How disappointing: Trek star's space travel unease

I guess I shouldn't be at all surprised, given the socialist utopian ethos of the TV series for which he is best known.

As I get older my unease at the time and the money that has to be spent on projects putting human beings back to the moon, and on to another planet, is so enormous," he said.

"And it would take up so many resources, which I personally feel should be directed at our own planet."

One of the more amusing and apt comments I read on this pointed out that he as an "entertainer" has no qualms about -- indeed, he encourages -- the several hundred billion dollars spent each year by an industry dedicated to the production of escapist fantasy. And at that, Hollywood's success/failure track record is far, far worse than NASA's or the broader space industry. Putting aside the "explorations of the human condition" and "cathartic expressions of feeling" and whatever self-serving emotion-based fluffy-cheese psychobabble "serious artists of the craft" like Stewart meringue their profession in, really, when it comes down to it, only the tiniest sliver of a fraction of a percent of what they produce ultimately adds value to human civilization.

If you want an example of a true waste of money, time, and resources, try renting Insurrection.

In film, as in any medium, most art is vacuous, exploitative, unedifying, talentless, forgettable garbage produced by self-important people who think they are more significant than they are and that their opinions mean more than they do simply because they self-identify as "artist", all the while looking down on their patrons (voluntary ones and involuntary alike) with contempt for being such easily deceivable "marks" for so unquestioningly eating up the fraud they serve. This contempt frequently morphs into a general misanthropy, which regards humanity in general as something irremediably flawed and unworthy, an attitude which in turn permeates the bilge that they pump out and foist on the paying public.

And people like this have the nerve to claim that space exploration is a waste of money, and preach that manned exploration and settlement is morally wrong. You don't like humans going into space and settling other worlds? Fine -- don't go...we'll get along just fine without you. You don't like your tax dollars being wasted on manned space exploration? Fine -- I don't like my tax dollars wasted subsidizing "art" and "culture" and "criticism" and "studies" and "thought" and "cinema" and all that other nonsense which appeals to a vanishingly small number of pretentious aficionados while intentionally offending or just being utterly useless to the rest of us...I'll be happy to give up my favored federal line item when you give up yours.

"Interviewed by the World Update programme, he added: "Humankind has just not simply become sufficiently evolved to now leave this planet, take itself out to space and began establishing more of us out there."

I would like to see us get this place right first before we have the arrogance to put significantly flawed civilisations out on to other planets - even though they may be utterly uninhabited."

I'm especially disappointed in Stewart for spewing the standard utopian bromide that always comes up with respect to space exploration and settlement. I would have expected someone involved with science fiction for so many years to have tired of this bit of undigested received wisdom -- apparently not.

It's funny how no one seems to mandate such perfection in other endeavors on which taxpayer money is spent. Sure, one hears opinions that money spent on one thing (e.g.: defense procurement) would be better spent on another (e.g.: subsidies for organic bulgur farms), but only with space does one so predictably and frequently encounter the requirement that ALL social ills, economic shortcomings, medical maladies, personal maladjustments, and trivial victimologies must be addressed before any money can be spent. I'm sure no one would have suggested that the world must be perfect before the City of New York or American Airlines subsidized Stewart's recent role in the broadway revival of Harold Pinter's "The Caretaker".

The obvious flaw in such an argument (or its best feature, if you're the one making it) is that the perfection used as a standard here is impossible. To overcome the usually-cited social, economic, and other problems would require either orders of magnitude more money than is available -- let alone what could be applied by diverting what pittance the government spends on space each year -- or a complete overhaul of human nature to remove the innate flaws, behaviors, tendencies, instincts, or whatever it may be at their root.

Another only slightly less transparent flaw/feature is that no matter how many of the typically-cited problems an all-out spare-no-expense global effort might succeed in resolving, the people making the argument today would be undeterred from finding other victims who need saving or problems that need fixing before we can even think about going into space.

A lot of people fell for that argument during Apollo (or else consoled themselves with the thought that the 'burning of the ships' was a sacrifice for some nebulous but surely noble "greater good"), but as others have noted in great detail, the money saved was a drop in the ocean of cash poured into nearly forty years of failed solutions to the very problems still cited as higher priorities today. Hopefully the argument has come to seem as threadbare and silly to everyone else as it has to space advocates...or at least moreso than it has, apparently, to Mr. Stewart.

Posted by T.L. James on February 5, 2004 07:35 PM