More Everything Forever(nytimes.com) |
More Everything Forever(nytimes.com) |
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 trope of "Why don't you solve poverty on Earth (with all that money)".
For once, can the malthusians come up with a single unique idea or viewpoint rather than recycling the same content? People criticize AI for producing slop but look at what makes the NYT.
We spend less than $10B per year on going back to the moon and trying to inhabit Mars.
Is the goal is to create an earthly utopia with minimum suffering and maximum happiness? Is it aggressive progress so that we can't be wiped out by a random cosmic event? Or should we be eschewing all of that and living harmoniously with nature and dying spiritually content when our time is up?
There is also the argument that if we had focused on solving poverty 150 years ago instead of prioritizing rapid industrialization and economic growth more people would be in poverty today. A 50 year period of scarcity would completely erase all progress we have made towards lifting people out of poverty, regardless of how equitably we distributed the scarce goods.
The deserts even have breathable air.
Antarctica is even more inhospitable than deserts, and there are people living there for research purposes.
That said, I'm definitely on the side of making Fresno a paradise before we try mars.
Let's funnel those resources to some ridiculous endeavor to put some people in an arid bleak red wasteland instead.
Any vessel taking water away from Earth should be shot down with extreme prejudice.
Solar energy electrolysis can turn water into rocket fuel.
In an emergency, you could burn that rocket fuel to get energy and water.
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.
This is an impossible way to get to a useful conclusion. Provide stats if you're going to make a claim like "the world is bad"
Going a little further, living in the ocean is easier than living on Mars. As far as I can tell there are no billionaire-funded submarine civilisation programs.
OTOH, if one of those took out human life on Earth, people living on Mars could re-colonize Earth.
It's hard to imagine anything that would make Mars a better place to live than simply staying on earth.
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 a few humans on mars within 100 years (optimistically). It will be hard! There are many problems to solve (as the book seems to note). There's a place there for SpaceX and all other competent private companies - I love public-private partnerships.
I actually think this kind of low-information escapism about the future (we will "fix it" with technology in a way that is impossible) is similar to religious faith in a coming apocalypse. Faith in an impossible event raising you up and casting down your doubters and opponents. Technology can do a lot! It has a lot of potential! But we cannot fix any of our big problems (climate change, eventually making humans multi-planet, equality) with technology alone and the people who tell you we can just want to scam you out of your money.
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.
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.
I doubt there will be a permanent settlement in a thousand years.
You can't know when the leap will happen so it's basically picking a year that seems far enough off to be pretty darn sure.
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.
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.
The Shape of a Mars Mission: https://idlewords.com/2025/02/the_shape_of_a_mars_mission.ht...
Why Not Mars: https://idlewords.com/2023/1/why_not_mars.htm
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.
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.
Starship is just orders of magnitude less than this. NASA is a moribund jobs program.
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.
For another, this hypothetical spacecraft (which does not yet exist) would not be wherever it is in terms of completion had NASA not existed.
"of course"? Why? Putting people in space, on the moon, or on Mars seems like a huge waste of resources.
We could have (conservatively) 100 JWST or 1000 Pathfinders for the price of a human mission to Mars.
What a great way to describe it.
It's like a good sci-fi or fantasy novel, but for people who don't read.
None of the bullshit coming out of Musk, for example, is real, it’s not even plausible, it’s just lies for dumb people.
One response (also by an abundance crowd?) to a similar sentiment:
https://www.chemistryworld.com/news/serbia-limits-academics-...
"Serbia limits academics’ research time to just one hour a day"
Putting humans on Mars is purely a technological problem.
Inequality is not a real problem.
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. PayPal isn’t revolutionary and getting rich off of that doesn’t make you an expert on (for example) AI.
I don't like this mindset. Be grateful for what you have. Maybe the world is not that great yet for many people and we should aim to improve things substantially, not marginally. This is something that the shuffling around of ressources on a political level can never achieve. Those dreaded tech entrepreneurs have correctly identified technology to be the only way substantial improvements can happen. So then it all blils down if you can make things happen and here the article and some comments here just claim, well, they NEVER deliver!
It feels like such a thing is a bit of a cop-out as it removes all the problems that arise from human imperfections and yet our own history is that of an improving standard of living despite these imperfections.
