KSR makes me feel good about space travel.
From an interview on Strange Horizons:
LJ: Where do you see space exploration going in the next 50-75 years? From all that has been found out recently about planets like Mars—and now the research interest in Pluto—do you think our exploration of space can possibly help us deal with the environmental crises on Earth?
KSR: Well, comparative planetology is a powerful tool for investigating how Earth’s biosphere behaves, so going to Mars and studying it would be a great thing to do. Even if most of the big lessons from comparative planetology are already learned (if not applied to Earth yet), still the news of people on Mars would emphasize every day that we too live on a planet, finite and capable of crashing ecologically. So space exploration still has a defensible place among the human projects, I think. None of it is going to go very fast, but that’s okay too. It would mean that significant space travel would be occurring in the context of a healthy global culture.
Yes….
And then:
LJ: What are your views on globalization and the so-called global village?
KSR: Globalization seems to be one name for late capitalism’s enmeshing of every culture on Earth, and the biosphere itself, into its system of strip-mining for short-term gain. I think globalization should be understood to be a malignant process, like a social cancer.
The “global village” on the other hand strikes me as real, for the fraction of the world’s population that has access to the global media, and potentially very good for world history. Not everyone is in the village, but it may be a really big fraction; and maybe almost everyone is aware of the rest of the world, more or less fully. It’s an information cascade that has touched everyone not living in isolation. That awareness of everyone else on the planet can very easily lead to the conclusion “we’re all in this together,” which while frightening for the currently privileged to contemplate, may yet be a spur to action by all, and to a general support of justice applied worldwide. Permaculture as the global project of the global village; as opposed to globalization, which is a kind of Taylorization of all humanity.
Oi. This guy gets it. I’m remembering from the Mars trilogy how he describes that humanity (in a few hundred years) has ample resources and incredible command over the natural world, and now they can begin the real work of humanity: building a decent society.