[HN Gopher] More Everything Forever
___________________________________________________________________
More Everything Forever
Author : c0rtex
Score : 74 points
Date : 2025-04-23 16:13 UTC (6 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.nytimes.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.nytimes.com)
| c0rtex wrote:
| Also reviewed by Cory Doctorow:
| https://pluralistic.net/2025/04/22/vinges-bastards/#cyberpun...
| cousin_it wrote:
| The phrase "grift behind AI doomerism" suggests that either the
| book author or the reviewer (or both) don't have a clue. AI
| will cause real and huge problems.
| _vertigo wrote:
| I think that depends on whether your definition of
| "doomerism" is the same as theirs.
| amarcheschi wrote:
| 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 past in philosophy. Although i do agree that
| investigating Ai dangers should be done, but in an academic
| context
| lazzlazzlazz wrote:
| Cars have killed millions of people. Add to that the
| consequences of electricity, industrialization, urbanization,
| and even capitalism itself. But billions and billions of
| people are not only better off -- living lives of outrageous
| luxury when measured against recent history -- but they
| wouldn't have existed at all.
|
| 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).
| mitthrowaway2 wrote:
| That's one vision of how things play out. But I do think
| it's possible that AI ends up killing every last person, in
| which case I think "everything good comes with tradeoffs"
| is a bit too much of an understatement.
| gusmally wrote:
| Even if AI doesn't kill every last person, I think it
| will almost certainly increase the wealth gap. I agree
| that the tradeoffs will most likely not be worth it.
| amarcheschi wrote:
| Yesterday I had someone here tell me timnit gebru didn't
| contribute to hard science
|
| She has a PhD in electrical engineering and has worked at
| Google before researching on Ai with a more philosophical
| approach
| elefanten wrote:
| Putting aside the nebulous notion "contribution to hard
| science"...
|
| 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.
| amarcheschi wrote:
| Oh, and I don't necessarily agree with all what she says, I
| don't want to know what happens when someone which 100%
| agrees with her enters the room
| owlninja wrote:
| Gift link: https://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/23/books/review/more-
| everyth...
| neonate wrote:
| https://archive.ph/liq8S
| oceanplexian wrote:
| > 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 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.
| nuancebydefault wrote:
| I don't see how solving poverty on earth can't be more
| important than the endeavor of trying with the current rather
| limited tech to inhabit an as good as inhabitable planet.
| bryanlarsen wrote:
| 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.
| LunaSea wrote:
| And both of these amounts seem to not be enough based on
| the resulting state of the world.
| bryanlarsen wrote:
| Given that world GDP is only $100T, it's impossible to
| spend significantly more. (where significant is defined
| as an order of magnitude).
| elefanten wrote:
| 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.
| FredPret wrote:
| > seem to not be enough
|
| 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"
| wyattblue wrote:
| Space exploration is merely a _technological_ problem.
| Solving poverty is a _political_ problem, one that is
| resistant to just throwing money at the problem.
| Hemospectrum wrote:
| Even if we solve poverty, we can always turn right around and
| un-solve poverty. Something like this has happened in quite
| recent memory with a whole lot of other "solved" problems.
| Luckily, we can come back from that failure and solve those
| problems all over again, _as long as we don 't go extinct_.
| ericmcer wrote:
| It depends on how you answer the question "why are we here?"
|
| 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.
| colonelspace wrote:
| There are large swathes of earth that are too inhospitable,
| like deserts. They're more accessible and easier to support
| life in than Mars, and yet no one lives there.
|
| The deserts even have breathable air.
| jayd16 wrote:
| I will say the compelling thing about Mars is that you
| wouldn't be disrupting an ecosystem to terraform it.
|
| That said, I'm definitely on the side of making Fresno a
| paradise before we try mars.
| ctoth wrote:
| I know what happens in Vegas stays in Vegas, but really?
| We're going this far with it? It doesn't even exist anymore?
| bryanlarsen wrote:
| But there are people living in the inhospitable deserts that
| have useful resources like oil. Or artificial resources like
| legalized gambling.
|
| Antarctica is even more inhospitable than deserts, and there
| are people living there for research purposes.
| colonelspace wrote:
| I'm just making the basic point that we have a wealth of
| much more hospitable places to live on earth, and somehow
| they're not viable candidates as "backup plans" for
| humanity.
|
| 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.
| bryanlarsen wrote:
| 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.
| IOT_Apprentice wrote:
| There are approaches to solving hunger and housing, however
| extremist capitalism & avoidance of paying taxes by oligarchs
| and their corporations are standing in the way of it.
| surgical_fire wrote:
| 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.