How do you know that?
The difference is that there's no need to build AIs with "motivation". Computers don't view us as anything right now, even if they're better at working with bits than us. What would change this in your mind?
Naturally, we will anyway because that's a short-cut and we're not very imaginative. But any kind of AI that would want anything will have to be explicitly built by us.
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 says that technological progress can help (it can!), but because it also implies that there's nothing really wrong with everything else we do and that we shouldn't have to think if we had a hand in the endless crises we see.
Don't tell me about a future where Earth is such a dystopian wasteland that going to Mars looks like the right choice. I don't want to build penthouses for the few billionaires that actually enjoy the place. The best place on Mars is still worse than the worst place on Earth.
Tell me about the future where Earth is seen as a wonderful spaceship, where we learned to live in peace and where we have a good thing going on such that going elsewhere to see what's possible is appealing!
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.
what you're talking about is capitalism becoming unsustainable
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 years ago, the emotional truths resonate the same way.
These developments sure altered my humanity. By making it possible.
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.
Which reminds me of the "Dogma of Otherness" by the scifi author David Brin:
"Think about it. 'There's always another way of looking at things' is a basic assumption of a great many Americans."
there is nothing wrong with "shoot for the moon, even if you miss, you'll land amongst the stars" aspect about these literal moonshot projects. regardless of what you think about the people running them, but these initiatives tend to bring out a lot of innovation.
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 Fyodorov's 18th century "cosmism," a project to "scientifically" resurrect everyone who ever lived inside of a simulation.
I think that I first heard of Fyodorov via SF author Charles Stross's writings. It was part of the world building in his early Singularity-oriented novels (Singularity Sky, Iron Sunrise, Accelerando, maybe Glasshouse). He also blogged about Fyodorov, as in "Federov's Rapture":
https://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2011/07/federov...
Fyodorov/Federov also shows up in Hannu Rajaniemi's "Quantum Thief" trilogy.
It's a bundle of ideas that has produced some very good science fiction, but I wouldn't reorganize my life around it.
Perhaps better is to kindly refer everyone to a physics 101 text book.
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, so some sort of divine techno-ascension seemed plausible in 2005 or so.
But we live in the failure path of our plans. So, I’m quite worried that a group will try to create an omnipresent AI, run out of runway, and end up having to monetize a tool that’s only real use is scanning everybody’s social media posts for wrong-think (the type of wrong think that makes you unemployable will invert every four years in the US, so good luck).
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.
Billionaires are a symptom, not the disease. You don’t cure a fever by smashing thermometers. If we want fewer billionaires, we need systems that don’t reward monopoly power ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
I agree with the author about the other big tech bros. They're evil.
The rest of us can meet up every couple millennia around Alpha Centauri for an old-home week.
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 admission that his political project had failed.
Jesus predicted his death several times, most explicitly in Matthew 20:17–19.
> Now Jesus, going up to Jerusalem, took the twelve disciples aside on the road and said to them, “Behold, we are going up to Jerusalem, and the Son of Man will be betrayed to the chief priests and to the scribes; and they will condemn Him to death, and deliver Him to the Gentiles to mock and to scourge and to crucify. And the third day He will rise again.”
- Matthew 20:17–19
Everything good comes with tradeoffs. AI will likely also kill millions but will create and support and improve the lives of billions (if not trillions on a long enough time scale).
Furthermore, they're people without a history in academia or a specific past in philosophy. Although i do agree that investigating Ai dangers should be done, but in an academic context
She has a PhD in electrical engineering and has worked at Google before researching on Ai with a more philosophical approach
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%? Who cares if someone is trying to naively live forever if it results in a lot of money into longevity research? Would you rather this person be spending his money on yachts?
I wish we had more ambitious things. It's fine that the author doesn't believe in this stuff, but to mock and try to get rich off it seems like more of a grift than anybody trying to do ambitious things. I don't get it, this guy is literally an astrophysicist, surely he's looked up at the skies at one point and imagined what could be done. I guess the only difference is he never took his shot.
