The Era of Broken Dreams

Which I date to Q2 1972, the day the 1% achieved escape velocity. The Long Boom, the post-WWII good times, was an anomaly, a grotesque aberration which stuck in the craw of the rich for intolerable decades. Fortunately, we worked our way back to inequality and the hereditary meritocracy the rich felt had been taken from them. This is, of course, a false narrative as the rich have always enjoyed their economic apartheid, but Q2 1972 was when they were freed forever by machines and algorithms. Now that they had built a secure enclave of domesticated food-powered robot peasants, it was simply a matter of time before they would be entirely rid of the remaining ferals, the stinky food-powered robot peasants.

The 21st century beckoned, when all the cool technocratic shit was going to be available. Not flying cars. Fuck flying cars. What a stupid idea. No, we were supposed to have nuclear fusion, space colonies, cities under the sea, IQ enhancing drugs, smart robots, age-prolongation/rejuvenation, and food-o'plenty grown in little plastic tubs so Earth could once again become an earthly paradise.

All stale century-old dreams of some nerd from the 1920s. Let's pick a current one with the same narrow vision.

How about Elon Musk? Too easy? True, he's a dork with poor communication skills, a perfect product of the current capitalist fitness curve, the narrative of beneficial inequality, but he also has bullshitted so many otherwise sane or semi-intelligent people.

Elon Musk gonna put Texas on the map. Between his prediction of an Austin boom town to Starship, he figures he will be the first trillionaire. That's a million million, and that's something worth being scared of.

Elon Musk piloting a Texas Mecha into the sunset gonna trod upon a lot of ape-shaped ants, but, hey, Elon Musk is going to Mars.

Elon Musk is not going to Mars.

Certainly not with that goofy Buck Rogers Starship. The logistics of a space colony I briefly went into some six years ago in this essay. The odds of a successful space colony are even worse today, but there is no way you win the Solar System* without at least a nuclear thermal rocket, and, quite honestly, even then it's a no-go. You need a nuclear fusion rocket to do anything beyond delivering corpses or tumor-ridden cripples to Mars. 

Anyone who looks at the numbers realizes Starship is just a stunt, a con to separate rubes from their monies. Here's a pretty good critique about Starship. I really don't understand why people laud Musk for doing things that were done 60 years ago, and with a lot less computing power. But hey. Musk is supposedly trying to make a resusable launch vehicle to cut down the payload cost of Earth-to-LEO through economies of scale. Current cost is $2,720/kg on a Falcon 9. (Actual cost is much higher due to adding in beyond the launch cost).

The thing that really pisses me off is the USA had a perfectly acceptable nuclear thermal rocket from the NERVA test days, back when it was estimated (from actual test results) a nuke launch would be around $10/kg. True, people worried about a nuclear booster crash, but we've already got so much plutonium in our bones, what's a few nanograms-per-person more? 

I think it's really interesting that the last test of a nuclear thermal rocket, the NERVA-XE in 1969, was just at the ankle bend of the development curve, and, 50 years later, would be kicking the living crap out of any existing chemical rocket. Given 50 years development and use, there would currently be at least 10 million tons of stuff in orbit right now. Easily. As opposed to the ISS 420 tons. What's a few atomic accidents, considering the fuck-ups we've already experienced?

So, Elon is no dummy. He knows this. He's conning you.