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I’m sort of mixed on the @self_made_human post on space exploration. While im sure that if everything turns out to work out as he assumes (costs continue to fall, colonies can eventually be self sustaining, and that eventually there will be value to extract from the colonies) it’s still probably at least several centuries of spending about 500 million a cosmonaut to build these colonies. The problem, to be blunt is even if it all works there are lots of other ways to use trillions of dollars besides trying to build those colonies. You can give the entire population of the USA universal basic income. You could build lots of AI data centers. You could give universal healthcare. Send every kid in the Americas to college. You can take care of most of the superfund sites. Transition to nuclear energy. You could probably do all of these at once, and they’d be likely to deliver value within a couple of generations. Space may not pay off for centuries if at all. The cheat code used is that of course the peasant isn’t being taxed to pay for the eventually valuable new world land. He just gets the benefits later (much later, obviously). Space isn’t free, though. We pay for the rockets, we will pay to build the colonies, and we will pay to supply them.
I obviously disagree very strongly on factual premises. Especially:
If we're using/relying upon human astronauts (or if the Soviet Union/Russia is pioneering in space flight, why cosmonauts?) for centuries, the future has dun goofed.
I am also not claiming that we should be spending all of our money on spaceflight. I am saying they we should be spending more money on it, but closer to the "3% of the national budget" that the average American believes NASA gets instead of the far, far smaller fraction it actually is.
In the near-term, we do have other very important things to spend our money on. I would be the last person to think that money spent on AI data centers is inherently wasteful or stupid, barring the usual x-risk concerns. If we got get AGI and then ASI, spaceflight and the exploration/industrialization of space becomes way easier.
But I do not think we are guaranteed to get AGI. I think it makes sense to hedge against a future where things don't pan out, and we need to do it with old-fashioned human grit. That means that spending large amounts of money on things like medical or anti-aging research, fusion power, spaceflight and so on. Just in case AI doesn't show up on schedule. And also because they would have immediate near and medium term benefits, assuming the research and investments pan out.
A society or a civilization can have multiple priorities. Even Uganda can spend money on both food, education and electricity, let alone the US. I am arguing that we should spend much more, but not ridiculously more, and that this spending should be considered a civilizational project that will pay off in our lifetimes, even if not next week. If the US has the money to waste in Iran, it has the money to put men on Mars (and women, and small children too).
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