The entire circumstances of biological life is weird. You gotta deal with the fact that we’re aware of the pointlessness of what turns us on. You can find a little bit of functional meaning of you dig into it, but it’s a fucked up rabbit hole best avoided.
Real page turner that one. Crunchy and fanfic-y in a good way. The pedo stuff way way too detailed for my comfort, but if that’s not a trigger for the reader, then it’s a real head trip.
Worth noting: not an author screed. Which the author was surprised he had to clarify, but I mean, my dude - have you met people?
Atun-Shei has a great video about it. One of my old reddit comments makes a brief appearance in a shitty tone of voice. I found this out after commenting basically the same thing on the reddit submission for the Atun-Shei video. I have never been nailed so hard in my life.
Incidentally I do still recommend Friendship Is Optimal as exploration of alignment and the control problem… with ponies. And as a more hard-sci-fi but still buck-wild examination of simulated worlds, Permutation City by Greg Egan.
This is one of the theories that explain why we don’t hear anyone else in our galactic neighborhood.
Civilizations just develop highly sophisticated digital worlds that they can just live in in complete bliss forever or until their system degrades and falls apart in millions of years.
We could be surrounded light years in every direction by perverts having infinite fun with tentacle hentai porn in their perfect digital world and they will never know or want to know that we even exist.
Either these companies will die out because they won’t accept tentacle hentai or new companies will take their place to offer tentacle hentai … whatever happens, we will get our tentacle hentai and never explore the universe.
It will never be a utopia, because those companies will use it to extract your thoughts, and pump relevant ads directly into your brain. Also, you’ll forget to pay your subscription and you’ll wake up in hell.
If that DBI can completely disconnect you from your actual body? (yes I saw that season of that anime where they used them on surgical patients and shit in lieu of heavy sedation that’s what I’m talking about) Chronic pain could become a thing of the past sign me the fuck up. Shit, just hook it up to my actual eyes I’m good.
I bet you could get really energy efficientefficient with it too. Like convert people into highly specialized pleasure nodes in a vast network spanning the circumference of the sun’s orbit
The other one is that if we were to disasemble all our planets (we can leave earth alone for sentimental reasons) and rebuild them in shells around our sun we could create as much habitable living area as the surface of every natural planet (habitable or not) in our entire galaxy. Plus the whole thing would fit inside the orbit of mercury which means very low light lag. Why build a galaxy spanning empire when you can just build a galaxy at home and have much better ping?
So I’m doing this calculation as I write this comment so I’m commited regardless of the outcome.
The sun is (roughly) 2 x 10^30 kg
The sun makes up 99.86% of the solar systems mass
That leaves about 2.8 x 10^27kg of mass in the planets and asteroids.
Earth weighs about 3000kg/m^3 at the surface
I’m going to assume the shells are about 1km thick, or maybe 500m but with an extra 500m worth of stuff in a more condensed form as structural support.
So 1km of surface requires 1km^3 of material or 3 x 10^12 kg of material.
Assuming we can get all of the solar systems material and use nuclear fusion to turn all of the gas into heavier elements (I assume anyone dismantling solar systems has workd out fusion) that results in about 9.3 x 10^14 square km of living space. about 1.83 million earths.
The total surface area of the solar system (with rough guesses for the size of the rocky cores of the gas giants is about 9.8 x 10^9 square km.
Since we can’t really detect small planets in other solar systems I’m going to assume they all have roughly the same amount of planet as our own one. So all in all we get just under 100,000 solar systems worth of living surface.
Ok so its actually about 0.1% of the milky way in terms of living space at best. But thats still pretty damn good and its all withing fairly managable lightspeed communication range of just a few minutes delay at worst. And we could get to 100x that if we could do starlifting and removed just 14% of the suns mass.
Civilizations just develop highly sophisticated digital worlds that they can just live in in complete bliss forever or until their system degrades
If I want to be blissed out until my body falls apart, I can do that now by turning my retirement account into a stockpile of fentanyl. I don’t think its presumed that intelligent civilizations all just do this, for the same reason I don’t believe modern human civilization will collapse on itself simply because we’ve discovered opium.
We could be surrounded light years in every direction by perverts having infinite fun with tentacle hentai porn in their perfect digital world and they will never know or want to know that we even exist.
We struggle to confirm the existence of a ninth planet while. We’re living in a solar system at the rural edge of the galaxy and we just found out black holes exist. Would we know what an advanced civilization would even look like?
We haven’t even fully ruled out life on Mars, ffs. There could be a layer under the cloud system of Jupiter, Uranus, or Neptune that’s absolutely teaming with life. The Great Space Whale Migration of Proxima Centauri could be happening right now and we’d never have a clue.
Do not sell the galaxy spanning race of sentient porn-loving starfish short just yet.
Reminds me of the short story “Nano Comes to Clifford Falls.” Basically a replicator arrives in a small town, and is freely available to use. At first it’s great, but then it’s not. I won’t spell it all out, but I remember it being framed as a kind of few facto civilisation/personal “test,” and that some people just can’t handle life without the struggle.
Kind of a problematic take, if I’m remembering it correctly, but story still had a big impact on me.
CW: attempted sexual assault, in case anyone decides to check it out.
Basically a replicator arrives in a small town, and is freely available to use. At first it’s great, but then it’s not.
I’m familiar with the story. It was popular in conservative circles in the same way “Rich Dad, Poor Dad” was popular.
I’m not stranger to tech pessimism, but - setting aside the fantastic nature of the premise - there’s little to support the theory that economic surplus has been bad for social cohesion. Given enough free time, people tend to be remarkably creative and productive. And a great deal of modern social cohesion is predicated on a certain ambient abundance of energy, housing, etc.
To quote Alfred Henry Lewis
There are only nine meals between mankind and anarchy
I hadn’t thought of the story as explicitly conservative, but thinking about it again through that lens, I can definitely see it.
As for the quote, I remember hearing it as “barbarism” instead of “anarchy,” but right you are. Actually, the search for more context lead me the full source (from his talk page), which is actually a really good read.
It’s not inherently conservative, just like the tragedy of the commons isn’t. However, its infuriate and most obvious takeaways are those that works appeal to a certain conservative mindset.
Tbf, turning your retirement account into pure bliss with Fentanyl greeeaaaatly reduces the amount of time you get to be blissed out. This hypothetical future likely had found a way to reach permanent bliss with as few downsides as possible
If I want to be blissed out until my body falls apart, I can do that now by turning my retirement account into a stockpile of fentanyl. I don’t think its presumed that intelligent civilizations all just do this, for the same reason I don’t believe modern human civilization will collapse on itself simply because we’ve discovered opium.
The key difference is that we still live in a society where, at least most people, have to work to live. If you spend your retirement on fentanyl the fentanyl isn’t going to be the thing to make your body fall apart, assuming you get pure shit and are able to dose properly and not od your body can handle that for decades. What’s going to tear your body apart is the poverty and deprivation of living on the streets after you lose your job. If you’re in a fully automated post scarcity society and you’re able to hook yourself up to one of these machines and live a long life I could see a majority of people doing that. Sure some people would object to it being meaningless, but in a post scarcity reality where God is dead, a robot can do anything better than you, and there’s no conflict or competition for resources there isn’t much meaning to be had anyway.
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