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More Everything Forever

nytimes.com

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Re: More Everything Forever

#181

Post by eli_gottlieb »

dmonitor wrote: post #106
alganet wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is known that the specifics of the story were modified. The current text is kind of frozen by its own similarities to itself. The use of extracted quotes is probably a mistake. You have to find the same event in a lot of other books beyond Matthew to be able to find a tiny whiff of historical information, very faint, very difficult to do with translated versions.

Luke 17:20-37 also seems to support the idea that Jesus was trying to tell people the kingdom was spiritual, not physical. The kingdom as a concept wasn't some novel idea, either. Jesus was claiming he was the fulfillment of the messianic prophecy in Judaism. He was reinterpreting the prophecy, though, as a spiritual rather than literal liberation. Tangential, but you can interpret the anti-christ in christian belief…

The "Kingdom of Heaven" was not a contemporary concept in first-century CE Judaism, to my knowledge.

Re: More Everything Forever

#182

Post by janalsncm »

selimthegrim wrote: post #166
janalsncm wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is a much darker tone that I’ve ever thought of that passage in. On a slightly related note, I think a lot of people today don’t realize when Jesus talked about the “Kingdom of Heaven” many of his audience heard that as a real, physical kingdom which would overthrow Rome. I believe Jesus also believed this, which to me is why Jesus’ dying words (“My God, why have you forsaken me?”) is quite literally an admissio…

I’m assuming you read The Passover Plot?

A lot of related books a while ago that I’ve mostly forgotten. I believe it was called “How Jesus Became Christian” which mainly talks about the influence of Paul.

Re: More Everything Forever

#183

Post by marcus_holmes »

ryandrake wrote: post #111
margalabargala wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The goal was "get a few humans on Mars". Not the insane goal of "a million in 20 years". Firstly, there's no reason the trip can't be one-way, or at least, temporarily one-way. Secondly, there's not a huge need to develop a new rocket. We've delivered lots of one-way cargo to Mars using the Atlas V; something like the SLS could deliver much more, plenty for a couple humans to get there and not die. We've already laun…

Consider what it takes just to keep McMurdo Station (staffed by only 200-1000 people) running on Antarctica, and that's on our own planet . I don't know what the cost is, but according to [1] the budget for the US's Antarctic program overall was $356M in 2008. And it depends on reliable logistics to get people and things to and from it. From there, step up to the ISS, which costs about $4B/year to maintain and operat…

Which makes it just a matter of priorities. If the USA spent 10% of its defence budget for a year on it, we'd be done. Would humanity benefit more from a Mars base than it does from 10% of the USA's defence budget? Almost certainly.

Though, to be fair, there are a lot of other things we could spend 10% of the USA defence budget on that would benefit humanity a lot more in the short term.

Re: More Everything Forever

#184

Post by Veelox »

ferguess_k wrote: post #151
ivape wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am sure Marc Andreesen is a very intelligent person but he built and sold a web browser. He isn’t an expert on every tech topic. Same with Peter Thiel and the rest of the PayPal mafia. I would say it's similar to politicians. We won't really have your, I don't know, career Costco Manager in political leadership. We'll get AOC or a Vance (staying bipartisan to make the point, moving off this topic next sentence). Th…

I think the ideal foundation of democracy consists of: 1) All citizens get mandatory high education on Math, Science, Language and Logic (what level is high enough is open to debate. I'd say college level), regardless of career -> This is to make sure they have the basic knowledge to participate in meaningful discussions; 2) All citizens are encouraged, and by law mandated to attend and organize political stuffs -> T…

>mandatory ... college level

I'm curious what your experience is with the world that makes you think every citizen is capable of completing college level classes. People with an IQ of 85 or less are like 15% of population and I think most of them with have a very hard time with high level logic.

Re: More Everything Forever

#185

Post by marcus_holmes »

dmonitor wrote: post #103
margalabargala wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The goal was "get a few humans on Mars". Not the insane goal of "a million in 20 years". Firstly, there's no reason the trip can't be one-way, or at least, temporarily one-way. Secondly, there's not a huge need to develop a new rocket. We've delivered lots of one-way cargo to Mars using the Atlas V; something like the SLS could deliver much more, plenty for a couple humans to get there and not die. We've already laun…

We also haven't specified if we're sending live humans to Mars. Just shuck someone onto the next rover we send over and call it a night. Sending a live human, or group of humans, on a suicide mission in the name of bragging rights as a species would be really bleak. I doubt you'd get much political support for a Mars mission without a return plan, or at least a sustainability plan.

