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Culture War Roundup for the week of March 2, 2026

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If AGI is real, and it’s really less than a decade away or whatever, won’t ‘ it ‘ just magically make all these issues null with its magnificence?

I have trouble understanding what I’m supposed to believe when it comes to AGI.

More directly to your post - we go to space because we can. A society that stops exploring, stops progressing (imo). We need to keep doing new and interesting space stuff, maybe colonization isn’t there yet, but we should be heading to the moon with the idea to plant a tree there.

AGI can't overcome fundamental biophysical constraints. If something is impossible given our energy/ecological/human resources, it will not happen, no matter how much intelligence we throw at it.

The limits of what's possible are still very great. Ecology is just a thin smear on the crust of this planet. Our energy production is similar to a man standing waist-deep in a lake, sticking out his tongue in a rainstorm and slurping up a tiny fraction of the torrent that's falling out of the sky. Anything a human can do, AGI can also do by definition - and it would be a human that doesn't need to sleep, that can be produced in weeks, upgrading in months...

AGI absolutely can make spaceflight easy, by rapidly developing all the technologies we need, by accelerating energy research and industrial output. We can use AGI to tap new resources.