Final Frontier No More
The curious death of interest in Space and rise of UFOs
The only people posting about Artemis II on the company Slack were three women. This struck me as very unusual. Of course most corporate jobs are now heavily female skewed but I was still surprised some of the more vocal usual suspects who I took for men who would be interested in NASA and Space neglected to say anything. A curious silence. Of course the mission is overshadowed by the current colossal fuck up that the incompetent Trump regime is carrying out but nonetheless it feels like most people couldn’t care less. Even discussion online seemed muted and uninterested. A few half hearted jokes about the black guy, woman, and Canadian who make up the four man crew.
Contrast this with the Joe Rogan Experience interviewing boomer crackpot Bob Lazar again or JD Vance just a few days ago telling a reporter than he’s fascinated in the topic and definitely thinks UFO’s are demons. Not to mention the flurry of interest now picking up around some curious deaths of scientists and the asteroid 3 I Atlas. On the one hand people can’t get enough of the idea of extra-terrestrial and sci-fi themes but on the other actual voyages into space don’t seem to excite or interest anyone. What exactly is going on?
Years ago a friend of mine at the time introduced me to this book. I confess I didn’t actually read all of it but the idea has stuck with me. It’s the idea of a robbed future that we have been denied. As much as I am a techno-pessimist-collapsitarian today my younger self was enamored with science-fiction stories and I still enjoy reading them today. That vision of the future myself and many others were once hopeful for. O’Neil was proposing a concrete path for humanity into the stars in this book. It wasn’t just the imagination of authors. As I recall it centers on the idea of building and constructing cylinder habitats in space that generate artificial gravity through rotation and centrifugal forces. These habitats could accelerate and change how we live. We could construct our own environments more than we already do. Perhaps the best vision of this remains The Bison Sphere a tongue in cheek April Fool’s article by Wolf Tivy.
And what is more advanced and well-proven than our very own biological ecosystems? Four billion years of proven self-replicating nanotechnology, far in advance of anything we have yet built ourselves.
Imagine the American West, before we killed all the bison, but at least a trillion times larger, in space. Imagine effectively infinite grassland steppe on vast solar-orbit space stations, populated by herds of quadrillions of bison (yes, quadrillions; I did the calculation).
As the constellation grows, giant nuclear-powered spacecraft will push rotating super-stations with artificial gravity into highly inclined orbits. Vast ziggurat cities carved out of solid billion-year-old space rock will be landed on the artificial plain, and space cowboys will range out from them, tending and hunting the herds.
Hungry space wolves will keep the herds in check, chasing them around so they don’t overgraze or get lazy. Man and beast will be in their best element, and the peak of their health, in an ecologically integrated space civilization bent on growth and life.
This is our vision for America’s future. The Bison Sphere.
That is a form of archeo-futurism that I could get behind. It is the melding of what we already know works with the technological power to implement and reclaim a past landscape. For me when I actually watched the replay of Artemis II lifting off I was thrilled for a moment. This flood of memories came back, of day dreaming about space adventure and of the possibility of building something up there in that final frontier. There is always a duality to man however and I was brought crashing back down to earth with the memory of what most of the rest of humanity has done to claw us away from the stars.
When America went to the moon of course a certain group of people and a certain set of beliefs was just beginning to take hold.
A group of 500 mostly African American protesters led by civil rights leader Ralph Abernathy arrived outside the gates of the Kennedy Space Center a few days before the launch. They brought with them two mules and a wooden wagon to illustrate the contrast between the gleaming white Saturn V rocket and families who couldn’t afford food or a decent place to live.
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“One-fifth of the population lacks adequate food, clothing, shelter and medical care, [Rev. Abernathy] said. The money for the space program, he stated, should be spent to feed the hungry, clothe the naked, tend the sick, and house the shelterless.”
It was the usual suspects and specter of anti-white communism rearing its head. Of course today America doesn’t have a hunger problem. We have an obesity problem. The reality is that the black communists like Abernathy have won. Today America is beset by huge amounts of fraud from migrant communities that a select few are using to enrich themselves and live off the backs of my and your labor. We have become the society that Abernathy wanted, everyone is fed but there is no greatness anymore. We have race communism that will hold man from the stars.
This is the triumph of the untermensch and the last men.
