Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?
This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.
Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.
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Notes -
Based on an exchange in the main thread, I've been reminded by how different some of the views I hold on technological progress are from the rest of this forum (and I suppose society in general). I don't think we will ever colonize space (and have started to view people who take space colonization seriously in a negative light), AI will be an expensive nothinburger, and we will spend our lives in an environment of declining energy availability and increasing ecological catastrophe. I'm not full doomer by any means, but I find the vague nature that many on the forum treat the material basis of our reality to be baffling. One of the best and most palatable speakers I find on this topic is Nate Hagens and his Great Simplification podcast. Every week he has a variety of guests on the show that deal with various aspects of our predicament, many of whom strongly disagree with him. I would really recommend that almost everyone here check him out.
What views do you hold that you feel are orthogonal to most people on this forum (or society at large)? Who is the best speaker/writer that you feel like captures your point of view?
If AI will be a nothingburger, then space colonization is probably inevitable, for certain definitions of "inevitable". Natural selection and civilization have this weird back-and-forth, where the scales of problems that need solving to make civilization-scale advances, and the conditions to maintain population growth long-term, often wind up clashing, so advances come in bursts, followed by declines, with the seat of innovation having to move to a new population with each iteration. The current paradigm seems to be in the bust phase of that cycle. So if "we" means "The West", yeah, probably screwed. But we've raised the waterline such that India is landing probes on the Moon, China is exploring Mars, Japan is returning asteroid samples, and Israel and Yemen are having the first space combat on the technicality that their missiles collided above the Carman line.
More likely, I think, is that the utter insanity of the past two centuries will necessarily come to a more stable form, whereever the seat of advancement winds up, and that will take a while. The current space exploration efforts better resemble Julius Caesar failing to invade Britain, then 2000 years later, the Sun never set on the British Empire. It's just that, instead of naked blue Celts in chariots forcing back the greatest army on Earth, it was economics and ideology and gravity ... defeating the greatest airforce on Earth. Someone will overcome fertility collapse, because Natural Selection works that way. Someone, perhaps much later, will take the Moon and NEAs, because if they don't, life ends here, not just civilization. And, had I to guess, they will, as their spiritual ancestors did, have a spectacular boom period that raises the civilization waterline for everyone else, succumb to decadence and unsustainability, nearly crash civilization for a while, only to be replaced another few centuries later with someone who goes even farther.
The fun part is, this works on the scale of centuries and millennia. So if AI doesn't pan out, there's plenty of time to get it right before the Sun, a giant space-rock, or some other cosmic catastrophe gets us RFEd. If AI turns out to be the big game-changer of this iteration of the civilizational musical chairs game, then it's anyone's guess what comes next, because whatever it is, it happens in the next few decades to a century or two.
Ok look, he was kissing the ground as he came ashore. He did NOT trip and eat shit on the beach in an inauspicious sign that his hubris was disfavored by the gods. The very fact that that you are insinuating this makes me think that you are a butthurt Gallic shill poster working out of a boiler room in some mud hut in Lugdunum. Opinion disregarded.
IDK, things in Britain might look different now if there were 10k naked blue charioteers running around, so you might have a point...
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See this is why I can't take space colonization advocates seriously anymore: you're extrapolating from trends on earth that have no real analogy in space. Colonizing space looks absolutely nothing like either the British Empire or Julius Caesar invading Britain because in both of those scenarios the various groups involved don't have to bring every single thing they need for their survival with them. There's just no real pressing reason to go to space: there's nothing super valuable we could get there that we can't get on earth for much cheaper (filtering sea water is probably cheaper than asteroid mining), if we really needed living space, seasteads or even colonies on Antartica would be far easier to supply and to make self-sufficient, yet we have done neither.
There are just certain things that are physically impossible and/or biologically impossible that will never come to pass. No one "has to" colonize space. We have no evidence of extraterrestrial space colonization (the Fermi paradox isn't a paradox if space colonization isn't biologically possible). You are giving evolution far too much credit. There are some boundaries that have never been crossed here on Earth in 4.2 billion years of life existing, there's no reason to think that life would necessarily be able to make it into space and expand throughout the universe. This is more of a reflection of our Faustian culture rather than of how life actually works. Life can just end with the sun evaporating the oceans on earth, and that's probably what will happen.
