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?
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.