best we can hope for is to retain _human_ control of our direction
in science and technology. That's what seriously worries me today.
For all the talk of "Society's Will" we are teetering on the brink of
abdication of all human will, at least with respect to the digital
technologies before which we bow.
“For all the talk of ‘Society's Will’ we are teetering on the brink of abdication of all human will, at least with respect to the digital technologies before which we bow.”
Because we will lose control over/ability to understand the decision making? Because limits to growth will force austerity? Because increased technological complexity leads to incomprehensible stochastic risks? Because…?
Those are all good risk models/mechanisms you mention. But clearly the
gamut of risks is unbounded. Human responses to those risks is not
quite the same thing, so your "because?" questions need more context.
> lose control over/ability to understand
What someone from the Union of Concerned Scientists once called
something like the "problem of the pulled-up ladder". I gave a talk on
this, and relating to Thomas Thwaites "Toaster Project" [1], on the
fact that we no longer have an education strategy that recognises that
one generation cannot hold the knowledge to reconstruct technological
society (100 years ago we could).
> Because limits to growth will force austerity?
Not necessarily, no. We've escaped Malthusian traps before, but
staying ahead of the curve gets more precarious as our failure
tolerances get tighter. For example fusion will be a positive step
change, but we might arrive at a point where near-unlimited energy is
still not sufficient to fix things (like a soil chemistry debt).
> complexity leads to incomprehensible stochastic risks?
Somewhat. We've always had that though. DDT, PFAS and Microplastics
kinda caught us with our pants down. We have to be careful getting
into Black Swan speculation. But in the cybersecurity realm _yes_, I
deeply believe that we are constructing systems that _will_ fail
catastrophically with almost total certainty. The focus then needs to
be on mitigation, resilience and maintaining contingent technologies.
I have said plenty on where I think the "cashless society" is leading.
At present it's the psychological/sociological issues that most
intrigue me - there's no doubt we're well into an era where we
recognise solutionism is making many things worse, and are
addicted/dependent, but don't have the psychological apparatus to
societally extricate from what are widely understood as harmful
courses of action.
How we'll solve that is one of the most interesting questions of the
century, I think.
To me, space travel is the (or one of the) technological challenge(s) that provide a way to compete for the breakthroughs that will power our ecological needs. High performance solar panels, alloys, lightweight construction methods, novel chemistry.
You could argue that you could do all of those for the betterment of mankind itself, but humans thrive on competition, challenges and yes, personal earnings.
I disagree with the silly categories. I think space travel is awesome but boy would I put so many other things in front of it. I think it's silly to insist on gut emotional reactions like awesomeness agreeing with prudent decision-making. Of course I can't get as hyped about vaccinating children and stopping global warming as I can for space travel. Of course I would fund vaccines and global warming campaigns all day over space travel.
That said, I think I'm in the camp of funding everything that matters to us at some level, while making sure that an urgent priority like global warming get's the lion's share, as much as we think can be put to use. The public can only get excited about two things at the same time, but we can spend money on a much larger set of things. I certainly hope, while the public conversation is focused on global issues like Covid and climate change, that we are also spending money on inspecting dams and levees. There is some right amount to spend on space travel, which is presumably much less than we should spend on global warming and public health and education.
> there's a temptation to consider those as easier problems that are already kind of solved and just in the need of convincing a bunch of people, whereas the real problems are those that involve figuring out if Nature even lets you do something, and how that might be accomplished.
In reality, convincing people is the harder problem, right?
Why are people even arguing about space travel vs solving poverty? Just imagine if all of Musk's wealth is seized by the US government, would that solve poverty or homelessness or even make a difference?
Obviously not, Musk's billions are barely a drop in a bucket. The US government printed and spent Trillions during the pandemic, and that barely made some people's life better.
Most of the problems that we're having on Earth, including poverty, homelessness and climate change, are in fact socio-political problems and they can't be solved with any realistic amount of money. The only way to solve them is through either strong socio-political coordination or very advanced technology (AI, nuclear fusion etc.)
I’ve noticed several politicians (including the one in the article) using false binary dilemmas as a premise to pander for votes. Even though, like you pointed out, trillions have been printed and yet lives have not improved.
They know they can’t fix it but they pander to the votes
> Just imagine if all of Musk's wealth is seized by the US government, would that solve poverty or homelessness or even make a difference? Obviously not, Musk's billions are barely a drop in a bucket.
