Right now we are seeing a mini-resurgence of the hope of technological progress, notably through the Artemis II space mission, a successful trip back to the orbit of the moon (so not even landing on it) and back to Earth, and through various advancements in technology, such as the spread of self-driving cars, and the developments in LLMs and Generative AI.
No one seems to really care about the fact that none of those advancements do anything for the fundamental problems of civilization, the main one being: how do we meet the exponentially rising demand of energy on a finite planet? A secondary problem, though of primary importance if you care about your own experience, is how to make sure that society is aligned with human needs, rather than needing to coerce large amounts of the population to do things they find alienating? 1
All of the "progress" in technology serves to only increase our demand on energy. Even when we make this or that part of the system more efficient, this only serves to further increase the demand, an observation known as the Jevons paradox. This is because there is no end to how far technology can progress. The vision that most techno-optimists have is a combination of (interstellar) space travel, and fully automating everything that human beings have to do. Assuming that the latter is even possible, the former doesn't even have any real limits, as the vast distances and harsh conditions of outer space will always present more and more challenges.
But this is thinking too optimistically already. We do not have access to the abundant forms of energy that techno-optimists believe we do. Even now we are seeing the cracks in that optimistic vision, through the cascade of disruptions to the global supply chains caused by the single geopolitical conflict involving the US and Iran (and the rest of the world in proxy, of course). As it turns out, oil and its derivatives are utterly essential to our industrial world, which is why the believers in Peak Oil were fundamentally right, even if many specific predictions were wrong, and even if their alarmist tendencies tend to be questionable.
All of this is especially egregious when it comes to space missions. At least so-called 'AI' can still do fairly useful things, even if it comes at the cost of an astouding amount of energy. LLMs for instance are good at summarizing a lot of generic information to provide decent answers. It's questionable whether they will ever be great at any cognitively challenging task, especially in the realm of creation, but at the very least they are useful for generic tasks and generic questions.
Space missions on the other hand are completely useless. People already went to the moon in 1969 and nothing useful came out of it. The only justification is that it allows us to prepare ourselves for more ambitious space missions. But the problem remains: interplanetary space travel is also useless. We have sent rovers on Mars, and some orbitary probes around Venus and other planets, so we roughly know what to expect there. It takes around 7 to 10 months for a Mars lander to arrive at destination, and this is not taking into account the unforeseen problems that come from having a full-on spaceship with live human beings in it, who on top of that will have to deal with the atrophy of their body, and the radiations of outer space (because the magnetic field on Earth protects us, but isn't available outside of it obviously).
Going to Mars might be possible if humanity decided, for one reason or another, to throw most of its resources in that project, but what would come out of it? It is much harder to live on Mars than anywhere on Earth, and the early colonizers would have to bootstrap themselves with as little as we can carry on a spaceship going for a 7 to 10 months trip, which is not much to say the least. The other planets are not much better to live on, which is why interplanetary travel by itself is useless.
But what about interstellar space travel, going on another solar system? The obvious problem is that the gap between interplanetary and interstellar is ridiculous, though techno-optimists hardly mention that gap. Even the closest star to Earth which is not the Sun, Proxima Centauri, is at 4.2 light-years away from us. In contrast, Mars sits between 182 light-seconds and 1342 light-seconds away from us, (because Mars moves relatively to us, so the distance is not constant) while the Sun is at 500 light-seconds away from us. The factor between 500 light-seconds and 4.2 light-years clocks at a ridiculous figure of 265,000! This means if it takes us 6 months to go to Mars, it would take us 132,500 years to go to Proxima Centauri!
And this is not even taking into account the fact that longer space travels are not just quantitatively harder, as in they require more energy and time, but they also present us with entirely new problems, in this case having to sustain a human civilization and the necessary technology for this amount of time, since the time of the trip outlasts any human lifespan.
This also doesn't take into account the fact that there might not be anything interesting in the solar system of Proxima Centauri to begin with. We might have to travel far, very very far away to encounter a planet with similar living conditions to our own planet. And then to do what? Perpetuate the same dysfunctions we have on Earth, mining most of the resources and destroying the biosphere, to the point that we will have to travel to another planet?
