More Everything Forever • Hacker News Board

Re: More Everything Forever

#71

Post by ctoth » Wed, Apr 23, 2025, 5:36 PM UTC

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 had a deadly childhood cancer, Retinoblastoma, which would have killed me without modern medicine. I'm pretty fond of existing.

These developments sure altered my humanity. By making it possible.

Re: More Everything Forever

#72

Post by bko » Wed, Apr 23, 2025, 5:38 PM UTC

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?

We should devise a system that gathers all human resources and applies them to a set of goals, like you mentioned. The smartest people in the world should get together, determine the most pressing issues and command all of humanities resources into those problems. We can remove a lot of waste like frivolous consumerism, endless choice and competition. Why has no one ever tried this before?

Re: More Everything Forever

#73

Post by aeturnum » Wed, Apr 23, 2025, 5:38 PM UTC

margalabargala wrote: post #64

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.

I really think you are under estimating things here. The trip to mars is ~145x longer (at minimum!) than the trip to the moon. Let's say it only takes us twice the time to develop a rocket & ship that can do that (and come back ofc) - so that's 20 years (for 145x the distance). Then you gotta develop structures and building techniques, some of which you can look at with robots, but some of which will need human feedback. The trip itself takes 7~10 months, adding extra time.

If all of humanity devoted ourselves to setting up a mars base it would take less than 100 years! My timeline was based on NASA with 2-4x the budget, which I think is very reasonable. I think you are being foolish.

Re: More Everything Forever

#74

Post by robocat » Wed, Apr 23, 2025, 5:42 PM UTC

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?

> fighting authoritarianism, inequality, genocide. Are these too boring?

Right, have the tech guys spent their money on politics - that seems to be working out well.

> fighting starvation

We have enough food in the world: we don't choose to share it or distribute it. Politics.

> fighting disease

Politicised within the US (measles, birdflu, NHI, health insurance), and similarly politicised within my own country (US social media is only partly to blame).

Bill Gates put a lot of money towards helping fight Malaria and other health issues: I would guess no other rich dudes wish to get similarly tarred.

Re: More Everything Forever

#75

Post by bee_rider » Wed, Apr 23, 2025, 5:48 PM UTC

feoren wrote: post #63

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? Huma…

The fact that we do dumb things does not make the specific plan of colonizing Mars a good idea. Hell, we could try to colonize the asteroid belt, at least that doesn’t involve dropping down some enormous gravity well to visit a dead planet.

> 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.

I’m not sure what “the argument” is here, I didn’t really present much of an argument (I think colonizing Mars is self-evidently dumb). But if the argument that is being levied against these things is that they are all too expensive—I disagree that it applies to some of the things in your list. The New Deal and the Highway system had positive effects for existing people. Maybe the Apollo program was frivolous on some level, but at least it had a plausible goal.

We have a finite budget, I agree that it would be better to spend less of it killing each other, but it will still be finite. We should try to do something more useful than Mars.

Re: More Everything Forever

#76

Post by psalaun » Wed, Apr 23, 2025, 5:49 PM UTC

cgriswald wrote: post #57

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,…

You don't need AI to scan social media posts for wrongthink. AI may let you go deeper, detecting thoughtcrime based on certain patterns of otherwise acceptable speech. However, AI is already good enough for that and the sort of people who want this don't care about false positives (or really truth at all) and are probably already compiling lists. Historically these sorts of folks just make stuff up against their enem…

In the end all our eggs as in the same basket as long as the solar system, the galaxy or the universe would eventually disappear. Allowing billions of billions of human to live for the next thousands of year is quite irrelevant: nobody asked to be born, so nobody won't miss the opportunity. As for our legacy, 99.995% of us don't leave a trace meaningful enough to be remembered as individuals by our grand grand grand children.

So, OK to conquer Mars, but not at any cost because the ROI seems really low to me.

Re: More Everything Forever

#77

Post by mbgerring » Wed, Apr 23, 2025, 5:52 PM UTC

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…

There are thousands of people and billions of dollars of capital deployed, right now, solving hard engineering, social and political problems to:

- electrify everything, including industrial processes

- replace and upgrade hard infrastructure to enable said electrification

- completely decarbonize the supply of electricity while massively increasing the total amount of available electricity generation

- restore and in some cases engineer ecosystems to draw down and store existing carbon from the atmosphere

It is a massive multidisciplinary effort that will require immeasurable person-hours of serious engineering work, among other things.

I promise you, if you think that any of these things are reducible to a simple answer, like e.g. “just build nuclear,” the actual work involved is more complex than you realize, and contains many as-yet unsolved problems.

I work in a small corner of this effort, building software to enable utilities to design electricity rates to support decarbonization. It’s a tiny piece of a gigantic puzzle.

Start at https://climatebase.org if you want to actually understand what “work on climate” means.

Re: More Everything Forever

#78

Post by robocat » Wed, Apr 23, 2025, 5:53 PM UTC

bko wrote: post #72

fnordlord wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

We should devise a system that gathers all human resources and applies them to a set of goals, like you mentioned. The smartest people in the world should get together, determine the most pressing issues and command all of humanities resources into those problems. We can remove a lot of waste like frivolous consumerism, endless choice and competition. Why has no one ever tried this before?

[deleted]. Not funny

Re: More Everything Forever

#79

Post by kurthr » Wed, Apr 23, 2025, 5:56 PM UTC

aeturnum wrote: post #73

margalabargala wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I really think you are under estimating things here. The trip to mars is ~145x longer (at minimum!) than the trip to the moon. Let's say it only takes us twice the time to develop a rocket & ship that can do that (and come back ofc) - so that's 20 years (for 145x the distance). Then you gotta develop structures and building techniques, some of which you can look at with robots, but some of which will need human feedb…

Yes, the quote "a million earthlings will be living on Mars in 20 years", is hilarious. It would require us to start launching hundreds of SpaceX Starship rockets a day every day, now. It's just dumb.

I know that there can be an amazing level of self confidence and denial of current reality required to build a new company from scratch, but this stretches all bounds of credulity. I just don't believe that they believe what they're saying. It's so far beyond marketing hype and "self driving" being available in 2018. At some point, this moves from encouraging hype to pure cult level deceit.

Re: More Everything Forever

#80

Post by bee_rider » Wed, Apr 23, 2025, 6:10 PM UTC

cgriswald wrote: post #57

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,…

You don't need AI to scan social media posts for wrongthink. AI may let you go deeper, detecting thoughtcrime based on certain patterns of otherwise acceptable speech. However, AI is already good enough for that and the sort of people who want this don't care about false positives (or really truth at all) and are probably already compiling lists. Historically these sorts of folks just make stuff up against their enem…

Mars is just a big dead rock really. The “self-sustaining tin cans” are the way to go IMO. We can learn how to do that in orbit around Earth (where aborting the mission isn’t automatic death), and then go colonize the asteroid belt, where the resources are just sitting there floating in space.

Mars offers: gravity, but the wrong amount. Air, but not enough. Sand and dust, but not the kind that grows anything, just the kind that gets in your filters. Also it is toxic. Not much magnetic field.