Divergence

In the anonymous-questions box today, I received an inquiry into what the point of divergence, as it were, was that led to the eldrae Spaceflight Initiative developing with vigor into exactly the kind of space program we didn’t get?

Well, I’ve touched on a little bit of this before. Some of it originates in more-or-less innate cultural differences playing out, and some of it has to do with the different economic and planning time horizons of a long-lived species. I could talk about greater tendencies towards curiosity and neophilia and not having an untimely crisis of cultural self-confidence.

But if I had to reduce it to one thing, it’d be the way that all those folks who prefer to smugly pontificate about why things can’t be done – be it technical limitations or economic ones – or shouldn’t be done, or aren’t worth doing, etc., rather than getting down to the hard work of figuring out how it can be done, tend to find themselves being marched out of the Senate, or wherever, by their peers, and then duly mocked, denounced, and belittled to the plaudits of the crowd and the amusement of the children.

Imperial culture is really hard on those it perceives as Obstructive Naysayers. It certainly doesn’t go around listening to them.