Star Trek is a beautiful concept I myself once dreamed humanity could live up to in my youth.

That said, Earth is by far the most hospitable habitat humanity will ever know.

We can send a dozen perfect specimen humans to Mars/Titan to make an inspirational point, humanity needs that, but sending dozens+ humans to form multigenerational colonies on worlds where a single significant human fuck up means oops, everybody dead? That is a fever dream.

We’re royally fucking up this easy tutorial where all we need to do is stop being greedy fucks and using our technology to shit where we sleep.

Yeah, we’re going to do swell out there on extreme hard-core survival all skulls on mode. /s

Sorry kids, we’re going to either make peace with or destroy the habitability of this world for our species looooong before the idea of spreading elsewhere becomes practical.

Fifty bucks says he caucuses with the Republicans.

https://thehill.com/homenews/3469975-manchin-said-hed-caucus-with-gop-if-thune-were-senate-leader-book/

Completely fair and correct criticism. I mistook their how query as a why query. I was wrong.

We need an amendment where campaigns are government funded, and offering money to or accepting money as a politician while in political office that isn’t that office’s salary is treated with the same life imprisonment severity as treason.

We won’t get it, but we need it.

If we’re going to wish for the impossible, lets wish to fix the root problem with our utterly, completely captured wall street owned zombie government. It’s why we have Alito. It’s why the Federalist Society, an extremist group of the affluent, owns all of our asses with no recourse now.

The difference is intent, which matters to me.

I wouldn’t equate a meteor that struck Germany killing millions to Adolf Hitler killing millions because there’s no reason to hate the meteor. It did nothing wrong because it had no agency or sapience, you might as well be mad at physical reality. Its a tragedy, but no one did it, causality set that meteor on our path from some random collision millions of years ago, and it just happened.

Your comment is akin to not seeing a difference between someone who drops dead from some internal reason like a heart attack or brain aneurism, and someone who was shot in the head. After all, who cares how, that person is dead, what’s the difference, amirite?

Just because wealthy business interests have spent a century pointing and laughing at the scientists warning us of what were doing to our only habitat(with our obedient consent because “jerb creators”), doesn’t mean we have ignorance as an excuse. Pretending the science was wrong out of convenience still means we knew and are responsible.

They didn’t know what they were doing, we do, and we actively choose to keep doing it. Unlike those trees mindlessly performing a base biological imperative, we possess the capacity to stop and simply don’t because we’d lose some of the comfort and convenience our destructive tech provides.

We’re cruel to this planet, all the other creatures on it, and one another. So my reverse ask is, why do you want us to survive? Just because ra-ra home team? Because billions subsisting to serve the whims and ego of a few thousand of our worst, most broken, greedy sociopaths in perpetuity is somehow meaningful? Genuinely asking.

I use this regularly use this as an example/precedent of a previous macro-cancer of the natural world that was detrimental to Earth’s ecosystem from a mistake of evolution.

The trees removed too much carbon from the atmosphere, leading to an Ice age.

We homo-sapiens are just doing the opposite. 🔥

Don’t worry though, our mother eventually found a solution to the tree’s carbon capture problem, and I have every confidence she will find a solution to us and in a few million years, nothing to her 3.8 billion year old story of life, she’ll finish cleaning up our mess. Problem solved, life will flourish, and new ecosystems in homeostasis with the Earth will develop… until the next macro-tumor of the natural world, at least.

Our captured Gov’t: You go to prison…unless you’re very wealthy of course, this is America after all.

Then we’re happy to negotiate, settle, reduce, and otherwise facilitate your repayment in a way that’s convenient for you and your tax litigation team, sir!

In my experience as an American, “fuck you pay me” is our only practiced and sacred value, and all our other supposed values are just empty feel good platitudes that allow us to play pretend our culture doesn’t revolve around greed and greed worship.

Most Congresspeople got into politics explicitly to be bought, and working your way up in local/state elections is a process both major parties use to measure your ability to both be amenable to and effective at funneling that sweet, sweet bribe money into the party.

That’s why the few that don’t take Superpac money are usually spoiler candidates with economic policy positions both parties loathe, as yes, the economics of political bribery, especially since Reagan converted his former opposition that used to get bribed by unions to rake the bigger corporate bribe checks as Republicans always did creating today’s neoliberals, greatly exceed any other force in American politics.

There’s nothing ideological about petrochemical subsidies, for example, that industry can and does just write “donation” checks to our elected leaders, and their bribes trump our ballots every time.

I’ve no hope of this changing, and have accepted this greed rot is going to be our end sooner rather than later, and that greed is creating a swath of vectors, Climate change induced famines/droughts, AI, fascism rising to defend the mass ignorance required to support such thoughtless corporate greed in the face of all evidence, etc to do just that.

deleted by creator

We like to believe the truth about us is inspirational and uplifting. We kind of need to. That doesn’t make it true. Smith/the Wachowskis had our number in that monologue(and also in their Second Renaissance anime prequel about the war between humans and AI, humans do everything you’d expect, we weren’t the good guys). We don’t care about this world. We don’t care about the other species on it. We don’t even generally care about one another in anything more than empty feel good platitudes.

We just tend to want moooaaaar for ourselves in practice

deleted by creator

The goal of modern, blood sucking, publically traded business is to exploit as much value from employees as possible for the smallest wage possible.

Unless you work for a coop or a genuinely benevolent small business, and in the US that’s rarely you, your goal ought to be to provide the least value possible for the highest wage possible, which is very doable once hired to a salaried position for a good long time, because big corporate is almost as incompetent as it is greedy. You can usually even do this while endearing yourself to your higher ups, as long as you fake caring about the bullshit corporate culture to their faces, while undermining the organization where you safely can. Not full on sabotage or fraud, just thinking about the better, faster way to do things, and finding the opposite way in which to do them, etc.

They don’t operate on honesty or integrity, and if we try to fight them on those terms, we’ll be placed where all the honest discontented peasants that fight back earnestly end up, in a cardboard box under a freeway. The capitalists love to crow about how voluntary capitalism is, and that’s what they mean, volunteer to be their battery, or volunteer to die of exposure and police capital defense force harassment.

The class war was fully lost half a century ago, the owners won by convincing the Reaganites there was no class war, proceeding to conquer without a fight. This is class occupation. All we have is guerilla tactic resistance.

When late state capitalist businesses are cruel, dishonest, and disrespectful to you, it’s “just business.”

Not treating Corpmurica the same way just makes you a sucker.

Capitalism has sabotaged and killed leaders of nations that tried to do better by their people to keep capital markets open for exploitation.

Our species grew/metastasized recklessly and without any consideration for equilibrium/homeostasis with the ONLY naturally hospitable habitat that our species will ever know.

Lol Jack Kemp and the Reagan Revolution beat them to that by half a century.

And Citizens United removed the most transparent of fig leaves from that reality.

Between all the crises threatening civilization, I’d say the only problem is if the wine runs out.

SORRY PETS ONLY

That doesn’t necessarily exclude people…

I’d avoid us too.