Looks like we could end homelessness for about 20 billion. Elon Musk, born into wealth because his parents had a diamond mine in apartheid South Africa, is worth over 220 billion.
Except that the US government has Trillions to spend and they absolutely do not need Musk's wealth to do this.
20 billions is nothing for the US government's budget, why don't they end homelessness? Again, a socio-political problem that money alone cannot solve.
Musk was not born into wealth and lived in squalor in Canada with his divorced mother at one point. He self-made his wealth when his first company (with his brother Kimbal) was bought by Compaq during the dotcom boom of the early 1990's. He rolled that cash into his next company, x.com, which merged with Confinity to create a little company called Paypal.
Elon "funding secured / sued by the SEC" Musk was absolutely born into wealth. His father co-owned an Emerald mine in Zambia, he went to a private high school in Pretoria, and attended Universities in South Africa and Pennsylvania.
Further reading: "As a result of this, the teenage Elon Musk once walked the streets of New York with emeralds in his pocket. His father said: “We were very wealthy. We had so much money at times we couldn’t even close our safe,”"
> The only way to solve them is through either strong socio-political coordination or very advanced technology
Those won't work either. "strong socio-political coordination" translates to "You must think like us or else." And what will AI or nuclear fusion do? Even with free energy and money people will still have issues between them.
There is no magic bullet to solving the ails of a large modern society outside of dismantling said large society.
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[ 3.5 ms ] story [ 122 ms ] threadI don't quite agree though with the "go to space VS help homeless people, on the margin" part of the frame.
Marginalist thinking is useful for understanding the dynamics of many economic phenomenon. I don't think it tends to describe the trade offs in this case though. Neither homelessness nor space take up a big enough piece of the pie to trade off against each other meaningfully. IMO, these are kind of disingenuous rhetorical cliches.
It's a spectrum, obviously. "Infrastructure or defense" as a dichotomy has more reality attached to it. These are both actually significant government expenditures. They actually require big chunks of available, and competitive resources. There's a real history of diverting resources from infrastructure to defense during wartime, and building infrastructure after wars as part of the demilitarization.
We're never presented with a "street signs vs waste treatment" dichotomy. It's on the "doesn't relate to reality" end of the spectrum... just like "homeless shelters vs particle colliders" doesn't.
It always baffles me that people seriously bring it up against space exploration instead of at least argue against something sensible like by mail advertisements thats is completely useless and inarguably damaging.
You could literally throw anything against it i.e., why build an airport/road/hydropower dam/new city hall/park bench/etc when there's homeless here?
It's frustrating. But I think it gives you a good insight on if someone is a long term or short term thinker.
The point is that it’s emblematic of all the frivolous, useless things resources get allocated to, instead of curing poverty - which is extremely straightforward to do (redistribute downward) except that rich folks hate redistribution downward but love redistribution upward.
My objection to your argument is that
(a) it applies everywhere. Public health, defense, education, rock and roll... all take away from poverty eradication efforts.
(b) It's only true in the most abstract rhetorical sense. It doesn't tend to be true in a way that relates to reality. A culture with rock and roll isn't more likely to have more poverty. Closer to actionable reality, rock and roll, space exploration and poverty eradication don't meaningfully trade off against each other. They don't really compete for resources, except in the sense that everything competes with everything else.
Is environmentalism the enemy of humanitarianism? If the frame is extreme marginalism, as it is in the "space vs homeless" cliche, the answer to that is yes. I don't think that's correct. You can have a society that is both. In fact, we do, to some extent.
As far as I'm aware we've had centuries of rhetoric where people have promised everything from small reforms to big sweeping programs to open revolt and replacing of governments in various well-intentioned attempts to end poverty. So far, none of them have worked.
There is a shortage of evidence that we can end poverty by trading away rich people having interesting toys. There is a surplus of evidence the other way around; the enlightenment was enlightening and has had an outsized impact on achieving the outcomes people want.
SF spending even more money on it won't help as long they're willing to do anything except building homes - all they can do is bid up the price of existing ones forever.
California has 9 empty homes for every homeless person.
https://www.self.inc/info/empty-homes/
>An empty home is what the government refers to as a ‘vacant housing unit’, which, for whatever reason, is not occupied by a citizen. This can include vacation homes but also properties which have sold but are not occupied.
