I felt a knot in my stomach while watching the livestream coverage and hearing "They're doing so much science!" and I wanted to reach into the monitor and ask "Tell me! Give me details!" but instead felt I was watching the tiktok influence bear out on scientific coverage.
To betray Sun-ra, 'space is not the place'.
We're not fit for space: there's nothing out there that's appropriate or suitable for our organism. The scale of space is absurd and insurmountable to our physics.
If by some apocalypse we could overcome these limits, to do so would be to betray our humanity; escape from human limits is implicitly beyond our scope. This contradiction is unavoidable.
If the ambition is to become not-human, we're much more likely to escape ourselves by careless environmental destruction.
And this observation exposes a fundamental inconsistency of any fantasy about an extraterrestrial evolution from a dying Earth: if we can't make it here on Earth, the planet of pre-conditions so favorable to our species such as to be the cradle of all life and giving rise to us, how do we survive in space under conditions infinitely less favorable to our organism? The conjecture that we will build it suit is insane.
This is all very well studied and understood: we are not grown from our own intentions; we do arise by any logic of causes and effects; the mind is emergent, not foundational. We don't live because we intend to, we live because we can.
A man that thinks his brain is in charge of his existence is a man with a brain that will soon be knocked off the pedestal of his own two feet.
This is why the Apollo missions ended with further exploration and studies application of telemetry and satellites.
Artemis is bulshittery-- unless it's regarded purely as an art project. But the physics are so risky it's like staging a dance performance of controlled self-immolation.
