I don’t know if I mentioned this foolish piece by Charles Seife last week (what would we do without “journalism” professors?). At the time, I merely tweeted that I didn’t understand why I was supposed to care whether or not Virgin Galactic and SpaceX were about “exploration.”
Jeff Foust commented that Slate editors must have taken the week off (which I think gives them too much credit during the non-holidays). Anyway he has taken it apart.
It’s difficult to imagine a student of Professor Seife’s turning in a class assignment with such factual errors and getting a passing grade.
Zing.
And speaking of “space exploration,” I’ve decided that this is the year I make all-out war on the phrase. It has held us back for decades in thinking about space in a sensible way.
I tried coining the saying “exploration for exploitation” because history shows this has always been the case… unfortunately it never caught on 🙁
Happy New Year, Rand.
Happy New Year to you and yours, Dave
“Exploitation” is a word co-opted by the Left in the mass media mind and is has such negative connotation and baggage that it should be passed over I’m afraid.
“Entrepreneur” remains a net mass culture plus. So far.
So if you want to wage war against the hide-bound baggage of “Space Exploration”, then maybe the phrase to co-opt is “Space Entrepreneur”. Or “Space Entrepreneurship”. Or “Space Stewardship”, but the latter has vast socialist tendencies that are probably too easily co-opted.
If you think think perception in popular culture doesn’t matter, think back, only just a few decades back, as to what the popular definition of “Gay Space Entrepreneur” would mean.
In my view, we haven’t even really been exploring, except for the Moon. We’ve been data gathering.
The real question is why have we been collecting this data? To ‘answer questions’? To keep PhDs busy? To funnel money to government contractor friends?
Or are we going to put that data to good use to tap the energy and resources of Sol system for the benefit of humanity?
The idea could have had some merit but the article itself was utter crap. I would rather that these people invest their money into possibly world changing technologies and enterprises than buy another yacht or worse just sitting on it. Elon Musk in particular is someone I really admire not only for betting his fortune like that but managing those challenging businesses so well. If the author wanted to bash onto someone he could have hit more on the pompous idiocies that Peter Thiel keeps spouting all the time.
I also agree that the fact that these people are now buying newspapers is somewhat worrisome given what happened in the XIXth century when moguls started doing that.
Wow. I could imagine some pinch-faced bow-tie wearing Berkley grad writing that thing, with imagined whip scars on his back from all his class warfare battles…
I certainly think that people like Musk and Branson do add “sizzle to the steak” as it were, but I am not at all convinced that it is ENTIRELY ego in either effort. Then again, so what if it were? Having a healthy ego makes things happen, not everyone can be a spectator to life and have life improve.
For clarification – I was referring to the original nonsense-riddled Slate article, not Mr. Foust’s rebuttal.
This article is a great example for why I don’t read Slate.