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PaperclipPerfector  2d ago (text post)   1720 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for December 7, 2025

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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we will spend our lives in an environment of declining energy availability and increasing ecological catastrophe

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.

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

I roll to disbelieve that this is a real problem rather than something like "French law says that there's a temperature limit on the water you can discharge into the river and one single summer during a heatwave all of the water in the river for one plant was already at that temperature so that particular nuclear plant was legally disallowed from using river water for cooling for 2 days".

Reactors could well be designed to run off of colder water than was available. Naively it should have been fine- most of the energy in cooling is used to boil the water rather than heat it up- but euros like to engineer things to have really tight tolerances for some reason.

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.

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

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.

place a huge emphasis on the density of their energy source are another good use for them

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.

I haven't seen any convincing evidence that nuclear power is a sustainable answer to the depletion of fossil fuels

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.

It's the only alternative that can work anywhere on the Earth's surface on a calm, cold night.

"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.

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

The whole nuclear waste discussion is immensely frustrating to me. Yes, depleted fuel remains dangerous for a long time, but the implication that we therefore need to also develop containment solutions that last for millennia is completely and utterly bonkers. The part that most scares people about radioactive substances is that they can cause injury and death by just being present in their vicinity. However, spent fuel is dangerous to the touch for a few decades at best, after that, the health and containment concerns are identical to those of any other chemical waste (basically, making sure it does not come into contact with the food supply and drinking water). Except, there is a universal method to detect radioactive contamination. Compare this to detecting chemical contamination, where one could run hundreds of tests and still miss the presence of a lethally toxic substance. Some toxic waste, particularly heavy metals, remains dangerous indefinitely. However, you never see any heated political debate about ways to permanently isolate entire waterways. The only reason we even have this discussion with nuclear power is because the physical amount of high level waste is tiny and because it's one of the only energy sources where most of the waste it produces stays neatly contained in a single building.

I don't want to be needlessly antagonistic, but the nuclear waste argument needs to die and whenever anyone brings it up in a discussion I also die a little inside.

Yes, depleted fuel remains dangerous for a long time, but the implication that we therefore need to also develop containment solutions that last for millennia is completely and utterly bonkers.

I mean sure I'll be dead by the time that problem shows up, but I do actually care about the world that we will bequeath to our descendants.

However, spent fuel is dangerous to the touch for a few decades at best, after that, the health and containment concerns are identical to those of any other chemical waste (basically, making sure it does not come into contact with the food supply and drinking water). Except, there is a universal method to detect radioactive contamination.

Yes, that is the entire problem! And sure, we can detect it - but that doesn't stop the river that could have supplied entire communities with life turning into a source of cancer instead.

Some toxic waste, particularly heavy metals, remains dangerous indefinitely. However, you never see any heated political debate about ways to permanently isolate entire waterways.

I am an environmentalist who does actually care about this issue. You're right, that is a big problem - but I'm not particularly moved by claims of hypocrisy when I have actively protested against this kind of thing in the past.

I mean sure I'll be dead by the time that problem shows up, but I do actually care about the world that we will bequeath to our descendants.

If my descendants in a thousand years' time haven't figured out some futuristic technological solution to disposing of nuclear waste, then fuck 'em. Presumably they're going through some horrible Max Max/Dark Ages thing to have regressed so far, and a bunch of radiation deep underground in the desert is the least of their problems. This is just papier-mache moral grandstanding, hence your need to resort to snark - it's much more reasonable to care about giving clean, reliable power (bracketing the cost question) to your actual immediate descendants than to prioritize some hypothetical 3035 descendant who finds themselves building a hut in whatever godforsaken place we put a waste dump in.

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.

China actually started up a molten salt 'thorium' (eg, starting with uranium, then moving to thorium) reactor last year,

I actually mentioned this in an earlier post. If they can safely generate power with a good EROEI, great!

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.

You're right that there's definitely a political aspect holding nuclear power back - the fact that you can't find enough subsaharan africans with degrees in advanced nuclear physics to meet diversity requirements most definitely imposes an additional cost on American/European nuclear power efforts. But some of those policy restrictions are actually extremely sensible and following them imposes lower costs on society as a whole. Take nuclear waste for example - if you can just throw your highly radioactive waste into the river, fucking the nearby ecosystem and causing a massive spike in cancer for every living thing that is connected to that river (which is more than you'd think if you haven't studied ecology) you've actually created a problem that will be substantially more expensive to fix than simply following the regulation. Building nuclear reactors on earthquake fault lines is in fact a bad idea, as is building them in floodplains or directly next to the sea. Your nuclear reactor should also be built to rigorous construction standards rather than relying on cheap contractors who half-arse everything and replace a bunch of structural cement with styrofoam to reduce construction costs.

