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Still doesn't create a 'moral' argument for not going out there, and instead staying on the one planet we currently have.
Note I'm not targetting anybody who doesn't want to fund space exploits. If you personally want to stay on earth, and don't care to put money into the space exploration fund, that's fine with me.
And as I intimated in my post from a few days ago that I linked to up there, I don't think we can obtain an answer to The Last Question without hitting Kardashev II status, at least.
Of course, if you, yourself, decide "Entropy can never be reversed, and that alone shows that we won't solve anything by leaving this planet, why bother?" I don't blame you either.
But the final, nigh-insurmountable argument is... wouldn't it just be more fun? Can't we imagine how much better life would be if we were consuming almost all of the sun's energy, and using all the excess to do things that we enjoy? And not having to fight each other over it? We can build homes where anybody who wants to live 'a certain way' can do that! If somebody dislikes people altogether, they can launch themselves into deep space on a whim.
I'm not saying we go full Culture, a la Iain Banks, but if you already agree that its better to say in the 'real' world rather than plug into a 'world sim' VR program forever, (not saying you do) then shouldn't it be almost self-evident that we will need to acquire more energy and resources so as to give ourselves more and more interesting things to do, games to play, (real) experiences to have?
Earth is large, but finite. Eventually you'll squeeze all the novelty out of it.
If you are suggesting that this is possible for any one person, I would be extremely surprised if you believe it. There is such a vast amount to be experienced and learned even within one town, to say nothing of a larger city, a whole country, bordering countries, or faraway countries--and this is just in the natural world and not even considering the variousness of people--that there isn't any way for a singular individual in one lifetime to "squeeze the novelty" out of it all, unless one is very very quickly given to boredom or incuriosity. I understand though that this is a matter of personal disposition.
Well, I'm also banking on improvements in longevity.
I also note that most people can learn all the 'important' information about literally any place in the world via the internet. As well as any time in history.
I've never been to Rome, but I've watched dozens of documentaries on it and so I've got a pretty good understanding of the main attractions there. I'm sure there are more interesting things to find on the ground... but I'd also bet that the experiences are very corporatized and streamlined, seeing as MILLIONS of people per year visit and they have to accommodate that.
I don't know that actually going to Rome would be all that enlightening to me. I still want to try it.
And this will make me sound cynical, but the world really is homogenizing. I can eat at a McDonalds in virtually any European city. Cultures are just not nearly as siloed as they used to be.
"Ah, but Faceh! You should eschew commoditized food and eat the local cuisine, Anthony Bourdain style!"
EXCEPT that the magic of internet recipes and globalization means that pretty much ANY COUNTRY'S CUISINE is available to me in at most an hour's drive in my own state! There is no such thing as food that is truly 'unique' to a single geographic area anymore!
Literally within walking distance of my office (which is in a smallish town!) is a Greek food restaurant, a Sushi/Sake bar, a Tex-Mex spot (and like 4 different standard Mexican restaurants), an Italian spot, a Peruvian spot, an Indian spot a short jaunt away, a Pho place, a Poke bowl spot. Korean barbecue, Cuban, Brazillian, and even a Hooters. Every kind of seafood, EVERY kind of pizza. And a specialized Bar that stocks alcohols from everywhere around the world. My area hosts a large population of German Expats, and they host a LARGE Oktoberfest event every year. I've got a low-rent version of EPCOT right in my fuckin' backyard. Also, I live only hours away from the actual EPCOT... so I can enjoy travel to other countries in miniature.
There's a Korean-Baptist church, of all things, right down the road from my house. Also, a Hindu temple. also a Buddhist temple, I just now learned. The world is genuinely smaller than ever. And will continue shrinking, if I get my way and tech keeps improving!
And hey, it would be nice to go and visit certain countries just to say I did. BUT...
Something that's also becoming more evident is that outside of the West, especially outside of the tourist areas... most places are just shitty to visit. Beggars, pickpockets, scammers, filth, and aggressive cultures that would see me as a mark for exploitation.
However, I will actually admit that natural wonders are irreplaceable, and cannot be simulated or imitated with current tech. Yellowstone National Park is actually mindblowingly beautiful and unique, in a way that can't be captured on film. But how long would it actually take for you to experience all the natural wonders on the planet, if you spent approximately a couple weeks exploring each one. 10 years? 20 at most? THEN WHAT. Those wonders aren't changing or updating regularly!
