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I know some people here are concerned with national demographic shifts, but there's a larger and more esoteric question. Epistemic status: Deep Thoughts with Jack Handey.
If we assume that our current state of understanding the physical laws of the universe are mostly correct (especially with the feasibility of FTL space travel), it seems to me that in the medium to long term, Malthusian limits are a foregone conclusion.
At some point the lines of human population, possible food/power/water resources and our technological advancement will intersect. Could be ten billion, could be a hundred billion, could be much more, but without FTL travel, we get there someday. The obvious answer is to have less people, and there's any number of horrific ways to achieve that, and one painless one. Given our assumption, and further assuming that we want to do this the most moral way possible, zero population growth is the way to go. We don't have to kill anyone or stop fighting disease and starvation, we just have to limit everyone to two kids at a global scale. Failing FTL travel, there is a maximum number of humans that are physically, practically, and politically possible to keep alive, and we don't know what those numbers are until we hit them.
Now we're stacking assumptions, which is always a bad idea. If we accept these two basic propositions: No FTL leading to someone someday having to stop people from breeding too much. This brings us to the issue that the demographics of the world change over time, so when this event takes place will have a huge impact on what sort of humans are represented in this hypothetically fixed future population. There will be a lot more africans in ten years than there are now, and fewer europeans, but in a hundred years, or a thousand? Who knows? If the decision is outside the next few decades, it's very hard to say what the population trend lines will be. People tend to slow production as they develop economically, so the whole thing may be solved organically.
This brings us to the questions, if it happens and isn't solved organically: How long do we "hold the door" for more people at the cost of the resources available to each? Does the shifting demographic composition play any role in your decision? Should we aim for maximum diversity? Maximum resources per person? Maximum people?
Bonus question: Do you feel strongly enough about the moral correctness of your current socio-political unit to want the decision? Every day the resources get less and the people more. Someone will make the call at some point. If we defer, someone else makes it. We have our own concerns, but the Chinese have different ones, and the Russians still different ones to that. Or some future superpower nation (or group of nations) not yet in existence. Do we put the decision off as long as possible because people are getting better over time? Or do we act as soon as is possible because we think we're the best possible people to do the moral calculus? And can we trust anyone who thinks that?
No FTL travel, does not imply not getting a vast a mount of resources from space. It doesn't even imply no expansion to other star systems (although obviously it makes such expansion slower and more difficult, and any colonies set up in other star systems will be more isolated and have to be more self-sufficient).
Also even without resources from space, you could have fusion, and other new sources or improved sources of energy.
And in terms of population, projections in to the future can and often have been wrong, but we may be facing more of a problem going forward from declining population (mostly from people choosing not to have children, or to have fewer children, or to put off having children until later and then not having as many child bearing years left), rather than overpopulation for the world. Its possible the world won't hit 10 billion. Its reasonably likely it won't hit 20bil. Such numbers should be quite supportable with technological advances and continued economic growth.
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What on earth makes you think you can achieve the second clause while still having the first be true?
No, because there is no global "we" that is capable of making and enforcing that decision for non-terrible reasons in non-terrible ways.
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Are you talking about after we've tiled our light-cone with maximally efficient computronium filled with maximally flourishing post-human sentiences, or are you imagining primates flying through space in little metal spaceships and running out of water on the moons of Jupiter?
Whenever people on Reddit or its progeny (as I now must qualify) lament about the inevitable malthusian limits that physical reality will impose on us, and then attempt to extrapolate back to our current condition, I am always flummoxed by their lack of imagination about the progress of technology even within the laws of physical reality as we understand them. I have no doubt that your concerns will be consigned to the same dustbin of history as Peak Oil theorists, the original malthusians, and foretellers of the Great Horse Manure Crisis.
That's all a distinct possibility, and yet I got the answer I feared. Of all the responses to my query, only one person answered the basic question in a hypothetical scenario, and that very vaguely.
This whole thread is people arguing that the assumptions are wrong, rather than using the assumptions to think about the implications.
Yes, Malthus has been wrong 100% of the time so far. Maybe he'll be wrong forever. But, if someday he isn't, this intellectual performance doesn't make me optimistic about the ability of anyone to solve the issue. People can't even accept the parameters of a thought experiment for the purpose of arguing on the internet.
