Post #2388491

There's a special kind of nerd that I call Puzzle Demons. They have big brains and they get satisfaction from solving puzzles without thinking about them. It doesn't matter what the puzzle is so long as it's a challenge to solve. They'll look back on their work with satisfaction because they solved the puzzle, regardless of what that work is. Puzzle Demons in the 1940s built V-2 rockets. We gave them space travel and the puzzle became making the rocket leave the atmosphere instead of hitting cities. That space travel made helpful consumer technologies to survive in extreme environments, things that were otherwise too expensive for commercial R&D. Then we killed NASA in the 1980s. The Puzzle Demons had no socially positive puzzle. They built the tech industry instead. I dated a Puzzle Demon whose fun little puzzle to solve every day was designing the UI for smart locks that go on the bunkers of the wealthy. She was thrilled to make locking herself out of the bunker more user-friendly. There are Puzzle Demons at the social media websites whose entire job is making them more addictive for children. Puzzle Demons gave us crypto, guided missiles, murder robots, AI slop, and corporate efficiency consulting. We need space exploration to pacify the Puzzle Demons. Without it, the population is still encouraged to go into STEM but most of the STEM jobs are profoundly evil. You stick them in a NASA office and they're just building useful things. Otherwise the prestige jobs are with defense contractors, tech companies, and multinationals.