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). The former knows more about basic commutes and the condition of public bathrooms than your average politician or tech mogul. Our tech leaders are not well-rounded or even representative. That's why they talk crazy shit because they are in a crazy rich insulated world. We tried some contrived way to get women and minorities to become CEOs, but I think it should start more grass roots and maybe think about stopping something like ycombinator (or Google for example) from constantly recruiting based on old boys club pedigree. Regular folks just don't get put into the mix for C-Level for whatever reason unless they are gifted at the ladder-climbing thing.
Exceptionalism dictates that we will never put them into the mix, and I think the world is probably missing out on some good practicality and humanity just based on sheer regular folk experience some people can bring.
Funny:
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 -> This is to ensure that they can speak out when they are not happy about anything;
Quite literally in the case of former Apple CEO John Sculley.
I don't know where the threshold ought to be, but beyond a certain size a pile of money can only indicate bad things about its owner. Either they're too unimaginative to turn that potential into action, or their designs are so against the will of the people that it's going to take gargantuan amounts of coercion to get them done. Either way, a billionaire is an individual of dubious merit.
A scientist, aside from their day job, is now also supposed to spend time debunking whatever half baked topic of the day is?
The only world where that works is one in which MA’s reputation is built on not saying dumb stuff all the time, like a scientist’s reputation is. If his follower count dropped for example. But it’s not, and that’s not how it works. People like him will move on to the next thing tomorrow.
This does not seem to have stopped anyone bullshitting to the media about AI.
Yes, it should be accessible and digestible, but should not be pushed.
I'm sure there's plenty of very intelligent ones, but there's also plenty of morons who started life off with an advantage and have managed to keep it up
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.
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 say I support billionaire pet projects. I would call a lot of it a misallocation of resources.
Yet the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere has never been higher nor has the rate of increase.
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 chosen to never revisit the topic to try to substantiate his suggestion.
This quote winds up being rather exemplary: for example, that one parenthetical description manages to make at least 3 errors: 1. Fyodorov was born in 1823, so he obviously could not have invented anything in the '18th century' (ie. 1700s); 2. Cosmism included many things, not just the 'Great Common Task', and the Great Common Task itself went far beyond reviving ancestors, including many overall more important things like colonizing the entire universe or conquering death; 3. and further, the revival part was not about computer simulation at all (that's Hannu's _Quantum Thief_ fictional version of the idea that he came up with for his Sobornosts!) but reviving them physically, in the body, possibly using cloning - and was no more about "inside of a simulation" than Jesus reviving the dead was.
You're right that Hannu made great use of Cosmism as world-building in the Quantum Thief trilogy which I highly recommend (see my review above) - but that could only work because the ideas of Cosmism are so novel & exotic, and not part of Western transhumanism. If they really were as foundational as Stross claims, the 'taproot' of Western ideas, they would make about as exciting fictional worldbuilding as suggesting that you have some sort of 'laws' for AIs, starting with 'An AI may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm."...
https://web.archive.org/web/20010211141901/http://members.nb...
I probably hadn't read that page in 20+ years, but it was familiar as soon as I saw it.
https://pluralistic.net/2025/04/22/vinges-bastards/#cyberpun...
The NYT article does not mention the dreaded T word, and is not clear to me whether this notional acronym plays any large role in Becker's book.
I see Mars as an inevitability. We need Mars. Our eggs are all in one basket and the only way to guarantee our future is to be a multi-planet species or to learn how to live in self-sustaining tin cans. Colonizing Mars would help us develop the tools for either one of these necessities. Colonizing Mars right now I'm a bit more skeptical about.
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.
So, OK to conquer Mars, but not at any cost because the ROI seems really low to me.
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.
> 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.
All of those had (and always had) far more obvious benefits than colonizing Mars, including the squishy benefit of "beating the Soviet Union to a contested goal."
You can disprove me by stating plainly what the benefits of colonizing Mars would be?
But not all military spending was wasteful. The military and military adjacent orgs have invested in tons of useful R&D with civilian applications.
She became famous for adopting a strain of strident and problematic activism, using it to attack her colleagues and making claims just as wild as some of the ones she cherry picks to critique.
It's not at all surprising that she ended up an extremely divisive figure. And meanwhile, the state of the art sped far ahead of where she drew her line in the sand.