The counter to all of that, except the last point about the nihilism of space colonization because techno-optimists can never answer the question of meaning through their disenchanted materialist-scientific frames, is that we will progress to such an extent that we will exponentially rise in power, such that the gap between interplanetary and interstellar travel will not be a big deal. For instance, we will develop technologies that allow us to teleport through space, instead of traveling from point A to point B.
This is obviously wishful thinking. Technology is not magically exponential for two main reasons: firstly, the resources on our planet are finite. Things that appear exponential are often the first part of a sigmoid curve, the second part appearing as the inevitable diminishing returns when you run into the boundaries of your environment.
Secondly, it becomes harder and harder to come up with new technology. Science itself runs into diminishing returns, because the ideas we have tend to follow the path of least resistance: we work on the lowest hanging fruits first, because they provide us with social benefits, and because we often need a scaffolding of ideas to work on the harder ones.
Much of our technology comes from the past century, such as batteries, nuclear reactors (even many attempts at fusion were done in the 20th century), computers, and of course the elephant in the room, the combustion engines which appeared all the way back to the 19th century, and which still power much of the modern world to this day.
Thus the idea that we can magically innovate on all of those to produce outsized returns is very naive. 2 The way I see it, the successes of the modern world come from the abundant supply of energy provided by fossil fuels, on top of which human ingenuity is applied. The human mind can figure many astounding things, but by itself, it isn't worth much.
Fossil fuels are so powerful because they are result of dozens, if not hundreds of millions of year of geological processes, that concentrate solar energy through heat and pressure, into the energy dense resources that we know of today. Replacing those is not an easy task, and in fact, I predict that civilization is going to collapse before we ever figure out something better, probably because there is no such replacement. 3
Thus we encounter one of the deep ironies of the modern world. We are told to "look at the figures", look at the Science and use our own critical thinking to make sense of the world. And yet as soon as the figures and our thinking are used to go against the religion of progress, we are told that we are stupid. Not just in terms of space travel, which as I have outlined is a complete waste of resources and time, but also in terms of our fundamental dependence on fossil fuels to maintain our industrial world.
Funnily enough, people hardly think in terms of numbers even though we present ourselves as a "scientific" species. They look at nuclear and fossil fuels as being essentially the same in terms of energy sources, even though there are many industrial processes which are utterly dependent on the high temperatures which can only be realistically achieved by fossil fuels. Or they don't take into account our dependence on industrial nations to provide the goods that we import in the West. Or they think that interplanetary and interstellar travel are essentially the same, when the gap between the two is ridiculous.
The only numbers that people look at are the numbers that align with the narrative of progress. Hence, people look at GDP or the price of diesel, but not the figures that describe the declining energy return on energy investment of our civilization, or the availability of (cheap) ores and rare metals. They look at finance instead of energy and resources, because the former is an abstraction that we can control, whereas the latter shows us the cold truth of Reality and limitations.
The narratives that win in the short term are the ones that deny the existence of limitations as much as possible. Thus we get the denial of death, or in this case the denial of the limits to technological progress, because the self-informed self doesn't dare to even imagine a world where it cannot keep perpetuating itself.
The delusion of technological progress is downstream of the fundamental delusion of that alienated self, which is the belief that it can control Reality and obtain everything it needs, for as little as possible. This has been possible through the energy subsidy of cheap fossil fuels, but alas, this is coming to an end, and we will have to be confronted with limits once again. Hence, the Age of Aquarius as I have called it.
1 Because even if you solve the energy problem, you might run into a population which is not just unmotivated to work for the system, but even prefers to sabotage it, because they see their own life being made worse by its growth.
2 I also think this will affect the coming years in the 'AI' industry, but who knows. Software is not affected by physical constraints, so the progress can be significantly quicker and over a longer period of time, but on the other hand, the principle by which people go for the lowest hanging fruits, particularly those that create good marketing, remains true, which throws a wrench in this idea of "exponential" technology.
3 See also this series by Nate Hagens of fairly short videos about the main things you need to know about Oil. Key figure from the first video: a single barrel of oil is worth around 5 years of human labor. And the world uses 100 billion barrels of oil per year! We have access to "energy slaves", but those are a lot less efficient than us, which is why spikes in energy prices are so disruptive, and also, they won't be there forever. Even our food production runs into an energy deficit, because of the amount of fossil fuel fertilizer and transportation required to bring the food to our plates.
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Distraction Copehope Collapse Spacetravel Peakoil
2026-04-13