| philipkglass wrote:
| _This is, loosely speaking, the bundle of ideologies that Timnit
| Gebru and Emile P. Torres dubbed TESCREAL (transhumanism,
| Extropianism, singularitarianism, (modern) cosmism, Rationalism,
| Effective Altruism, and longtermism)._
|
| _While these are largely associated with modern Silicon Valley
| esoteric techbros (and the odd Oxfordian like Nick Bostrom), they
| have very deep roots, which Becker excavates - like Nikolai
| 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.
| bko wrote:
| 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%? 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.
|
| https://www.visualcapitalist.com/the-cost-of-space-flight/
| f1yght wrote:
| 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 have a large
| (currently vague) impact, but don't solve our long term
| relationship with our own planet.
| bko wrote:
| 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 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.
| bee_rider wrote:
| > 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).
| housebear wrote:
| 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.
| gusmally wrote:
| >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)
| mbgerring wrote:
| 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.
| elefanten wrote:
| Does it though? Maybe in absolute terms it spends "a lot" of
| thought on these things, but in relative terms it borders on
| nothing.
|
| 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?
| hotep99 wrote:
| Because the author's worldview requires him to compel other
| people to do what he wants, and if they're not doing what he
| wants that's a problem.
| ferguess_k wrote:
| Because a lot of these stuffs like longevity and advanced AI
| are going to break the human 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.
| Henchman21 wrote:
| _The media_ has taken an orchestrated turn to the right. The
| people just fall in lockstep behind because _that is what
| they're used to doing_.
|
| The public is and has always been played like a fiddle.
| ferguess_k wrote:
| Well it is the leading elites that matters. The public, as
| you said, does not really mean much.
|
| We are just human resources.
| dudeinjapan wrote:
| We can back-test the mentality of this book:
|
| - 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.
| fnordlord wrote:
| 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?
| AftHurrahWinch wrote:
| 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.
| fnordlord wrote:
| I don't agree entirely. They are different types of
| problems but I think they all can benefit from people who
| are good at solving technical problems.
|
| 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.
| bko wrote:
| 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?
| robocat wrote:
| [deleted]. Not funny
| bko wrote:
| Yes, that was the joke.
| robocat wrote:
| > 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.
| snozolli wrote:
| _What 's the harm in trying to go to mars if it results in
| decreasing the cost of space flight by 99%?_
|
| 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.
| iNic wrote:
| 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)
| moolcool wrote:
| > 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 years ago, the emotional truths resonate the
| same way.
| ctoth wrote:
| 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.
| bee_rider wrote:
| 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, 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).
| cgriswald wrote:
| 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 enemies if there is no
| real evidence, so I'm not sure AI does much at all here, except
| possibly adding some credibility for the less skeptical.
|
| 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.
| psalaun wrote:
| 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.
| bee_rider wrote:
| 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.
| dmonitor wrote:
| I can see the appeal of "colonizing mars as an extinction-
| proof backup plan", but I'm not convinced that it's a
| positive-EV play. Attempting to go to mars increases odds of
| our survival in case of earth going to shit by some amount,
| but it also increases the odds of earth going to shit due to
| the waste, energy expenditure, and missed opportunity cost of
| not solving pressing issues.
| feoren wrote:
| > 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.
| bee_rider wrote:
| 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.
| janalsncm wrote:
| Yes, we waste a ton of money on military. Historically
| (middle ages) it's been even higher as a percentage of GDP. A
| higher peace dividend would probably be good.
|
| But not all military spending was wasteful. The military and
| military adjacent orgs have invested in tons of useful R&D
| with civilian applications.
| sorcerer-mar wrote:
| > 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
|
| 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?
| alabastervlog wrote:
| Mars is extremely terrible. I don't understand why we'd
| _want_ to colonize it, versus any number of other things we
| could do with that immense effort. Visit it, sure, I guess,
| maybe, but colonize? LOL why?
| ryandrake wrote:
| There are places on Earth that are probably 3-5 orders of
| magnitude less terrible than Mars, and we don't even have a
| reason to colonize those areas. Let alone a cold, barren,
| lifeless, radiation-covered, nearly atmosphere-less rock.
| aeturnum wrote:
| 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
| 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.
| margalabargala wrote:
| 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.
| aeturnum wrote:
| 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.
| kurthr wrote:
| 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.
| margalabargala wrote:
| The goal was "get a few humans on Mars". Not the insane
| goal of "a million in 20 years".
|
| 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.
| aeturnum wrote:
| I think you're imagining a limited mission that's pretty
| far outside the tradition of space travel up 'til today.