Today it would not surprise us to hear the likes of Dave Smith or even Tucker Carlson sputter out a line about how we shouldn’t be funding NASA space travel whilst Gaza children starve.
It goes without saying of course that a significant amount of effort and funding has gone into reframing the original NASA space missions to include the important history of some black women who were involved. For the left the Great Men of History approach is only valid if a black women is involved so listen up!
Artemis II’s crew represents the unfolding of how society has changed. For those in doubt of who got us to astronauts and space they should read Tom Wolfe’s The Right Stuff. The book is a powerful paean to the quest for fighter jet supremacy and then the birth of the American space program. It was done by white American men who put their life on the line and some paid the ultimate price. They flew higher and faster than any before them and were on the limit. Now of course we have diversity and women in space and a lot of the media framing of Artemis II has been around that. Disregarding that propaganda it’s still an interesting return to space and pushing limits we’ve seemingly ignored for years.
The truth is though that we have become bored with space. “Space is fake and gay” is a refrain I’ve heard around here though oddly from people who then develop an interest in aliens and UFOs. That is where the supposed paradox lies. We’re living through weird times. There is a degree of evidence out there that suggests we are not alone and some weird technology is operating about the place. There are basically three possibilities:
Aliens are real and they visit our planet
It’s our technology created in secret and could jump humanity ahead but is kept from us
Something else
The something else might feel like a cop out to some of you but it really could be anything. Could be elaborate hoaxes or deliberate ones to bring about one world government. Or maybe they are what JD Vance and others have theorized: Demons?
The fascination with the UFO topic is understandable but the root causes of that fascination don’t lie in a good direction. To some extent we’re all just schizos now. People are of course interested in knowing if there are actual aliens but part of the thrill is the speculation. It’s why Rogan has these guys on again and again and you have the diverse theories within the UFO space. My understanding is that some like Jacques Vallée tend towards more esoteric explanations versus others who concretely believe greys are wandering around.
Our own Vice President has come out and thrilled the religious base by claiming to be super interested in this but also convinced they are in fact Demons. It’s hard to tell how sincere he is being here. Vance is a meme character now for all intents and purposes, it’s obvious he reads the side of X that many people exist on. He’s got to be aware of the whole dialogue around this and has picked a soundbite that appeals to a specific kind of voter. Conspiracy is the hottest game in town right now and interest has never been higher. Actual interest in going to space or moving towards something like O’Neil’s High Frontier spheres seems diminished and shrunken. Musk’s trip to Mars doesn’t even seem to excite many anymore and I am one of them. Jumping into a Mars trip without building some kind of Elysium first seems odd to me.
Long time readers will know that I tend towards a collapse outlook. Pessimistic about the future for numerous reasons. There is another modernity out there though where our ideas won and we began looking upwards and outwards more than inwards. The navel gazing of the intellectual obsessed with power structures and inequality has dominated our world. Call it what you want, longhoused or cultural Marxism but we have been made small again. The frontiers of finance are not in expanding asteroid mining as some thought but in prediction markets and gambling. The stupid discourse around LLMs as some kind of world eating AI has seemingly made us ever more obsessive about that as well. Generative slop and AI data centers are eating the world’s resources. One of the more noble elements of the desire to put humanity into the starts might be that we could start to repair some of the damage done to this planet. Space has become boring and banal, we’re locked in here fighting the Marxists for all eternity it seems. The fetid mass of humanity that seeks to extinguish that spirit of exploration that so many of our ancestors have had in the past. You can critique it all you want but to be reaching towards something is important and powerful. It forces a development not unlike that of war.
One curious thing gives me hope though. That VR technology has stagnated and withered. It was all hyped a couple of years ago but if even VR tech couldn’t grow during covid it seems unlikely it will ever grow now. There do appear to be natural limits of our myopia. It remains a fad and a niche interest that has not suckered in the masses. Perhaps it still will but it seems ever further away now than before. That alone says we are capable of rejecting certain technologies. For all the doom scrolling and phone addiction we have we are still locked into the real world. People will have AI induced pyschotic breakdowns now but not VR enabled ones!
Space remains this final frontier even if most of us don’t look up at the sky. Even if most of us think we’ll never make it to be living amongst the stars we have had a greatness. A greatness of triumph in the total vacuum of the ether once and perhaps we will do so again.
