I feel like everyone saying op is glorifying the past and future seems to be missing the fact that this is a shitpost.
Yeah, one should not take this random post too serious. 😅
That top panel is just Elden Ring?
I hate to break it to you. But if you were born back then, you wouldn’t be a knight. You wouldn’t be an explorer. You’d be a peasant. Working your farm from birth to grave.
Even if you were a knight. Most knights lived shitty lives and didn’t have armor and maidens that glamorous.
Yeah, this is very much glorifying the past, and probably the future. Medieval peasants would dream of sitting in a warm cubicle, well fed, while scrolling lemmy, if they could imagine it. Space colonization is probably impossible too.
Congratulations. SpaceX, Inc. is pleased to conditionally extend you an offer of employment (contingent on a successful political background examination, employment eligibility verification and genetic scan) to the position of FACILITIES MAINTENANCE SPECIALIST at ARMSTRONG’S LANDING SPACEX LUNAR BASE. As discussed, your starting daily wage will be 96 DOGE, and working hours will be MONDAY-SATURDAY 05:00-20:00 UTC. Please report to ARMSTRONG’S LANDING SPACEX LUNAR BASE at 04:00 UTC MONDAY 14TH JUL 2093 to begin work.
As an employee of SpaceX, you are entitled to numerous benefits, such as discounted employee housing at ARMSTRONG’S LANDING SPACEX LUNAR BASE. As agreed, you will be provided a Class-8 dwelling at the location indicated at a rate of 1,700 DOGE per lunar day. Please inquire with your supervisor for move-in information. As a reminder, housing at SpaceX facilities is contingent on good performance and your continued employment.
Your supervisor has provided the additional information:
Meet at Spaceport 9 at the aerodrome at 04:00 UTC. Remember to set clock to UTC and prepare 7 days for jet lag before arriving. Employee space shuttle tickets from Kennedy Space Centre on Florida Atoll can be purchased from SpaceX site for 20,000 DOGE, company will deduct payment from future payroll. Ensure right thumb print is in good condition. Employee access card can be obtained from security desk in front of Spaceport 7. Welcome to SpaceX family, hail Elon.
Still more leisure time then now.
That is mostly a myth. They may have worked less than people at the height of the industrial revolution, but even a laborer who was paid a salary had to spend at least several hours per day on average on “not work” things like food preparation, home maintenance, feeding livestock, gathering firewood, repairing and cleaning clothing. Many tasks that are trivial today were highly arduous.
Then to top it all off it was fairly common for the local lord to force them to do extra labor without pay, like maintaining roads or training in a militia.
Don’t forget all the time spent dying from now preventable diseases!
I currently and never have made enough money to pay professionals to do those things. A LOT of my time is spent preparing food and repairing/cleaning my clothes and dwelling.
If you hand wash your clothes and process all your food from scratch you’re most likely the exception.
Remember that one of the biggest contributions to women’s liberation was the invention of the washing machine.
You’re in the good times right now.
I technically disagree, most periods human history had “good times” and the happiness of those people was relative to their expectations and equilibrium with the social and technical possibilities of their moment. You might be miserable if you were teleported to a relatively comfortable life in the year 1500, but they were probably every bit as content as some financially comfortable credentialed working class individual today.
That’s the worst part
You won’t be a knight, more like a farmer.
I don’t like farms, no thanks. So much bugs. My grandparents, while working on the farms, got bitten by some worm that sucks your blood, ouch, don’t want that.
(Also if you are conscripted in medieval era, knives and swords and arrows hurt like hell, at least a bullet is a quick clean death)
Yeah, I wanna sit in full plate armor and make-out… sounds fun. No, I wouldn’t even want to live in a 17th century castle! Just living in a modern apartment, in a modern neighborhood is vastly more comfortable than a dank, dark, non-AC, poop in a chute 17th century castle.
Oh but we can sit around a campfire. Thats not so bad at least.
Yeah, camping and campfires are nice. They are nice because they are temporary and by choice.
this is extra funny when someone laments like this in Ukraine. Compared with some of our “too late” periods - we’re having it good.
You’d be working the fields.
You’d be working the ice hauler.
REMEMBER THE CANT
In the first pictures, the knight would clearly be of the “upper” class. Your chances of being some peon in a field are much, much higher.
Even being a king of that time would be a brutal life in a lot of ways. Death all around and a piss-poor chance of surviving any given year with every bit of your body intact and functional, extremely limited dietary variety, and the smell. Oh god the smell.
A pitchfork still could kill a knight in armor. And then you have a horse and armor
No it can’t, not unless you get incredibly lucky.
Horse thievery is a hanging offense, hanging offense.
Well I guess that’s something you should consider before you kill a knight
Didn’t show ‘mind the size of a planet, but stocking shelves’.
But, I guess I’m happy to be here.
Hah, as if the current fucked up trajectory will ever bring us to a future of high tech space exploration.
