pusher_robot
PLEASE GO STAND BY THE STAIRS
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User ID: 278
pusher_robot
PLEASE GO STAND BY THE STAIRS
2d ago
Is this soft power?
pusher_robot
PLEASE GO STAND BY THE STAIRS
2d ago
I disagree with this take. The natural human tendency will be to either invest it conservatively or spend it on lifestyle. For a person with that kind of wealth to plow ~100% of it on self-run high-risk, high-reward business ventures is actually quite rare and should be lauded.
pusher_robot
PLEASE GO STAND BY THE STAIRS
2d ago
No you're not crazy. Not only is our GDP much larger now, we also spend much more of it on welfare than we used to. Yes, at levels that even approach western Europe. That doesn't prevent people from being jealous, though. Even under hard core communism, the preternaturally jealous personality will covet the smallest things with equal resentment.
pusher_robot
PLEASE GO STAND BY THE STAIRS
2d ago
But over all this time, I've kinda synthesized a superstructure that I don't think is gonna change, that I think is not on the left right axis, but on another mysterious plane: I'm jealous of china.
Any ideology rooted in jealousy is likely to be catastrophic in its application to society.
And yet people voluntarily sign up to live on submarines for stretches at a time, under military rules and discipline, and with the knowledge that other people may try to deliberately kill them. I think you are engaging in far too much typical-mind fallacy.
I also think that you would only need a relatively small cadre of pioneers to establish the core infrastructure that would enable building out more comfortable living for larger numbers of people. Submarines are unusually cramped due to the tremendous forces needed to protect the low-pressure space. Using cut-and-cover construction, building larger-volume spaces is fairly straightforward (and structurally easier than on Earth due to the lower gravity).
pusher_robot
PLEASE GO STAND BY THE STAIRS
3d ago
Like what?
pusher_robot
PLEASE GO STAND BY THE STAIRS
3d ago
Short of a nuclear war, this is the worst our space capabilities will ever be.
There is no way of knowing this. This was also true in 1973, and then until very recently, it wasn't for a long time. That recent change was not guaranteed. It could only take a relatively minor slowdown in global economic growth to make spaceflight uneconomical if not impossible, and while the whole of human history is one long mostly-continuous rise in technological capability, past performance is no guarantee of future results, as they say.
pusher_robot
PLEASE GO STAND BY THE STAIRS
3d ago
Most gold on Earth doesn't physically change hands, it just sits around in bank vaults being traded electronically
Is this true? Gold is highly useful in a variety of both jewelry and commercial applications.
pusher_robot
PLEASE GO STAND BY THE STAIRS
3d ago
Why? The constraints of reality will be more severe, but it's not obvious to me why bureaucracy would be a priority in such a location. Leaving efficiency on the floor for the sake of feel-good regulations is exponentially more expensive.
pusher_robot
PLEASE GO STAND BY THE STAIRS
3d ago
Both of these "sealed" examples occur on Earth, shielded from radiation, and in moderate ambient temperatures. This will not be the case on Mars, nor on the 9 month journey to the Red Planet.
A Mars settlement would never be sealed in any sense of the word. It would be pressurized, but unlike the Biosphere experiments there is no reason or expectation of a fully recycled or self-sustaining ecology. If you need more oxygen inside your pressurized volume, you just go out and get it from the surrounding environment. If you have too much CO2 in your volume, you dump it into the surrounding environment. This is less like operating a miniature biosphere than maintaining the environment in a submarine. The only limiting factor is how much energy you have available to work on resource utilization.
Now obviously for the entire settlement to be self-sufficient in all aspects, you will probably need to grow crops of various sorts, but again, this is more akin to standard industrialized farming, where you can avail yourself of all kinds of resource inputs and discard unwanted outputs. There is no requirement that they operate in perfect balance.
This relieves a lot of the "population pressure" to colonize space, but also indicates a collapse in the narrative of progress that underpins the whole rationale that would lead us to even want to do such an absurd thing
Disagree. The population was far lower in the 19th century, but that didn't prevent relentless pressure to settle the entire continent. Aside from simple population pressure, there is also the inherent freedom of the frontier, which will always be attractive to people who chafe under the rules and expectations of settled society, which appear to only ever increase over time.
pusher_robot
PLEASE GO STAND BY THE STAIRS
4d ago
I would not rule out the chance to preserve a nucleus of human specimens. It would be quite easy...at the bottom of...some of our deeper mineshafts. Radioactivity would never penetrate a mine some thousands of feet deep, and in a matter of weeks, sufficient improvements in drilling space could easily be provided.
No, the desire to create more wealth and power is not necessarily rooted in jealousy. I don't go to work and save my money because I'm jealous of other people that have houses and cars. I do it because I want these things for myself, independent of what other people do or don't do. Because having those things is better than not having those things. That's a totally different motivation.
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