It's hard to find discussion of her that isn't strongly biased in one direction or another (surely, my own comment included). In my experience (sample size 1), when she gets brought up (or involved), the quality of the discussion usually plummets.
- Longevity research is bad/wasteful > In 1900 and prior, the global average life expectancy was around 32 years. Thanks to modern medicine, this has doubled to 70 years. This is a tremendous gift to every human alive today.
- Going to Mars is bad/extravagant/fruitless > Going to the moon, exploring new continents, these were all "extravagant/fruitless" undertakings in their own eras. In hindsight we take for granted how significant these are; e.g. I was born on a continent that my ancestors had never set foot on until a few hundred years prior.
What we want as a species is "portfolio" of pro-human bets. Some of this can be low-risk, low-reward social spending to alleviate here-and-now problems on Earth, but some of it can be high-risk, high-reward "moon-shots" (or "Mars-shots") which, if successful, unlock completely new/better modes of existence. The two are not mutually exclusive, they are both part of a balanced strategy.
Was this ever true?
Within a few decades of the European discovery of the Americas they had already subjugated both the Aztec and Inca empires and were able to extract vast amounts of wealth.
I agree with you though.
Measure it by VC dollars invested and what actual orgs at tech companies are assigned to. It's almost ALL on a 1-10 year horizon.
So, as gp notes... is it really that harmful to allocate <1% to "sci fi" ambitions, especially when most of what they actually produce is short-horizon, immediately-usable stuff?
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 stuff is exhausting. Environment is the biggest problem so everything that uses energy is bad. It's just a formula for mass de-industrialization, making everyone poor, and eventually de-population.
So no, I don't think wealthy people should do more lobbying. I'm happy with them paying their taxes and trying to build tech that makes my life better.
Picking a problem like space flight avoids all the "nimbyism" from say actual nimbys but also from say Exxon.
There's an interesting fight every 4 years in Texas where billionaires who want to own a casino in Texas flood money into the state to get it approved and billionaires outside of the state who don't want to share the market flood money to counteract it. If you pick something that doesn't have a billionaire that will oppose you then your live is much easier.
Capitalism will solve the world's problems as it always has, no matter how much do-nothing authors, journalists and "social scientists" will bloviate to the contrary.
"Why don't they stop focusing on space and solve world hunger" they say, not considering the utter priviledge that they can live a safe, happy life while writing tripe contributing nothing, which is only thanks to the miracle of consumer capitalism.
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.
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.
IMO, the harm is that the weirdo billionaire who wants to do this has said that he needs a trillion dollars to accomplish it and subsequently embedded himself within an incompetent, would-be-authoritarian regime.
I want humanity to colonize Mars and space. I don't want it happening at the whim of a madman whose only concern is going down in history as the man who made it possible at any cost to society.
I'd rather NOT have that kind of technical advancement before we figure out how to make the human society a bit more equal.
With the whole world turning to the right, we are further, not closer, from that objective. I guess not everyone believes in that, but hey I'm just talking about myself.
The public is and has always been played like a fiddle.
Also I'm not sure where Rationalists or transhumanists said "it would be cool to live way longer" and you read "get rid of love." That seems like a weird failure of your own imagination. You can't have love if you're dead, so the transhumanists want you to live longer and... experience more love!
On all test flights with a payload exceeding the mass (~300 grams) of a single stuffed toy banana (for scale), the flight has failed.
Flight 7: 20,000 kg payload (starlink mass simulators) - engines fail after 7m39s
Flight 8: 8,000 kg payload (starlink mass simulators) - engines fail after 8m04s
Flight 9 is not currently planned to carry a payload.
None of this is a technicality. It is technicreality.
They just operate in different universes no matter how much you dislike the CEO.
I simply come from bad neighborhoods and the amount of times I heard "shhh, don't go there, people will see you" from guys who clearly were looking to start for trouble, was substantial in its own right.
Anecdotal evidence, sure, but from a psychological point of view the people who want to steal or harm others feel much safer doing so in the darkness, I have found.
Sure, it requires some research, engineering and a crapload of investment, but it doesn't require anything that is currently "science fiction".
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.
times a few orders of magnitude and this is the main reason to doubt a settled Mars colony.
Possibly a research outpost, but why would that be staffed by humans rather than robots?
