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More Everything Forever

nytimes.com

231–240 of 321 posts

Re: More Everything Forever

#231
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…

We are inventing things to fix it though. We have massive advancements in battery technology and solar cells and nuclear generators that will lead to cleaner energy. If you have an alternative to growth as a viable path forward, that solves the global group decision problem which explains why Brazil must stop burning down their rainforests and India isn’t allowed to industrialize, I’d love to hear it. That isn’t to s…

>We are inventing things to fix it though. We have massive advancements in battery technology and solar cells and nuclear generators that will lead to cleaner energy.

Yet the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere has never been higher nor has the rate of increase.

Re: More Everything Forever

#232

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>actually think this kind of low-information escapism about the future I think this is called techno-utopianism. The "leaders" in technology have been doing this ever since the industrial revolution. People sold the idea that street lights would fix "public morals" and eliminate crime. Also see the progress trap and professor Simon Penny's work and what he calls the end of the anthropocene.

There is some evidence that street lights reduce crime! E.g. https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10940-020-09490-6

Reduce, yes, absolutely. Eliminate -- no.

Re: More Everything Forever

#233

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? We developed and flew the Saturn V in less than a decade. We have plenty of rockets that can do one way trips to Mars that if we really, really needed to get a person there could do it with some modifications. It's mainly a question of will. If the will existed, we could do it in a decade with doubled or tripled funding. Not a century.

We haven't created a self-sustaining human population in earth orbit yet. We need to constantly supply the space station and even when we do, the health impact of staying there is really serious. That's table stakes for a Mars mission and no improvements in rocketry will compensate for the fact we simply can't keep someone alive for that long outside of earth atmosphere.

Honestly, the number of people who think they know the ins and outs of living on Mars because they saw a Matt Damon movie is bizarre.

Re: More Everything Forever

#234
> They would require regular shipments of food and water from Earth

That's one of the core challenges techno-optimists like Musk constantly handwave and ignore when grandstanding about humanity becoming a "multi-planetary species". Yes, we can settle Mars. We could probably even do so with the technology we have today, certainly if we invest resources into further research and development with that specific goal in mind. But we can't do so in the political and economical landscape we have today.

We have a massive resource allocation problem here on Earth. We're overproducing goods because it's less economically damaging to destroy surplus products than to sell at cost or only produce to meet actual demand. We build for planned obsolesence and encourage wasteful competition between ten different companies owning a hundred different brands of the same product just to perpetuate an artificial demand via "FOMO". We're siphoning global wealth into the hands of a few people who waste our resources on superyachts like Bezos or actively prevent public infrastructure projects like Musk's attacks[0] on public mass transit. We're subsidizing legacy fossil fuel production and consumption instead of developing more efficient energy use and storage technologies. Meanwhile Russia suicide-bombed the European economy by invading Ukraine and now the US rapidly disassembles its decades old network of allies and trading partners. None of this is stabilizing let alone sustainable - and we need a sustainable human presence on Earth before we can build out a persistent presence elsewhere.

If Musk truly believed in making humanity a multi-planetary species to ensure the survival of our species, his main focus would be terraforming Earth, not Mars. Instead he sells visions of a future that only considers the extremely wealthy, with point-to-point rocket shuttles and hermetically sealed self-driving underground robotaxis. Just like Bezos uses his dildo rocket[1] for a girlboss publicity stunt after getting visibly upset when William Shatner had a genuine moment of realizing the fragile beauty of Earth and humanity[2] because Bezos' vision is to send all the unsightly refuse, industry and laborers into space so the rich and beautiful can have Earth to themselves[3].

But people like Musk aren't actually interested in making a multi-planetary species a reality. It's just a sexy mission statement that justifies their business ventures. He may actually believe in it but if he thinks that's what he's doing, he's not nearly as smart as people claim he is.

[0]: The Hyperloop concept was infamously pushed by Musk to sabotage the public infrastructure proposal of a highspeed rail network but this isn't the only example. A lot of his mass transit concepts boil down to "busses but smaller" or "trains/trams/metros but on wheels". When he first pitched the idea of FSD allowing Tesla owners to let their cars "work for them" as robotaxis, he also floated the idea that this could be used to pay for the cost of the car, which would allow Tesla to run a form of car sharing that offloads the actual risks and maintenance costs to the "owners" of the cars. Tesla's early vision also explicitly included the goal of making EVs affordable to the general public, which Musk no longer seems to be interested in.

[1]: Blue Origin's rockets have rightfully been criticized for being excessively phallic. While rockets necessarily have a phallic tendency, Bezos' rockets stand out for looking specifically dildo-like even by rocket standards. Given that there is no technical necessity for making it look this much like a dick and that the design hasn't been modified to make it any less dildo-like, the appearance can be considered deliberate even if we grant the benefit of the doubt and assume it wasn't originally intended to be so blatantly phallic - at some point everyone in charge agreed that the rocket should continue to look the way it does now.

