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Rent-A-Cop posted:The problem with this is that no one needs a chunk of platinum the size of Texas. Spending several hundred billion dollars to crash the global mineral markets isn't a high priority for anyone. I was more talking about the cost/benefit of establishing a space colony vs a colony on Mars. I don't really care what the Earth terrestrial uses for it would be. I want the space colony for the sake of the colony not for it's utility to Earth based investors or the economy. Once we have colonies in space Earth will become irrelevant, humanity will spread further and faster than it ever has. In that context the best place to put your colony is space; not Mars. I want to advance humanity and I don't think that can be done nearly as quickly on Earth as it could in space. We have a limited amount of space and natural resource on this planet. We are already reaching the limits of its capacity. I will quote an article here: http://filmladd.com/?Overpopulation quote:Albert Einstein was born in 1879. World population at that time was approximately 1,325,000,000. We have reached the limit on the number of Einsteins we can produce. Maybe we could produce more with better education or a different social structure but we are still drawing from a finite pool. This doesn't just apply to Einsteins, but Van Gogh's, Napoleons, and Gandhis too. They are all in limited supply. If we don't want to destroy the Earths ecosystem we shouldn't really be adding too many more people. In The high frontier: human colonies in space Gerard K O'neill calculates that using the mineral contents of the solar system to their maximum utility we could support a population in the hundreds of trillions. Imagine what a society with thousands Einsteins or Van Gogh's could produce! Rutibex fucked around with this message at 08:33 on Apr 23, 2014 |
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Apr 23, 2014 07:47
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...Except human population will stabilize around 9-10 billion. When Einstein was born most humans lived in abject poverty and as education has increased so have average human IQ levels. If we could get a hundred trillion humans sustainably that would be interesting but I don't see how you could get enough humans to willingly procreate up to that number unless you started creating humans in labs. Birth rate is a function of economic wealth.
America Inc. fucked around with this message at 09:13 on Apr 23, 2014 |
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Apr 23, 2014 08:47
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Negative Entropy posted:...Except human population will stabilize around 9-10 billion. When Einstein was born most humans lived in abject poverty and as education has increased so have average human IQ levels. If we could get a hundred trillion humans sustainably that would be interesting but I don't see how you could get enough humans to willingly procreate up to that number unless you started creating humans in labs. Birth rate is a function of economic wealth. I don't think the question of why advanced societies have diminishing birth rates has been definitely answered. Correlation is not causation. If it where just a function of material wealth then the Industrial and Green revolution would have resulted in a decline in population. It didn't, it created the greatest population boom in history. I think it has more to do with the social structure that wage labor creates; not material wealth but that is just speculation.
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Apr 23, 2014 09:39
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Nessus posted:We do not choose to do these things because they are easy, but because they are hahd. Actually the US chose to do these things because they wanted to prove that they got a bigger dick than the reds, but that doesn't sound as nice as a soundbite.
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Apr 23, 2014 10:09
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Cerebral Bore posted:Actually the US chose to do these things because they wanted to prove that they got a bigger dick than the reds, but that doesn't sound as nice as a soundbite. So we really did go to the moon to prove that it's hard 
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Apr 23, 2014 10:23
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Rutibex posted:I don't think the question of why advanced societies have diminishing birth rates has been definitely answered. Correlation is not causation. If it where just a function of material wealth then the Industrial and Green revolution would have resulted in a decline in population. It didn't, it created the greatest population boom in history. As the value of labor goes up along with education - particularly women's labor - so does the relative cost of having a child. There's no escaping this. The green and industrial revolutions occurred when women were still mostly confined to the home so the added wealth just made it more affordable to have more children because you didn't forego any earnings or opportunities. People just got more money and chose to spend it on children. Today if you have more children not only does cost go up and they are much higher per child now than then, your earnings are likely to go down as well. The dynamic is very different. I'm not sure what you mean by social structure but even in welfare states where the cost of children are much lower and you don't have to worry about college tuition or healthcare and you get maternal leave - birth rates are still quite low. Relative to countries like the US it's much more affordable to focus on family at the expense of your career but that's not what's happening. The number of people who chose to have no children are on the rise and the number of women who chose to have children without a mate is also on the rise and they are much, much less likely to have more than 1 child. What change in the social structure do you envision that could change this trend?
