Science Fiction as Idiocy
I’ve always been a science fiction fan. Though not reading many books, I watched plenty of movies. 70 years ago, Hannah Arendt noted the then still new genre had not been taken seriously enough in regards to revealing mass aspirations. Last year, I realized popular science fiction is increasingly used by our Tech Lords as futuristic utopias to justify their various idiocies of now. This is not a good thing.
Here’s a very good piece well worth reading, The looting of science fiction – “Tech titans claim the genre inspired them. But all they’ve done is graft their politics onto stories of a better future.” The piece begins with Elon telling the American military establishment he’s going to make Star Trek real – Oyyy! It also includes good looks at the fantastical idiocies of anti-christ Thiel, the foolish doughboy Andreesen, the Zuck, and of course Scamming Sammy Altman.
American science education is so poor people can’t challenge these fools, most incapable of separating science from fantasy. If you tell someone they’re never going to meet a Wookie, they dismiss you as a hater.
Americans, homo sapiens, have a great fascination and love of technology to the point they have a hard time discriminating about the pluses and minuses of any given technology’s adoption or even feasibility. Most disturbing, with the rise of compute, technology has become a new religion, a faith, accompanied by a complete disregard to the great change industrial technology already fostered on the planet's established ecologies. Have no delusions, earth's the only spaceship we’re all going to be on for a long, long time.
There’s two well overused sci-fi tropes. The first is some beings flee the planet they destroyed to find another. If you destroyed your planet, there’s no way you can build a life sustaining spaceship. The second fantasy is most spaceships are basically industrial design. No one’s ever doing industrial spaceships. You ain’t ever lifting all that stuff into space – the tyranny of the rocket equation. “As long as rockets are the mode of transportation for traveling into space, we are stuck with a vehicle that is 85+ percent propellant.” The more payload you put on top of that propellant, the more fuel you need.
The most immediate problem we have with technology is it’s controlled by only a handful pushing us into disaster for their own unquenchable greed. The future is fundamental politics. The idea any of these knuckleheads, who spent their lives in front of screens, have any understanding of what our collective future should be is idiocy. We need to all be part of claiming and designing that future with the understanding this spaceship earth is a wonderful place that orbits the sun at 67,000 mile per hour, in a solar system moving 514,000 mph, in a galaxy moving 828, 000 mph. How about that for space travel?
Highly recommend two great videos on science fiction and idiocy from my favorite theoretical physicist from Eastern Kentucky. As I said before this is smart and very funny polemics:
Billionaires want you to know they could have done physics
Ok, speaking of the immediate future, Tuesday in Michigan, the Democratic DC establishment lost again. A couple days ago, I pointed out in 2020 the campaign looters spent $70 million in Maine to get 350 thousand votes and in 2024, a $100 million to get 250 thousand votes in Montana. In Michigan, they spent $60+ million to not even get half the Democratic vote.
The Dems haven’t got 50% of the vote in a Michigan Senate general election for ten years. Good luck to El-Sayed, don’t listen to DC and stay far, far away from Barnie. Here's a clue, AI unease and look to those counties that voted for Obama and then Trump, if you can't speak any kind of Maga, at least they already voted for an Arab name.