Right. It looks like being a functional human being and writing more upgrade are temporarily not happening because I’m overwhelmed. Have a thread about space narratives instead.

A lot of our narratives around space are centred around transcendence: in space, free from the shackles of gravity* and the constraints of human society, we are free to fashion a new world

*sounds weird, but it’s part of 19th-century Russian cosmism

A lot of space narratives are, at their roots, explicitly mystical. We believe we *should* be able to transcend our earthly constraints through the power of space alone.

This doesn’t happen. It can’t happen - we all take the ideas of the past with us. But what that space mysticism does is making it very easy to ignore past and ongoing harms.

In the world of the space mystic, von Braun’s N*zism is washed away because of his contributions to the US space programme, we ignore the involvement of defence companies in the space sector, and billionaires will save humanity.

The problem with space mysticism is that we’re supposed to be able to transcend that. We can’t. We’ve been launching things into space since 1957 and haven’t transcended any of this stuff, only entrenched it in new and worse ways.

You can’t fix a problem by ignoring it.

I’m saying this as someone who is *very* attached to space and transcendence: we cannot achieve that transcendence unless we take several long, hard looks at what we are doing here on Earth and try to fix it

(can you fix it? maybe not. is trying worth it? I think so.)