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Apr 23, 2014 11:23
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Anosmoman posted:I'm not sure what you mean by social structure but even in welfare states where the cost of children are much lower and you don't have to worry about college tuition or healthcare and you get maternal leave - birth rates are still quite low. Relative to countries like the US it's much more affordable to focus on family at the expense of your career but that's not what's happening. The number of people who chose to have no children are on the rise and the number of women who chose to have children without a mate is also on the rise and they are much, much less likely to have more than 1 child. What change in the social structure do you envision that could change this trend? By social structure I mean the material incentives mothers face. Like you said the value of children is much diminished in a world where women are educated and need the time they would spend raising children to further their career. But this would be very easy to counter as a matter of public policy if you wanted a population boom. Simply figure out what the average material difference is between a successful career woman and a mother and award a lifetime pension to women based on the number of children they have. A social structure like ancient Sparta would also help with the birth rate. In Sparta only very young children are taken care of by their mothers. Once a child becomes a certain age they are forced to the state school and they are no longer their mothers responsibility. We might find that barbaric but it allowed the Spartan women a degree of freedom in their society that was unmatched in the ancient or medieval world. Centralization of childcare would also be of huge economic benefit, you would need much less labor per child. Also because this is a sci-fi thread: we can grow them in vats
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Apr 23, 2014 16:09
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To be clear the 'cheaper' bit was me being flippant. That quote is a little out of context anyway, as I was talking about building a space colony(fuckoff hard and far in the future, probably pointless) compared to fixing humanity's problems both socially and ecologically(probably impossible on any reasonable timeline). If anybody thinks building a permanent space colony is a smaller undertaking than solving humanity's humanity, then well, I wish I had your optimism. EDIT: It's not important to what I said, but I also never meant 'sustainable' to mean 100% efficient and running on magic. Nothing is 'sustainable' if that's the way we're interpreting that word.
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Apr 24, 2014 06:26
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TerminalBlue posted:To be clear the 'cheaper' bit was me being flippant. That quote is a little out of context anyway, as I was talking about building a space colony(fuckoff hard and far in the future, probably pointless) compared to fixing humanity's problems both socially and ecologically(probably impossible on any reasonable timeline). I'm with you on everything except for TerminalBlue posted:probably pointless It'll also be necessary to work on our problems at home to ever make it feasible, but that should be obvious.
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Apr 24, 2014 06:52
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The Protagonist posted:This is tantamount to saying all of human endeavors and existence is equally pointless, which in a broad sense I guess everything could be, but as long as you assume living, learning and creating have any intrinsic value than the eventual colonization of space is implicitly part of that endeavor. I didn't really mean it, I just lazily typed that as shorthand for 'not something that is not likely to get a positive monetary RoI within a generation or two's time'. Which from most of my discussions about space-related stuff pretty much translates directly to 'pointless' for most people.
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Apr 24, 2014 07:49
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TerminalBlue posted:To be clear the 'cheaper' bit was me being flippant. That quote is a little out of context anyway, as I was talking about building a space colony(fuckoff hard and far in the future, probably pointless) compared to fixing humanity's problems both socially and ecologically(probably impossible on any reasonable timeline). Not picking on you - I wish people who said this got specific. It seems like it means 'this is a low-utility expenditure, compared to a GMI/cap and trade/policy du jour'. That's a fine argument, we live in a world of extreme scarcity. It kind of reminds me of 'you contribute to your alma mater? don't you know Africans need bed nets?' But sometimes it's phrased as 'we need to do x before we explore space', as if it's a technical prerequisite. Or, rephrased, 'x would lead to more space exploration'. This is a more interesting argument! One particularly interesting x is state control of production and planning. The Soviets did not shy from big technical projects - after winning the space race, they tried to divert rivers into floodplains with atomic bombs, tried to end world hunger by growing spirulina in lakes and oceans, built MIR, and tried orbital solar power to end energy scarcity. There's no law that says capitalism can't achieve that, too, but is there any doubt that Soviet state capitalism was a better system for space exploration?