What relevance to our present circumstances does the eventual malthusian constraint of the mass-energy of our light cone after it has been converted to computronium possibly have? I guess that is the root of my confusion. I agree that "numbers so mind-bogglingly large that it's difficult in practice to distinguish them from infinity" are in fact distinguishable from infinity, but the magnitude is such that I have difficulty understanding how the distinction might have any practical relevance to the minuscule handful of billions of people who exist today, enfleshed and earthbound as we are.
I also think there's a real chance that supercluster-spanning superintelligence may well find a way through the constraint into true infinity. It's hard to estimate odds that there will ultimately be found a loophole in our physical laws, but there seem to be at least a few speculative leads even today, and it would be an act of great hubris to predict the ultimate limitations of a superintelligence whose superiority in intelligence and capability is many orders of magnitude greater above human beings today than we, today, are above ants or amoebas. So the first paragraph is applicable only in the dismal case that no such loophole can be found.
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The problem with this is that the population most likely to comply with rational limits are the high-IQ types who you would want to reproduce, while low-IQ types are more likely to carelessly continue to reproduce, so you will end up with a population even more heavily titled toward a low-IQ population that is less likely to come up with effective technological solutions to population growth and other potential crises. Instead, we need to encourage high IQ people to reproduce more in the hopes that it will blunt or harness the effects of low-IQ reproduction.
At least in Finland, the fertility rates have for some time been higher among the well-educated than those with a lower level of education. IIRC same applies to other Nordic countries.
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Remember Scott's post about how 2100 "isn't a real year"? You're making that mistake, times a thousand. The question of "based on physics, how many consciousnesses can our civilization support" has almost nothing to do with our current existence; any answer, and any pressing need to answer, is way beyond the future event horizon where the world will be unrecognizable to us.
What you're doing now is the equivalent of ancient tribes sitting by their campfire, taking a break from their stories about how the Moon Goddess hides from the Sun God, to talk about how the Fed should optimally set interest rates to avoid a recession. It's beyond pointless.
To be fair, this is approximately the same criticism I have of the AI panickers -- as though MIRI or its ilk ever had a prayer of solving Friendly AI, and as though delaying "AI capabilities" research would do anything other than give us more time to hang ourselves on some unrelated catastrophe while the hardware overhang grows.
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I don't think we do. Family planning exists, and I think people will make calculations on a per-family basis as to how many kids they can support. It won't be easy or super accurate, but people do it regardless even now.
In other words, the problem may very well take care of itself, though not perfectly.
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Whenever I feel existential dread or depression based on the inevitability of increasing entropy putting a cap on the ability of humans, or anyone else, to expand and thrive in the universe, I do find it helpful to read The Last Question by Asimov. Even with our current understanding of physics being accurate, there's the tantalizing possibility that there are further phenomena that we could eventually uncover that gives us a lot more to explore and discover and possibly escape that final fate.
That's maybe a bit misleading, since we could likely establish some kind of upper bound which we believe we absolutely CANNOT cross, and then reason backwards from that towards a 'safe zone' of population.
I'm fairly convinced that the upper limit for earth alone, if we assume tech advances continue and we manage to learn to tolerate each other enough to not do a genocide or two (LOL) is around 1 Trillion People.
We are more limited by the rate at which we can grow than the absolute, final number we could maintain.
I also don't know what the hell the demographics would look like since the introduction of genetic engineering, affordable human cloning, artificial wombs, and cybernetics means you can't really reason about what the world looks like beyond these techs since they have fat-tailed impacts. And I'm leaving out AGI because... duh.
I do think that the trope of humanity trending towards becoming a 'single' race which is just a mixture of all the current races due to interbreeding is silly along several dimensions at once.
I'm going to punt on this by saying "it'd be nice if we could give people the freedom to make their own choices within the above-discussed framework." That is, once we know the constraints, to make up some arbitrary ones "don't exceed 1 trillion people total, no single person's genetic children should be more than 5% of the total population, don't go under X% rate of genetic diversity, and do not increase the population more than 5 billion in a given year," let people choose when to have kids based on whatever conditions they find themselves in, at whatever time they find appropriate." THE FREE MARKET WILL FIX IT!