Time to look for wonders on other planets!. Personally, I REALLY want to visit Olympus Mons.
if they can turn Mt. Everest into a Tourist Trap, they can do that with anywhere worth going.
Finally finally, what happens if we get approximately 1:1 simulations in VR of these places, which can convincingly simulate the natural wonders or any location on earth? Then you can go anywhere on earth cheaply and see all there is to see without leaving home.
What then? How quickly will you figure out that there's just not THAT much variety, in the end?
Okay I'm quite bullish on space exploration, but I really don't agree with this. At all. Even a little bit.
Globohomo is a thing but this is seriously overstating the point. I'm a Malaysian who now lives in Sydney and no, the Malaysian food joints in Sydney are not the same. I have lived here for nine years, and in that span of time I have only managed to find one authentic restaurant (which I only found last week. Yes it took me nine years to find one). Not gonna lie, I nearly teared up when eating the food.
Of course, it's a single restaurant, and it serves approximately 0.001% of Malaysian dishes. There is still no substitute for going to a country and trying their food there. The amount of variety your city offers may satisfy you, but no, it isn't a representative sample of what the world has to offer.
Have you... actually been to East/Southeast Asia recently? Not 50 years ago. Not even 20. Recently. I have, and this is usually not what it's like there. Hell it wasn't even like that when I grew up in Southeast Asia. Things are clean, and generally quite safe - safer than in many Western countries to be honest (look up the crime stats in a city like Beijing and compare that to say London. There's no comparison). In addition, I routinely see more homeless in Western cities than I do in Asian ones, and more insane people who just do crazy shit on the subways and streets. There's a real sense of hope that things are getting better in many Asian countries.
In contrast, many areas in the West feel like they're stagnating. My recent trip to Toronto was eye-opening - the sense of torpor was palpable, the subways were fucking falling apart with water damage and exposed wiring in a lot of areas, and homeless were so common that it was hard to walk a kilometre without encountering one of their encampments. I would much rather go home to third-world Malaysia than visit Toronto again. Really, it's funny - I used to want to leave Asia, and now I really yearn to go back.
Tell me precisely what would stop you from producing food that is identical to back home, same ingredients, same process, in your current country, other than "I've got other things to do with my time."
Is there any intrinsic reason that "authentic" Malaysian food can only be made in Malaysia, if a person who knows the recipes is available?
What possible ingredient(s) can not be shipped to any other given country, on ice or otherwise, so as to produce them the exact same way they are back home. We can overnight any package from any first or second world country if needed. There is no physical limitation on this factor under current tech.
And more to the point, what possible combination of ingredients can produce a truly unique sensation that isn't similar to some other dish that you're familiar with?
Humans have a finite capacity for taste. There's only so many combinations of salty, sweet, sour, spicy, bitter, umami one can produce. I'm familiar with the basic 'philosophy' of cooking, but also that flavorspace is pretty strictly bounded by what humans are capable of sensing.
You can vary the textures, the consistency, the 'mouthfeel,' the temperatures and acidity and crispness. Indeed, I get the sense this is precisely what the best chefs on the planet are doing to come up with 'new' dishes.
But these foods aren't breaking the laws of physics. They're utilizing mostly the same constituent parts, just in different configurations.
Is there any evidence that there's anything resembling a truly 'infinite' diversity of possible food experiences available?
Is there some food experience out there that I can LEGITIMATELY only experience if I take a trip to some other country?
It's really too bad, then, that East Asians are self destructing by failing to reproduce. I'd like these cultures to survive and persist as unique societies. But they don't seem to want to.
This is my larger point. We're going to lose so, so much in the short term because we just decided hedonism was preferable to exploration.
Lack of experience, for one (so yes, I have other things to do with my time). Also a lot of Malaysian food requires exceptionally high heat to get proper wok hei, and the stove in my apartment and in fact many Western kitchens do not allow for that.
In addition, it is easier for me to recreate Malaysian dishes having tasted it before. If you don't, how in the world would you ever be able to recreate a food you've never tasted an authentic version of? Note a lot of Asian food also does not rely on strict codified recipes and often rely on the chef to improvise until it tastes "right". Cooking Asian food is traditionally something you just gain a feel for overtime by tasting and replication, and most internet recipes won't get you 100% of the way there. In practice I would say it's not going to be easy to make authentic Malaysian food without actually having tasted an authentic version before.
