It’s not about panic or even profit; it’s about proliferation. The power to travel from one star to another or between dimensions is the power to destroy worlds. If everyone on earth had a starship tomorrow, we’d be extinct by lunch. It’d be worse than universal nuclear proliferation.
Even a limited rollout of such technology would be fraught with existential challenges. People like you and me cause enough trouble with small arms and automobiles and often can’t be trusted with much more. Some of our institutions can do better but even the best are fallible and fragile. There’s a strong argument that we’re not good enough for own technology, much less the comparably “unlimited power” we’re talking about.
So do you see how the people running these programs sleep at night? – and the operators they send on deadly missions to suppress the truth? See why they are so committed to secrecy? They think they’re friends of humanity and patriots who’ve chosen the best of bad alternatives. To use a close metaphor, they see themselves as fighting to prevent al Qaeda getting nukes, the Soviets and Saddam and North Korea getting nukes. In their eyes, their work is a crucial safeguard of our security… from ourselves.
Now it should also be clear why a man like Jimmy Carter would have cried when he learned the truth, then never spoken about it again. It’s not because religions are a (horribly failed) alien program of social control. There’s really a lot to cry about in all this. For one thing, the horrible shame in the fact – on this view – that we cannot be trusted with technologies that would solve most our problems because we’d use them savagely to destroy one another. Another is the putative fact that the norms at the core of our nation must be transgressed as the only means to prevent that outcome – that democracy cannot be more than a decorative feature of a façade, one that conceals the most incredible truths of science and our place in the universe.
Imo it’s a fantasy to see suppression of the truth and enforced monopoly as anything but a temporary and extremely dangerous solution to this quandary. The status quo is as unstable as it is wrong and will only last so long. I take it from some of Grusch’s remarks that this is his view as well. The technology is here now, however much we may like to pretend otherwise. We will have to progress from crazed hostility and superstition towards its proper management in a very short period of time, starting about now.
As we set off down this road, the easing of some resource scarcity by means of the same technology will probably help improve our condition, but still this is a challenge like none we’ve ever faced. On top of that, it has us on a limb. Either we meet it or we destroy ourselves, eg by events similar to global nuclear war or perhaps even more pathetically – Germanwings Flight 9525 in a starship could be the end of life on earth.
All that’s just the half of it – of the moment we’re in, in my analysis. It’s harrowing. Please understand what’s at stake.
submitted by /u/bonelessfolder
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