To wit, coincidences are more noticeable than non-coincidences, and once you’ve noticed one it’ll be much easier to notice others you might have missed.
I myself once spent about a week seeing Curta hand-held mechanical calculators everywhere. Books, magazines, blog posts, youtube… I wasn’t complaining, of course, the Curta is an amazing piece of engineering, but still, it was a bit weird.
If we controlled the world government, then what are all these politicians who run on a platform of exposing the secret government that already controls the world going to do?
Another species is very useful for unity, not necessarily for us to band together against, but because a proper intelligent alien kind of invalidates every religion. All the conflicts from culture clashing suddenly become pointless.
Or at least racists will have something else to look down on.
Throughout history men have joined with their enemies to kill their neighbors. Cortez had an army of native Americans with him to take down the Aztecs.
When the aliens show up and demand who’s responsible for why our societies are such shitshows, all we have to do is point towards the fancy neighborhoods
I’d like to support solarpunk development. I just want to live a simple life, with high tech in cooperation with the environment. We need it badly. I would fund so many community libraries. Don’t misunderstand me though. I still want space travel, but I no longer trust capitalists with it.
I’ve been thinking along the same lines lately. A fully open source hardware and software architecture and implementation, to replace the closed “old world”.
People make this sound way harder to achieve than it actually is. There’s even people who are poly for free. I don’t know how many do group sex but it’s not none, and theoretically you could be one of them.
Is that where it’s from? I knew it was a meme, but I just thought I’d bring up that it’s a weird one, given it’s in the responses to every question like this.
Or it’ll be a gold rush situation where that guy will break even, but the people selling him rocket fuel will make a modest fortune. It’s all dependent on how expensive the shipping method invented is.
Asteroid mining is incompatible with current capitalism. Say you harvest an asteroid with 100,000 of platinum in it. You in theory now have trollions of dollars in platinum for the $40 billion you spent harvesting the asteroid, only you have now quadrupled the amount of platinum in the economy, crayering the price and totally ruining your company. It’s obviously a net good for humanity as a scarce resource is now abundant, but it is bad for capitalism because the ones who finaced the work are the biggest loser.
I did some googling and math. Global platinum market is 8 million oz a year. Current spot price is ~$900. That’s $7T per year. They would have a monopoly and be able to shut down all mines by undercutting the price selling at say $800/oz. If it cost $40 Billion to mine the asteroid, that means it would take 7 years to pay back the cost.
7 year payback is short for businesses. Commercial Solar is installed despite having a 10 year payback.
Oil jas constant demand and the Saudis have so much of it that it costs them very little to drill for it and store it. And digging a new well doesn’t immediately flood the market with 4x the annual production of oil.
I’m not arguing against asteroid mining. I am saying that it is fundamentally impossible under our current capitalist system. That’s why there has been zero advances in the concept in iver a decade.
They don’t have to sell all the platinum immediately. Just like DeBeers has mountains of diamonds they keep locked up in warehouses to keep the price controlled.
An end to the problem of aging, and death. Whether that means turning into cyborgs, I don’t care. I just want to choose when I die. Not having dying slowly happen to me like a terminal illness. Plus life is way too short. If I get tired of immortality let me off myself. But let me at least get tired of it first.
Honestly I’d be horrified knowing that without aging, a traumatic, fatal, accident becomes more and more likely as time passes to the point of being inevitable. Always on edge for that moment when it all suddenly comes to an end.
That sounds like the gambler’s fallacy to me. Time alone wount make an accident more likely, it just means potentially mpre opportunities wheee an accident could occur. Sitting on your sofa today or 10,000 years from now makes no difference if the environment is the same. If you’ve played the lottery 10 times before you likely won’t win if you play again, if you play 100,000 times you still won’t win.
You shouldn’t be any more anxious about an unexpected accident than you are right now. Just without the worrying about factoring in aging.
Have you ever heard of de’beers diamond hoarding story. Thats like what i expect would happen to humanity if we gained the ability to live forever, ‘manufactured scarcity’.
A tumultuous time of oligarchic rule with infighting to control the life extending technology. Eventually ending in a winner take all dictatorship. The masses would never see their lives extended (greener pastures visions may be made in the beginning). In fact common peoples lifespans would likely shorten as the controlling elite no longer required the same sort of widespread healthcare present even at todays standards, (depending upon where you live).
The elite would form a supplicant circle around the eventual dictator who maintains control, drip feeding the life extending technology to those who serve their dictatorship best.
Within a couple generations they won’t be a dictator but our Monarch, and the common people will obey, and descend to a miserable condition.
Yeah. But on the other hand, isn’t civics sort of a technology too? Policies were invented, no?