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Apr 24, 2014 16:18
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Dystram posted:Well, at some point we might want to expand beyond our solar system, so it might be good to figure out how to live in space to a certain extent. Why? There's nothing within many dozens of light years that is worth going to so we'd be doing it "just because". DrSunshine posted:Wow. Mainly because they need some way to extract cash from gullible investors. Asteroid mining is many lifetimes away. Then again this whole thread is fairly pointless speculation because when/if any of it does happen the technology people will be working with would appear as majics to people currently living. At least there isn't someone going on about space elevators, cause that poo poo is never gonna happen. Honestly the storyline of mass effect is more plausible than the stuff a lot of people are coming up with.
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Apr 25, 2014 15:28
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It'd be really interesting if someone attempted something like Biosphere 2 again. You'd think that developing some kind of enclosed, self-sufficient environment on Earth would be good practice for doing so in space.
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Apr 25, 2014 16:30
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enbot posted:Why? There's nothing within many dozens of light years that is worth going to so we'd be doing it "just because". I don't think we can say with certainty that "there's nothing worth going to". We really don't know much about stellar systems outside our own. We know a fair amount about the stars, but we know little about their planets. We can deduce the presence of some planets, make educated guesses about their composition, and that's about it. Honestly, given the sheer number of stars just in our little corner of the Milky Way I'd be amazed if we didn't find at least one planet worth taking a closer look at, for one reason or another, and the speed-of-light communication barrier ensures that we'd have to physically send people out there if we want to do anything more complex than automated, preset measurements.
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Apr 25, 2014 17:29
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Honestly while colonizing other star systems would be worth even if just as a safeguard against something going terribly wrong in our solar system it has so many apparent and unforeseen problems that we have no way yet even to imagine how to solve that it's an irrelevant point in the medium run. Especially since when we start tapping even a fraction of the low hanging fruits (by comparison) close to home such as orbital power generation or asteroid mining it will be such radical game changer that anything beyond that is pure speculation.
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Apr 25, 2014 17:41
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All of us are gonna die before the really cool stuff happens. 
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Apr 25, 2014 17:49
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Fojar38 posted:All of us are gonna die before the really cool stuff happens. This is why pursuit of space travel is silly when there is the much more pressing problem of ending death. After that we have plenty of time to figure out whatever in space.
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Apr 25, 2014 17:52
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Jeffrey posted:This is why pursuit of space travel is silly when there is the much more pressing problem of ending death. After that we have plenty of time to figure out whatever in space. Ending death is impossible, but even putting that aside it's a stupid idea. It would really make resource use exponentially grow unless people stop having kids, and that would bring a whole bunch of issues in and of itself too. Plus you'll always have a segment of the population who just wants to die, either at 50 or 100 or 500 or 1000. Ideally what you want is a stable system - equal numbers of people going in and going out. The only variable is how many people you want in the system at any one time. Once you have that, it's fairly trivial to keep a constant or at least very slowly growing population.
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Apr 25, 2014 18:06
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computer parts posted:Ending death is impossible, but even putting that aside it's a stupid idea. It would really make resource use exponentially grow unless people stop having kids, and that would bring a whole bunch of issues in and of itself too. Plus you'll always have a segment of the population who just wants to die, either at 50 or 100 or 500 or 1000. This is status quo bias. Do you imagine you could convince an alien race without death to adopt it? Population already grows exponentially, just with a different exponent, and it responds to things like crowding and resource usage - obviously birth patterns would change a lot when creating a new human is a permanent thing, as they have as societies have industrialized. I could accept that some amount of the population will want to die at some point but that should be treated like anyone else expressing suicidal thoughts. I don't think it's impossible either - brains/minds are physical objects that can be mapped and built, it's just a matter of figuring it out. I can't claim to know when that sort of thing would happen or what the results would look like, but if random chance/natural selection managed to build brains on its own, I think we could apply them and just go one step further into copying them.