| Consider the public reaction to Apollo 13 or Vladimir
| Komarov. Certainly, we could deliver a one-way small
| number of people more quickly, but I didn't think that's
| what we were talking about (it's certainly not what the
| article is talking about).
|
| Edit: I suppose I should have said "a few humans
| [permanently settled] on mars, [able to return whenever
| they like]" in 100 years.
| dmonitor wrote:
| We also haven't specified if we're sending _live_ humans
| to Mars. Just shuck someone onto the next rover we send
| over and call it a night.
|
| Sending a live human, or group of humans, on a suicide
| mission in the name of bragging rights as a species would
| be really bleak. I doubt you'd get much political support
| for a Mars mission without a return plan, or at least a
| sustainability plan.
| ryandrake wrote:
| Consider what it takes just to keep McMurdo Station
| (staffed by only 200-1000 people) running on Antarctica,
| and _that 's on our own planet_. I don't know what the
| cost is, but according to [1] the budget for the US's
| Antarctic program overall was $356M in 2008. And it
| depends on reliable logistics to get people and things to
| and from it.
|
| 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...
| xnx wrote:
| > Yes, of course I support space travel and settling on mars. I
| expect that,
|
| "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.
| aeturnum wrote:
| I agree that missions to colonize exoplanets should be low on
| the priority list per marginal dollar - and also I think we
| should fund such research because its popular and
| interesting. We should fund it on the lowest practical level,
| which probably means establishing a 'starter' base on the
| moon and a base on mars in the coming centuries.
| paulpauper wrote:
| There is no pleasing the NYTs or other tech critics like Wired,
| Axios, or Arts Technica. Either tech is too profit-focused, too
| focused on mundane or minutia, violates user privacy, or its
| proposals are too far-fetched or unworkable. What would be the
| perfect tech or the perfect tech company? One that makes
| minimal profits , works on products that are not too
| outlandish, does not make big promises yet is able to secure
| large investments with modest proposals.
| ctoth wrote:
| "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.
| janalsncm wrote:
| That is a much darker tone that I've ever thought of that
| passage in.
|
| 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.
| lurk2 wrote:
| > I believe Jesus also believed this
|
| 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
| alganet wrote:
| It is known that the specifics of the story were modified.
|
| 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.
| dmonitor wrote:
| Luke 17:20-37 also seems to support the idea that Jesus
| was trying to tell people the kingdom was spiritual, not
| physical. The kingdom as a concept wasn't some novel
| idea, either. Jesus was claiming he was the fulfillment
| of the messianic prophecy in Judaism. He was
| reinterpreting the prophecy, though, as a spiritual
| rather than literal liberation.
|
| 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.
| alganet wrote:
| All of these declared disputes in meaning, names and
| events is precisely what I am referring to.
|
| 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).
| blaze33 wrote:
| > 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 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!
| janalsncm wrote:
| 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 say I support billionaire pet projects. I would
| call a lot of it a misallocation of resources.
| janalsncm wrote:
| I will say that our discourse is weighted pretty heavily towards
| people who don't deserve it. Most genuine experts are careful to
| only talk about things they know, not bloviate about everything
| under the sun.
|
| 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.
| chadcmulligan wrote:
| Its not just tech bros though, anyone who's made lots of money
| from business is treated like they're the smartest person in
| the room by many people. The person who made millions from
| making a sugary drink and marketed it as something healthy is
| not necessarily pretty smart and more than likely isn't someone
| you want in charge of anything.
| thingsilearned wrote:
| Did this get removed from the home page? As I write this it was
| posted 2 hours ago with 48 points and 73 comments. Should
| definitely be on the home page. Why are we filtering content like
| this?
| bryanlarsen wrote:
| There's a "controversy filter" that downrates articles with
| more comments than points.
| codr7 wrote:
| Explains a lot, there's no such thing as substance without
| controversy.
| Smaug123 wrote:
| Basically false, I think? From the first couple of pages of
| the top-of-all-time HN posts:
|
| * 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 )
| aethrum wrote:
| If you like optimistic Sci-Fi, I would recommend the Culture
| Series. It really changed me when I read it in university.
| cousin_it wrote:
| The Culture is a world of AIs that are far better than humans
| at every task, and keep humans as basically pets out of
| sentimentality. I agree a lot of "nice" futures with AI will
| look like that, but the problem is that there are much more
| "nasty" futures than "nice". I don't see a path from AIs built
| for profit and national defense to a Culture-like future or any
| "nice" future at all. Or rather, there could be such a path but
| it would require AIs to be built for public interest already
| now.
| fullstackchris wrote:
| If I see another mention of the paper clip example I'm gonna lose
| it.
|
| Perhaps better is to kindly refer everyone to a physics 101 text
| book.
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