seven-year-old me is screaming and covering her ears

[brin_bellway]

[fairly strong cw: death]


oh my *god*, you are going to fucking *traumatise* some poor kid by giving them "Somebody Will", what the fuck is *wrong* with you

(A few years back I came so close to actually listening to "Somebody Will", but fortunately I happened to see the lyrics first, at which point I realised what an *incredibly fucking depressing* song it is and noped out of there.)

---

Also, while I love "I.S.S. (Is Somebody Singing)", a large part of what makes it good is *the circumstances under which it was recorded*. You cannot make an earthbound cover: to be done right it *has* to be sung, absolute minimum, by someone who *has been* in space, and if at all possible by someone who *is currently* in space.

(otherwise it's just more fucking ~aspirational~ shit same as "Somebody Will": your life and everything in it contains nothing of terminal value, you're just an instrumental good, even the *foundations* of what is Right will swallow you up with barely a trace

No. I build *loads* of foundations, but I do it for *myself*. *Future generations* are an instrumental good, and to the extent that they do not make a good instrument--the extent to which even a vast and thriving near-future society will not figure out how to keep me alive, the chance that even a vast and thriving far-future society will never figure out how to revive me--they are a tiebreaker, something you might as well want all else equal because it is ever-so-abstractly better than nothing.

(In practice, other people--those who currently exist and those who do not yet--are so instrumentally valuable that barring weird edge cases one never really needs to *decide* whether or not one terminally values them, so it is very hard to be *sure* that the above paragraph captures my full feelings on the matter. But when I query my justifications, that's what I get.))

Comments

[contrarianarchon]

I'll admit I find cover band inherently suspicious so I'm never going to like this precise circumstance. (esp kinda unmarked cover bands. It's bad. I spend enough time angsting about the moral status of my music choices for this)

Somebody Will (This is the Ada Palmer one, right?) was written to counteract a very specific kind of despair in a very specific kind of nerd for whom cool space travel *is* a terminal value. It does a so-so job of this even in the ideal case, but it isn't lying to you, at least.

(And yeah, there's a very fundamental level on which the world is so large that any kind of fundamental good which isn't centered on you and yours will swallow you alive. That's just what living in a world with so much in it means)