Dreamers of a Better Future, Unite!
March 13 2008 / by GuestBlogger / In association with Future Blogger.net
Category: Space Year: General Rating: 16 Hot
By Athena Andreadis
This piece was originally posted here on the blog Starship Reckless.
Views of space travel have grown increasingly pessimistic in the
last decade. This is not surprising: SETI still has
received no unambiguous requests for more Chuck Berry from its
listening posts, NASA is busy
re-inventing flywheels and citizens even of first-world countries
feel beleaguered in a world that seems increasingly hostile to any
but the extraordinarily privileged. Always a weathervane of the
present, speculative fiction has been gazing more and more inwardly
– either to a hazy gold-tinted past (fantasy, both literally and
metaphorically) or to a smoggy rust-colored earthbound future
(cyberpunk). 
The philosophically inclined are slightly more optimistic. Transhumanists, the new utopians, extol the pleasures of a future when our bodies, particularly our brains/minds, will be optimized (or at least not mind that they’re not optimized) by a combination of bioengineering, neurocognitive manipulation, nanotech and AI. Most transhumanists, especially those with a socially progressive agenda, are as decisively earthbound as cyberpunk authors. They consider space exploration a misguided waste of resources, a potentially dangerous distraction from here-and-now problems – ecological collapse, inequality and poverty, incurable diseases among which transhumanists routinely count aging, not to mention variants of gray goo.
And yet, despite the uncoolness of space exploration, despite NASA’s disastrous holding pattern, there are those of us who still stubbornly dream of going to the stars.
(cont.)