If you have someone with you who possesses the ability and equipment to cook authentic food, then yes it's trivially easy to obtain. In practice this condition does not typically hold. Maybe you think all these differences are minimal and that you can get most of the effect of a food tasting an inauthentic version of it, and that they're not meaningful enough to travel for (as a bona fide foodie I disagree, but that's a claim I can't contest by virtue of it being a value judgement).
But then there are foods I just straight-up haven't been able to find in Sydney, and I find nothing else scratches that itch in quite the same way.
Of course there's no intrinsic reason, but authentic Malaysian food in other cities is just nearly impossible to find in spite of the theoretic possibility of its existence. And no, the amount of flavour and texture combinations in existence isn't infinite, it's just way larger than you will ever be able to experience in your lifetime. Which means @George_E_Hale's assertion that the variety on Earth is enough to satisfy most people is correct.
And there are indeed some foods where the taste relies on it being made in a specific place. Korean makgeolli has a lot of variation and since it is a fermented drink made from a wild starter, at least some of its taste is reliant on the regional climate it's produced in. You also can't import it and expect to get the best version of it, since it then needs to be pasteurised to improve shelf life and this shits up the taste. As someone who has been to Korea and tasted the nectar of heaven that is makgeolli, then tried to get one in Sydney and found it tasted like watered-down piss, I can attest to this,
seriously makgeolli overseas is so fucking bad compared to the real shit I swear to god.The world has gotten smaller as time has gone on. Globohomo is quite real. That doesn’t mean that travel won’t yield you new cultural and sensory experiences.
I actually took the time to subject that to further analysis.
The major Asian countries with low birth rates relative to death rates are, unsurprisingly, the hyper-modernised ones: China (death rate 8.3, birth rate 6.3), South Korea (death rate 6.7, birth rate 4.3), Taiwan (death rate 8.8, birth rate 5.7) and Japan (death rate 12.3, birth rate 6.0). Interestingly enough, Japan's birth rate is the most unfavourable compared to its death rate across all East Asian countries and is thus depopulating the fastest, in spite of all the focus on SK - likely because its population is older and birth rates tanked earlier there. These results are largely consistent with your article. But I will note there are a small handful of Asian destinations which are actually quite wealthy and also have higher birth rates than their death rates; e.g. Singapore (death rate 4.8, birth rate 8.2) and Macao (death rate 4.8, birth rate 6.3). Southeast Asia is doing pretty good in general, with Malaysia clocking in at a death rate of 5.2 and a birth rate of 12.4 (I can testify that Malaysia isn't that much of a shithole, in spite of people's perceptions, and it doesn't seem to be disappearing any time soon). This is all still not great, and I agree that East Asia faces a lot of challenges regarding that in the future.
What I think is illuminating about this is that large swaths of the west seems to be depopulating as well. Many places in Western Europe possess birth rates well below their death rates, for example Austria (death rate 10.2, birth rate 8.2), Finland (death rate 10.7, birth rate 7.8), Spain (death rate 9.3, birth rate 7.0), Italy (death rate 11.2, birth rate 6.5), Portugal (death rate 11.1, birth rate 8.3) and so on aren't doing so good. Oh and don't look at Eastern Europe unless you want to see horrific depopulation. Even where they seem to be doing okay, this isn't the full picture. For example, I notice your article states that US births still exceed deaths and that its population is set to increase. This is trivially true on its face but it's misleading since that obscures a shit ton of heterogeneity - non-Hispanic white American deaths exceed births, and this has been true ever since 2012. The fact that the US still has a higher birth rate than death rate is being driven by the immigrants they have brought in. Does this bode well for the survival of "American culture"?
Western countries are depopulating, and have been for a long time. Unlike Asia, they're just stemming that by bringing in immigrants who don't hold the same culture and values who breed like rabbits, so their overall birth rates look better. But that does not imply cultural survival, and this tactic certainly doesn't allow Americans to escape reproductive oblivion just because they've decided to replace the kids they're not having with a bunch of people who have as much relation to them as they do the Chinese.
I agree we're gonna lose a lot. We may all be boned. Except for maybe Africa, who - if they ever modernise - will also face the same issues, and begin to go gently into that good night.