The way things are going Mankind is vastly more likely to end up in some Dystopia were society has regressed to outright Feudalism and the most technological advanced stuff are at best mass distraction devices or some kind of ML-based social mass manipulator, possibly just the implanted equivalent of slave shock-collars and the systems to control large number of those.
If even just a tiny fraction of the money spent in stock-buybacks was spent in space exploration we would already have space stations in Mars and be extracting minerals from the Asteroid Belt.
We’re not currently evolving, we’re devolving.
Assuming that space ships like in sci Fi are even physically possible. That’s a tall ask. Momentum and energy are a bitch.
Also money can’t buy “progress”
Using materials obtained outside the Earth’s gravity well, we can make much larger ships than if we have to launch them from the surface of the Earth. Of course that requires some kind of materials processing facilities in space, which is depending on stuff like Moon bases and the years of development of materials science in low and zero-gravity environments possible in those.
Further, the Apolo Program has most definitelly shown we can buy progress. Not “beyond the known principles of present day science” progress (so, no amount of money is going to get us FTL travel) but certainly Engineering progress (so solar sail towed asteroids, moon mining, moon-based nuclear reactors, mass drivers to push loads from the Moon surface into orbit, alternative ship designs using materials found outside the Earth’s surface and/or low weight designs such as the insuflable space stations that were at one point suggested and even test at a small scale, and so on).
It wasn’t by chance that what I suggested was asteroid mining and Mars stations rather than interstellar travel - the money wasted in the Iraq invasion alone over the decades since could have built the infrastructure needed, to get the engineeringe experience required to be able to do the former, not the latter (as that indeed requires a kind of progress that we cannot buy).
Instead, we have Facebook, over the counter credit derivatives and LLMs.
Fantasy was always fantasy
At least we have air conditioning
Speak for yourself!
Now replace the future with how Night City in Cyberpunk 2077 looks like.
Nah, the past was filled with peasants dying of infections and dysentery. The future will just be the Pony Express crew from Mouthwashing. Honestly, I don’t even know what member I’d choose to be since they all went out horrifically.
The future represented in this image has little chance of actually happening: it is the mythology of fossil fuel powered capitalist society, which has expanded past the planet’s environmental limits but needs to expand somewhere, or admit it is at the end of its useful life.
Do we think that’s actually true, though? Life, all life, has a tendency to spread out when a niche is open in a new environment which it can fill, and there’s nothing shown there that isn’t technically within the bounds of humanity. Before capitalism, before humans were even Homo sapiens, we were already migrating out of Africa and into Eurasia. The drive to explore is, in my opinion, deeply human, and nothing says that the model of that exploration or expansion needs to be capitalistic. We wouldn’t have colonized the world in prehistory if it did.
People expanded to places with resources that they could live in, or bring back home. There are no resources that we know of in space that are not more easily accessed on Earth, and living out there would require a material investment from Earth that would be devastating.
Most of the Earth is currently empty of humans, while space is colder than Antarctica, and less accessible than both the top of Everest and the bottom of the Mariana trench. You could build a city in any of those 3 places easier than even low-earth-orbit and any other celestial body would be thousands of times harder still.
The idea that there are no resources we know of in space which are not more easily accessed on earth is just outright untrue, or at least is only true in a narrow sense. My example here would be Helium-3, the ideal fuel for fusion (a difficult choice due to high fusion temperatures, but it has the advantage of not kicking off neutron radiation in the process the way something like Deuterium-Tritium fusion would). Earth contains ~10-50,000 tonnes of feasibly accessible Helium-3, and if we were to move over to fusion power at a large scale at our current rate of power consumption, we would consume that amount of fuel in a matter of years, likely less than a decade. By contrast, the moon contains orders of magnitude more Helium-3 in its regolith, somewhere in the ballpark of 600,000-1,000,000 tonnes, a sufficient quantity to last over a century in the same usage conditions as outlined for Earth. Additionally, both of these sources pale in comparison to the amount available in Sol’s gas giants.
The caveat here is, of course, that it’s unlikely we would switch to fusion entirely in the first place, and that accessing that helium-3 at scale is not easy, no matter where it comes from (though doing so at scale is likely easier on the Moon than it is on Earth). It also ignores ideas like degrowth, energy efficiency improvements, dealing with the drawbacks of alternative fusion fuels, etc. I think, however, that it remains illustrative of the larger point: there are compelling reasons to go to space, even from a raw materials perspective alone.
‘The drive to explore’ is from Star Trek. To boldly go where no one/man has gone before!
The US retold its origin story (the expansion West) through Westerns in the 50’s. Particularly because the US won the space race, tv, and Hollywood, retold a future origin story expanding into space.
Many American people I come into contact with online really seem to have bought it, even though Star Trek portrays a communist society. The cognitive dissonance seemed to be on a national scale.
Life has a tendency to spread when new environments are available, yes.
But beyond this planet, there are no other environments. You might say the rest of the universe is antivironment. There is a wide range of possible conditions, of radiation and tempurature, gravity and molecular composition. Life requires a very very narrow and specific set of those conditions to continue.
