I just started thinking about it. Why is space exploration even that necessary? They’re spending so much money on it when we have so much problems in our own planet…

    • happybadger [he/him]@hexbear.netEnglish
      9·
      9 hours ago

      China is even more STEM-intensive than the US. I would love to study at a Chinese university, but I would be the worst student there. My parents didn’t demand I score well on puzzles as a child so my inner Puzzle Demon is satisfied by grand strategy games but intimidated by anything beyond basic algebra. China has utilised its Puzzle Demons to do so many good things in recent years. They’re supporting their Puzzle Demons in state institutions and as a result they’re the only country able to actually address climate change or field a domestic space station. The Soviets democratised Puzzle Demon science and made their farmers and factory workers participants in projects that weren’t building more lethal drones. They were collaborating with their neighbours to do the little spreadsheet and crunch the numbers and see the result that benefited their neighbours.

      The US gives its Puzzle Demons hundreds of thousands of dollars in student debt and says the only way to actually pay that off is indentured corporate servitude doing something evil. They numb themselves in the moment to deal with it and find ways to justify it after. Their career history pushes them further into antisocial jobs where they can stomach the philosophical side because they weren’t required to take philosophy classes and were told to look down on humanities students.

      Give 'em NASA and sure it’s expensive. Sure most of the results are just cool new space pictures I’ll look at a few times. Sure I’d benefit more from social spending. But I can’t enjoy those parks if the Puzzle Demons are building murder robots that anyone can fly. I want them building really complex rockets that only a handful of heavily screened PhD-tier astronauts can fly. I don’t want them going to SpaceX and making profitable things because that profit enables Elon Musk and restricts development to short-term goals and marketable products. I want them in a strictly regulated government lab using their little graphing calculators to crunch the numbers and be some other planet’s problem. Not the one I have to live on.

      edit: And every satellite pointed outward is one that isn’t pointed inward. It’s the same job to build and control either. Fund the ones that point outward and make all the Science Kids want to grow up to look at cool space pictures instead of surveilling their neighbours.

        • happybadger [he/him]@hexbear.netEnglish
          2·
          3 hours ago

          It’s what drove me out of emergency medicine. My inner Puzzle Demon was completely satisfied by an environment where the puzzle is doing creative, emotional, technical, moral, manual labour for a noble mission. Keeping track of a dozen metrics and half a dozen textbooks, a constant stream of new puzzles, I got to indulge my need to compulsively read and analyse. But I also felt like a vampire because the US medical system means I save a life only to saddle a profoundly disabled person with an unpayable debt. The only non-Puzzle Demon route I could find was being an MSF doctor right as the west decided that bombing MSF hospitals was okay.

          It’s also what drove me into public sector horticulture. I get to spend all day in the sun solving puzzles. Every kind of labour involved except for emotional, but all of that Puzzle Demon energy goes into making meaningful public gardens. With those budgets shrinking and my pay freezing below subsistence level, the better-paying alternative is to be a private landscaper and poison my neighbours while stealing the water from their mouths. The richest assholes in the city get another trophy that I can’t even visit after work and it raises the surrounding property values. All roads lead to Puzzle Demonology without the disarmed public sector providing a sustainable alternative.