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MaxChaplin t1_j6ng64w wrote

Reply to comment by doodcool612 in Happiness is an essentially nihilistic ideal — it is the best goal to follow when there is nothing else on the table. A meaningful life on the other hand can embrace more of life including struggles and suffering because it is oriented towards a higher ideal by thelivingphilosophy

Musk is a dumpster fire, but I can sympathize with this bit of poetic waxing (relevant XKCD). Trying to fix the world in the conventional way is a monstrously difficult, counterintuitive, dirty and depressing task. Trying to do this without having half of humanity hating your guts is downright impossible. Meanwhile, making space travel more accessible is a low-hanging fruit, fun and relatively uncontroversial (other than the argument from the aforementioned XKCD).

The "we" here refers to humanity in general. Not that every human will get the opportunity to go to other planets, but that some will. I don't know what goes own in Musk's head, but I think that most of his fans accept that they will not go to Mars, and are simply glad that some humans will eventually do. It takes a certain kind of egolessness to look at these promises and not ask "but what about my share?"

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doodcool612 t1_j6ngv4p wrote

I’m not asking “What about my share?” so much as “Is this actually a good future for humanity?”

No, the answer is so obviously no. This is the society we get when we let great-men tech-fetishist hypercapitalists define our future.

You wanna get to space? Me too. But what will space be when we get there? A “progress” that treats exploitation as the cost of doing business may get us to space… but it brings the dystopia with us.

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