Not sure this implies what you believe it to imply.
If you actually look at the data they’ve mapped out in that article, you’d see that California actually has a shockingly low number of “empty houses” per homeless person - the lowest in the nation. Mississippi has 166, Indiana 151, and West Virginia 128!
A home that has no one living in it because it is in the process of changing hands(sale, looking for a renter) is not something that signifies a distribution problem. Your number overstates the actual number that are habitable by those without houses by a unknown, but likely very large factor.
Additionally, California is HUGE. Housing location isn’t fungible. You can’t address Bay Area homelessness with empty houses in Redding.
The “we already have enough houses” argument is a gross oversimplification, that constantly gets rolled out by people who think the status quo is ok, when it clearly is not.
https://darrellowens.substack.com/p/vacant-nuance-in-the-vac...
At least one of the Painted Ladies is counted vacant but actually uninhabitable.
But you could solve homelessness this way if you moved everyone to Detroit. Maybe.
Transient is the class that would be fixed by adding more housing. It's when you leave an abusive spouse and have nowhere to go, or you miss one too many rent payments.
Chronic is the class that has some more fundamental concern that leads to them being homeless. That's stuff like chronic physical or mental illness, substance abuse problems, etc. That needs more support than just a home.
https://www.homelesshub.ca/solutions/prevention/addressing-c...
It doesn’t help that the government tends to steal all their stuff in sweeps.
Or have they not been implemented? I haven't seen 'housing for the homeless' programs around here yet, at best it's dubious charities like the Salvation Army doing some work for them.
The thing is, these programs cost money, time, resources and people. And I think that last one is a big issue, because few people want to actually become a carer for recently-rehomed people.
Half-arsed implementations, without real concern for the homeless from politicians, haven't worked, that's true.
Which of them combined free and/or cheap housing, health and mental health services to trouble homeless, community building, job/education plans (for the homeless than are capable), and welfare (for those that aren't, e.g. mentally unstable, or sick, etc), plus innovations in housing, and doing it in non fire-and-forget way that will just build a soon-to-be ghetto?
Instead there are fragmented attempts, that touch isolated aspects of the greater issue, and people are often abandoned after a "here's your housing, now bye!" stage, that only works for a small percentage of cases of homelessness.
"Eradicating poverty" may be a little more opaque than one might think, and context matters a lot. If you live an isolated peasant existence, is poverty nonexistent or is it universal? Is a person living in a shared room tenement "living like a prince" because elements of his material existence are similar to medieval castle life... or does the prince or pauper question have a social/cultural/class element to it
Homelessness is less opaque. If you narrow the discussion to this, than there are possible answer. IMO yes, there are plenty of examples/evidence of homelessness being more and less prevalent. You can find both in poor, rich, urban or rural environments.
Homelessness is probably never literally eradicated, but 0.1X is achievable, and you can find such 10X discrepancies between different cities, countries, decades and whatever else you might accept as existence proof .
I don't think it's possible to "cost seriously" though, at least not fully. These aren't usually the kind of policies that are only or even mostly about direct funding. They also take time, decades, to develop.
There is no nuance to the answer. There is no meaningful and sincere way to interpret sharing a room in a tenement as living like a prince.
One thing it reminded me of is how science fiction visions seem to have diverged between cultures. I recently stumbled over a series of digital art called China 2098 by Fan Wennan, a Chinese (nationalist) artist (https://www.artstation.com/nangesfg), the difference to 'cozy scifi' is pretty stark.
It's also a trend when it comes to writers. 'Hopepunk' novelists like Becky Chambers which seem to become more popular strike a different tone compared to something like the Three Body Problem.
Also, there's a set of pictures that shows a reinvention of Le Corbusier's Radiant City (https://www.artstation.com/artwork/8exKRO)
Is 'hopepunk' any different from cyberprep?
Heh. Nestled in amongst the megaproject-flavored art, there was this cheeky piece:
https://www.artstation.com/artwork/28l9Ra
Lots of amusing bits if you zoom in to the details.
This should be the definition of futurism period but I get the point the author is making.
Having come back from Dubai I spent a few days walking around the country pavilions. There was a number of technology ideas and demonstrations that you could classify as 'cozy futurism'. Curious if others visited the Expo and what they thought of it.
It's crazy that you need to basically be a millionaire to afford a decent house in a decent city.
