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PaperclipPerfector  1d ago (text post)   1034 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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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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