Will this mean that the future will be dominated by the hyper-fertile? Almost certainly yes. That's been the case since, I dunno, the genesis of life itself?
But if we're working off of the assumption that we'll never actually get off-world colonization, may as well let people enjoy earth as best they can according to their own utility functions rather than trying to forcibly optimize everything towards some particular metric or metrics and use top-down authority to push us there. Coase theorem tends to imply that given sufficiently low transaction costs/respect for private property rights then we can avoid tragedy of the commons and bargain away externalities, whether those be excess people, too little or too much diversity, or misallocated resources per person.
If we instead assume that we WILL eventually make it out of the planet and out of the solar system, then we're going to have a LOOOOOT of time to think about this problem and maybe solve for it, so this is genuinely a problem for our descendants, and our main goal now should be to NOT DIE so we are able to actually have such descendants.
TL;DR:
INSUFFICIENT DATA FOR MEANINGFUL ANSWER.
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I feel like, when you're talking about quadrillions of beings, our existing reasoning breaks down. That is assuming race is still going to be relevant post-singularity, which is at least highly questionable. I think skin color is going to go the way of rare dyes, where rarity used to signal social standing, but now that anyone can trivially have any dye in near any number, it's relegated entirely to aesthetic preference. - What else is there? IQ? Personal choice. Conscientiousness? Personal choice. Neuroticism? Habits? All, all, editable.
In the future, there will be a million times more white-people descendants, a million times more black-people descendants. There will be cross-blending, customization, randomization, de novo species. There will be telepaths, hiveminds, superintelligences, copyclans, and weirder things that we cannot even imagine now. I don't have an answer for you - but I'll eat my hat if the predominant moral question as we approach the physical Malthusian limit will be one of race.
Maybe! I hope so, as the best thing we can say about human progress is that we get to fail at a higher level of problem.
Then again, ingroup bias is strong, especially under threat.
Right, I think more like...
We have this picture. And it has a bunch of colored blobs on it. There's pink blobs, and brown blobs, and yellow blobs, and red blobs. What I'm saying is that we're about to open this picture in MSPaint and go absolutely hog wild on it for a billion years. It's not that ingroup bias isn't strong, it's that I doubt that there will be recognizeable racial ingroups even a century after the Singularity.
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There is also the possibility of inorganic life forms, such as beings that exist as computational consciousness and need far fewer resources and space compared to flesh and blood humans. Probably the bigger concern is social programs being run dry and inflation as a result, than the constraints imposed by the physical limits of the universe
The reason I broke those categories out was that I believe the physical, practical and politically possible numbers are all wildly different.
There's a game-theoretical aspect here. Any group can boost its future influence by breeding faster (defection, essentially). Any group that is strong enough can gather more resources for its own population, denying them to others. The political limits will be hit first in this scenario. Look how we howl about five dollar-per-gallon gas, and imagine if we were being put on strict calorie restriction to conserve resources for poorer areas. Hell, if the "poorer areas" were the nearest major city you'd see civil unrest. When the Hutus find out they're getting restricted more than the Tutsis (or vice versa), how is that gonna play out?
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Even without FTL travel, there is enough energy and material being produced in our current solar system to support an unimaginable number of humans. The Dyson sphere gets built incrementally. You just keep building new permanent space habitations ( each could support 50,000 to 1 million people) that get sent into close orbit around the sun, with an array of solar panels running at 100X the efficiency you get running solar panels on earth. Each of the habitations would have enough energy to both make its world a utopian human experience and allow for building new habitations for the colony's children. In the far future, human life will be primarily non-terrestrial, and visitors from the habitations will come on vacation to Earth and marvel at how people put up with blizzards and mosquitos and rain and other hazards of planetary life. What happens when the Dyson sphere is complete and the solar system has reached capacity of quadrillions people? We'll cross that bridge when we come to it...
Also, there is not reason you couldn't send out colonies to other solar systems even without FTL travel. The colony ships would just need to be self-sustaining habitations that would house many generations of people.
