Fressoz’s book deals primarily with the creation of myths about energy futures; Becker’s with the creation of myths about futures in space. They overlap in their consideration of why such myths are created. Who pays for them to be created; who benefits from their creation?
Does anyone remember this media story from about 10 years ago that was about recruiting people to go settle on planet Mars?
It is pretty interesting to think about what a remote habitat would logisitically need to operate a survivable environment for humans. For example, just think about the energy requirements being met WITHOUT fossil fuels. There in an infographic here about the conversions between a multiple reactor nuclear power plant and other technology, for example solar panels (3.1 million) or sports cars (2000). So imagine having digging and mining equipment, life support etc and suddenly you’re flying a nuclear reactor to Mars or flying millions of solar panels. We are so blind to the interconversions between fossil fuels and other energy sources that you don’t look at a bulldozer or backhoe or dump truck and really comprehend the stupendously insane amount of energy flowing.
NASA actually provides some numbers… It costs $100,000 per crew member per day if you’re only flying material (water and oxygen) to the moon. ( https://ntrs.nasa.gov/api/citations/20230015110/downloads/Take or Make ASCEND charts.pdf)
Some people here do the napkin math on putting material onto Mars surface.
( https://www.reddit.com/r/Mars/comments/42rs7k/cost_per_pound_to_mars/). It seems like it’s about 5X more expensive.
Moving to Mars seems like a believable narrative. We’ve seen it on countless movies and TV series. People will wear spacesuits, drive rovers, live in a dome with a farming area, recycle water etc.
Then you start putting numbers on things and suddenly it seems absurd. Like a shovel is $200,000 etc.
Another huge factor is that this is the cost for one way trips. If you want to send a vehicle to Mars and then have it come back to planet earth, you have really have to take double the fuel on the trip. That means when you first launch from earth, your launch costs more than double, because you’re lifting fuel weight that doesn’t get burned off lowering the mass of the rocket…like, this is a major blind spot in a lot of the calculations. People are simple extending the costs to earth orbit but that’s not even close to the right values…
I think the technofuturists most publicly masturbating about a manned Mars mission were openly talking about making it a one-way trip. They imagined there’d be no shortage of people willing to die on Mars - and had no qualms condemning people to certain death for what would have been the world’s most expensive publicity stunt.
One of the silver linings of the general collapse of, well, everything nowadays, is that the American public no longer cares about manned space travel. We have so many real problems on earth that pissing trillions into the void doesn’t catch the world’s imagination anymore.
A lot of people have latched onto technology worship as a kind of secular religion, all with blind faith components.
Technology worship is a kind of “instrumental knowledge”. We end up having to use everything we know how to do. Nobody asks the question " why are we doing this?". The ability itself is an imperative.
There is an interesting technical point about human space flight and human ingenuity: if planet earth was 1.5X the current diameter, earth gravity would have been so great that the energy content of rocket fuels would not be dense enough to be able to lift itself to earth orbit. Putting this another way, it is a total fluke that humanity had A) fossil fuels and B) low enough gravity that space was actually possible to reach.
It gravity was just slightly higher we still would never have invented space flight, even now today. Its all just the ratio of fossil fuels to gravity cost being in our favor.
We were never smart, we were always just lucky. That’s the real lesson of space.