Going from one continent to another, within the same atmosphere, with the same underlying set of conditions, is not all that much of a change. Actually leaving the planet? Permanently? And without just dying in the attempt? That would require a level of organization, long term planning (like, centuries long term), and resource management that we as a species have yet to demonstrate.
I disagree that life requires a narrow set of conditions to continue. What I believe is the case is that life requires specific conditions to begin, but once it exists, it is incredibly resilient. There are extremophiles which could reasonably survive in the vacuum of space, and from a more anthropocentric perspective, humans have proven ourselves to be remarkably resilient in the face of climatic tests. Sure, the most inhospitable of earth conditions is a paradise in comparison to something like Mars as it exists now, but we adapted to those when the height of technology was a flint knapped hand-axe. It’s safe to say that the technological aspect of humanity has come a long way, and our ability to survive in and adapt to the conditions of bodies other than earth improves steadily day by day as the wheel of technology turns ever-faster (to say nothing of outright space habitats, which we could absolutely reasonably build with our current understanding of physics). I don’t mean this as a glorification of human industry; rather, I mean to say that ingenuity, adaptability, and tenacity are fundamental characteristics of our species - it’s why we’re here today.
I will also note that there’s no guarantee that there aren’t habitable worlds in other solar systems, and no reason to assume that they couldn’t be found. Even within our solar system, there are planets which, with sufficient effort, could feasibly be colonized near to our current tech level (looking at you, Venus. I know Mars gets all the attention but you’re my one true love).
And, indeed, I wonder if you’ve proven the fundamental point yourself with your observation on organization and long term planning. After all, is it perhaps possible that the very reason we have never demonstrated that level of resource management in our modern, industrial world is itself capitalism? Such a duplicative, wasteful structure is fundamentally inefficient, and more to the point, is fundamentally at odds with the communalist nature of humanity. We are a species which, historically, shares, and just the mere fact that we have convinced ourselves that selfishness is in our nature does not make it true. Additionally, centuries of planning becomes a lot more reasonable when humans reach the point of living for centuries, which is a prospect that I think a lot of people ignore the (relatively speaking) imminent nature of.
All that is to say: we are a species of firsts, and typically when we are met with a survival challenge on a physiological level, we conquer that with technology. Clothing, fire, tools, and planning allowed us to conquer the arctic despite a body plan which is adapted for equatorial living, why should we assume we won’t also eventually rise to this technical challenge in the long term? I have no idea what that intermediary period will look like (except that it will likely be, at minimum, equally unpleasant for us as it is at present), but if history shows us anything it’s that we eventually pull through. Humanity tried to migrate out of Africa several times before it stuck, populations died out, and we find fossil remains which have genomes entirely unrelated to anyone not from Africa, but the notable thing is that we kept on trying anyways.
We’re just stubborn like that.
I would contend that you haven’t really grasped the sheer scale of the universe if you think space travel or colonization is even remotely possible. Sure we went to the moon once but it took pretty much all of our might coupled with gobs and gobs of money. We will surely be back at some point, and I think it’s inevitable that some humans will at some point travel to mars, or one of the moons of Saturn/Jupiter (on what will assuredly be one-way trips), but that’s it. Forget about even attempting to reach our closest neighboring star; our current understanding of physics ensures that we would never be able to make that trip. Same reason we’re not hounded by alien tourists all day every day even though the universe is teeming with life, those other instances of life are equally locked to the respective places where they spawned, which brings us to the next point:
Life. Yes, earth-based life is very resilient, on earth. Consider the massive, incomprehensible planetary forces fighting it out for billions of years until some semblance of a stable -but incomprehensibly unique- balance was reached, where life was finally allowed the necessary time to thrive, flourish and diversify around that very particular balance. Take life out of the environment in which it developed and it fizzles out very quickly. 99% of the effort in any kind of human space exploration would be on trying to replicate earth’s environment to a ridiculous degree of precision and then hope/pray that nothing ever breaks on any of the systems/machinery/technology you use to replicate earth, because then you’d be SOL and fizzle out quickly.
Here on earth we’ve got gargantuan industries (just to name a few think about electronics, plastics/petroleum, metals), built piece by piece over hundreds of years in all material sciences, mutually interacting and interdependent, with massive and incredibly specialized supply chains that rely on readily available amounts of very specific resources that you can get on earth. You can get a plastic ring seal, any size of nut&bolt, and a microcontroller here on earth for $1. No amount of money will get you any of these out there in space. We only manage this for the ISS because it is pretty much tethered (at a distance of only 400km) to a huge-ass planet that can source and produce anything it could ever need, put it on a rocket (costs a lot of money but can be done on demand) and have it get there in a matter of hours, and even then it’s very specialized, technical and perpetual effort to maintain it.
I can see us maybe pulling that off for something built on the moon (our backyard, really) but for Mars, our closest neighbor? No chance if you want to have actual humans involved, only machines and very slowly over hundreds of years, if at all.
