Some cultures are better than others. Quoting from Hogg’s Cannibalism and Human Sacrifice, a missionary’s 1844 report from Fiji:
The cruel deed was then perpetrated. The men doomed to death were made to dig a hole in the earth for the purpose of making a native oven, and were then required to cut firewood to roast their own bodies. They were then directed to go and wash, and afterwards to make a cup of a banana-leaf. This, from opening a vein in each man, was soon filled with blood. This blood was then drunk, in the presence of the sufferers, by the Kamba people.
Seru, the Bau chief, then had their arms and legs cut off, cooked and eaten, some of the flesh being presented to them. He then ordered a fish-hook to be put into their tongues, which were then drawn out as far as possible before being cut off. These were roasted and eaten, to the taunts of "We are eating your tongues! As life in the victims was still not extinct, an incision was made in the side of each man, and his bowels taken out. This soon terminated their sufferings in this world.
From Rev. John Watsford in 1846, also in Fiji (Ibid):
The Somosomo people were fed with human flesh during their stay at Bau, they being on a visit at the time. Some of the chiefs of other tribes, when bringing their food, carried a cooked human being on one shoulder and a pig on the other; but they always preferred the 'long pig', as they call a man, when baked. One woman who had been clubbed was left upon the beach in front of our house at Vewa. The poor creature's head was smashed to pieces and the body quite naked. Whether it was done by the heathen to insult us, or not, we do not know…
…At Bau, the people preserve human flesh and chew it as some chew tobacco. They carry it about with them, and use it in the same way as tobacco. I heard of an instance of cruelty the other day that surpasses everything I have before heard of the kind. A canoe was wrecked near Natawar, and many of the occupants succeeded in swimming to shore. They were taken by the Natawar people and ovens were at once prepared in which to roast them. The poor wretches were bound ready for the ovens and their enemies were waiting anxiously to devour them. They did not club them, lest any of their blood should be lost. Some, however, could not wait until the ovens were sufficiently heated, but pulled the ears off the wretched creatures and ate them raw.
When the ovens were ready, they cut their victims up very carefully, placing dishes under every part to catch the blood. If a drop fell, they licked it up off the ground with the greatest greediness. While the poor wretches were being cut in pieces, they pleaded hard for life; but all was of no avail: all were devoured.
What happened when a cannibal culture encountered a superior one? From A. I. Hopkins (Ibid):
It is noticeable how people who have never been cannibals despise the horrible thing; and how quickly it disappears when a cannibal tribe comes into contact with a wider world than that merely of their own bush villages. Directly daylight falls on the habit, it withers away. This is remarkable when we remember the sanctity of it in primitive man's eyes. The cannibal is not necessarily a hopelessly degraded brute, but a man who has not yet lived out of the dark obscurity of bush tribalism, and so has blindly followed a practice deep-rooted in the sacrificial ideas common to man the world over from his earliest days.
Which dark obscurities are we living in at present? Alexey Zhilyaev recounted his experience from the front lines in Ukraine:
A guy, 18 years old, signed a contract instead of a fixed-term service. 20 minutes at the front, an FPV (First-Person View – small commercial drones. – SR) flew at him with a TNT block – that’s it. Those immediately turn to dust. It’s the same at our “zero”. The soldiers from the second battalion arrived, the drone tore off a guy’s leg in a dugout at the old “zero”. We run up, provide assistance. It’s clear that they’re still flying. They covered him with a second stretcher and jumped into another dugout saying “we want to live too”. There really are a lot of drones.
In the current converging monoculture, other sentient (probably conscious) animals suffer in numbers beyond reckoning. Bird flu is in the news, and the favorite method factory farms use to cull their flocks by the hundreds of millions is “ventilation shutdown”, in other words turning off the AC:
The hens took more than 91 minutes to die from ventilation shutdown alone, 54 minutes to die from VSD with supplemental heat, and 11.5 minutes to die from VSD with carbon dioxide, according to a 2017 final report based on the research that was submitted to the U.S. Poultry and Egg Association. According to a separate study published the following year by some of the same researchers, time to death is significantly longer for hens in a large, multilevel cage setting, which more closely resembles factory farm conditions than individual cages: 3.75 hours for VSD alone, 2 hours for VSD plus heat, and 1.5 hours for VSD plus carbon dioxide.
In other cases, “foam depopulation” is used instead:
It’s easy to imagine a culture that doesn’t accept these things, but difficult to create one, or to shift the current culture far enough soon enough in that direction. New cultures emerge slowly, probably more so now that everyone is connected with everyone via device. Spengler thought there were only eight with a capital “C” since the Babylonians. Is it even possible for a new Culture to bud off at this point, or are we stuck with vibe shifts? Of course, individuals have tried relentlessly to create “something different” like Seasteading or Rajneeshpuram or recently Próspera and “network states”. These work great for a few months until they receive a modicum of attention and the government–who does in fact control the land or sea these people set up shop on–steps in and smothers everything. Rinse and repeat.
There’s a nagging question about Mars that’s more important than smug stupid quibbles about how to deal with perchlorates. Mainly, what is it for? What are people going to do there? The best answers Elon has come up with are “a backup plan for Earth”, and “make art all day”. It’s not surprising Mars is expected to be a colossal money pit, with no goods or services coming back the other way. So what’s the value in it?
The real value of Mars is the potential to create a new Culture there. Specifically, a better one than the present-day monoculture; our civilization at The End of History. The land on Mars is the only reasonably habitable territory in the solar system not claimed by a terrestrial nation-state. Everyone who sets up a Starlink terminal has agreed to this in the Terms of Service:
GOVERNING LAW.
For Services provided to, on, or in orbit around the planet Earth or the Moon, this Agreement and any disputes between us arising out of or related to this Agreement, including disputes regarding arbitrability (“Disputes”) will be governed by and construed in accordance with the laws of the State of Texas in the United States. For Services provided on Mars, or in transit to Mars via Starship or other spacecraft, the parties recognize Mars as a free planet and that no Earth-based government has authority or sovereignty over Martian activities. Accordingly, Disputes will be settled through self-governing principles, established in good faith, at the time of Martian settlement.
This anticipates the future state of affairs quite well: the Moon will always be in the grasp of Earth’s governments, no matter what the Outer Space Treaty says about appropriating territory. But Mars is different.
In Iain Banks’s novels, the Culture is “the evolutionary winner of the contest between all cultures, the ultimate basin of attraction”. An evolutionary winner on galactic scales implies a vast marketplace of ideas and practices and values seeded across many worlds, rather than the accidental culture converged on by a single one. This explains the value of Mars: it’s the opportunity for the beginning of a great cultural divergence to explore the fitness landscape, before collapsing back down on a global minimum. If successful, what comes back from Mars to Earth is a blueprint for better ways to live and govern. A lower rung in the basin of attraction. Now repeat this along an expanding front out to every corner of the galaxy, and we have the makings of a proper stage to play out our lives.