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crushing the pernicious mirage of space colonization, "the enoblement of the frontier" as it is succinctly put here, is a load-bearing element of the battle against techno-fascism

this piece nails the entire underlying impulse: exhuming a midcentury sense of modernist momentum out of nothing more than shallow nostalgia, itself a muffled, distorted yearning for an older and more troubling colonialism, "short of ethical or genocidal wrinkles" and reified as our species destiny

this is really what Musk offers to his followers: the sense that their identity as engineers makes them part of a bold, noble modernism, freeing them from any introspection about their privilege, or any ugliness in how they wield techno-scientific power... virtuous pioneers in an endless frontier

this ideology has to be concealed under layers of self-delusion, with regard to the viability of space as a frontier for settlement as well as the fact that it is ultimately more nostalgic than forward-looking, because when you strip it down it is such a deeply ugly, entitled, regressive worldview

This part really took me out

So while living on a planet where a significant portion of your bandwidth is spent simply on making it survivable, you’re also going to solve physics problems we haven’t managed to solve here on earth where the air *can* be respired??