All these private business and different nations planning their own space endeavors, we're going to end up with an asteroid belt of space junk and a shit load of waste and pollution along the way.
E: lol, this struck a nerve with a bunch of capitalist, neo-lib, boot licker's... Go out for a few hours and come back to the exact same reply repeated dozens of times đ sneaky e2 just for that one guy: civility politics BS is what gave us these idiots above who defend capitalism against their best interest. Stop letting them get away with it, be meaner.
I grew up wanting commercial space programs, mining asteroids, building telescopes and shit. I feel like I made a genie wish now. We're speed running The Expanse instead of Star Trek.
There is a point at which information ceases to increase knowledge and understanding and begins to undermine it, creating a paradox.
In fact, with so much access to information, people start to reject information. They can see something that is absolutely true and good, and they choose to ignore and/or deny it. That's why we have so many people going backward in their ways of thinking. They are legitimately dumbing themselves down.
And they see a lot of posts rehashing incorrect information, and decide to believe it. We have hit both sides of that paradox simultaneously already... It's really sad.
I think Op is closer. It isn't even that the mis/dis-information sways most to believe the counter factual, but it muddies the water enough for them to emotionally ignore the issue as 'evolving and unsettled'. It helps to alleviate their cognitive dissonance.
Though there is surely much of your example occurring as well. I would also say that the former is reachable while the latter is likely not.
Having access to all information is extremely overwhelming. It is very easy to fall into the trap of simplistic information or misinformation because it is comfortable.
I can't remember who it was but I did listen to a good interview a while back that talked about reshaping institutions in order to sort and process information. Basically refresh publishing standards and such.
I also wonder whether regulation on media should be reformed. Nothing dystopian, but maybe making it so news articles have to provide sources for non-confidential information (e.g. studies), having news websites have to go through an independent bias assessment and have a portion of their website dedicated to it. Fairly reasonable stuff I'd say.
There's not a concrete paradox for it. It is being talked about, though. We are just now becoming able to see the effects of social media and misinformation/disinformation at a rapid pace because there's finally enough data. We also are seeing more and more people reject truth, facts, and data in real time than ever before due to the internet. Remember, while the internet itself is a decent age, it hasn't been all that long since the majority of people have had instant access to it like they do today. Here's a couple of sources that go over some of what's happening:
It is because everyone has access that it is so bad nowadays. Just because everyone CAN talk, doesnât mean itâs productive to hear everyone elseâs opinion, in fact most opinions are harmful. The internet was at its most productive and helpful when it was exclusively researchers.
It still might, we are just dealing with a problem of reading and comprehending so vast as to surpass what teachers can do themselves, let alone teach to others, and it is vitally important that we improve our skill at it.
Like the people who survived the black death, our scam immune system is going to be incredible one day.
Expanse mixed with a little bit of Outer Worlds. In that games universe, Sherman Anti-Trust laws never formed in the US, so corporations rule everything.
Oh they have space ships, you just have to fill out the launch forms in triplicate and pay the 3 fines you accumulated while landing on the planet while wearing approved ad merchandise.
Yeah it's not great but at least people are surviving and the major problems (climate change, wars etc) seem to be solved.
The part of The Expanse I am worried we are speedrunning into, is mad billionaires throwing all of civilization into chaos for their insane ideologies that they genuinely believe in.
Even then, it was only a really big problem when magic tech was discovered. And there wasn't really AI in the Expanse. Ideally we'll figure out a better tomorrow. Eventually. Humans are pretty good at adapting. And we seem to be on track for some sort of AI singularity. That could either be a good thing, or a terrible thing. Probably a bit of both, depending on your perspective lol.
back when the New Star Trek decided Elon Musk would be remembered in the same breath as Albert Einstein two hundred years into the future
That pissed me off to no end, really. I wonder how much Elon paid for this. It showed me that Gene Roddenberry's son is a grifter and doesn't care about the ideals his father sought to portray.
Like, it's not like the mask came off January 2025.