The issue with this is that without FTL there's a limit to what we can reach due to the expansion of the universe, so we're likely stuck in our local group of galaxies, where gravitational attraction holds things together.
Note that the universe doesn't expand at any fixed speed but at a speed per unit of distance, which we normally measure in kilometers per second per megaparsec (one megaparsec is about 3.26 million light years). If the expansion rate is 70 km/s/Mpc, that means, on average, an object that’s 10 Mpc away should expand away at 700 km/s; one that’s 200 Mpc away should recede at 14,000 km/s; and one that’s 5,000 Mpc away should appear to be moving away at 350,000 km/s.
An analogy that's often offered up to illustrate the expansion of the universe would be the balloon analogy, where coins are placed all over a balloon then the balloon is inflated to show that every coin will be moving away from all other coins at a rate proportional to how far away they are (note that you'll be ignoring the interior of the balloon here, this "balloon" universe is represented by the surface). The balloon analogy isn't a perfect one, since the balloon is a 2D universe and is curved whereas our universe obviously isn't 2D and also is flat, but it helps illustrate the concept. What this means is that there's some distant event horizon of sorts beyond which everything will be receding from us at a rate that means we won't ever be able to reach it.
This basically ensures that only a finite portion of the matter and energy that exists in the universe will be available to us, and eventually we'll be reaching some kind of limit assuming no Great Filter scenarios rear their head before then. Improvements in technology can only really take us so far, because eventually there'll be no more increments of efficiency to squeeze out of what we have (it seems reasonable that there will eventually be some sort of sheer physical limit we'll bump up against).
Ultimately, this pushes the problem very far down the line, but doesn't at all eradicate it.
Nah, the "reachable universe", while not as large as the "observable universe" and slowly shrinking, is bigger than that (it's something along the lines of a billion galaxies IIRC). The Local Group's only the eventual size of the reachable universe, as t -> infinity, not its current size or anywhere close.
Obviously, exponential growth will still hit the "reachable universe" eventually though.
Of course, if FTL is real then many estimates for the size of the universe boil down to "time and/or aliens are the limit, not space". 10^10^10^122 makes exponential growth go cry in a corner.
Yes, the reachable universe at the moment isn't only the Local Group. However the size of our reachable universe is premised on the assumption that we leave today, and at the speed of light. What's currently in our reachable universe is a very generous estimate as to what we can practically reach.
In retrospect the way I phrased it was probably misleading - the statement that we might be restricted to the Local Group was my extrapolation of what in practice might be our limit, incorporating my own quite pessimistic estimates as to the difficulty of achieving anything close to relativistic speeds (let alone speeds nearing that of light) as well as the difficulty of keeping a crew alive and the ship working when going at these speeds.
Given the constraints that relativity imposes, this seems like it might be unlikely absent some revolution in our understanding of physics.
EDIT: added more
Laser sail/Bussard brake. Antimatter ramjet. (The Bussard idea doesn't work as far as we know, because of the scoop's drag and the difficulties getting p-p fusion to happen in a scramjet throat, but it works as a brake - or injecting antimatter into a scramjet throat would certainly get it to burn.) Baryon number nonconservation does also seem allowed, which implies that non-antimatter-based total conversion engines could be possible. There is, indeed, trouble with keeping a ship intact in the intergalactic void given the cosmic rays, relatively-relativistic dust, and lack of new material to replace that blown off - but that's mostly an issue of building a bigger ship.
General relativity does allow for FTL in the broad sense of "get from A to B faster than light conventionally could" - the Alcubierre metric and wormholes being the most obvious. And there are some plausible answers to the time-travel problem (there's a hypothesis that attempting to convert a wormhole into a time machine would collapse it, for instance). Whether FTL's possible is an open question.
Okay now I'm getting into things I'm not too certain on (obviously IANAP), but from what I understand apparent FTL that entails the warping of spacetime is one of these things that we're not 100% sure is impossible but does pose a lot of problems. Apart from the whole "closed timelike curve" problem that these apparent FTL methods seem to create (which, granted, as you noted one can try to resolve through all kinds of difficult-to-verify chronology protection conjectures), there's also the fact that both Alcubierre drives and traversable wormholes alike require unobtainum exotic matter that at best isn't impossible but there's no evidence for its existence and at worst violates an energy condition.
