Much as I'd like to think humans-in-space in large numbers will become a reality any time soon, I don't see it happening in the kind of time frame it offsets the dangerous growth curve we're on.
The cost to keep one human alive in space is logistically incredibly expensive. It'll get cheaper the more infrastructure we put up there, sure, and eventually we may see space-based colonies become self-sufficient. But I don't see it happening any time soon.
Meanwhile, current projections suggest that ~2050, human population is going to get very hard to maintain. Even if we could get 100,000 people living in space by then it would be a drop in the ocean.
It occurs to me that a lot of the problems about moving the human race into space involve logistics. Which makes me happy we have a guy working on this who is an absolute genius at logistics.
I would prefer billions. Why do we consider growth a good thing? Why can't we challenge it? Wouldn't it be easier and better to improve the life of a constant number instead of trying to make room for always more and more people and try to make their lives minimally comfortable?
I suppose there's always the argument for survivability. The greater the number of humans and the more distributed we are, the greater chance we (that is, humanity in general) has at surviving.
Well, growth has some advantages: more people means more minds, more ideas, and improved technologies. There's 20 times as many people on Earth now as a thousand years ago, but our lives are more comfortable. Sustainability is the key word that we want to focus on; if we expand into the Solar System before figuring out how to not consume net resources, we could use up the whole system and then really be stuck.
I'll get behind that argument once 100% of our population is educated and living comfortably, contributing to arts and science. And yes, living sustainably too, even if I suspect this particular goal will be easier to reach than the others.
I agree with his assertion that a space-rated nuclear reactor is necessary. I think that in order to be self-sufficient, humans have to be able to make their own little sun wherever they go.
Well, sure. But they had to hurry up and live in space. Sticking with spec-fiction, wouldn't it be preferable to start work on this sort of thing before the moon explodes (or some more likely scenario makes the Earth uninhabitable by humans)?
I understand the reasoning against this line of thought and I'm well aware that "not putting all eggs in one basket" is a common motivation for investing in off-earth colonization. That said, I took Seveneves to be a fun, occasionally tedious story of how crappy it would be even if we did everything "right" on short notice. Starting the process before we have a deadline would theoretically help to avoid the crunch that led to much of the issues in that novel.
I think space is cool. Like, really, really, cosmically cool.
But before we go ahead with mass colonization, could we maybe prove that we can take care of _this_ planet, reach sustainable living and responsibility stewardship, and stand half a chance of not completely junking up the rest of the planets too?
I would add to that request that we can take care of all the humans we've already got and ensure everyone has awesome standard of living and equal opportunities before we go trying to hit trillions of people.
“I wish there were a trillion humans in the solar system. Think how cool that would be. There would be so much dynamism with all of that human intelligence. You’d have a thousand Einsteins at any given moment—and more.
This one sentence nails everything wrong with the expansionist mindset: we could have a 1000x as many active geniuses as we do now, and all that dynamism and intelligence with our current population if we could just figure out how to better organize the society that we have, stop wasting resources on things that don't matter (like most of the crap Amazon sells), and stop grinding people into dust (the the people toiling in Bezos's warehouses, for example) for the sake of short-term gain, vindictiveness or simple neglect.
That's where our future lies. Not in throwing in the towel, and simply scaling the current social model out by 1000x.
I agree. I think the biggest thing that needs to be fixed is the monopolization of capital be it IP, land, or factories. At some point the ownership of these things should be held in common at the very least. After that, I think the rest of the social order will fall into place because it's the lynch pin that keeps the rest where they are.
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[ 1.7 ms ] story [ 67.2 ms ] threadI want to hear more about that as an alternative to terrestrial limits to growth based paradigms.
The cost to keep one human alive in space is logistically incredibly expensive. It'll get cheaper the more infrastructure we put up there, sure, and eventually we may see space-based colonies become self-sufficient. But I don't see it happening any time soon.
Meanwhile, current projections suggest that ~2050, human population is going to get very hard to maintain. Even if we could get 100,000 people living in space by then it would be a drop in the ocean.
I understand the reasoning against this line of thought and I'm well aware that "not putting all eggs in one basket" is a common motivation for investing in off-earth colonization. That said, I took Seveneves to be a fun, occasionally tedious story of how crappy it would be even if we did everything "right" on short notice. Starting the process before we have a deadline would theoretically help to avoid the crunch that led to much of the issues in that novel.
But before we go ahead with mass colonization, could we maybe prove that we can take care of _this_ planet, reach sustainable living and responsibility stewardship, and stand half a chance of not completely junking up the rest of the planets too?
This one sentence nails everything wrong with the expansionist mindset: we could have a 1000x as many active geniuses as we do now, and all that dynamism and intelligence with our current population if we could just figure out how to better organize the society that we have, stop wasting resources on things that don't matter (like most of the crap Amazon sells), and stop grinding people into dust (the the people toiling in Bezos's warehouses, for example) for the sake of short-term gain, vindictiveness or simple neglect.
That's where our future lies. Not in throwing in the towel, and simply scaling the current social model out by 1000x.