Imagine for a moment that someone had built a self-sustaining space colony. It'd be immune to all the status quo's most common tricks. The obscene expense of launch costs vs local materials would mean whenever possible, it'd have to manufacture locally rather than importing, so boycotts and sanctions wouldn't work, likewise, importing scab labor would be more expensive than training the original colonists and their descendants as laborers and accepting whatever wages they demanded as what the market would bear since there was no cheaper alternative. Regime Change in favor of a more earthling-friendly vinchy regime? Possessing the technology and infrastructure for moving large masses around in space would be an essential prerequisite for building a space colony in the first place and the earthlings live at the bottom of a gravity well, or in other words, the space colony would have a MAD deterrent.
Sure we can imagine, but that doesn't make it real. It's not that your argument is without merit if we were actually capable of doing this,
but we are not. In another thread you wrote this, which you frame as the "conclusion" to the points raised by an ideology being discussed, but which I
assume is actually just your own view:
All of these problems have the same solution, we need more resources and a frontier to serve as a pressure release value for dissidents to establish whatever type of society they'd prefer. We have the technology, what we don't have is the money and that's primarily because our leaders know they couldn't accomplish their dream of ruling everyone if people escaped to self-sustaining space colonies and possessing engines capable of moving large masses around in space, had a MAD deterrence.
You outright state that we can supposedly build actual space colonies, but we don't have the money because our evil leaders are deliberately stopping us. Well, I agree they'd be that evil -- but they're hardly that competent. No, the truth is: we aren't remotely close to being able to build space colonies, or in fact doing
anything half-way profitable in space.
I'll re-iterate my earlier points about this:
1) Even if we can get automated mining probes built, launching them and jetting them over there, and then sending useful stuff back (and somehow landing that safely) is still going to be prohibitively costly. (And forget about self-replicating machines. That's cool, but also something we're not even close to, yet.) For a very long time, exploiting resources on Earth is just going to be cheaper and easier, which means that's what'll happen.
2) We'll see colonisation -- real, actual, people-live-there colonisation -- of Antarctica and the bottom of the ocean, before we see meaningful space colonisation. Once you have already built a domed city with a few hundred thousand untrained civilians living in it right at the South Pole, and that's stable and safe over longer periods...
then, you can really work on a space colony. Not before. Not if you want it to work.
So, really, I challenge those who say space colonisation is so very feasible: build us a domed city at the South Pole. Have, say, half a million civilians live there for, say, five generations or so...
without cataclysmic failures leading to mass death. Also, since you explicitly advocate space colonisation as the way to escape oppressive government, you're obviously prohobited from using anything even
resembling authoritarian methods to keep things going smoothly, or your results will be invalid. Good luck. Until this "proof of concept" has been delivered, I'll maintain that the time for space colonies has not yet come. And in the meantime, I'll periodically think back to the failure of
Biosphere 2, and heed it as a warning against the hubris of people who think they can just colonise the most hostile environment in existence. We can't even manage a closed ecosystem here on Earth!
NERVA nuclear rockets or Project Orion had that solved since they were invented during the cold war and in the long run, wouldn't create much more radiation than all the test nukes the US and Russians were detonating essentially to show off. Space development being crippled by legalistic bullshit against using them isn't an argument against space development any more than earth-based infrastructure's crippling by greenlaw is against it.
I'm all for nuclear rockets. Of course, the comparison with nuclear tests is revealing. Isn't there a test ban treaty or something...? Isn't there a reason for that...? Hmmmm. My point being: nobody is going to let you do this. Nuclear propulsion
in space, sure, and that's awesome. But for surface-to-orbit launch, you will
not be permitted to use nuclear detonations. Even if at some point, some government is willing to allow it... that scheme is
one failure away from termination. All it takes is one Columbia disaster, and it'll be like the Hindenburg turning into a fireball, or the Concorde ploughing into a high-rise building. Except worse. Much, much worse. Which means the end of the nuclear rocket, and far more definitively than the end of the Zeppelin or the end of the hypersonic passenger plane. (And we don't see a lot of those, right now.)
