Let’s get our asses to the rest of the solar system! And here’s how:
These videos are good resources for how colonization of the solar system could happen. Those two YouTubers also have lots of other very valuable space resources, which could be very valuable for educational purposes and science fiction projects.
This should be especially interesting for @Eric_Hunting and @Joao_Luz. What do you think? And how would that fit together with science fiction worlds like Fracal Cosmos and scenarios like
I’ve been following this excellent video series for a while. I agree these are valuable resources. But I’m becoming increasingly doubtful that the public has any active interest in space development to build on. People like to dream about space but they don’t seem to really want to, or believe they can, do anything about it or participate in it. They’ve become complacent, relegating it to oligarchs and government. We see a lot of hype lately about Mars colonization, but it’s really just the Elon Musk Show. Another spectacle. The public remains resigned to the notion of the future as something that just happens to you.
I’ve become very frustrated in trying to reach people with a message of participation in space development. I try to tell them about the many fun and interesting things they can actually do, right now, toward realizing those dreams. But they’re only interested in the end-result–in that seat in Capt. Kirk’s chair.
For a few years now I’ve been shopping around this concept of an amateur public space program built on telerobotics. The development of homebrew construction telerobots built from the hardware of RC construction models and the creation of prototype ‘telebases’ as a new kind of community model train layout accessed online. A new TMRC for the 21st century. A new hobby that can grow, directly, into the actual creation of real space facilities and a new industry built around them that would become the basis of space settlement. But it’s been futile. I pour my heart out in articles and posts like this one and there’s never much, if any, feedabck. The concept makes no sense to people because it’s not the vision of a space future that gets shown to them by SciFi, space agencies, and the New Space folks. It’s not presented by the right people (ie. billionaires and government representatives) in the right way (ie. elaborate videos with Star Wars level CGI) and so no one ever gets it. And I just can’t bootstrap these things alone. I have neither the health or wealth. I get the same kind of response to all the futurist projects I try to cultivate people’s interest in. We can do so much, instead of just waiting around for the future to happen, but no one really wants to. They just want to be a passive audience to someone else’s spectacle.
I can empathise with your frustration. I’ve been in a similar situation with trying to make people interested in creating a reputation income economy, but nobody really seems to be sufficiently passionate about that to generate some serious action towards that goal. It’s a typical problem for futurist projects. And that problem is one of the reasons why I’ve started the Fractal Future. From the most cynical point of view, you could see it as “futurist project leader self-help group”.
Reaching out to people in a way that actually inspires them to become active is hard, very hard. I haven’t found the right recipe for doing that. In any case, it seems to require a mind-boggling amount of sustained effort and lots and lots of skills in many different areas. At the very least, you need to develop an entrepreneurial mindset. The problem with that is that most start-ups fail. So, you need to keep failing and failing, until you finally find something that actually works. There doesn’t seem to be any reliable shortcut to that.
But anyway, I think it’s good that at least Elon Musk has had quite the success with his SpaceX company. He’s a big innovator in that field (although he’s using ideas that have been out there for decades – implementing them was the really hard part). Have you tried contacting him?