I guess you could say the UBI has already been invented, but I think practical implementation is important too. Same as if I’d said we should do fusion power or something.
Ive been thinking for years that if we could put the (absolutely enormous) privacy concerns aside think of the environmental benefit of every major city in the world having an “AI” controlling the traffic lights and variable speed limits. Using numberplate recognition cameras and gps on every vehicle to optimise flow, reduce bottlenecks and minimise time spent in traffic.
That won’t work because you’re approaching the problem from the wrong angle; you’re trying to “fix” traffic by encouraging more traffic. If you want to improve car traffic the only possible solution is to make other forms of transport more appealing. It doesn’t really matter which form of transport you focus on, it could be trains, busses, bikes, walkability, etc; just as long as you ensure it’s as or more efficient than a car for the majority of journeys.
The only way to fix traffic is for there to be less traffic.
Well you arent wrong but its not like its a “pick one” situation. With the unbiased data from the AI you could optimise all forms of transport. If you can see that theres clearly a lot of people driving from point A to point B you can examine the why and implement better solutions.
Society wastes a great deal of time looking for the perfect solution while some good ones sit right under our nose. If the AI solution has a city of 1 million drivers saving 5 minutes each way on an average commute of an hour. Thats the equivalent of 166k cars not driving that day and everyone saves 10 minutes.
I’m not sure what point you’re trying to make and the metrics you’re using don’t really make sense. If one million people are driving with an average commute of 1 hour (personally I find it insane that that’s considered “normal” in some places, it should be an upper bound) and switch to a train which saves only 5 minutes each way they’d still save that same 10 minutes. Depending on what you mean by your “cars not driving” metric, that’s anywhere between 1 million cars (no more cars driving) and 255k cars (carbon emissions of 1m electric car commuters vs 1m national rail commuters, using this data).
That’s not even accounting for the induced demand previously mentioned, making driving more appealing only creates more drivers which makes driving worse.
And all of that is still only considering the traffic itself and not the effect of the infrastructure. Take a satellite shot of any random North American city and chances are a significant portion of it is just places to park a car. It’s a bit less common to see a city center dedicate half of its land to bike, bus, or train parking; that land is better used for people or business instead.
If you take 1 million cars with an average useage time of 1 hour a day and reduce that by 10 minutes thats roughly the same as taking 1 in 6 cars off the road from an emisions standpoint.
Make it 500,000 cars and reduce it by only 5 minutes its roughly the same as 41,000 cars worth of emissions that werent pumped out of exhaust pipes.
No it doesnt solve everything. Yes a well designed public transport system would be a much bigger environmental benefit. But its something that could be done with current tech and without massive infrastructure overhauls with a real tangible benefit for the environment and society.
The numbers do matter because the numbers are literally your entire argument. You’re arguing building for cars is more effective, you cannot make arguments about effectiveness without numbers. Alternative transport methods can be done with current tech since alternative transport methods literally existed before cars. There are plenty of examples of places that aren’t car-centric, and most major car-centric cities weren’t originally built around cars. I honestly have no idea how you could have thought that’s a remotely reasonable argument? It’s utter nonsense.
Even if your massive infrastructure overhaul argument was valid^1^, we’re literally talking about a hypothetical scenario where you can pump absurd amounts of money into a project.
Well yes, but a) the immune system gobbles up bad cells, but becomes less efficient as it ages b) point mutations accumulate with age => increases the risk of cells going haywire.
I was hard on the r/longevity train until their figurehead (Aubury) was busted for being a sex pest and half the subreddit defended them. Aging is a disease which must be treated as such, but I have zero faith in a community that is so willing to overlook their mascot being a creep, especially not when so much research is being done by other individuals who aren’t carrying that baggage.
The fiction part would kind of keep me from doing that. And I fully believe that everything that actually is possible is already being worked on as quickly as possible.
So, maybe just pay for a whole lot of renewable energy plants all around the globe. Buy up all fossil fuel plants, demolish them and put in renewables instead.
Or fund a fully open smartphone with modular components like a PC with good specs and an optional keyboard.
For the phone, I’d like to point you to Fairphone. I’m not sure specs are the best, and I don’t know about keyboard modules but other than that, it’s pretty much there.
I fully believe that everything that actually is possible is already being worked on as quickly as possible.
That’s either very optimistic about our level of knowledge about the universe, or a purely semantic thing where you count the precursor technology of another technology that would eventually be the major breakthrough as “already being worked on”…
I’ll add mine here then. Cat Girl genetic engineering. It helps no one but the amount of non destructive upheavel from it be easy available would be entertaining.
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