Sure, part of the problem might be social/political/economic, but surely if the technology experiences a dramatic (10x) improvement, there's no way that the average person will not feel the effect of that.
[1] https://www.buildzoom.com/blog/paying-for-dirt-where-have-ho...
As for Bernie’s tweet, I’m not sure he’d really want Musk to use his resources for political purposes. Does he really want him getting involved in tax laws?
I don't think the tweet is addressed to Musk himself.
Ultimately I think it is absolutely crazy to think that making earth's life multi-planetary is something we should start now for any other sake than inspiring our young people; because by any other measure, we could do something else to solve the long tail risks multi-planetary life solves starting with living deep underground or under the water and powering everything with nuclear reactors. But nobody wants to do that for obvious reasons. Furthermore, there are many other long tail risks that we can invest in to decrease the likelihood of extinction.
But Elon Musk knows this. In fact one of his other businesses is devoted to helping stop climate change! So what is this really about?
I think it's about history books and status. Nobody will read about the billionaire that funded think tanks. They'll read about the one that got people to Mars first. That's my best guess, anyway. Because it's so clearly obvious that going multi-planetary in 100 years will be vastly cheaper for us and there is no way any of this math makes sense to do it now unless you just want to do it for coolness sake or maybe, MAYBE, inspiring young people will get us to 100 years from now faster.
Doubt it though.
A place in history might be a component of the motivation, but I think the core reason is simpler. In his eyes, nobody was taking the idea remotely seriously or actually trying to accomplish it, which was largely true — the closest anybody ever got prior to SpaceX was a bunch of handwaving around paper rockets. Certainly no company made it their flagship goal, and even if NASA had technically at some point, whiplash from changing presidential administrations and being so married to traditional aerospace contractors whose primary interest was keeping the money flowing tied NASA’s hands and feet on the matter.
> Because it's so clearly obvious that going multi-planetary in 100 years will be vastly cheaper for us and there is no way any of this math makes sense to do it now unless you just want to do it for coolness sake or maybe, MAYBE, inspiring young people will get us to 100 years from now faster.
Not necessarily. Technology doesn’t improve on its own, particularly when it’s highly specialized. For there to be leaps in launch and spacefaring technology, some entity (preferably multiple entities) have to be pushing it, and to make progress at a decent pace not be afraid to stray from the path of the well-known. Crewed spaceflight stagnated for a whopping 40ish years thanks to it getting put on a back burner last time, what’s to stop it from getting stuck for a whole century, or in the worst case getting left behind entirely as the can continually gets kicked down the road?
Musk has spoken about this in the past, with concern that the window we have now may not be around forever, and how without someone pushing progress on making crewed spaceflight and settlements beyond Earth’s surface commonplace, it may end up never happening, and I think that concern is warranted.
> with concern that the window we have now may not be around forever
Right, but there is the opposite concern as well. By trying to do this too soon we underfund arms control or climate change response at the margin and we suffer extinction or societal decline.
For me it's about resources. It's true technology takes actual effort, but it generally speaking takes less effort over time due to exponential tech. If the folks involved in the manhattan project had just ONE modern computer it probably would have halved the timeline / resources required. My argument is that if the goal is species survival there is much, much, much lower hanging fruit to go after.
Mars, or any location well beyond easy reach of the Earth-Moon system for that matter, act as forcing factors for the development of truly independent self-sustainability, and thus also all of the various technologies required to do such a thing. Even on the moon, the presence of a eject lever (ability to return to Earth relatively quickly and easily) and fast and “easy” resupplies greatly reduce the impetus to become self-sufficient.
Mars would also serve as a great stepping stone to vastly larger and more ambitious spacecraft. Its reduced gravity and aerodynamically insignificant atmosphere along with the raw materials available on Mars along with a relatively temperate climate and Earthlike day-night cycle make it a good candidate for use as a shipyard for building and launching extremely large interplanetary freighters and the first permanently spaceborne non-orbital crewed crafts — something that’s not feasible in Earth’s orbit due to the need to tow all the raw materials in, and less suitable for the Moon due to its greater extremes and deficiencies in readily available resources.
So in short, Mars is really more of a starting point in humanity’s permanent inhabitance and traversal of space with potential for huge gains in science and technology applicable to problems on Earth than it is a goal in and of itself.