Yet Mars is a new frontier, and endless, massive numbers of humans would go to Mars in a heartbeat.
Frankly, settlers travelling to the new world in the 1400s faced a far more dangerous journey and living conditions than a trip to Mars.
We're talking first explorers here, so many died on boats, of starvation the first year, on and on.
Modern tech does not remove said risk, but it tips the playing field.
* War stories (e.g. "How I cut GTA Online loading times by 70%" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26296339 )
* Anything by ciechanow.ski (e.g. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42443229 )
* Strange bits of personal whimsy (e.g. "I sell onions on the Internet" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19728132 )
* Neat toys (e.g. 2048, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7373566 )
Sarcasm aside, that was a bit of a pity, because even if it had no relationship to anything in 'TESCREAL', Cosmism is an interesting historical artifact. When I was in LA back in 2019, I was able to visit the Museum of Jurassic History where there was an exhibit of Tsiolkovsky stuff like drawings on how humanity might live in space, and it was much more interesting when you knew a little bit about the Cosmism background there.
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.
Today the rich pray for the singularity and freeze their bodies. And want to colonize Mars I guess.
Vanitas.
In any case, going to Mars isn't mutually exclusive with solving issues on Earth.
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.
The same event is described in the book of Mark (10:32-34) and the book of Luke (18:31-34).
There are two other predictions that appear in all three books:
Matthew 16:21-23
Mark 8:31-33
Luke 9:21-22
Matthew 17:22-23
Mark 9:30-32
Luke 9:43-45
Tangential, but you can interpret the anti-christ in christian belief to bring the alleged kingdom, as a sort of anti-fulfillment of the prophecy.
One could argue that Jesus is the book itself anthropomorphized, edited so many times by so many sinners (crossed), that whatever salvation was contained within (a prophecy, a guide, a story) is not there anymore. It only serves to spare those who changed and betrayed it (to support churches and beliefs not originally present in it).
Thus, the book died. It is said that once it briefly was brought back to life. It is a reference from the New Testament to itself. Then it died again (once a living, thriving narrative of human history constantly being augmented, now unable to be that again, eternally locked in disputes and conflicted interpretations, thus, dead).
We are just human resources.
It could be a decade long blip but since we've peaked per capita and various large nations have peaked and we have extensive research on what the causes are and active programs to mitigate those it's probably more reasonable to say that CO2 (and Greenhouse gasses generally) are growing but at a slower rate with some credible hope to reverse that growth.
Don't get me wrong it is fucked up that we partly squandered a few decades and let it get this far and things could still go badly wrong but we have enough data that we can stick to the scary facts.
If nuclear power had continued to grow at a normal rate since the 60's the developed world would all have emissions per capita in line with France.
- 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.
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).
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)
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.
Given the current geopolitical climate, it's possible we could see nation states feel an urgent need to stake their claim in order to not lose out on access to those resources forevermore. This is just as much, if not more, of an argument to colonize the Moon rather than Mars, but both are subject to the same international laws.
So this argument is: we need to get there first so we can mine it. But what can we mine? We have no evidence of anything on Mars that's valuable to mine for any reason other than Mars colonization or further space exploration.
If you don't already believe Mars colonization or space exploration are intrinsically valuable, there's no evidence of anything worth mining on Mars.
Such as?
Predicting a destructive event (flood), gathering survivors to a safe place (ark), a sacrifice (bird that does not come back) followed by a success (bird comes back revealing land is close).
It is predictive of the Bible itself. It's original version lost, only surviving pieces gathered, first testament interpretation sacrificed, new testament proven to be a fertile narrative. (sounds like a preface, doesn't it?)
It's a book of the story of the book itself. Quite a thing. Is there something about the book that is not the book itself? Well, there are coincidences such as the ones I mentioned throughout the text. A kind of ghost conceptual presence, untangible but present in the similarities between the books.
There you go. Three pieces book. Two testaments and a ghost.
But is there something else beyond it? Probably not. That's what the book says, it's not there anymore. It says right away, as someone took it right in the beginning.