There is the odd school of thought that sending a bunch of tardigrades would be better. They'd have a chance of surviving, and they'd evolve there, and in only a few million years we might have another planet teeming with life. In the (very) long term, a much better use of our resources than trying to colonise Mars ourselves.

Re: More Everything Forever

#186

Post by marcus_holmes »

sudoshred wrote: post #169
dmonitor wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We also haven't specified if we're sending live humans to Mars. Just shuck someone onto the next rover we send over and call it a night. Sending a live human, or group of humans, on a suicide mission in the name of bragging rights as a species would be really bleak. I doubt you'd get much political support for a Mars mission without a return plan, or at least a sustainability plan.

There’s always an element of risk in any endeavor, just because prior space missions (the ones that get recorded and remembered) were successful does not mean that this outcome was certain. There are records of space missions that were known to be unlikely to sustain human life prior to launch.

The same is true of early expeditions around the world. The odds of making it back alive were low, yet plenty of people signed up. We remember the ones who made it and forgot the ones who didn't.

Re: More Everything Forever

#187

Post by hakfoo »

alabastervlog wrote: post #108
feoren wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Colonizing Mars is such a dumb idea. A back-of-the-napkin calculation puts humanity's total military expenditure at about $100 trillion (USD adjusted to 2022 $) since 1949. That's not accounting for lives lost, infrastructure destroyed, and all the other negatives that come from war. Humanity is spending unfathomable fortunes just to be able to kill each other. And you're saying colonizing Mars is a dumb idea? Huma…

Mars is extremely terrible. I don't understand why we'd want to colonize it, versus any number of other things we could do with that immense effort. Visit it, sure, I guess, maybe, but colonize? LOL why?

The appeal I imagined for a particular type of person was the promise of sovereignity.

It's very difficult to bootstrap a new state on Earth. The failure of seasteading initiatives suggests land is a requirement for credibility, but virtually all land is either claimed or considered not viable (i. e. Bir Tawil).

But other planets offer new land that you could prop a flag on and potentially get existing states to acknowledge. You can set up a captive legal system, potentially find a way to domicile your paper wealth there, and potentially blow out the airlock of anyone who dares question you.

It's not that someone wants to be king OF MARS, they want to be KING of Mars.

Re: More Everything Forever

#188

Post by ojbyrne »

mikeyouse wrote: post #175
GauntletWizard wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

AOC was an intern for Ted Kennedy before being strategically placed in a "bartending" position as part of her background grooming. Her family owned multiple New York Brownstones in the rich part of the city. She has as much claim to humble background as Trump.

Source for any of those claims? It's pretty well known after a few weird political fights that she grew up in a tiny house in Yorktown and that her dad died when she was a freshman in college and that her mom was a house cleaner. [her childhood home: https://pbs.twimg.com/media/DhCMERUXUAAY68Z?format=jpg&name=... ]. Hard to square with her family "owning multiple brownstones". Trump's dad gave him millions of dollars…

Wikipedia supports the claim that she was an intern for Ted Kennnedy, but none of the rest. Interestingly she has an asteroid named after her.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexandria_Ocasio-Cortez

Re: More Everything Forever

#189

Post by DavidPiper »

aeturnum wrote: post #47

I am surprised this obviously correct take is so controversial! The problem, essentially, is that the "more everything forever" crowd wants to get paid for the idea of the future today and then will never actually deliver what they promise. They are selling snake oil for the new millennium. Yes, of course I support space travel and settling on mars. I expect that, if we doubled or tripled NASA's budget, we could get…

> low-information escapism

What a great way to describe it.

It's like a good sci-fi or fantasy novel, but for people who don't read.

Re: More Everything Forever

#190

Post by pasquinelli »

aoeusnth1 wrote: post #164
aeturnum wrote: post #47

I am surprised this obviously correct take is so controversial! The problem, essentially, is that the "more everything forever" crowd wants to get paid for the idea of the future today and then will never actually deliver what they promise. They are selling snake oil for the new millennium. Yes, of course I support space travel and settling on mars. I expect that, if we doubled or tripled NASA's budget, we could get…

100 years optimistically!? That's an incredibly pessimistic timeline, maybe one of the most hardline "nothing ever happens" outlooks I've ever heard articulated.

that's crazy to say. mars is very cold and very dry and not shielded from radiation and doesn't have much air and that air isn't breathable.

i wouldn't say we've settled antarctica, which is on our planet and has air.

100 years would be a wild amount of time for us to settle mars.

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