Do all of those regulations impose additional costs? Absolutely. But at the same time, they prevent much larger and more expensive consequences from showing up later. I'm not going to deny that some of those regulations are bad - mandating that half of your construction workers are women of colour imposes additional costs for negative benefit. But I don't think many people can accurately determine which regulations fall into the former category and which fall into the latter.

Take nuclear waste for example - if you can just throw your highly radioactive waste into the river, fucking the nearby ecosystem and causing a massive spike in cancer for every living thing that is connected to that river (which is more than you'd think if you haven't studied ecology) you've actually created a problem that will be substantially more expensive to fix than simply following the regulation.

Nobody reasonable wants to throw nuclear waste into the river. What reasonable people want is to vitrify it and then keep it in containers in a parking lot-sized storage yard in the middle of nowhere and enventually maybe reprocess it.

The unreasonable people want to spend ridiculous amounts of money to bury it all underground or something because nuclear waste remains radioactive for millions of years and let's ignore the fact that the longer half-life something has, the less dangerous it is.

The unreasonable people don’t even want to do that, they want to try to bribe really poor communities to have storage facilities near them, then decide better of it and just hold onto it.

Take nuclear waste for example - if you can just throw your highly radioactive waste into the river, fucking the nearby ecosystem and causing a massive spike in cancer for every living thing that is connected to that river (which is more than you'd think if you haven't studied ecology) you've actually created a problem that will be substantially more expensive to fix than simply following the regulation. Building nuclear reactors on earthquake fault lines is in fact a bad idea, as is building them in floodplains or directly next to the sea. Your nuclear reactor should also be built to rigorous construction standards rather than relying on cheap contractors who half-arse everything and replace a bunch of structural cement with styrofoam to reduce construction costs.

But I don't think many people can accurately determine which regulations fall into the former category and which fall into the latter.

At the risk of embarrassing myself, I feel like I could pretty easily sort them into 'yes' (most of the stuff you mentioned), 'no', and 'demands further enquiry' if I didn't have political considerations to worry about.

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.

even if you just handwave away the problem of storing dangerous radioactive waste that lasts for millennia and hope it doesn't leak into the rest of the environment

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.

Then nothing is cost-effective except for fossil fuels and hydroelectricity, ultimately.

Correct! Hell, forget about cost - there is no viable replacement for fossil fuels.

But we already knew that; that's why banning their use is such a powerful socioeconomic weapon.

Nature is already going to do that for us - not only are the fossil fuels going to eventually run out, rational human beings prioritised the easiest-to-access and most efficient stores of fossil fuels. The energy return on energy invested of conventional fossil fuels is going down, and the EROEI of shale and fracking is even worse.

This line always frustrates me because this is an isolated demand for rigor.

No, not at all. I believe mining should be heavily regulated, especially when it comes to disposal of hazardous and toxic wastes. Allowing people to pollute and destroy the biosphere imposes immense costs on the rest of society - it is a form of abusing the commons, and is ultimately substantially more expensive than properly disposing of the waste. It's just that the cost is paid by the rest of society as opposed to the mining companies.

Which is why you basically can't do this until you have a military that will deal with that.

How long are you going to be waiting? We've already hit peak conventional oil, and tight oil is significantly less competitive on an EROEI basis (which is the only basis that actually matters). Nuclear power, barring some great new discovery or innovation(which, to their credit, the Chinese may have actually achieved), will remain on the shelves in most cases because it is just not capable of functioning as a viable replacement for fossil fuels due to the poor EROEI.

Nature is already going to do that for us - not only are the fossil fuels going to eventually run out, rational human beings prioritised the easiest-to-access and most efficient stores of fossil fuels. The energy return on energy invested of conventional fossil fuels is going down, and the EROEI of shale and fracking is even worse.

Isn’t there quite a bit of easy to access fossil fuels that are off limits for political reasons, eg Venezuela’s dictator not trusting anybody capable of drilling?

Venezuela's oil is notably low quality and requires extensive processing before it is usable - and they actually are drilling for oil anyway for export to China. The last time I ran the numbers, Venezuela's oil reserves, if totally extracted, would be able to power the current global economy for less than a decade assuming zero economic growth. While there's likely to be significant demand destruction due to the US economy imploding to the degree that the administration won't even publish the numbers anymore, Venezuela's oil just isn't worth the squeeze - and even if it was, it won't last for long.

I'm not sure I believe that regulation is the reason why we don't have fission

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?

Gattsuru has already answered but we've always had a bit of a head start on the technology for high-quality fission plants. Expecting mind-bogglingly corrupt communist regimes to do it well seems counterintuitive.

We've always had a bit of a head start on the technology for high-quality fission plants. Expecting mind-bogglingly corrupt communist regimes to do it well seems counterintuitive.