[2]: There's a widely circulated video clip of Shatner having a moment and being interrupted by Bezos fetching and spraying a champagne bottle. Shatner stated that he went on the trip expecting to be overwhelmed by the endless possibilities of space because he had always been fascinated by it but that the experience had fundamentally changed his outlook by showing him the contrast of the vast emptiness of space and the vulnerability of Earth containing all that ever has and and ever will matter to him - an experience he apparently shares with many others who got to see Earth from space. Of course this isn't why Bezos took him on the ride and isn't a message Bezos cares for - the vapid girlboss soundbites by the more recent ride carrying female influencers is a much better match for his intented PR, especially the insistence on referring to the space tourists as "astronauts".

[3]: Although Bezos hasn't been in the news much over his visions (probably because when Musk did so he had a more receptive audience because there was a general pop culture of space optimism which largely seems to be gone now) he has floated the ideas of launching Earth's waste into space (presumably especially radioactive waste, which might be a bad idea if there's a chance of rocket malfunction) and of moving dirty industry into space to reduce pollution on Earth - the latter included the idea of creating habitats for the laborers, which had certain undertones.

Re: More Everything Forever

#235

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They're not viable candidates as backup plans for humanity because they have the same vulnerabilities to comet strikes, global nuclear war and pandemic as the rest of the Earth. OTOH, if one of those took out human life on Earth, people living on Mars could re-colonize Earth.

Earth after a global nuclear war or comet strike is still more hospitable than Mars. It's hard to imagine anything that would make Mars a better place to live than simply staying on earth.

Yes it would be. But that doesn't matter if no humans make it through the apocalypse in the first place.

Re: More Everything Forever

#236

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.

> Starship is just orders of magnitude less than this.

Starship does not exist.

Starship is the name given to a design for a fully reusable superheavy launch vehicle intended to take 100t to LEO.

The things being launched by SpaceX are not Starship.

They are impressive, but are not Starship.

They are called Starship, but are not Starship.

Let me be clear. I am not saying that Starship will not exist.

What I am saying is that today, right now, Starship does not exist and SLS does.

You implied that Starship does exist, and is cheaper.

Nobody, not you, not me, not Lord Ketamine, can predict when it will exist or how much it will cost with any degree of accuracy.

I genuinely, sincerely, and earnestly WANT Starship to exist, but as of today, April 24th, 2025 it does not.

Re: More Everything Forever

#237

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> Starship is just orders of magnitude less than this. Starship does not exist. Starship is the name given to a design for a fully reusable superheavy launch vehicle intended to take 100t to LEO. The things being launched by SpaceX are not Starship. They are impressive, but are not Starship. They are called Starship, but are not Starship. Let me be clear. I am not saying that Starship will not exist. What I am saying…

We can argue technicalities all day long but to me, this exists: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CMGiNKcVSek

Re: More Everything Forever

#238
Without the hope of technological progress, human expansion and economic growth the world becomes zero-sum.

In such a world, humanity will soon arrive at their self-imposed limits, after which no-one can hope to create wealth and prosperity but only to take it from someone else.

The pre-industrial world was like this and it is characterised by millenia of warfare and slavery. Human suffering on a scale that we struggle to comprehend.

Of course, some people are overly optimistic about the near-term possibilities of technology, but I much prefer that to the alternative.

Re: More Everything Forever

#239

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But the main figures behind the Ai doomerism are nutjobs either applying bayesian math in a bad way or right wing extremist believing that black people are inferior for genetics reason (I know it's an overreach that doesn't represent all the population of Ai doomers, but the most important people in that sphere are represented by what I said). Furthermore, they're people without a history in academia or a specific pa…

Why is this downvoted? It’s clearly a reference to the zizians and MIRI and Bayesian nutjobs is an absolutely correct assessment.

That's more or less what I was referring to, but I should have been more clear

Re: More Everything Forever

#240

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.

Colonizing Mars isn't a problem. Colonizing Mars is a goal. Making that happen requires addressing a ridiculous number of problems and sub-problems.

If history teaches us anything, the biggest problem is supply chains - and supply chains have been so difficult to get right that they've led to countless famines, lost wars, failed businesses and economic crises. And those have all been supply chains here on Earth, mostly between fixed locations at fixed distances with relatively few environmental hazards and risks compared to space travel.

If we want to create a sustainable multi-planetary future, we need to solve this incrementally. Colonizing the moon would be a logical stopgap. But as it stands now we haven't even established a presence on the moon - let alone a permanent one. The only presence we have off-planet is the ISS and that one's still in Low Earth Orbit, no different from regular communication satellites, so that only qualifies as "off-planet" by not being on the surface of the planet.

Remember that we can't just scale up space travel indepently either. Even if SpaceX figures out how to do space launches every other day, that still requires a supply chain for fuel, parts, refinement, resource extraction, etc, all of which also needs to be scaled up accordingly. And that's just for launching stuff into space, which so far has mostly meant LEO.

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