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More Everything Forever

nytimes.com

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Re: More Everything Forever

#221

Post by ema »

travisgriggs wrote: post #197
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.

To some degree, wasn’t the exploration of the poles that took place at the beginning of the previous century similar? For country and glory. Motivated tons of men to have a go at the foolish. Many died, some prevailed. After all that we get to maintain a station there. Don’t take this as support of mars colonoziation which I think is a fools errand. Just pointing out that “suicide mission” seems to actually be motiva…

There's a big difference between being wildly over-optimistic about your odds of making it back and expecting from the get go you won't make it back.

Re: More Everything Forever

#222

Post by b112 »

pasquinelli wrote: post #190
aoeusnth1 wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

We purposefully decided not to settle there socially, yet we have settled there permanently with research and military stations.

Just as we will with Mars.

And yes we grow things there, even if just green onions and herbs.

Not to mention the reason for this isn't that it is insurmountable, merely that far better land is close by.

100 years is beyond pessimistic. We could easily have settled Mars with 1970s tech.

Re: More Everything Forever

#223

Post by thom »

gwern wrote: post #130
philipkglass wrote: post #14

This is, loosely speaking, the bundle of ideologies that Timnit Gebru and Émile P. Torres dubbed TESCREAL (transhumanism, Extropianism, singularitarianism, (modern) cosmism, Rationalism, Effective Altruism, and longtermism). While these are largely associated with modern Silicon Valley esoteric techbros (and the odd Oxfordian like Nick Bostrom), they have very deep roots, which Becker excavates – like Nikolai Fyodoro…

This also illustrates the bad research that goes into this sort of thing. There are no deep roots of 'TESCREAL' (which doesn't exist to begin with) in Russian Cosmism, because there are no roots of any of those ingredients separately in Russian Cosmism. Stross just made that up, as pure post hoc ergo propter hoc. There are no sources, and he got it from Hannu: https://gwern.net/review/quantum-thief#fn2 Stross has cho…

I agree this is somewhat manufactured. Both Hugo de Garis and Ben Goertzel identified as Cosmists in the mid to late 00s, but I don't remember it ever coming up on SL4/singularitarian/transhumanist mailing lists as a major source of ideas at their peak.

Re: More Everything Forever

#224

Post by robertlagrant »

__MatrixMan__ wrote: post #177
derektank wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most rich people aren't sitting on piles of cash; their capital is (usually) invested in a corporation which is busy turning potential into action, as you put it. I think there's an argument to be made that amassing and hoarding great wealth, particularly near the end of one's life with the intent to pass it directly onto one's heirs, is morally questionable if you believe in any kind of universalist ethic. But I thi…

That sounds very good but it's difficult to square with the behavior of those corporations. Can it really be that the change all of these well meaning rich people want to see in the world is... products that spy on an manipulates their users, products that can't be repaired, and products that putting future generations at risk by damaging the environment? Either these investments are not paying off, or they are and t…

> products that spy on an manipulates their users, products that can't be repaired, and products that putting future generations at risk by damaging the environment?

You seem to have a very narrow view of the range of products that exist. Are you basically just talking about smartphones?

Re: More Everything Forever

#225

Post by casey2 »

blaze33 wrote: post #83

> The “ideology of technological salvation” On this point, 20+ years ago I had a chat with my uncle who managed a factory of rubber thingies for the car industry. I asked him what he thought of climate change: "Oh well, if it's ever an issue we'll just invent something to fix it, like carbon-sucking machines or whatever!". I take issue with this mindset where innovation is the cure-all silver bullet. Not because it s…

The only thing "wrong" with it is that both parties are being intentionally vauge and operating at a "higher level" than the actual problem they are dealing with.

You can immediately rule out "carbon-sucking machines or whatever" because it will take at least as much energy to capture and sequester the carbon as you got from burning it and spent extracting it. Which directly brings us to the actual solution of getting energy from a renewable resource that is cheaper.

Over time all tech will cause issues but if it's well designed the issues won't be exorbitantly expensive to fix compared to the benefits. innovation will always be a cure-all, cause otherwise the problem is already solved, showing or educating people about which solutions are already optimal energy-wise will do more than enough to set their expectations straight, or at least convince them that they don't want to carry around tnt in their pocket.

Making Mars habitable will be a thousand year project which implies that the earth is not uninhabitable. Nobody except a conman will tell you that we have to "escape" earth to go live on mars.

Re: More Everything Forever

#226

Post by robertlagrant »

cousin_it wrote: post #114
aethrum wrote: post #107

If you like optimistic Sci-Fi, I would recommend the Culture Series. It really changed me when I read it in university.

The Culture is a world of AIs that are far better than humans at every task, and keep humans as basically pets out of sentimentality. I agree a lot of "nice" futures with AI will look like that, but the problem is that there are much more "nasty" futures than "nice". I don't see a path from AIs built for profit and national defense to a Culture-like future or any "nice" future at all. Or rather, there could be such a…

> but the problem is that there are much more "nasty" futures than "nice".

How do you know that?

Re: More Everything Forever

#227

Post by robertlagrant »

moolcool wrote: post #60
iNic wrote: post #21

It is obviously true that technology allows us to modify nature to an ever greater extent. That is what technology is! I don't think we'll have a colony on mars anytime soon, but AI is obviously coming and will obviously be extremely disrupting (for better or for worse)

> It is obviously true that technology allows us to modify nature to an ever greater extent I would dispute the relative significance or meaning of those changes though. We can build dams and tall buildings. We can cure diseases and develop elaborate communications infrastructure. I don't see that these developments alter our essential humanity though. If you read any classic literature from 100, 200, or even 1000 ye…

> I don't see that these developments alter our essential humanity though. If you read any classic literature from 100, 200, or even 1000 years ago, the emotional truths resonate the same way.

That just means that field can be static (or just updated for modern references). It doesn't mean there aren't lots of things to improve in other areas.

Re: More Everything Forever

#228

Post by dominicrose »

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…

Getting paid before delivery is clearly an Elon Musk strategy and in some cases it does mean that he (Tesla) will be able to deliver but he's clearly full of shit with crazy ideas like living on Mars because the Earth is doomrf or whatever. BS does also bring money or fame or whatever sometimes.

Re: More Everything Forever

#229

Post by ido »

__MatrixMan__ wrote: post #177
derektank wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most rich people aren't sitting on piles of cash; their capital is (usually) invested in a corporation which is busy turning potential into action, as you put it. I think there's an argument to be made that amassing and hoarding great wealth, particularly near the end of one's life with the intent to pass it directly onto one's heirs, is morally questionable if you believe in any kind of universalist ethic. But I thi…

That sounds very good but it's difficult to square with the behavior of those corporations. Can it really be that the change all of these well meaning rich people want to see in the world is... products that spy on an manipulates their users, products that can't be repaired, and products that putting future generations at risk by damaging the environment? Either these investments are not paying off, or they are and t…

I would guess it's not so much that they "want to see this change" as much as "they want to make as much money as possible and don't care about these consequences"

Re: More Everything Forever

#230

Post by FL33TW00D »

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…

Doubled or tripled NASA's budget? NASA has spent 32 BILLION on SLS with nothing to show for it. Each launch is expected to cost 2.5 BILLION https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Launch_System.

Starship is just orders of magnitude less than this. NASA is a moribund jobs program.

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