[ExI] Spaceflight: The only valid case for waiting

[Dan TheBookMan]

On Mon, Sep 28, 2020 at 5:16 PM Mike Dougherty via extropy-chat
<extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote:
> On Mon, Sep 28, 2020, 4:48 AM Giulio Prisco via extropy-chat <extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote:
>> I have been an internet evangelist since the very very beginning, but
>> I never considered the internet as a replacement for the real world. A
>> very useful complement yes, but a replacement no. Not the same thing.
>> I see going back to the Moon as going back to the real world. Reality,
>> not videogames.
>
> I get your point, but you are dismissing a large chunk of humanity as "video games"
>
> Instead of VR, let's consider TV.  It's mostly just staring blankly for hours on end,  but we've
> spent megabucks (mega megabucks) and millenia of person-hours on this huge waste of
> attention. We can't honestly examine who/what/how we are without acknowledging that
> this technology is both shaped by us and also shapes us.

TV is only waste from a certain point of view. In the 19th century,
reading was considered a waste by many, especially folks reading
novels. There's a built-in suspicion of new stuff and also a built-in
suspicion of leisure that combined against novels (which in the 19th
century were the new thing in terms of have a mass readership due to
lowering cost of printing and also publishing them as serials in
newspapers) and later against TV (and comics and music recordings and
video games and social media and now smartphones). This isn't to say
it's all good, but I think one should avoid the default position that
it must be bad because it's new and because it's taking people away
from other things. (During the rise of novel, the other things were
stuff like work, prayer, and more work.:)

> I expect VR will be a logical extension of what TV has been for 50+ years, and
> perhaps what technology of "books" have been since the printing press made
> them available to the masses.

I keep waiting for VR to take off. AR has to some extent, but not
enough given the promise. I thought by now we'd all be wearing
something like Google Glass and spending most of our day in VR.

Regards,

Dan
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http://author.to/DanUst