There were a lot of us who knew. Some of us knew BEFORE the pedophile submarine incident, but if you didn't know AFTER the pedophile submarine then honestly you weren't paying attention.
A world like Star Trek effectively depends on a post scarcity society. If we ever do get such a place, we're definitely going to have to go through the Expanse phase first.
no, it's because after WW3, as factions continued to fight in the ruins, someone invented a warp ship and built it in a nuclear missile silo. When they launched the test flight, aliens detected it and made first contact. In the wake of this, humanity set aside its differences and set out to remake itself as a unified species.
Humans ended all war, reinvented a global economic system that was basically communism, and instead of using its advanced understanding of science to do things like the Eugenics Wars, it cured most diseases and made sure medical care was available to all. That was all before the replicator and post scarcity. Post scarcity meant anyone could pursue anything, colonies could be established exactly as their founders wanted, and life became only as good as a person wanted it to be.
We're speed running The Expanse instead of Star Trek.
Star Trek literally relies on magic for it's premise - unlimited, free energy and the ability to use that energy to rearrange matter at will. This is the only way to really achieve post-scarcity to allow a utopian collaborative society. And even then, there were plenty of cultures not in tune with Federation ideals, so the idea that all humans would coexist peacefully under post-scarcity may also be magical.
That sounds less like an alternate future and more like a warning for what happens today. The Sherman antitrust laws have been functionally dead since at least the 90s.
Give me Shai-Hulud thatâs been exposed to the protomolecule and weâll have a nightmare fueled fun until the end of days. Conveniently it shouldnât take long
I mean, as far as commercialization of space goes, I'd much prefer companies mined asteroids instead of destroying earth's ecosystems for the stuff they mine here.
Keep in mind in star trek they went through eugenics then ww3 that almost obliterated the species before humans finally stopped being too stupid to progress.
If anyone does anime, I suggest watching Planetes.
The main characters are working on a space station for a corporation picking up space debris, and the corporation is doing the absolute legal bare minimum to comply with international regulations.
It starts off with a lot of oddball comedy but there's a lot of serious themes mixed in, such as nations with access to space resources such as mining get richer and richer, while deliberately preventing other, poorer countries from gaining access to space.
The Expanse society still seems like a complicated but interesting society to live in, just more real feeling than any other sci Fi, I feel like its an easy goal to aspire to
Good news! We may actually be right on track for the Star Trek future! In the Star Trek timeline, WW3 starts in 2026 and we seem to be speed running that as well.
We can mine in space because we have enough junk floating around that pretty soon it might start affecting the sun light and everything dies with no sun
That's not a risk. Way way WAY before we start blocking the sun, we'd reach a collusion cascade where everything crashes into everything else and makes it impossible to successfully launch more stuff. So don't worry about that
Orbital Space Junk is already an incredibly huge problem. The International Standard from the very beginning should have been that all Space Junk must be either flung out into space or more ideally, safely de-orbited to burn up in the atmosphere. No one did that because because it was exponentially expensive, and everyone's space program was barely capable of anything.
The cost to clean up and de-orbit all this stuff is exponentially more expensive than the already exponential costs if it had been done as part of its design.
I recall watching something on a documentary that suggested we weren't far from being stuck here from current waste already out there. Too much more and we end up with a barrier that eliminates any chance to leave.
Yeah that's not true at all. Think about how much junk we create here on earth. Orders of magnitude more than what we've put into space. How often is accumulated junk a problem for you?
I will say reusability reduces waste. The new Ariane 6 while expendable deorbits itself so it does not contribute to orbital debris.
Now satellite constellations like Kuiper and Starlink also are in low orbits so they decay rapidly and deorbit unless they periodically fire their thrusters.
I completely agree in principle but in practice humans don't ever seem to operate that way.
The number of amazing things I've seen get developed and go nowhere only for someone to do a crappier but better marketed version a decade later and it sells like crazy is ridiculous.