So that's a no. Surface-to-orbit is the big hurdle, and if shortcuts were as easy as you think they are, we'd be taking them. Keep working on it. My estimation: we won't see
meaningful space colonisation until science and tech develop enough to allow us to build a space elevator. (It helps that if you're savvy enough to do
that, you can probably also build a decently safe space colony.)
While this forum loves comparing everything to Rome, Dynastic China arguably makes a better prediction model.
- The status quo leadership deliberately sabotages the country's own technological and scientific progress because it's expensive and since they've got a monopoly on things the way they are, any change could alter that, while foreign barbarians who don't likewise limit themselves eventually outcompete them.
- Massive governmental corruption.
- Education system is weaponized, you can't rise in societal rank without extensive and massively expensive education which is also intended to brainwash students into supporting the status quo.
- Barbarian foreigners take over the system, set up humiliation rituals for and ban symbols of the natives*.
- Extensive use of eunuchs as bureaucrats and enforcers**.
- Foreigners flood country with drugs to simultaneously weaken it and get rich. British Opium and Chinese Fentanyl.
- The ruling classes succumb to bizarre cultish ideologies about how they should run society, eventually leading to their mismanagement causing failures of supply chains and famines.
Going with the parallel, either we're gonna get militarily defeated by foreigners who've adopted technologies we've refused for reasons of ideology and expense*** or have an Emperor Qin Shi Huang figure seize power after the status quo discredits themselves by causing a famine through equal parts slavish adherence to unworkable ideology and incompetence and buries all the ideologues alive.
I can't speak for others, but I'd like to point out that the historical comparisons I tend to make are not limited to Rome. Because my whole point is that civilisational cycles keep recurring, regardless of the "window dressing". In fact, I did that in post #20 of this very thread, where I wrote:
"(...)
in this case we talk of the Classical and the Christian/Western cultures, but of course you and I have talked at length of many others, such as China, Egypt and Mesopotamia. The same patterns of development recur again and again. The same causality shapes all of them, and sets them on remarkably similar trajectories."
Anyway, I have to point out that you're pretty randomly listing characteristics you associate with China, with little regard for the fact that many things you mention were only relevant in certain periods, over a history spanning thousands of years. The key question is: what happens in what stage of a culture's developmental cycle?
I'd say you're not far off the mark here:
(...) an Emperor Qin Shi Huang figure seize power after the status quo discredits themselves by causing a famine through equal parts slavish adherence to unworkable ideology and incompetence and buries all the ideologues alive.
I compared Modernity in the Western world to the Hellenistic period in the Classical world, but it's just as accurate to compare it to the Warring States period in China, or the Second Intermediate Period in Egypt, or the chaotic period following the Late Bronze Age collapse in Mesopotamia. So whether you want to imagine the future tyrant as Caesar, Qin Shi Huangdi, Hatshepsut or Ashurnasirpal II... that barely matters. In a world-historical sense, you're talking about the same figure. The one who seizes power and brings ruthless order after several centuries of chaos, confusion and division.
And yes, such a tyrant is typically too harsh, too unyielding, to be tolerated for an extended period. Most often, you'll see this person killed or deposed, to be supplanted (optionally after a final civil war) by a more constructive leader, who establishes the universal empire, the early phase of which will forevermore be viewed as the "golden age" of that culture. Augustus inaugurating the Principate. Gaozu founding the Western Han. Thutmosis III organising the New Kingdom. Shalmaneser III consolidating the Neo-Assyrian Empire.
We've had our "Alexander" (who initiates the age of chaos) in the form of Napoleon. You may expect our version of the last great Despot by the end of this century, and our version of the First Emperor at the start of next century.
Ultima Cumaei venit iam carminis aetas;
Magnus ab integro saeclorum nascitur ordo.
Iam redit et Virgo, redeunt Saturnia regna,
iam nova progenies caelo demittitur alto.