So they're not exactly impossible per se, but there's reasons to believe they probably are.
Clarke's First Law is a decent heuristic, and there's no clear no-go theorem (Earnshaw's theorem is the obvious example of a theorem with a lot of important loopholes). I recall reading about somebody trying to build an Alcubierre metric using the Casimir effect, though I'm not sure how it turned out and that's well beyond my own paygrade.
Overall I'd say it's in the "maybe" category; I'm leery of saying it can be done, but at least as leery of saying the opposite.
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Is it not the case that, once we start moving towards those distant objects (in say a colony ship), the expansion behind us compensates for a growing portion of that total expansion? It's my understanding that there IS an inflection point as you describe, but we haven't reached it yet.
Perhaps "Save the Universe" is the ultimate point of the simulation we built ourselves. Seems fitting.
The case for an inflection point is pretty strong. It’s my understanding that for objects that have already crossed the boundary of the event horizon, no reduction of the distance between us and that object will occur.
Think about it this way: There are objects far enough away from you that they are moving away at a rate that exceeds the speed of light, meaning without FTL travel they will be receding from you faster than you can travel to them. The space between you and any object beyond that horizon will only increase and the further they go, the faster they recede. If you try to reach it in a relativistic colony ship, all that happens is that you’ll be stranded from your original galaxy group and will never reach the new one as your galaxy of origin passes out of your event horizon. Sure, you are closer to the object and further away from your point of origin than you would've counterfactually been, but that does not equate to closing the distance.
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The global total fertility rate was 2.4 in 2019, and has been falling since. The global replacement rate (ie. the number of babies needed to maintain the population as is - if the fertility rate is above that the population is destined to grow, if it's below it's destined to fall) was estimated as 2.3 at the same time, slightly higher than the usual 2.1 rate mentioned in these discussions since it accounts for increased baby mortality in Third World countries. As such, it's very possible that the global TFR is below replacement rate already - which would mean that we are destined to have a global population peak in the coming decades, unless the fertility rates reverse themselves.
That 2.4 also included a Chinese figure of 1.7 which is far above the true figure of 1.2-1.3 and would lower the global TFR by 0.1. Also worth mentioning that African fertility is terribly measured and could be off by a very large margin, especially recently where mobile internet penetration has increased from essentially zero to a third of the population.
We could very easily be below replacement now with no end in sight.
I find the general claims that Chinese population is overcounted by some 200 million (ie. it's 1.2 billion, not the currently stated 1.4 billion) plausible, and suspect that many other countries overcount their populations as well, particularly the African ones where population statistics are basically often more guesstimates than hard numbers and the various regional administrators have an impetus to make higher than lower guesstimates to get more funding from the central government. I wouldn't be surprised if the global population was, perhaps, 500 million lower than currently given, or even more.
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Do you have a source for that China claim?
China 2020 census
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Have you read Karlin's Age of Malthusian Industrialism? The argument is essentially that, absent a singularity, there'll be a demographic explosion as culture selects for those who reproduce quickly, with genes doing the same on a deeper level.
I'm familiar with this general argument, but it bears mentioning that this reproductive selection effect is not yet in sight, even though many Western countries have been hovering around or under the replacement rate for decades, if not a good part of a century.
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It's fairly plausible that we'll solve aging in the next century. Statistically people will still eventually die of other causes, but if you assume an average lifespan 20x what it currently is (ballpark based on accidental death rate, probably conservative since this will likely decline), then holding TFR constant the population will nonetheless be 20x as large.
And probably lifetime TFR will be substantially higher if people have centuries in which to have children. Have a 30 year career, then spend 20 family-focused years raising two kids, then 'retire' for 20 years… then do it all over again! That's a TFR of ~22 if you repeat this over a 1600 year lifespan. And that assumes people don't decide to have larger families given artificial wombs, robot childcare, and lots more material wealth.
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This is a possible future, of many. I hope it goes this way.
If fertility rates remain sub-replacement forever, that's an X-risk. I doubt this will actually happen, though.
