Space Colonization And The Myth Of Separateness: Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix

I’m old enough to remember people defending the incarceration of Nelson Mandela with “He’s a criminal, he cheated on his wife, people died because of him!” Now they smear Assange but history will vindicate his defenders. The only question is how long, and will it kill him first?

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I only see random douchebags with hardly any followers smearing Assange online now. It used to be highly influential pundits doing it. Virtually everyone knows his case is bullshit at this point, even if they don’t have the balls to admit it.

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Did you hear about the billionaire-engineered virtual reality universe where consumers plug into another world that’s like a cutesy fantasy version of real life? They’re calling it “the mainstream news”.

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The year is 2031. The sky is red and we all live in cubicles but we don’t notice because our Meta goggles only show us happy Pokemon trying to sell us digital accessories. We’re at war with China but the news is only reporting on the controversy over whether Peppa Pig is a SWERF.

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Covid vaccine mandates will radicalize workers more than today’s western left ever could.

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If you speak out against “anti-vaxxers” more than you do against western imperialism then just put on a pussyhat and add a blue wave emoji next to your name on Twitter, because you’re a worthless shitlib now.

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The overall behavior of the United States government has changed a tiny fraction of a single percentage point since Trump left office.

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If you’d seen a video clip of me calmly watching a child drown in a swimming pool and doing nothing to help, would it ever occur to you that I should be in charge of the world? That’s how weird it is that we let billionaires who could end world hunger at any time shape society.

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All of the problems that proponents of space colonization claim it will solve can be far more realistically addressed by sociopolitical changes and technological innovations geared toward protecting and preserving life here on Earth. The only reason anyone takes it as a given that humanity needs to become independent from Earth’s ecosystem to survive is because they assume the destructiveness inherent in capitalism are an inescapable constant. And there is literally zero reason to believe it’s even possible.

The only reason anyone even believes it’s possible to colonize space is because cognitive and perceptual biases cause us to assume that the human organism is separate from its ecosystem. It is not. The biosphere is one inseparably unified happening of which humans are part.

We developed these biases of perception out of evolutionary necessity; our recently-evolved prefrontal cortices gave us unprecedented capacity for abstract thought, but it couldn’t help us advance our survival unless we thought of ourselves as separate from sabre-toothed cats etc. In reality the biosphere isn’t made up of separate “things” any more than a tornado or hurricane is. An organism is just a process, a happening, that is in nonstop interplay with the rest of the ecosystem on every level due to its need to eat, breathe, drink etc.

We’re interconnected with this planet in so very, very many ways, many of which we probably don’t even know about since we’ve never actually tried to live independently from it. Our brief visits to space have been nothing more than glorified scuba excursions that were 100 percent dependent on supplies and support coming directly from Earth.

But because we’re conditioned to think in terms of a separation that doesn’t actually exist in real life, we think we’re these separate things that could just ship off into the stars. Really it’s like thinking you can snip a swirling eddy out of the river it appears in.

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