Current space exploration efforts are almost entirely the result of the one time fossil fuel burst we had as a civilization. We still haven't returned to the moon since the 70s, and the ISS was built in the early 2000s. We haven't made serious attempts at space colonization, other than a few probes, since Apollo. Yes SpaceX has made great strides in increasing efficiency and decreasing launch costs, but the vast vast majority of those launches are for satellites, not humans because there aren't actually that many reasons to go to space.
Resource extraction for Earth is an utterly terrible reason to colonize space, and I don't know why anyone would take it seriously. You don't colonize the Moon and asteroids for gold; you do it because of how differently things work in space. Because there are things that you can do with satellites and space stations and space factories that you either can't do on Earth, or can do more efficiently in space if the cost of working there came down a couple orders of magnitude. Colonizing other planets is a sideshow for the next million or billion years or so.
But when I'm talking about natural selection, I mean the people who are super pessimistic have a tendency to be evolutionary deadends, as do the people who are overly optimistic and burn through resources too quickly. More than just genes get selected for through attrition. Apollo was unsustainable, and Artimas looks like it's just as unsustainable. But the current iteration of Western Civ is unsustainable.
I also feel I should say something about the comment on fossil fuels, but I'm not sure I'm interpreting it correctly. It sounds like it's implying that, since fossil fuels are a non-renewable resource and we've burned through most of the easily accessible supply, it's all downhill for Earth in general from here? Because we kinda already used all that fossil fuel wealth to develop workarounds, albeit they are harder or more costly. But they are also workarounds that many non-Western nations have invested in the foundational tech and infrastructure for. If you have effective alternative energy sources, you have alternative means of accessing hydrocarbons if needed. Even if it's not for space, someone in the next Renaissance will look at Millennium texts, think that maybe having these things would be nice, and figure out how to concentrate enough energy to pick up where we left off.
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Jesus Christ as if my "lying in bed at midnight Sunday scariest" weren't bad enough already
Why? You’ll be dead and humans probably won’t exist anymore, or have existed for millions of years
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Speaking of Christ, the first job God gives to Man in Genesis is tending Eden. The next job that wasn't a curse was to be fruitful and multiply. So it could be argued that People of the Book are religiously obligated to preserve life until God says otherwise.
Hell, if we want to get extra Unsong brained, Revelation includes a plague wherein the Sun does start to roast the Earth, and after Armageddon a cube city with enough space for everyone and its own power / water / food supply descends from the sky and starts exporting medicine and raining fire on attackers. So that's ... fun?
... Do I really want to post something this off-the-wall after trying to be serious in the rest of this thread? Especially since Revelation also includes a scene where a trio of Satanic Kaijuu spit demon-frogs from their mouths to start the Battle of Armageddon? ... Why does the Bible have a Gainax ending?
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We've had the answer to this since the discovery of nuclear fission, we just gaslight ourselves into pretending we don't by regulating it off the board and saying "it just isn't profitable 🤷♂️"
Amusingly, the West may finally come to its senses on this matter as it's under threat of losing the entire game board to China. Civilisational suicide would be totally cool in a vacuum, but when there's a rival, it looks like you're just coping for losing, rather than virtuously killing yourself, which is totally not cool.
Tangentially, this is why I view fusion as basically irrelevant: if we get fusion, we'll just make that illegal, too.
I'm not sure I believe that regulation is the reason why we don't have fission. US has more fission power by GW than China and so does France. France's electricity mix is actually 70% fission and is dealing with various climate change related problems such as being unable to run the reactors in the summer because the water level is so low in the various inflow rivers to the nuclear power plants can't be used for steam generation. Even with a government that doesn't give a shit about safety regulations (China and the Soviet Union) fission clearly actually isn't that effective of a technology. Fission has actually declined as a share of China's energy mix recently (probably because of build out of solar), so I have a hard time believing it is a wunderkind energy source. @FirmWeird has posted a lot about this in this in the past.