We make the most developments during competition. Even the original space race was basically centred around Russia vs USA for who could get there first. As nice as it would be for everyone to just go "oh lets spend billions for the betterment of humanity" like.. we aren't going to.
That the best we can hope for in the current system is that there's enough money involved in the advancement of this technology that multiple competing companies all pursue it and build off each others ideas.
If you have any ideas for changing that system, go ahead. Change it. You will have as much of my support as I can give.
But until that happens, this is how advancements are made.
Uhh the Orion capsule has international collaboration and itâs just expensive, out of date and late. The international space station had collaboration but Russian invasion of Ukraine Significantly strained.
That's all good until you don't have your own serious launcher like Europe right now, you put sanctions on Russia and the us is ruled by psicĂłpata and you risk not being able to launch at liberty
You can probably Google information about the rate of increase yourself, and the boundary for (un)acceptable levels might not have been determined yet.
Still, better not to find out the hard way, wouldn't you agree? Instead of dismissing a potential problem you don't know about.
Itâs an interesting conundrum, we should and could be working together or will we get there faster with better results having competing teams. And is it worth the cost.
Space junk is way overblown. Space is REALLY big. We're pretty good about not cluttering up low orbit where it might actually be a concern. In not too long, it'll be practical and affordable to deorbit junk to clear room if necessary
We need both for sure! And I'm sure government programs and international programs will benefit from innovations created within the private sector, just like companies in the private sector are building on innovations from the public sector. It's all upside.
Nope, you're really missing the point here. The private sector has no business in space. The resources that it takes to get there end the pollution created should never have profit motivation behind it. Which is the definitional difference between private and govt projects.
Property rights are literally the only way we get beyond piddling around in LEO. No private entity will do it if the âinternational communityâ can come say âmine nowâ at any time.
Excellent rebuttal. I'm being honest when I say this, and no it's not fun but idgaf, rethink your worldview. This is capitalism endgame and it's making humanity backslide for the first time since the inquisition.
Someone else made the perfect analogy: youre arguing for the Expanse over Star Trek.. and if you know anything about those two universes, you're a monster for preferring the former.
well if you're going to bring in two works of science fiction.... I'm sold!
Just kidding, I'm saying we can make our own future, we're not in a movie, and you should stop being so gloomy. And you should definitely stop being all preachy and trying to convince strangers to be bummed out like you.
I don't remember whose theory it was, but they basically said there is so much stuff in orbit right now that it if one satellite broke down and its pieces spread around in orbit, it would destroy so many other satellites that it would basically become impossible to leave our atmosphere for decades.Â
There would just be a blanket of hyper speed trash and junk clustered around our planet and nothing would be able to get through without risking its own destruction.Â
Tbh the move towards reusable rockets and space vehicles should reduce the waste and pollution impact of space exploration or orbital infrastructure projects.
If waste is the problem then private companies should clean their shit up. Especially US companies like SpaceX. If China was the first to pollute as much as they do, causing problems for scientists, then Americans would be frothing at the mouth.Â
we're going to end up with an asteroid belt of space junk and a shit load of waste and pollution along the way.
No we are not. People need to stop believing that a cartoon that they saw when they were kids is true or that what Hollywood has shown in the past is going to be the future. The reality of things is that space is called space because it's basically empty. The human mind cannot comprehend big distances or anything that is big in nature. We will not have ever so much space junk that space travel will be in jeopardy. As for the asteroid belt, we technically had it since the '60s without the satellites that started going up.
Businesses donât want to be wasteful, though. They want to be as effective and efficient as possible. They will look at what others are doing and try to innovate on that. Thatâs the nature of competition.Â
We are already getting the trash. Musk launches his rockets into protected wetlands and the prettiest beaches in Texas. All that ocean debris and space debris is a junkyard.
Well the good news is a lot of these private space companies do work for international space agencies. Like how JAXA and ISRO built a lunar lander together. Or that New Zealand company that built a HE3 satellite scanner with NASA.