Going to Mars isn't a problem or a solution to a current problem. It's just a thing that hasn't been done. I think starvation and disease could use some help from technical people. And considering the damage done by technical people with regard to inequality and authoritarianism, I would hope technical people could also contribute towards fixing the issues. Inevitable mortality is arguably a problem because if solved, would generate a whole other level of problems.
But yeah, political solutions would be amazing and technology is not the answer to everything. At least, that's how I see it.
Either these investments are not paying off, or they are and the investors have a very dark vision for us. Neither reflects very well on the investor.
You seem to have a very narrow view of the range of products that exist. Are you basically just talking about smartphones?
This sounds like the "poverty is a moral failing" argument in reverse. See eg https://unherd.com/2017/08/remembering-time-poverty-often-bl...
I am on two embryonic programs that are not viable without starship or an equivalent.
If starship exists I will be able to cash out, buy a 54-foot catamaran and spend the rest of my life sailing around the world scuba diving and spear fishing.
I want starship to exist and do not care who builds it.
It does not exist and I know this because I am currently on the third floor of a boring cookie cutter business park building right now staring at computer screens and not off the coast of Gili T doing mushrooms after a dive.
Highly doubt this is true. Everyone's rich on their wild little minds.
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 launched SLS uncrewed around the moon, there's no reason to think it would take decades of dedication to launch one again 1-way to Mars.
From there, step up to the ISS, which costs about $4B/year to maintain and operate, an order of magnitude more.
It's likely another order of magnitude (tens of billions/year) and probably more like two (hundreds of billions/year) to do the same thing on Mars.
1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Antarctic_Progra...
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.
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.
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 motivational to the intrepid adventurer.
Edit: I suppose I should have said "a few humans [permanently settled] on mars, [able to return whenever they like]" in 100 years.
It'd also be cool to send an empty rocket with auto-landing capabilities and supplies way before the manned mission, and when those Mars visitors arrive, they can move the tech needed for survival (which would've been invented/improved in-between) to the return rocket.
But that all sounds like Kerbal scenarios rather than real life ones.
This is the ultimate admission that it can't be done. Anyone sane would at least propose a free-return trajectory like Artemis 2. Even if you are crazy enough to sacrifice your astronauts on a one way trip, you would still need to practice a lot of free-return trajectories just to train your astronauts and test the hardware.
This whole idea is the stupidest thing I've heard people seriously discuss.
What would be the point?
If you want to experience "life on Mars", bury a cargo container in your back yard, and live in it for a year.
If there's some burning need to go live underground, as you would on Mars, why not just do it in Nevada? The grocery store is a lot closer.
The post at the top of this thread is correct in saying the logistics of supporting a colony on Mars would take decades, and cost billions (at least).
I'm an advocate of exploration and science, and in the modern world we have effective automation. There is NO need to send people to Mars, absolutely not in any large number.
> there's no reason the trip can't be one-way
If the crew includes elon, I am actually in favor of this...
Can you write this with a straight face? This feels like the opportunity of a life time for someone who wants to push the envelope on what is possible. Yes it will be expensive, but the tech and lessons we learn will surely be worth more. Consider all the developments from the Apollo program. This level of pessimism always shocks me, shouldn’t we rise to the challenge?
- Portugal, 1490
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.
It's very much like the reasoning problem many of us software developers face: because we're used to working in extremely complex business domains without having actual real-world domain expertise, we overestimate our understanding of those domains and thus underestimate the complexity of various domains in general. We look at problems, recognize patterns we're familiar with and think the problem is trivial to solve. Hence "second system syndrome" and all that - even when looking at software we underestimate the complexity because we see the general structure and mistake the complexity for cruft.
Orion is going to send humans past the moon this year, and could theoretically send humans to mars not much further out than that. It is literally on the Lockheed Martin website that they would like to send humans to mars sometime in the 2030s, provided they can get the funding.
I'm not involved in the project any longer, but this has been the ideal vision of the project since the mid 2010s. Currently the plan is to put people on the moons of mars, as we have no way of getting them back if we actually put people on the surface of mars.
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.
The reason to colonize Mars is to see if we can
For a lot of people that's a sufficient reason
And frankly it may be worthwhile because if we can colonize Mars we may be able to colonize a large asteroid full of resources that we need, or something else
Or create a chain of fueling station colonies on planets on the way to a new, habitable planet
Who knows. But sometimes we just should set sail and see what happens
There's a lot of interest in visiting Mars because it hasn't been done. There are a lot of exploration fans. It'll stop being novel once we've made a few visits.