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Apr 25, 2014 18:12
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Jeffrey posted:This is status quo bias. Do you imagine you could convince an alien race without death to adopt it? Population already grows exponentially, just with a different exponent, and it responds to things like crowding and resource usage - obviously birth patterns would change a lot when creating a new human is a permanent thing, as they have as societies have industrialized. No, it's only "exponentially increasing" if you're only counting total number of births. As related to net population, populations in the industrialized world are Logarithmiclly growing. They did grow by a lot but now they're mostly stable. Stable is good because we know how to work with a population of X that has remained constant for Y years rather than one that's constantly increasing/decreasing/etc. It's just about predictability. quote:I could accept that some amount of the population will want to die at some point but that should be treated like anyone else expressing suicidal thoughts. I mean the whole "voluntary euthanasia" thing is a pretty big issue in some regions (mostly progressive regions for obvious reasons). quote:I don't think it's impossible either - brains/minds are physical objects that can be mapped and built, it's just a matter of figuring it out. I can't claim to know when that sort of thing would happen or what the results would look like, but if random chance/natural selection managed to build brains on its own, I think we could apply them and just go one step further into copying them. That's not ending death though, that's copying. Death is entropy, it's everything but one/a few specific configurations of your body. Arguably "you" cease to exist when the copy is made and the original disappears. The other issue is that copies aren't perfect. That's how Evolution works - a trait is copied wrong, and you get something new. Eventually people will "die", if only because their copy can no longer be processed correctly.
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Apr 25, 2014 18:19
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Fojar38 posted:All of us are gonna die before the really cool stuff happens. Don't worry, I'm sure the asteroid miners a hundred years hence will be saying the same thing about the dudes getting to build colonies on Titan in their future, and then those future Titan inhabitants will be saying the same thing about the lucky devils getting to travel to Alpha Centauri hundreds of years from their time, and then those guys will be saying the same thing about their descendents living in an truly interstellar society with warp drives and sexy green aliens a la Star Trek. My guess is this feeling of 'future generation envy' would continue until we reach a level of development akin to the Q or Clarke's monolith aliens, since what could be better than being a god?
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Apr 25, 2014 18:24
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Fojar38 posted:All of us are gonna die before the really cool stuff happens. Chin up! The On a serious note, the fact that there's so much money to be made from asteroid mining gives me hope that it might be coming sooner than we think. Still a long way off and probably not quite within my lifetime, but someday.
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Apr 25, 2014 18:25
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Jeffrey posted:This is status quo bias. Do you imagine you could convince an alien race without death to adopt it? Population already grows exponentially, just with a different exponent, and it responds to things like crowding and resource usage - obviously birth patterns would change a lot when creating a new human is a permanent thing, as they have as societies have industrialized. I could accept that some amount of the population will want to die at some point but that should be treated like anyone else expressing suicidal thoughts. I can't wait to add the "So You've Turned One Thousand" module to my annual suicide prevention training.
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Apr 25, 2014 18:26
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computer parts posted:The other issue is that copies aren't perfect. That's how Evolution works - a trait is copied wrong, and you get something new. Eventually people will "die", if only because their copy can no longer be processed correctly. That's not very different then what happens now. You're not the same person you were a decade ago. Your neurons have been replaced, they've destroyed old connections and made new ones. Some of the stem cells are carrying a number of transcription errors. It's not really 'death'. A mind isn't like a photo being xeroxed repeatedly. The change in the system introduced by the transcriptions of a mind wouldn't be anywhere near the changes introduced by a mind doing what it normally does.
