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Notes -
I think that the main difference between a Mars base and AGI is that we have quite a good understanding of the physical constraints of a Mars base.
While SpaceX might have changed the economics of rockets by recycling them, the underlying physics and engineering constraints have been known since ca. 1950. We know what exhaust velocities we can reach, what the delta-v requirements for travelling to Mars are and so on. Absent black swans such as "someone invents a portal gun", we know that the way our constraints work out is very unfavorable, with rather small error bars.
For artificial intelligence, we very much have no underlying theory. We are Daedalus in a world where it turns out that you can craft wings from feathers and beewax which enable a human to fly. While some have been warning that we might get the Bad Ending if we soar to high, the truth in that analogy is that we have no comprehensive theory of heavier than air flight, aerodynamics, composition of the atmosphere and all that. In that world, asking if a man with wings can reach the moon is a question whose answer is purely an error bar, we just don't know. We notice the skulls of the Naysayers before us who had declared that feathers will not stop a man from falling, then that people can only glide downwards, then that sure, by flapping their wings a lot, they can gain a few meters, but surely not more than 50m, and are reasonably reluctant that to declare that the Moon is forever out of reach. On the other hand, in the real world, most straight lines can not be extrapolated indefinitely. So we just throw our hands up in the air and confess we don't know.
If you fly too close to the sun you'll be in for a bad day
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