> Right, but there is the opposite concern as well. By trying to do this too soon we underfund arms control or climate change response at the margin and we suffer extinction or societal decline. > For me it's about resources. It's true technology takes actual effort, but it generally speaking takes less effort over time due to exponential tech. If the folks involved in the manhattan project had just ONE modern computer it probably would have halved the timeline / resources required. My argument is that if the goal is species survival there is much, much, much lower hanging fruit to go after.
The resources being sunk into space right now are couch change relative to practically everything else, and a company like SpaceX pursuing long-term settlement of Mars would only increase that to pocket change (at least in terms of usage of taxpayer funds). Vastly larger sums are spent on the military and even wasted on utterly broken government contracting and procurement, like the $20,000 routers that were purchased for hundreds of tiny libraries in WV[0] where $60 consumer grade routers would have sufficed.
There is no lack of resources, only rampant mismanagement, waste on titanic scales, and lack of will.
[0]: https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2013/02/why-a-one-room-w...
The longest stay in space currently is 14 months and Mars is nearly two years away.
Going to Mars is just a super charging station for Musk's narcissistic supply.
At some point in time, if the wealth inequalities are not addressed, "society's will to cooperate in a shared civilization" will cease. At that point in time, the entire planet could become a welfare state, with fossil resources expended and no society will for anything beyond survival of a population holding on.
This new insistence on "saving the planet" might replace it, especially as it also comes with apparent "technical demands" (should we choose hydrogen? how could we make nuclear faster to build and cheaper? fusion!!) that play right in the hands of the technical middle-class, but imo there's still an open battle between the two world-views. I slightly wish for the "space travel" new theology to have the upper hand, but that's just a personal preference of mine.
I see Becky Chambers getting a call-out below, for instance.
As far as graphic novels go, I recommend Tim Eldred's Grease Monkey: https://greasemonkeybook.com/
From 1960 to 2010, Americans when polled if someone with pre-existing conditions should be able to get health insurance or government-funded care not only wanted that by a majority, but by an overwhelming majority. Nevertheless it was blocked for half a century in the legislature.
There is a narrative that many of these things don't happen because Americans don't want them, but that is a false narrative.
On the half century theme, the inflation-adjusted hourly wage in the US is below what it was 50 years ago. All productivity gains have gone to the rentiers, to the heirs. Why are the people doing the work and creating the wealth going to support something they see no benefit from?
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pluralistic_ignorance
But when polled if government should raise taxes, the overwhelming majority said no. You are leaving out the part that really matters.
A perfect example is Trump voters supporting building the wall and Trump voters being against raising taxes to pay for the wall. How can you resolve such a contradiction? You can't. If you are a clever snake oil salesman like Trump, you lie and say "Mexico will pay for it". But that's not how the world works.
People will always be noble and virtuous when nothing is at stake. It's like how elizabeth warren can support mass immigration but asked if she's willing to house a migrant family, she'll say no. It's like how politicians support war but find exemptions for their sons.
Personally, I think universal basic income is the best shot. If the poor, homeless, uninsured, etc were getting a steady monthly check, the markets will find a way to provide housing, insurance, etc for them.
Although in the case of California, simply ceasing the practice of blocking private developments would be a huge benefit.
"Futur-ism" has it's origins in 1920s/30s European design aesthetics. It's a strange projection of the values of the wealthier classes, mixed with some early fascist-industrial values, but also influenced by the Grand Exhibitions (for example Crystal Palace, or the World's Fair (Exposition Universelle where the Eiffel Tower was built)). For America this kind of thing had enormous cultural influence, for example [1] how General Motors/Chrysler projected a future to the growth-hungry 1950s USA.
To a large degree this works. We imagine things we desire through science-fiction and go on to create them. But Futurism has gotten conflated with Futurology, by the likes of Kurzweil - the idea of technological singularity - and the modern Cosmists for whom quasi-religious ideas like "uploading your brain into the cloud" hold huge appeal. This movement seems qualitatively different in its departure from desirable "Earthly" goals, toward technological determinism, cybernetic governance, a sense of "inevitability" and "uniquity" to everything, and as Neil Postman put it, "abject surrender to technology".
The counter-movement today is Humane Technology, see for example [2] which resonates somewhat with the "cozy-punk" theme of the article. Space travel is at the intersection. It's simultaneously useful and useless at present - a Kierkegaardian state of man whose feet are in the mud but head in the stars. We can integrate a very optimistic view of space technology for peaceful purposes.