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That's one possible future. I expect that there will never be a post-scarcity world, as humans are pretty good at creating scarcity. But that could be wrong, and only time can tell.
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Why the focus on FTL? Post-energy scarcity via technological advancement seems possible / more likely than FTL. There are a lot resources available in the solar system, no FTL required.
If the focus by technological advanced societies was on food, healthcare, water and strong borders for themselves rather than feeding the world wouldn't this sort itself through natural consequences? Aren't we already acting via various international aid and development programs? Would stopping these also be acting?
Is there evidence for people getting better over time? Better in what sense?
I want my in-group to decide and act as soon as possible in their own interests.
Compared to how many resources we're using now? Sure. With foreseeable technology we might eventually comfortably support quintillions of people in the solar system, maybe sextillions, at a high standard of living. The resource usage of Earth circa 2022 would be negligible by comparison.
Compared to how many resources we could use if we continued to increase population at 1%/year, as we did for most of the last century? Compute 1.01^3000. The solar system would be full, sextillions of spots all taken, in a few millennia. At that point non-FTL interstellar flight doesn't really relieve the pressure; a light cone's volume only grows as a cubic function of time.
Even FTL is a red herring here. FTL to the rest of the galaxy would only buy us a few millennia after the solar system is "full"; to the rest of the universe would buy a few millennia after the Milky Way is full. Packing people into some kind of computronium rather than meat for efficiency's sake might buy a few more millennia still? Got any more ideas? There's only so many millennia of exponential growth that we could buy before we hit limits to growth for the rest of the life of the universe (or we start shortening that life by burning negentropy even faster than it's currently being wasted). Productive new technology is amazing stuff, but it's hard to get more amazing than an arbitrarily large exponent. Fingers crossed for us to find some productive new thermodynamics loopholes too.
Or maybe it's silly to worry about theoretical limits with literally astronomical error bars. Maybe we'll get to post-scarcity anyway, due to population peaking rather than technology keeping up indefinitely with growth, simply because of the demographic transition finally reaching its last stragglers. "Everybody stop having too many kids despite the lack of any serious pressure stopping us" doesn't seem at all like an Evolutionarily Stable Strategy to me, but that hasn't prevented it from becoming amazingly popular so far.
There are so many things we still don't understand about the universe; I think it's virtually guaranteed that a black swan fundamentally changes our understanding of technology and how the future will progress.
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No, you're thinking of the observable universe - that from which light has reached us.
The size of the entire universe is unknown (because we can't see it), but it's presumed to be much larger. Some estimates are large enough that exponential growth is no real issue - particularly the "infinite" and "10^10^10^122" numbers (in the latter case, time is a bigger problem than space).
I was; I appreciate the correction.
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If correct, this raises the ceiling but does not remove it. FWIW, I don't know if this decision will ever get made, or need to be made. It's an interesting framework for thought experiment though.
This is probably the "correct" or most common real answer. The question then: Is your ingroup big and powerful enough to swing that? And are they (not you) smart enough to know what their interests actually are?
I agree with you, but my answers to the subsequent questions must be negative.
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The available negentropy of the universe still places fundamental limits on the number of humans that can exist. Even with absolute control over all the matter in humanity's lightcone, the accelerating expansion of the universe ensures that we will only ever have access to a finite amount of matter-energy. Even if we run everyone's consciousness is maximally efficient simulations, the total number of subjective-human-experience-years that can exist is not infinite, and eventually the malthusian condition emerges back.
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I find the arguments against moral obligations towards non-existing persons convincing, so I embrace whatever solution is best for the people of today.
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I believe your final question is the best one, and the answer is, "no, we cannot."
The tragedy of politics is that anyone who "wants the ball" in terms of decision-making is almost by definition morally incapable of a good one.
Someone who can wield power responsibly and is willing to do so is not quite a unicorn, though rare enough. As to the problem generally, the Federalist Papers are the best answer I know of, offhand. Decentralize and split power finely, set ambition against ambition, recognize inefficiency as your ally, etc. None of them are the "one weird trick" that solves corruptibility, but there are several partial hacks that keep a lid on things, if maintained.
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