Beyond a certain point, supposing that your investments continue to yield monetary returns at the cost of making others tolerate worse outcomes, it's just an indicator that you're a junkie.
Hinton at least says that other issues in Ai should be dealt with, rather than just being an Ai doomer who only fears Ai takeover he actually realizes that there are other current issues as well
At this point, how many times should we have been dead for eliezer?
Trump's dad gave him millions of dollars to start businesses and then left him somewhere near a billion when he died.
I think those are two pretty different upbringings!
She was indeed a congressional intern, but then her father died and family finances got rough, and a year later Ted Kennedy died (August 25, 2009) so she lost the job in his office.
> Following the financial crisis of 2008, tragedy struck when her father passed away suddenly from cancer. The medical bills and other growing expenses placed their home at risk of foreclosure. Alexandria pulled extra shifts to work as a waitress and bartender to support her family,
Her father seems to have been in the business of home remodeling and renovations. I haven't found any source for "owned multiple brownstones", but a little bit of house-flipping or some rental properties wouldn't be weird to see in that kind of business. Being a landlord with a mortgage doesn't necessarily mean huge wealth, and it it's easy to believe a combination of cancer treatment bills/being unable to work/2008 housing crisis could take a situation like that from comfortable to house-poor to foreclosure on upside-down loans in an awful hurry.
The actual land records that prove this are impossible to link, for reasons that are charitably described as "Monstrous incompetence of government officials".
I don't know, for both the politicians and CEOs, I sort of wonder like when do you get to say "okay I got enough out of regular life to now manage regular life for others"?. Thirty? Fourty? Fifty? So Elon is 55, but we see that simply being fifty is not enough. I'm open to having the wrong line of thinking here.
> After college, Ocasio-Cortez moved back to the Bronx and took a job as a bartender and waitress to help her mother—a house cleaner and school bus driver—fight foreclosure of their home.
That sounds pretty “real Bronx” to me.
As for her campaign:
> Ocasio-Cortez began her campaign in April 2017 while waiting tables and tending bar at Flats Fix, a taqueria in New York City's Union Square. "For 80 percent of this campaign, I operated out of a paper grocery bag hidden behind that bar,"
I don’t think there’s an age when you are “ripe” to become a politician. I think that in order to be good at it, you have to maintain contact with ordinary people and listen to their concerns. Elon sucks at it not because he’s 55 but because he thinks he knows all the answers and doesn’t care what anyone else thinks.
I like her, but to pretend that she's just some up-start from the Bronx to go against the grain is absolutely false. She was selected, groomed, and installed because she fit a profile and she is a very manufactured candidate.
Rather than trying to force a round peg into a square hole, I’d say this a case for refactoring bicameralism: one house of professionalized legal specialists and technocrats, another house chosen by rotating lottery for short stints of public service by random citizens (sortition).
Huh? You think a bartender in the Bronx wouldn't walk while living there?
the Ottomans had cut them off following the Fall of Constantinople in 1453 (or where they didn't they taxed the hell out of them).
they knew for sure there was good stuff over there, and just wanted a new way there.
we know for sure that Mars is blasted, toxic, rock ball with less metal than Earth. what great and grand spices will future explorers be returning with? the Portuguese could prove that nutmeg and silk existed...
We stopped being interested in the moon landings because they weren't doing anything new
This article talks about her dad's Bronx condo that she lived in, or claimed to live in. No offense to the people of the Bronx, but that is not a "rich" part of NYC. Units for sale in the building mentioned are rather cheap for NYC, in fact.
Apollo 17 astronauts drove roughly 12 miles in around 8 hours to get to a site and do some science. The curiosity rover's longest drive in a day is around 150 meters. If it drills a rock and encounters some difficulty, it has to wait send a reply home, wait another 4-24 minutes for the message to get there, wait 4-24 minutes for a message to come back before proceeding. It's also obviously unable to conduct repairs on itself or it's tools, or even do something as basic as cleaning the dust from itself.
