Space Travel vs. Genetic Engineering

 I was thinking about genetic engineering. I realized you have to be way smarter than us to do any good genetic engineering. No amount of incremental improvement is enough. You can't do the computer thing where you hack together black boxes in an abstraction stack. If you want to edit a natural genome, you have to understand not only what it's doing, but why it's doing it that way. What mortal scientists can manage doesn't even count as finger painting. It's not even banging rocks together. It's a monkey smearing their shit on the wall, spreading the stench and waste-borne disease.

 Scifi often portrays space travel as about as hard as genetic engineering. And that's true, now isn't it? I can't prove it, but I don't think I need to.
 Humans can't go to space without getting dramatically smarter. Probably 600 IQ at least - and that's assuming significant nonlinear growth in epistemic competence with IQ. Seriously superhuman intelligence. Smart enough to deliberately engineer for IQ, making the subspecies even smarter.

 If aliens visited us here on Eden, we wouldn't even look like children to them. We wouldn't look like monkeys. They wouldn't be able to even see we're conscious without advanced instrumentation or special epistemic techniques. They wouldn't try to go to war with us, any more than we tried to go to war with the dodo or passenger pigeon, as per Jared Diamond. Reflect on thy hubris, or more accurately, the hubris of Hollywood and its sponsors. (Narcissistic demand for hubris.)

 Heed: a metal species wouldn't work. Wet carbon nanoengineering is clearly better. A metal organism can't automatically self-repair, as just one example. Not to mention the brain runs on 20 watts. Uses rare parts, sure, but even so. Figuring out carbohydrate engineering is non-optional, and nobody but me has even conceived of attempting it.

 Evolution is conflict; know thy enemy (environment) know thyself. Mortals have indeed seized control of the environment. Other species are not peers, but fluffly flavour details. To be or not to be, it doesn't matter. If it's important they will be domesticated, becoming little more than an extension of their farmers. However, without control of the self, control of its own genome, mortal species remain a natural species. They control their environment, but without self-control, who really is in control of the environment? 

 Lo, it is so. All is indeed one. The self is part of the environment. The genome is part of the environment. These parts of the environment remain wholly beyond plans and artifice. What runs down the middle of the soul isn't the line between good and evil, but the final frontier. The last wilderness to be tamed lies in the heart. (And everywhere else DNA is found.)
 Mortals are too dumb to even notice this constitutes an unexplored frontier, never mind conquering this virgin land.

 If Musk wants a Mars colony, studying rockets is the wrong approach. He needs to study rocket engineers, and more importantly habitat engineers. Where is his test colony site? Where is the trial Antarctic city? Where is the prototype underwater city?
 You uh having fun playing in your box, there, Musk? Got enough sand to be getting along with? Mind the walls...wouldn't want to upset the caretakers...
 More importantly, he needs to rehabilitate eugenics. Without an IQ breeding program, he will find that the reason there is no underwater city is that the habitat engineers aren't smart enough to make it profitable. They can't work out how to make it self-sustaining. 

 Revenge is Sour, in this case, due to lack of self-control. If space were a viable environment, mortals would have already been controlled into it. It would have just happened. 

 But wait, there's more. A big reason there's no eugenics breeding program is that stockholders have a 3-month time horizon. It's not even long enough to gestate a fetus, let alone go through multiple generations. Musk needs to study not habitat engineers, but securities law engineers. He needs to study law engineer engineers, to figure out why security law personnel lead to this securities policy, so he can reintroduce long-term thinking. In other words, he needs to study the Lords of America.
 He needs to be the kind of person who isn't remotely surprised by the advent of [Woke]. We should be skeptical when Plato says the unexamined life is not worth living, but it seems, in the end, he was correct. With perhaps some caveats, but certainly this applies to someone like Elon Musk. He needs to have the kind of education that I developed, or his project is flagrantly hopeless, with the one base exception of efficiently sucking blood from the society.
 God's sense of humour: Musk has his bureaucrat whispering. The prank is that he refuses to use it for what he needs. The heavens are incomprehensibly generous. There is no conceivable reason for them to shower us in gifts like this, but they have done it anyway. Musk has the necessary skills; he can't blame anyone but himself.