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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   32879 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 10, 2022

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There are a lot resources available in the solar system, no FTL required.

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.

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.

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).

No, you're thinking of the observable universe - that from which light has reached us.

I was; I appreciate the correction.

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