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Apr 25, 2014 18:58
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computer parts posted:Ending death is impossible, but even putting that aside it's a stupid idea. Do you mean ending all forms of death, or ending natural death? Because there isn't any reason to think that the latter will never be possible. Not in the sense of copying our minds into other bodies or something, but in the sense that our understanding of genetics/biological processes is rapidly improving and there isn't any reason why we we couldn't potentially alter humans/other organisms in such a way that the biological processes involved in death just don't occur. While there are very good reasons to think that something like FTL travel is impossible, the same isn't really true of eliminating natural death. Of course, if it ever did become possible it would only be made available to a small percent of the population and probably wouldn't have a notable impact on the vast majority of people.
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Apr 25, 2014 20:56
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Jesus poo poo dudes, ending death is literally impossible as the universe itself will dissolve itself into a cold, dark emptiness eventually because entropy. Also, unless you shut yourself into some bunker and avoid all human contact, the probability of dying because of some freak accident or deliberate act of violence will become pretty drat high as the centuries rack up, so even ending biological death or whatever isn't going to guarantee immortality.
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Apr 25, 2014 21:52
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Cerebral Bore posted:Jesus poo poo dudes, ending death is literally impossible as the universe itself will dissolve itself into a cold, dark emptiness eventually because entropy. Hey man, it need to be forever, it just has to be long enough for Multivac to work that poo poo out for us. Which did supposedly take it a little time.
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Apr 25, 2014 21:56
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Look, you're all wrong, humanity will have learned to control our own biological drives and motivational mechanisms long before it's learned to overcome scarcity, let alone interstellar travel. There is no pressure innate to civilization that drives expansion into space, at least not for our species. It's basically the same argument as the why-would-post-scarcity-singularity-bother-with-this one, but much bleaker, because it won't be post-scarcity anything, just post-bothering. The first global conflict that takes place after someone finds a way to mass-pacify populations, all of this talk ends. Whatever may or may not colonize space after that point might as well be alien. We wouldn't be able to understand it, we can make no predictions about it.
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Apr 25, 2014 22:22
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down with slavery posted:Yeah and it failed miserably. This is on earth where you just get gravity for free. The idea of building a "sustainable" space habitat (no supplies necessary from the outside?) is literally insane and anyone talking about the "cost" of such a thing is full of poo poo. Just because it wasn't feasible then doesn't mean it always will be  Failure is the first step to success.
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Apr 26, 2014 05:24
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Frostwerks posted:Just because it wasn't feasible then doesn't mean it always will be His point about it being easier to build underwater habitats is completely valid, though. What is the benefit to building a sustainable space habitat that couldn't be attained more easily by building an underwater habitat? Both would be really difficult, but building a sustainable space habitat would undoubtedly be a lot *more* difficult. People only bring up the idea of a space habitat because that's what they've seen in science fiction, etc. If humans ever faced the problem of running out of land living space, it would make more sense to consider habitats on/in the oceans than in space.
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Apr 26, 2014 22:55
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Fojar38 posted:All of us are gonna die before the really cool stuff happens. At least we have lived to see the greatest invention of Man: anime.
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Apr 26, 2014 23:47
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Mr. Wynand posted:Look, you're all wrong, humanity will have learned to control our own biological drives and motivational mechanisms long before it's learned to overcome scarcity, let alone interstellar travel. There is no pressure innate to civilization that drives expansion into space, at least not for our species. It's basically the same argument as the why-would-post-scarcity-singularity-bother-with-this one, but much bleaker, because it won't be post-scarcity anything, just post-bothering. The first global conflict that takes place after someone finds a way to mass-pacify populations, all of this talk ends. Whatever may or may not colonize space after that point might as well be alien. We wouldn't be able to understand it, we can make no predictions about it. To be more serious, how realistic is my previous suggestion that humans mold their bodies (not minds) and metabolisms to better endure scarcity? I am really curious as to how genetic engineering of humans and biomodification can get humanity to evolve out of scarcity. Obviously genetic engineering and biomodification will only be available to the wealthy for several decades, but the technology could move down as it depreciates like any other technology. E: And I mean changing the body in the sense of needing less resources to sustain oneself and a greater hardiness towards hostile environments that can allow humans to do colonization without building habitats. VVV What a useful post! How do threads work??? America Inc. fucked around with this message at 01:01 on Apr 27, 2014 |
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Apr 27, 2014 00:20
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who cares
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Apr 27, 2014 00:53
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Negative Entropy posted:"It is every citizen's final duty to go into the vats, and become one with all the people." Well you'd probably need both modified minds and bodies because right now I might be physiologically able to survive in all sorts of places, but I'd much rather curl up in front of my fireplace under my favorite blanket and internet the night away, and I will actively fight for my right to continue doing so. Like if we're going to space I'm bringing my blanket is what I'm saying.
