I think there’s a tendency to see inter- (and intra-)stellar travel through the lens of the inter-continental expedition and colonialism. It… kinda makes sense… superficially, there’s some similarities; a voyage in a vessel, going to uncharted places, kicking off a new era of settlement and extraction. For this reason, movies and games really like the comparison, cus it makes for an easy narrative the audience is already familiar with.
In reality, though, nothing about space bares any similarity to anything in our past. Everything about the expeditions to, the colonizing of, and the industrial development and extraction of the Americas? All that was couched within the biosphere, contingent on it. Movies and media and junk get to ignore that because they exist to tell a story. So what if SciFi du jour doesn’t actually make sense? Doesn’t harm anyone, right? Except…
…except Musk and his fanclub really like describing Mars as the next colonial outpost. They’ll tell you it’s only a few short decades away! And I think that’s cus they don’t see where the metaphor falls short. To them, colonizing Mars is just the next thing that will happen in the narrative of history. After all, it’s happened once - so it must happen again right??? They don’t see the sheer wall of work and resources and work and decades (probably centuries, realistically) that would have to go into it. They don’t think about anything more than a superficial picture on a screen. People needed boats to cross the Atlantic, we’ll need rocketships. Now that they’ve got rocket ships, thats most of the work done. Afterall, in movies, you just need to get there. Then the plot can advance.
I think there’s a tendency to see inter- (and intra-)stellar travel through the lens of the inter-continental expedition and colonialism. It… kinda makes sense… superficially, there’s some similarities; a voyage in a vessel, going to uncharted places, kicking off a new era of settlement and extraction. For this reason, movies and games really like the comparison, cus it makes for an easy narrative the audience is already familiar with.
In reality, though, nothing about space bares any similarity to anything in our past. Everything about the expeditions to, the colonizing of, and the industrial development and extraction of the Americas? All that was couched within the biosphere, contingent on it. Movies and media and junk get to ignore that because they exist to tell a story. So what if SciFi du jour doesn’t actually make sense? Doesn’t harm anyone, right? Except…
…except Musk and his fanclub really like describing Mars as the next colonial outpost. They’ll tell you it’s only a few short decades away! And I think that’s cus they don’t see where the metaphor falls short. To them, colonizing Mars is just the next thing that will happen in the narrative of history. After all, it’s happened once - so it must happen again right??? They don’t see the sheer wall of work and resources and work and decades (probably centuries, realistically) that would have to go into it. They don’t think about anything more than a superficial picture on a screen. People needed boats to cross the Atlantic, we’ll need rocketships. Now that they’ve got rocket ships, thats most of the work done. Afterall, in movies, you just need to get there. Then the plot can advance.