Well I'll give you that most of the stuff about accessing other star systems is deeply unrealistic now. But pretty much all of the awesome stuff that we've actually created in the last 150+ years started out with someone's imagination running away on something that didn't seem very realistic at the time. The idea of having artificial satellites was once a pipe dream, and now we have so many of them we have to redo our numbering scheme to track them all properly.

I'm not gonna hold my breath for the other star system stuff, but if they manage to get the kinks worked out of Starship and it delivers full reusability as promised, it seems like off-world colonies might actually be possible in our lifetimes. If that gets up and running, we might plausibly develop enough space infrastructure that some of the ideas don't seem too crazy anymore.

There is too much fantasy about distant habitable planet and not enough about making a planet in solar system habitable or building artificial habitats

The second is likely easier than the first

Not just likely easier. Far easier. They're so far apart on any reasonable effort scale that the comparison is basically meaningless.

Or even before that, fixing the habitat of the planet we are living on. A lot of the current cultural fantasy of colonizing space feels less like expanding the human frontier and more like escapism.

You can't imagine someone getting excited about difficult problems as an engineer? And you can't imagine why there's creativity involved?

I don't know, it feels like you can't process the output of human creativity.

I love human creativity. I don't like pseudo-science, especially coming from people who believe they are above it (and fall prey to it anyway).

> Like, the people who tend (no offense) to be the most literal, black and white thinkers get exposed to art and instead of processing it as the output of human creativity, they start to imagine that it's desirable or even real.

Why can't you process their fantasizing about it as an output of human creativity?

No, it doesn't seem very creative to me.

I don't think I've ever sounded so cynical in my life, but something about the way sci-fi fandom bleeds into real science really makes me deeply uncomfortable.

cynicism and critique are comfortable positions imo. i appreciate the relatively newfound cultural shift back towards earnestness (although i can already feel the pendulum starting to swing back)

I generally see myself as an earnest person, but some kinds of earnestness read as cynical to me.

skimming your comment history, to me you seem very comfortable occupying the sociocultural critic position which is to some degree inherently cynical imo. i say that because i also recognize it in myself

Yeah, but I'm only cynical in relation to what I see as the orthodoxies of the kind of people who post on HN.

When I say it like that, it sounds pathetic. And in fact, it is. Yet, here we are.

FWIW I don't think it's pathetic at all, and I have the same reaction as you to a lot of things on HN. There are a wide variety of topics that bring out various biases and other cognitive blind spots in people, and bots.

Space travel seems to be one of the more harmless ones, but I agree it's frustrating to see people implicitly or explicitly skip over things like near-light-speed travel as solved problem, then reject arguments from others as "not thinking big enough", etc.

In general, divorce from reality doesn't seem to be related to intelligence at all in my experience. I'm sure there are plenty of times when my wishful thinking gets in the way too.

> No, it doesn't seem very creative to me.

You don't think exploring a problem/possibility space (heh) that is probably unobtainable is an effort in creativity?

It is creative as long as you acknowledge it's unobtainable. But in threads like this, fantasy and reality tend to blur.

there is clear reason why this would be desirable for many, the others - sure.

There is a fourth that the author would never mention:

Hire consultants about the problem

Have unpopular solution or mitigation strategy, hire consultants, execute, blame the consultants

You don't have to wait 100 years. You can build a bridge to alleviate traffic without any understanding that the bridge will in fact generate more traffic, and then you have to widen it a few years later (which also doesn't help). I know this has happened several times in NYC and I'm sure it has happened many other places where engineering know-how far outstrips knowledge of urban planning.

How do you know that? What do you know about prehistory? Nothing. You might as well be picturing the Flintstones in your head.

You're using broadly shared but totally unsubstantiated about past humans just to argue that things are good right now.

So you're claim is prehistoric humans are stupider? Also unsubstantiated. And insulting to prehistoric humans. That kind of behavior isn't allowed on HN. Don't disparage a group.

My grandmother used to give me mix CDs as gifts. One time I asked her where she found all the music and she told me "Oh there's this amazing app called Limewire." She then taught me how to pirate music.

Am I crazy or does this just real like secular eschatology? What evidence do you have of any of this?

Particular categories of land will always be scarce by definition. Not all of us can live in off the coast of the Mediterranean in a sprawling villa.

There is no real evidence that we'll reach AGI any time soon. It relies on AI continuing to scale, and we have no proof that will continue to be possible.

There is an alternative interpretation, which is that Demis looked at the US government's ham-fisted handling of Fable, and deciding that setting up a body to act as a buffer between the Trump admin and the AI companies would be a good thing.

Or Demis realizes self-hosted models are a threat to frontier lab margins, and gating access to the US market is beneficial to the cartel based on whatever post-hoc arguments he can come up with.

I don't remember Dr. Tobias Funke being into Hindutva, but it's a funny image.

That's an absurd false dichotomy. I'm assuming the historians are the cucks in your analogy? As the author points out, many of the "chuds" haven't even read translations of Greek or Latin texts, while historians can read the text in the original. The main skill historians have is exactly the strawman you've set up to knock down. They understand the limits of our knowledge of ancient societies, and the "chuds" do not.

You are holding historians to an epistemological standard that I am confident you don't hold anybody else to. Whether intentionally or not, you're muddying the waters to undermine their expertise. Why?

>I'm assuming the historians are the cucks in your analogy?

only the grifters who are in business of re-imagining history for the modern audience.

>You are holding historians to an epistemological standard that I am confident you don't hold anybody else to. Whether intentionally or not, you're muddying the waters to undermine their expertise. Why?

why shouldn't I? historians do not deserve unconditional veneration, no one does. for every serious historian there are two dozen creative writers who can produce a thousand pages about everyday life in in Egypt 6000 BCE.

history is a very soft science. ancient history in particular is equivalent to trying to divine how the stars and planets millions of light years away look based on fifty bytes of real data from a telescope.

You should work on the ability to distinguish respect from charitability.

One can be charitable to views that one does not respect. And if one ends up being disrespectful it does not mean that they were insufficiently charitable.

I did a pandemic project of reading Dredd from the start for as long as I could. I made it through about 25 case files volumes, which took me from 1977 to the late 90s (I think).

Is Judge Dredd cyberpunk? I don't care. It's an incredible run of comics, that touches on many of the same themes as cyberpunk.

There are many people involved in Dredd over the years, but I do think John Wagner has had the rare opportunity among work for hire creators to shepherd a fictional universe over decades of real and in universe time.