Robots certainly have the advantage in longevity; curiosity has been operating since 2012 and is still going, but it's like comparing a roomba vs a team of professional cleaners. I think if you asked a planetary scientist if they'd could go back in time and instead of sending curiosity, send a couple of people for six months, they'd do it in a heartbeat.
Think of all the science the robot will get done in the decades of research and engineering necessary to figure out how to get a human there and back to do science without immediately dying.
A rover runs mostly on solar power. Humans need breathable air, food, potable water, medical supplies, stable temperatures, radiation shielding, etc etc just to survive, let alone actually do anything. Unlike sunshine, Mars has none of those things. And if any of them fail, your human rover would quickly go kaput.
It seems far more reasonable to use automation to build a livable outpost before sending a human there - especially because a human is going to need that outpost to survive anyway. So even if we want to send people to Mars eventually, automation would be step one.
PR or not, there are still skydivers and wing suit people pushing the envelope. I really don't agree with the doomerism/well actually crowd on these sorts of things, there is still the indomitable human spirit, no matter how irrational it seems. We still have field scientists that get sent to the edges of the earth to explore and find things, even when we think they have completely been explored. A friend of mine is an arctic botanist that spends 3-4m a year in the high arctic tundra doing research on plants in that biome.
There is no rational reason to want to cross the entirety of Antarctica, and yet humans have done it.
Again, the big problem here is scale. It takes a lot more resources to send someone to Mars than to Antarctica and it takes a lot more resources to keep them alive there. Your friend in the high arctic trundra probably also isn't living in collapsible tents and foraging for food - all the infrastructure available to him (even if it's just shelter) needs to be built on Mars too and is orders of magnitude more complex and more resource intense and the materials are much harder to ship and assemble - plus of course material failure is signficantly more lethal.
And she grills "witnesses" of congressional hearings the way a politician who is actually doing her work grills them. Compared to "career politicians" who are probably too busy golfing with rich "campaign donors" to read the briefing and understand the issues they need to deal with..
And well, I'm not surprised nobody knows which generation of Ai could undergo an increase causing our extinction, it's not even sure if there could exist such a thing, let alone know which generation
It is not a contradiction be confident of the outcome while remaining very uncertain of the timing.
If an AI is created and deployed that is clearly much "better at reality" than people are (and human organizations are, e.g., the FBI), that can discover new scientific laws and invent new technologies and be very persuasive, and we survive, then he will have been proved wrong.
I agree with all you are saying, and those techs can be developed. I am a tech optimist. I see these as problems to try to solve, not a list of reasons why they can't happen.
We can agree as well that it will be fantastically more expensive and yes an order of magnitude etc etc. These are engineering problems, not physics problems. Probability vs possibility in my mind. We can disagree about if the resources are worth spending (that's not my call, I vote, which doesn't seem to do much). I can't predict the future.
Another point against it is it used to be a boat with dudes sent into the unknown with no way to know what to know what was happening. This was totally affordable for imperial seafaring nations at the time relative to the cost of rockets. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heroic_Age_of_Antarctic_Explor...
After this age there was a rise in using tech to do it. (mechanical age I think?)
It will be an insane feat to pull off, and I hope it happens in our life time.
If I said so, you might ask me if I saw a doctor or something similar to make me suspect that, and that's my issue with him. He's a Sci fi writer that's scared of technology without a grasp of how it works, and that's OK. He can talk about what he fears, and that's OK. It still doesn't mean we should take him seriously just because.
My pet peeve is that when trying to make laws regarding Ai - at least in Europe - some considerations were done regarding how it worked, what it was (...), how it's being talked in academic literature. I had a lawyer in a course explaining that, and while not perfect you eventually settle on something that more or less is reasonable. With yudkowsky, you have a guy that is scared of nanotech and yada yada. Sure, he might be right. But if I had to act based on something, it would look much more the eu process to make laws and less the "Ai will totally kill us from now to 30 years trust me". Perhaps now I'm more clear
And don't get me started with the rationalist stuff that just assumes pain is linear and yada yada
At least he could learn to use some confidence intervals to make everything appear more serious /s
I'm very much in favor of research in Ai safety, maybe done with less scare and less threats of striking countries outside of the gpu limit agreement (and less bayes, God)