I have, and I have eaten numerous downvotes for it. My point has always been that nuclear energy has too low an EROEI to be a viable answer to the energy needs of a modern industrial society, and I haven't seen any convincing evidence to the contrary. France's nuclear system was only viable because they got their uranium for cents on the franc from Nigeria, and even then it ran out of money and had to be restructured when I was posting about it last. This doesn't necessarily mean that there's no place for nuclear power - having a source of power that isn't reliant on fossil fuels could prove to be particularly useful in a future where fossil fuels are harder to come boy or the Middle East is in a state of war. Similarly, nuclear submarines which don't actually have to make enough money to justify their continued existence but place a huge emphasis on the density of their energy source are another good use for them. If China actually manages to get those molten salt reactors working, that would be fantastic as well. But right now I haven't seen any convincing evidence that nuclear power is a sustainable answer to the depletion of fossil fuels - and a large graveyard of failed attempts.
This is the reason why France has the nuclear system it does- it was de Gaulle's baby precisely because the US doesn't have French (or European) interests at heart. France was under [his] military dictatorship at the time, which helped get things moving.
He was right, of course; both in 1973 with the US-caused oil shortage and then in 2022 with the US-caused LNG shortage.
It's not so much that as it is completely obviating the need to resupply with fuel. And, especially relevant for submarines, nuclear power functions even with a complete lack of oxygen, so doing that is a no-brainer.
It's the only alternative that can work anywhere on the Earth's surface on a calm, cold night. Lighting a fire is the classic method to get energy at that time, but "magic hot rock" is fine too.
I once heard stated that the reason it's difficult to get good output from nuclear is because they simply can't run the reaction hot enough- hence the emphasis on exotic coolants (molten salt, etc.)- whereas with LNG the exhaust heat is sufficiently hot that you can heat the steam driving a secondary turbine to the point where it's very, very efficient. Of course, because we want to reserve the right to quench the reactor if it gets too hot for... certain reasons, we'd like a coolant that doesn't make the problem worse if we do that. At least with LNG you can turn the gas off and the reaction will stop.
"Work" is the key sticking point here - does it provide enough energy to pay for itself? To pay for the extraction of the raw material from the ground, refinement into usable fuel pellets, transportation to the plant, the construction of the plant, the lives of the people who run it and then on top of that provide usable power for the rest of the society that sustains it? The answer is, at present, "No."
That's the entire basis of my objection - even if you just handwave away the problem of storing dangerous radioactive waste that lasts for millenia and hope it doesn't leak into the rest of the environment, nuclear just can't pay for itself. Every single existing nuclear program I'm aware of is made viable on the basis of government subsidies or exploitation (i.e. the hilarious prices France paid for Nigerian uranium). Every single proposed nuclear program that doesn't have these problems (fusion, molten salt, thorium, etc) is 20 years in the future, and has been 20 years in the future for the past 60 years.
China actually started up a molten salt 'thorium' (eg, starting with uranium, then moving to thorium) reactor last year, with the first full thorium cycle this November. I'm not optimistic about its effectiveness, but that's more because it's a lot more complicated than it needs to be, rather than net energy or net cost problems.
A lot of the various cost problems with nuclear plants reflect political willpower, rather than actual material costs. That's most serious in the United States where we've intentionally made them several times harder to produce at the same time that the control and construction technology has gotten much much better, but most western governments have done something similar. (or just had politicians launch rockets directly at the construction sites.)
There's a revealed preferences sense where, if you can't solve those political problems, you can't produce power at price, and it's not entirely wrong. But it's misleading to treat it as a physics problem.
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Then nothing is cost-effective except for fossil fuels and hydroelectricity, ultimately.
But we already knew that; that's why banning their use is such a powerful socioeconomic weapon. Nuclear just happens to be both the closest you get to viability (since the plants from the '70s and '80s seem to be doing just fine; that was back when construction and labor were way cheaper though) and something that's arguably worth funneling research dollars into from a materials science perspective.
