21–30 of 221 posts
- less reliance on gasoline / fossil fuels for energy
- waking up from wishful thinking about China / Russia
- we invented brand new medical tech to handle Covid, which maybe could open all kinds of fronts in fighting other diseases
Earlier quoted context omitted.
So your answer to “what makes you optimistic about the future?” is the apocalypse? Reminds me of pets by porno for pyros
It's just an apocalypse -- or probably many small ones -- for one species. The other millions go on to some degree, I hope! I don't think humans deserve some special place in evolution that make us more important than all the other life and life-like beings out there. But yeah, I don't think there's any saving our species anymore, I just hope enough of us perish soon so other beings can have a shot. Maybe we can go t…
> Tell me what a man finds sexually attractive and I will tell you his entire philosophy on life
Daily flights from earth to nearby planets. 99 percent of all diseases cured (other than hourly Covid variants). Universal Income for nearly all. Limitless energy.
We've just had a stark lesson on how important the price of energy is to our economy. In the future, the opposite is going to happen. The price of solar power has been dropping about 80% per decade for the last 50 years or so, and it looks like that is going to continue for the rest of this decade at least. It hasn't had a significant impact yet because solar has been more expensive than alternatives, but we've reached the crossing point, and solar power is now cheaper.
Energy is a major direct and indirect input into the price of pretty much everything.
Some people are going to figure out some good ways of turning cheap intermittent power into dollars, and those people are going to make a ton of money, dragging the rest of the economy with it.
(Unless of course that mechanism is completely useless, like crypto).
> Given all the above, what makes you optimistic about the future? Why do you believe that the world of tomorrow will be better than the world of today? What do you look forward to in the world of the future? Many species, and viruses too, have population-level boom-bust cycles. Maybe humans will self-destruct enough to wipe out a fair number of us and our impacts will dwindle for a few millennia. It'd be cool if oth…
- We have the accumulated knowledge of the entire human history at our fingertips and can avoid a large chunk (not all, obviously) of the pitfalls that befell our ancestors. maladies that basic sanitation eradicates, old deadly diseases like leprosy, polio, being eaten by lions, mass starvation ... those are things that are not a Thing in developed countries, and a lot more developing countries than before. The amoun…