However, remember "the future" isn't cozy (by definition), because it's an unknown we should rightfully have a respectful fear of. Every technology will bring its benefits and dangers, pleasures and pains.
Leftists will project egalitarian values on to what we can technologically achieve. Libertarians will uphold the (established in the West/North) values of freedom, speed, individualism in their technological vision. Some (evolutionary psychologists like Peterson) will insist that a-priori we cannot escape the limitations of Pareto dominance hierarchies, perhaps missing that all technologies are means by which we escape limitations. However, the limits to growth (see Meadows etc) will definitely put hard brakes on, because even with fusion we are unlikely to become alchemists in this century or the next.
The best we can hope for is to retain _human_ control of our direction in science and technology. That's what seriously worries me today. For all the talk of "Society's Will" we are teetering on the brink of abdication of all human will, at least with respect to the digital technologies before which we bow.
[1] https://www.formtrends.com/when-the-future-had-fins/
[2] https://www.humanetech.com/
Because we will lose control over/ability to understand the decision making? Because limits to growth will force austerity? Because increased technological complexity leads to incomprehensible stochastic risks? Because…?
> lose control over/ability to understand
What someone from the Union of Concerned Scientists once called something like the "problem of the pulled-up ladder". I gave a talk on this, and relating to Thomas Thwaites "Toaster Project" [1], on the fact that we no longer have an education strategy that recognises that one generation cannot hold the knowledge to reconstruct technological society (100 years ago we could).
> Because limits to growth will force austerity?
Not necessarily, no. We've escaped Malthusian traps before, but staying ahead of the curve gets more precarious as our failure tolerances get tighter. For example fusion will be a positive step change, but we might arrive at a point where near-unlimited energy is still not sufficient to fix things (like a soil chemistry debt).
> complexity leads to incomprehensible stochastic risks?
Somewhat. We've always had that though. DDT, PFAS and Microplastics kinda caught us with our pants down. We have to be careful getting into Black Swan speculation. But in the cybersecurity realm _yes_, I deeply believe that we are constructing systems that _will_ fail catastrophically with almost total certainty. The focus then needs to be on mitigation, resilience and maintaining contingent technologies. I have said plenty on where I think the "cashless society" is leading.
At present it's the psychological/sociological issues that most intrigue me - there's no doubt we're well into an era where we recognise solutionism is making many things worse, and are addicted/dependent, but don't have the psychological apparatus to societally extricate from what are widely understood as harmful courses of action.
How we'll solve that is one of the most interesting questions of the century, I think.
[1] http://thetoasterproject.org/
You could argue that you could do all of those for the betterment of mankind itself, but humans thrive on competition, challenges and yes, personal earnings.
https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/cultures/fully-automated-luxu...
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2019/06/give-us-fu...
That said, I think I'm in the camp of funding everything that matters to us at some level, while making sure that an urgent priority like global warming get's the lion's share, as much as we think can be put to use. The public can only get excited about two things at the same time, but we can spend money on a much larger set of things. I certainly hope, while the public conversation is focused on global issues like Covid and climate change, that we are also spending money on inspecting dams and levees. There is some right amount to spend on space travel, which is presumably much less than we should spend on global warming and public health and education.
In reality, convincing people is the harder problem, right?
Most of the problems that we're having on Earth, including poverty, homelessness and climate change, are in fact socio-political problems and they can't be solved with any realistic amount of money. The only way to solve them is through either strong socio-political coordination or very advanced technology (AI, nuclear fusion etc.)
They know they can’t fix it but they pander to the votes
https://www.globalgiving.org/learn/how-much-would-it-cost-to...
Looks like we could end homelessness for about 20 billion. Elon Musk, born into wealth because his parents had a diamond mine in apartheid South Africa, is worth over 220 billion.
Easy, because the Democrats are feckless at best and the Republicans are a death cult.
Further reading: "As a result of this, the teenage Elon Musk once walked the streets of New York with emeralds in his pocket. His father said: “We were very wealthy. We had so much money at times we couldn’t even close our safe,”"
source: https://web.archive.org/web/20211215175402/https://www.indep...
Those won't work either. "strong socio-political coordination" translates to "You must think like us or else." And what will AI or nuclear fusion do? Even with free energy and money people will still have issues between them.
There is no magic bullet to solving the ails of a large modern society outside of dismantling said large society.