This line always frustrates me because this is an isolated demand for rigor. Mine drainage (and it is a rather interesting flex that a modern mining company saw fit to name itself after the most expansive environmental mining disaster zone in human history- that being the Rio Tinto, which is what that's a picture of) will kill future Fred Flintstone far more quickly than anything else will. Fortunately, we discovered radioactivity before we invented the backhoe.
And I get that you have to convince John Q. Public of that, who will never come around in their lifetimes thanks, ironically enough, to radiation exposure (they sat too close to the TV while watching Simpsons reruns). Which is why you basically can't do this until you have a military that will deal with that.
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I'm one degree removed from the industry and I'm sorry, but regulation => cost is the reason why we don't have more fission.
Then why doesn't China have more fission? Hell, since the US is so rich in fossil resources: why didn't RUSSIA ever get more fission?
Over five percent of China's power comes from fission plants, and that's underrating it since they've got very high uptime compared to on-demand plants. As for why it hasn't scale up faster, China's political classes had very obvious mixed feelings about dependence on foreign-produced infrastructure for a long time, which only went harder once . While they've theoretically had 'domestic' production of nuclear plants since the mid-90s, they didn't actually manage serious production of the CNP-600s until 2010-2012... at which point the Fukushima disaster and its political fallout lead them to go back to the drawing board and start the production cycle again.
But they've put >3 GW of fission power online just in the last year. As bad as their political situation is for power construction, it's still beating the west's.
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Russia has quite a lot of nuclear power, which is remarkable considering that, as you say, they care minimally about the environment and have abundant access to fossil fuels. Further, it's worth noting that the more civilised European parts of Russia are the parts with the most nuclear power, comprising around 40% of their generation.
If nuclear power is competitive with Russian fossil fuels, that means it's pretty darn cheap!
China doesn't have much nuclear power at present, but they are investing an enormous amount in building plants, and their forecasts are that it will quadruple in proportion of their energy supply over the next 25 years--and that's with the buildout of other energy sources!
Looks like I'm wrong about Russia! They have actually an increasing share of nuclear power as a percentage of total electricity mix and are building a number of new power plants that will be online later this decade!
Quadruple nuclear still puts China at only 20% of electricity from nuclear which is comparable to Russia right now. This does represent a big difference from the US still, but I'm not sure it will be enough. What we need to start seeing is a decline in the total amount of fossil energy in the electricity mix, which we haven't even seen in Russia. I actually don't think we've seen this anywhere except for maybe Germany/UK, but the renewable buildout in those locations has obvious problems of intermittency.
Nuclear is better than I thought though, so I stand corrected.
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Yeah.
Unless something is very wrong about my understanding of physics, we have beautiful technological solutions for almost every civilizational problem just sitting there, if only we can solve the coordination problems necessary to use them.
Although I do start to worry that we don't have a sufficient supply of competent people to coordinate around even if we could. The main disconnect from optimistic/utopic Sci-Fi from the past, including Older Star Trek, and the current reality is a ready supply of smart, driven people can work together to solve any pressing issues in front of them.
I think this is less of a problem than may at first appear. I think large amounts of human capital is locked up in playing video games. Obviously the median player is basically useless, but there are so many skilled players who don't aspire to much besides playing video games.
I was watching a former world record run of FFVII recently and the guy doing it was the most milquetoast underachiever in life I could imagine. He was talking about how his dream job was to finish community college and get a union job as an electrician. Or take Haelian, a pro Hades player with multiple world firsts in various challenges: before switching to full-time gaming, I think he worked at Walgreens (as a shelf stocker, not a strategist at corporate HQ). As a strong believer in Spearman's hypothesis, I'm confident these people severely underestimate how gifted they are and how successful they could be in mainstream professional work. They're just lowborn, and don't view the professional world as something that's even available to them. And it's not like the cultural class markers even relevant anymore -- this isn't Victorian England, where you have to hold your spoon in the right way or be shunned by civilised society. Musk is off smoking pot on Joe Rogan, and Alex Karp is apparently doing crack before going on interviews. The behavioral standards are not high. If you're competent, you're allowed in.