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I mean there’s a pretty big opportunity cost to things like mars colonies. I’d give a conservative estimate that it would probably cost several trillion dollars a year to build human colonies on Mars. Keeping in mind that it’s going to cost that per year as everything they need is probably coming from earth. Now if we’re spending $10 trillion a year just think of some of the other much more useful projects you could fund for that amount of money. The NHS costs about £3000 per person which is roughly $4050 per person. At ten trillion dollars, you can give everyone on planet Earth access to first world health care. Or we could give every human on earth clean water and electricity. Or work on carbon scrubbing technology to mitigate global warming. Send every child on earth to not just through K-12 but through university.
I honestly don't believe that, since after a certain point the bottleneck STOPS being money, and starts being skilled practitioners, specialized machines, and increasingly rare chemicals/materials.
There's a finite number of people on the planet smart/dedicated enough to become an actual doctor. We're probably not utilizing them optimally now, but the more we throw into the medical field, the fewer we have to throw into other industries where they could have more impact. Tradeoffs.
There's probably not enough of them to give everyone access to true 'first world' healthcare, sans leaps in Robotics (although... LLMs are giving us a tool that can somewhat replace doctors).
Which is also why sending EVERY child on earth to University would be akin to lighting the money on fire, incidentally. Not all of them are going to learn much.
If I was going to throw money at something, it'd probably be at trying to gene edit some significant portion of the population to bump their intelligence up more. Not to make more geniuses, but to just reduce the number of violent idiots ruining things for everyone else. Raise the floor so we aren't spending as much money cleaning up their messes for them.
And being clear, I do not give two FUCKS about 'opportunity cost' of space exploration. The benefits, in the long term, are so ridiculously asymetrical in favor of doing its hilarious.
We could spend trillions on food to simply grow the population of hungry people until we can no longer keep up... or we can spend trillions putting up O'Neill cylinders that enable literally optimal conditions for growing food crops, and can be scaled up endlessly so our population never outpaces our productivity.
This choice should be easy, if we weren't the type of species that we are.
When literally EVERY OTHER watt of energy, every kilo of rare earth metals, every other possible ounce of water is OUT THERE and not on the surface of our planet, do me a solid and try to calculate the 'opportunity cost' of leaving all those valuable resources floating in space, unused, for hundreds of years.
The sooner we make it viable to get to those things and use them, the more problems we are actually capable of solving.
Doesn’t choosing to leave those things “out there” imply pretty strongly that we could economically get them? I’m not convinced that’s true. Getting to the asteroid belt is not energetically cheap, and the trip itself would take years and require that any crew taken along bring food water, and life support sufficient for a 2+ year journey. At current launch costs, you’d have to bring back a lot of minerals to break even.
O’Neil cylinders would enable space farming, but again, we have the difficulty of sourcing the materials to build the cylinder, the energy to launch it all to wherever you want to build it.
I think all of this points to the problem I have with over-romanticizing space exploration. We sort of have an unfounded assumption (probably because of poor analogy to sea-exploration) that you can sort of just find or get the resources on the way. That works on the ocean. Out of food? Go fishing. Out of water? Get some on the next island you pass. You won’t run out of air because obviously you never left Earth and you can breathe the atmosphere on the boat. In space, you have to bring it with you. All of it. And worse, you have to launch it or the tools and materials to make it from Earth. The free lunches that sailors got simply don’t happen in space. If you’re in space, water either has to be brought along, recycled, or chemically manufactured. Food either must be brought along, or you must bring the seeds and everything required to grow, harvest, and preserve them. The fuel is the same situation, either you bring it, or you manufacture it. The free lunches don’t happen. In fact space is probably one of the most dangerous places to be. You can’t breathe in space, it’s too cold for survival. There’s no food or water. That’s before considering the radiation that would be dangerous to humans, or the asteroids that can smash tge ships protecting astronauts from exposure to space.
Yeah, hence:
Would be part of a two-pronged strategy. Get as many materials as you can that are already in orbit, and convert those to productive uses in orbit.
Transferring foodstuffs to the ground is a lot cheaper, once you've already grown them. Or to the nearest actual colony, if we get that far.
Fuel costs is probably the only truly unavoidable one, it is possible to be 'stuck' in space in a way that's not quite true in the ocean, if you have no more energy or no more materials that can be used to transfer momentum.
But there are options that are less reliant on bringing fuel with you (railguns/space cannons, solar sails, space elevators, to name a few). Massive engineering challenges for each, though.
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