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More Everything Forever

nytimes.com

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Re: More Everything Forever

#61

Post by AftHurrahWinch »

fnordlord wrote: post #48
bko wrote: post #20

This book seems insufferable, at least based on the review. Half of the review is trying to poke holes in why people won't live on mars and the other half is about how people trying to pursue goals such as this are self-serving and corrupt. I'm sure a market exists for this kind of book, but to me it's just exhausting. What's the harm in trying to go to mars if it results in decreasing the cost of space flight by 99%…

Maybe I misunderstand your comment as if we've run out of ambitious things besides those that border on science fiction. In that case, I think the market is those of us who think there are more tangible ambitious things right in front of our faces. And in front of those with the resources to make a difference ie, fighting starvation, authoritarianism, inequality, disease, genocide. Are these too boring?

No, they're not boring, but they're qualitatively different types of problems.

Going to Mars and living forever are primarily technical problems.

Starvation, authoritarianism, inequality, and genocide are primarily political problems.

The resources and skills used to solved the former set aren't broadly applicable to the latter set, though it is easy to find examples of people who are good at solving one of these sets of problems who assume that they'll be good at solving the other set as well.

Re: More Everything Forever

#62

Post by surgical_fire »

oceanplexian wrote: post #12

> He encourages us not to get hung up on galaxies far, far away but to pay more attention to our own fragile planet and the frail humans around us. While I don't necessarily agree with the motives of the Silicon Valley billionaires you must have a really basic imagination to hate on the future, and the answers to Man's oldest questions which may be on Mars and beyond. Of course, like a broken record, out comes the tr…

Of course, why use our limited resources to improve the lives of human beings on Earth? That lacks imagination.

Let's funnel those resources to some ridiculous endeavor to put some people in an arid bleak red wasteland instead.

Re: More Everything Forever

#63

Post by feoren »

bee_rider wrote: post #34

Colonizing Mars is such a dumb idea. I wish it was a strawman, not the stated goal of the world’s richest man. Anyway, some of the utopian/distopian thinking, I get. We aren’t going to create an AI god, good or evil. That belief is probably a side effect of the facts that Millennials are (finally) grabbing the reins, and we grew up in an era where computers actually got, tangibly, twice as good every 18 months or so,…

> 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? Humanity is wasting its potential on the stupidest shit you can imagine. Colonizing Mars is a galaxy-brained idea compared to most of what we're spending our money on.

And of course colonizing Mars is trivial compared to terraforming Mars, which you can make a stronger argument against. "If you can't terraform Earth, then you can't terraform Mars." Of course that argument misses the point that if you set terraforming Mars as a goal of humanity, then we focus our efforts on developing the technologies that would allow us to terraform Earth as well (long beforehand, I might add). Focusing humanity on a course to accomplish an immense feat of engineering always produces an immense amount of positive externalities.

You could have levied the same argument against the Apollo program, any of FDR's New Deal megaprojects, the national highway system, the Large Hadron Collider, ITER, etc. And of course people do say we shouldn't be "wasting" our money on such things. I say: how about we keep doing all those projects and more, and stop wasting the vast majority of our money on stupid shit like bombs that in the best case sit in a warehouse until they decompose into duds, and in the worst case kill some wedding attendees and set humanity back.

Re: More Everything Forever

#64

Post by margalabargala »

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?

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.

Re: More Everything Forever

#65

Post by bee_rider »

bko wrote: post #40
f1yght wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the final paragraph of the article sums up the issue pretty well. The tech world spends a lot of thought and energy on trying to escape our current existence instead of trying to make it better. There's very real crises that are solvable like climate change and food security. But instead of working hard to fix those, tech billionaires are focusing on space travel, AI, etc. Things that are important and could…

I don't know, my life is made better by electric vehicles, Starlink, Amazon one day delivery and large language models. What does "working on climate change" look like? The only thing I hear from climate change activists is that the government should extract more money from people and this will somehow change the climate. So I guess rich billionaires should be lobbying for politicians to tax me more? Again, all this…

> What does "working on climate change" look like?

There’s probably room for some engineering work and a business innovation in the smartgrid space. It seems like a big communication/optimization problem that could use similar muscles that the AI sector uses (but it doesn’t actually compete for talent because there’s no way in hell utilities will ever be able to pay tech startup salaries).

Re: More Everything Forever

#66

Post by housebear »

bko wrote: post #40
f1yght wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the final paragraph of the article sums up the issue pretty well. The tech world spends a lot of thought and energy on trying to escape our current existence instead of trying to make it better. There's very real crises that are solvable like climate change and food security. But instead of working hard to fix those, tech billionaires are focusing on space travel, AI, etc. Things that are important and could…

I don't know, my life is made better by electric vehicles, Starlink, Amazon one day delivery and large language models. What does "working on climate change" look like? The only thing I hear from climate change activists is that the government should extract more money from people and this will somehow change the climate. So I guess rich billionaires should be lobbying for politicians to tax me more? Again, all this…

Well, I think you articulate the situation quite neatly with, "I don't know, my life is made better..." As long as you yourself are either benefiting or not immediately suffering you are content. That many contrary positions in this thread are thinking about humanity as a whole is why you will not be swayed. You do not seem interested in thinking outside of your own comforts, and therefore all of the anxiety and alarm over the fate of billions outside of yourself just comes across as "exhausting."

I, for one, find the endless selfishness of ultra rich people and their enablers to be exhausting, and happily root for anyone trying to break through to the uncertain that this is a moment for action, not idle ignorance.

Re: More Everything Forever

#67

Post by ctoth »

"Blessed are the meek: for they shall inherit the earth."

The rest of us can meet up every couple millennia around Alpha Centauri for an old-home week.

Re: More Everything Forever

#68

Post by elefanten »

LunaSea wrote: post #39
bryanlarsen wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is more important. We spend > $2T per year fighting climate change. We spend > $10T per year on social welfare programs. We spend less than $10B per year on going back to the moon and trying to inhabit Mars.

And both of these amounts seem to not be enough based on the resulting state of the world.

As others in the thread mention, these are problems of political economy that no person or mega corp or even nation state can solve.

So, continuing to also work on other things is both rational and morally sound.

Progress in one area unlocks new possibilities in other areas. E.g. abundant near-free energy would make eliminating poverty a more tractable political problem than it has proven to be.

Re: More Everything Forever

#70

Post by gusmally »

bko wrote: post #40
f1yght wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the final paragraph of the article sums up the issue pretty well. The tech world spends a lot of thought and energy on trying to escape our current existence instead of trying to make it better. There's very real crises that are solvable like climate change and food security. But instead of working hard to fix those, tech billionaires are focusing on space travel, AI, etc. Things that are important and could…

I don't know, my life is made better by electric vehicles, Starlink, Amazon one day delivery and large language models. What does "working on climate change" look like? The only thing I hear from climate change activists is that the government should extract more money from people and this will somehow change the climate. So I guess rich billionaires should be lobbying for politicians to tax me more? Again, all this…

>I'm happy with them paying their taxes and trying to build tech that makes my life better.

But neither of those things is their goal. If they happen to build tech that makes your life better, it's because it makes them money (that, generally speaking, they try not to pay taxes on)

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