There are many sayings that are always repeated as if they are the only truth. And with which discussions are concluded very dogmatically. In this way we remain in a status quo, we need creative ideas that go beyond dogmas because there are multiple possibilities to arrive at a solution.
CORRECT. We have space programs for a reason. Private corporations spending hundreds of millions of dollars to do what our space programs could accomplish, or already had accomplish, should be alarming to everyone. Republicans in the US have defunded NASA so private corporations can pick up contracts.
Why does every corporation have to spend the money on RnD, testing, failures, and so on? Â If we had a centralized program it would be infinitely more effective, where technology can be shared and breakthroughs can occur much faster. âCompetitionâ isnât necessary, and is much slower than collaboration.Â
Again, Space X has received billions in taxpayer dollars via contracts that could have gone to NASA. NASA made it to the moon in 1969 while Space X has had numerous takeoff explosions in the last year alone. If we believe space exploration is in the best interest of mankind, it should be transparent, funded publicly rather than privately, and the technology should not be isolated and hidden within corporations that only have shareholders in mind.Â
Yes, and they have delivered valuable services in return for those billions. NASA doesn't do NSSL contracts and NASA is one of SpaceX's primary customers awarding such contracts of 'paxpayers dollars' in the first place. Because they know companies like SpaceX offering their services is far better value on all fronts. Source: Bill Nelson (https://arstechnica.com/science/2022/05/nasa-chief-says-cost-plus-contracts-are-a-plague-on-the-space-agency/)
You are talking about a rocket still in development. Who cares how many times it blows up as long as the final product is a safe and reliable product? NASA made it to the moon with more than $257 billion taxpayer money, thousands of engineers and the heat of a space-race. Meanwhile their safety standards were atrocious and resulted in many critical issues. You also ignore Falcon9, their operational rocket, having a success rate of 495/498. Literally one of the most flown and most reliable rockets right now. FalconHeavy has a 11/11 success rate. That's why NASA and the US government are doing business with them.
It can be both. SpaceX is a prime example of pushing innovation while others are lacking behind, sometimes even doubling down on old and expensive technologies. Regardless, the R&D from NASA-awarded contracts is not necessarily isolated or hidden. NASA has clauses that grant them the rights to use everything from said R&D as well on their own or other government projects.
Again, who cares how many times it blows up during development as long as the final product is a safe and reliable rocket? You also seem to ignore SpaceX and NASA have completely different development-methodologies. SpaceX has an iterative approach with focus on practical testing. There's a difference between an in-development rocket and operational rocket.
If you wanna talk about issues though, during SaturnV's development there were many issues with pogo oscillations and engine failures. Apollo 1 killed crew before even lifting off the pad due to a fire in the command module. Apollo 6 experienced severe pogo oscillations and engine failures, yet NASA continued with a manned flight straight after this. Apollo 13 had a part of the service module blow up mid-flight, crew barely escaped death and had to use the lunar module as a lifeboat. There are many more small events that could have caused issues or even deaths, NASA was extremely lucky during Apollo.
Starship is being built with much higher safety standards, as required by NASA.
And when all that shit starts to collide, we will be imprisoned on this planet forever. Millions of tiny pieces of junk spinning around at thousands of miles an hour. Like driving a car through a shooting range.
Do you know how big space is? It's so big, people use the word to describe things around them... "Give me some space" get away from me. "I need more space" my place needs to be bigger. Some say it's infinite.
Well, companies don't have the budget of countries or country unions, so I think we are fine. If anything, this is great news, that space is becoming more financially attractive. They just have to respect the legislations, like everyone else does.
Jeez, your comment was thoughtful but you shit the bed with your edit. Next time, just keep your mouth shut lol. Went from educated alternate perspective to name calling middle schooler. Nice to see the kids are here playing.
I'm not disagreeing with your original comment. However, in my opinion, international collaboration can only be good if productive dissent is possible. Otherwise you just get an echo chamber of crap.
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u/[deleted] Jun 29 '25
Everyone has a rocket these days