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Apr 27, 2014 03:13
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Ytlaya posted:His point about it being easier to build underwater habitats is completely valid, though. What is the benefit to building a sustainable space habitat that couldn't be attained more easily by building an underwater habitat? Both would be really difficult, but building a sustainable space habitat would undoubtedly be a lot *more* difficult. People only bring up the idea of a space habitat because that's what they've seen in science fiction, etc. If humans ever faced the problem of running out of land living space, it would make more sense to consider habitats on/in the oceans than in space. As least in terms of building structures, dealing with vacuum is a hell of a lot easier than designing for miles of head pressure. I did a quick calc, the pressure delta ratio between the average ocean floor and outer space is 360x.
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Apr 27, 2014 09:14
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Ytlaya posted:His point about it being easier to build underwater habitats is completely valid, though. What is the benefit to building a sustainable space habitat that couldn't be attained more easily by building an underwater habitat? Both would be really difficult, but building a sustainable space habitat would undoubtedly be a lot *more* difficult. People only bring up the idea of a space habitat because that's what they've seen in science fiction, etc. If humans ever faced the problem of running out of land living space, it would make more sense to consider habitats on/in the oceans than in space. Which we will literally never, ever face. Given that both scyscrapers and underground habitats are both possible and vastly cheaper than either underground or seafloor habitats and combined with the fact that we've literally got a bazillion square miles of undeveloped land here on earth, we will never run out of physical space for habitation. poo poo, we'd hit the maximum carrying capacity of the planet long, long before we'd hit any physical limit on places where we can build houses.
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Apr 27, 2014 09:46
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So let's just say that we, somehow, overcome the immense engineering and technological barriers to having some form of big-rear end space colony. How do you deal with the almost zero tolerance for disasters in space? Like, on earth bad poo poo happens in cities all the loving time. Huge fires, devastation by weather patterns, a powerout on the entire eastern seaboard, whatever. If we have cities in space, then bad poo poo will happen up there, but the end result will be the destruction of the majority of last decade's gdp and everyone up there dying. Plus the debris hitting earth and whatever. I just can't see how you get around the fact that if disaster strikes in space, everyone dies.
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Apr 27, 2014 10:39
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Cerebral Bore posted:Jesus poo poo dudes, ending death is literally impossible as the universe itself will dissolve itself into a cold, dark emptiness eventually because entropy. The heat death of the universe is long enough away that if you compressed all time from the Big Bang to then into a single year we'd currently be somewhere between 1 and 2am on January 1st. It's such a stupidly unimaginable distance away that worrying about it as a problem seems pretty hyperopic to me.
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Apr 27, 2014 12:58
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vegetables posted:The heat death of the universe is long enough away that if you compressed all time from the Big Bang to then into a single year we'd currently be somewhere between 1 and 2am on January 1st. It's such a stupidly unimaginable distance away that worrying about it as a problem seems pretty hyperopic to me.
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Apr 27, 2014 15:40
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Negative Entropy posted:Yeah I'm sure humanity could figure something out in a 100 trillion years, especially if the multiverse is real. This makes me realise I was thinking of the amount of time until stars stop forming in my last post; the actual heat death of the universe is predicted at more than a googl years away. It never comes up as a thing for some reason, but the universe is in its very, very early days.
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Apr 27, 2014 17:36
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