Come on, this is cope. The Soviets had the first nuclear power plant in the world online, and by the 60s they had a unified civil design ready (the VVER), regularly putting up new 400 MW reactors. By the early 70s, the VVER had iterated to a standard gigawatt design, and they built quite a few of those in the early 70s (most of them are online today) and then just... never stopped. There will be new gigawatt VVERs connecting to the grid in the next 2-3 years. The Soviets, of course, also got a ton of naval reactors online quite quickly, which is a far more impressive feat. We'll ignore the slight... reactor design detour they took with the RBMK, and focus on the fact that they didn't even let that shit show stop them for one second. They decommissioned some of them, kept others running, and went straight back to building more VVERs.

The Chinese had several decades where they could have bought reactors from the Soviets, licenced the Soviet design and/or straight copied that reactor. They did all of that for many other vital technology stacks.

What I'm trying to say is: even high state capacity corrupt communist regimes with access to uranium and a well-developed homegrown nuclear industry didn't build an energy abundance electro-state. No matter how thin you cut your security margins, and no matter how hard you subsidy the industry, no matter how many dozens of reactors you have your commie slaves build: it never actually gets all that cheap. If you have coal or gas, you might as well just burn that. And if you made it into the 2020s and now have terawatt solar capacity... well, you probably know how that's is going: you can just try to have your commie slaves install a nice round 600 GW (yeah, yeah, I know: peak) of new generation capacity. Per year.

I'm probably more aligned with you than you think on this. One weakness of capitalism is that it's not going to build "an energy abundance electro-state" when the demand isn't there. Especially when coal or gas is the shortest putt.

This has definitely been true for China up until very recently, and for the US as well. My point is that we've made Nuclear far more expensive than it needs to be, despite our relatively hungry first-world energy demands. In some cases, we've artificially depressed the price of fossil fuel generation and/or reduced the externalities associated with it through technology, which also hurts the case for nuclear.

One weakness of capitalism is that it's not going to build "an energy abundance electro-state" when the demand isn't there. Especially when coal or gas is the shortest putt.

I know what you mean, but right now we're seeing everywhere around the world that capitalism can also do stuff just from the supply side. Solar and batteries are getting so cheap (especially in grids that are still below 50% renewable), they are displacing almost all new generation capacity. Once that capacity is online and starting to get amortized, electricity prices should drop, which will bring up demand. It's the slow way, but it should work. Historically, cheaper energy has always resulted in people ending up spending MORE money on energy - because it gets used for so much more things.

My point is that we've made Nuclear far more expensive than it needs to be, despite our relatively hungry first-world energy demands.

This is certainly true, but I'm not convinced nuclear ever had a chance against the fossil capacity of the past and the renewable capacity of the future. Reactors are large and complex, and such projects often resist scaling laws (see also: housing, hospitals, dams, bridges). I'm curious to see what the Chinese manage to do with their modular reactors. I'm skeptical: nuclear reactors work better if they are large. But making them in a factory might unlock some extreme efficiency gains. We'll see.

I hate using the word "hope" for this, because I honestly just want human society in general to produce a lot of energy as efficiently as possible. But I hope that wind and solar build-outs slow down, if only for aesthetic reasons. I think they take up too much space relative to a nuclear plant's output.

I know intellectually this planet has so much space it shouldn't matter at all, and that we're generally smart about where we put these generation centers. But from an emotional standpoint, I prefer to leave even sparsely populated or classically ugly landscapes as untouched as possible. When I see massive solar or wind farms, I can't help but shrink back a little (admittedly more for the former than the latter).

I'd love it if Solar were something we could realistically just put on top of already industrialized space and be successful, and if offshore wind farms were more viable.

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 as western regulatory overhead killed western nuclear power. 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.

Over five percent of China's power comes from fission plants

This is... not all that much? Slightly more than necessary to keep the tech stack alive enough for a weapons program?

China's political classes had very obvious mixed feelings about dependence on foreign-produced infrastructure for a long time

I've talked about that in another reply, they had multiple decades of close friendship with the soviets during which getting a licence and tech support for the VVER reactor would have been trivial. They had decades of messing with a home grown design. It never got all that cheap, which is extremely concerning, because the Chinese have world class expertise in optimizing the last cent of slack out of industrial processes.

But they've put >3 GW of fission power online just in the last year.

This is impressive - for nuclear. And that summarized our sad story about the entire technology. Because they increased their coal capacity by 42 GW (they probably took old coal plants offline, which means they installed even more new coal plants than those 42 GW) and they seriously plan to make it to 600 GW (peak) of new solar and wind capacity in 2025.

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.

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 do start to worry that we don't have a sufficient supply of competent people

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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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