I guess that depends on how efficient you think "The Sort" has gotten.
My general perception is that if some person (in the West) possesses real noteworthy talent at a marketable ability, they will be identified and absorbed by some talent-hungry institution, AI Lab, Quant Trading Company, Pharma, etc. etc.
Although I could believe the hypothesis that there's a lot of guys with talent but limited discipline/drive who are ascertaining (correctly?) that beyond monetary rewards, the incentives to go out and use your talents are kinda dulled. You're not all that likely to find the love of your life, have kids, have a fulfilling long-term life and avoid burning out by age 40, so hey, smoking weed and playing vidya with the bros is an acceptable substitute.
What do we think would cause the U.S. to try and draw forth from such a 'latent' talent reserve?
I know it sounds gay, but it really is a loss of civilisational vision. There is no Mandate of Heaven that inspires gifted people to actually build cool stuff.
Part of this is that everything is so myopically chart-driven from the top down. It's one of the things I like about the Arabs: was the Burj Khalifa "worth it" in some strictly financial, bean-counter sense? Almost certainly not. It would have been vastly more efficient to build a bunch of concrete boxes and use the space for the same purpose.
But the Arabs do not have such a severe chart-worshipping brainworm infestation. The Burj Khalifa is badass, and badassery justifies itself.
No, I agree.
The coolest 'monumental' works human have recently achieved are the aforementioned Burj Khalifa, SpaceX's Starship (still in progress) and, no shit, the Las Vegas Sphere.
The Sphere is more ephemeral, of course, but its such a cool thing to exist in its own right.
There is a serious lack of inspiration from things 'larger than the self.' Religious belief has declined, national pride seems on the wane, and I think there are fewer truly inspirational figures around that people would cast aside their lives to follow.
I feel it myself. I've had to inculcate in myself a 'civilizational vision' for radical secular humanism that views conquering the local solar system as my own personal manifest destiny. That's something to do that feels big and important enough to matter.
But I'm an odd duck, I don't think this is a vision that will unite all that many people in its current state.
We haven't yet stopped building. It's pretty easy to fill out that list a little, even if you look just at the anemic Euros: The Sagrada Familia made impressive progress over the last couple of years, the Millau Viaduct is pretty monumental, and - while harder to just look at, on account of being underground - the the Gotthard Base Tunnel and the Large Hadron Collider are gigantic feats of engineering. I can recommend visiting the latter when they do upgrade next time, even just the detector halls are monuments (and you can only enter them when they shut everything down during construction).
I think most of those will stand all throughout the fall of the West. People will live in their shadows after centuries of decline.
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Hey, now. I neither smoke weed, nor do I have any bros to play the handful of games I can actually play with. I'm basically stuck playing old Capcom fighters in single-player and learning to despise the announcer in MVC2 with a passion.
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I know it's not directly the point but I'm equally baffled by your views as you would be (I suspect) of mine.
What makes you say that? AI has already ruined education, flooded the Internet with even more low-effort content from images, text, video to music, and even caused new kinds of psychosis. Oh and it's changed a lot of the nature of software engineering (causing a crisis in the junior dev market), data analysis (NLP is pretty much solved), and general automation of tasks. That's without going into computer vision, speech-to-text, etc. To not see that would require you to be, I don't know, a rural farmer in an African country or something.
But I occasionally see people with the same opinion as you, and we don't actually live in completely different realities. Or do we? Is it just impossible not to be in a bubble and capture only an easily biased sliver of reality? How do you avoid that and stay objective? I can just bluntly say your facts are wrong and mine are right, but I feel like that's missing the point.
I should clarify my view on AI. I don't disagree with any of your points, but I don't think AI will be materially transformative in the way that people seem to think around here. It's all incremental improvement (and destruction). It's not going to solve the energy crisis or help us discover genuine new knowledge.
In the long run it's also not going to last. We are going to run out of cheap energy or AI is going to rot everyone's brains enough that it can't self perpetuate.
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