Dr. Triton and the Fusion Fever: Check out LinkedIn discourse (I know) on Savannah Mandel’s forthcoming apparently wildly controversial book Ground Control: An Argument for the End of Human Space Exploration. @knilirabaj.bsky.social if you’re not tracking this, may be of interest. Also, @nuclearanthro.bsky.social

Check out LinkedIn discourse (I know) on Savannah Mandel’s forthcoming apparently wildly controversial book Ground Control: An Argument for the End of Human Space Exploration. @knilirabaj.bsky.social if you’re not tracking this, may be of interest. Also, @nuclearanthro.bsky.social

Savannah Mandel on LinkedIn: In response to one of my other posts which is currently getting a lot of…www.linkedin.com In response to one of my other posts which is currently getting a lot of attention from both sides of the human space exploration debate I wanted to post a…

I’m not sold on human space exploration with its current colonialist and extractivist roots.

Space capitalists and space colonizers are ruining the idea of a future in space.

I just...I want people to live beyond just Earth. I don't want us to bring the current bullshit with us.

Capitalism doesn't belong in space. Hell, capitalism doesn't belong on Earth!! We can and must help the Earth's ecosystem heal itself of the grievous wounds we've dealt it, but also, there's so much out there to see and to share and to be inspired by, and it would be a terrible shame to abandon it.

I’ve got seriously mixed and complex feelings about about her general thesis as well, but I’m looking forward to reading the book. One of the top comments on LinkedIn is a space CEO guy genuinely asking her to “not publish” the book. Nerves have been touched. Savannah has the discourse juice.

Yeah, I'm definitely going to have to read this. I am, of course, going into it with a strong belief that "commercial space exploration" is a festering blight on what should be one of humanity's greatest aspirations.

Space being privatized definitely crushed my interest in it. Really aiming for that expanse future where the butcher of anderson station cuts oxygen to children because of a labor strike.

the argument against crewed space exploration is back to the 50s at least in the USA and quite compelling (IMO) for beyond-lunar, or maybe beyond mars, until significant advances in technology.

And WILDLY controversial. Then and now and every time since.

Oh, yeah. Just the biology of it all bounds our possibilities at a pretty hard limit and visceral limit. Even in the “optimistic” Expanse verse human off-planet existence is depicted as pretty brutal and tenuous.

Yeah. Like, we can get to maybe indefinite survival in space, but it’s no way to live.

Simply doing it because it’s there is not nothing, sometimes you just have to climb the mountain. But there are not any interesting mountains to climb in the near future

Get me a mars sample return, get me a Titan helicopter, get me a Venus balloon.

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