Why are there so many humans?

Its great this conversation has started, like most I'm unaware of these problems, and its good to get them out in the air, if the fix is renaming a street - then who cares, rename the street.

> It's why the never-ending expectations of our national demise and erosion, going all the way back to our formation, have always turned out so embarrassingly wrong. They're wrong now as well.

History has shown us that nearly every civilization that flourished and prospered also managed to vanish over a really short period of time. Societies are a lot more fragile than you would believe. American success is not based on some jingoistic manifest destiny; it is a country that has managed to get its fundamentals right. However, even the best prepared civilization can collapse in short order; its happened before, and there is no reason to believe it won't happen again.

As much as people have cried wolf over the last decade plus (maybe more, I don't recall) about whether there would be normal elections, I feel like now we have a discrete point in time where the (un)willingness of the volunteer military to do unconstitutional things is all that remains; the people and other institutions are no longer in control of our fate.

You can say, oh, we're fine, the military still has integrity. But it's a volunteer military that's become a distinct class; if they're the only bulwark, then we're very close to a military dictatorship. At best, it could be like in certain countries where they serve as a check on bad civilian governance.

So, I can still hope/think that this President as dictator is alarmism, but I can't say that if it is crying wolf, it is making me more confident the US will go on and on. He can end his term as an ineffectual wanna-be despot, but he's probing and outlining the weak points - how someone smarter and more respected and sympathetic can deal the final blow to the system. Someone said that history doesn't repeat, but it rhymes.

What recent events make me think of is the point Richard Feynman made about the O-rings in the Challenger investigation:

"To paraphrase Feynman's example, if engineers built a bridge that could bear 3,000 pounds without any damage, even though it was never expected to bear more than 1,000 pounds in practice, the safety factor would be 3. If a 1,000-pound truck drove across the bridge and a crack appeared in a beam, even just a third of the way through a beam, the safety factor is now zero: The bridge is defective, there was no safety factor at all even though the bridge did not actually collapse."

So yes, people were saying the same things in the 1970s. And they were wrong. But things always seem worse for good reason, and eventually, some day, things do fundamentally change. When things crack, but don't break completely, it is not necessarily a sign everything is fine.

Covid doesn't seem in itself like an existential threat to the US in particular, but any time it seems like people are denying reality that worries me, honestly scares me, and certainly it's been over a month that global daily cases are reaching new heights, while financial markets and the media seem detached and focused on reopening. Maybe we need to stay the course; maybe Mnuchin and many others are right that there's no going back, but the sense that people are imposing their wishes on reality, as though it is reality which will be forced to bend, feels like a bad premonition to me. I hate the idea of daring fate, of putting the all-powerful to the test.

Once we define the threshold of high standard of living, we can optimize for it. This is literally when we say "nearly nobody can live as opulent as this" and can condemn waste. Feel free to pick say 90th percentile or something.

If there was one thing that we could do to increase sustainability, it would be to Increase quality of life as fast as possible

And I seem to remember this in a display the Museum of Natural History in NY. Neanderthal using speers at close range, but not able to throw an atlatl or speer.

Sounds like people (and I) have been wrong!

So is a pig that started with human genes, still human? Of course not. What about a human that started from pig genes? Hm.

That's what I mean, by being defined by existing humans. Because that's all we really have to go by.

You add wings to a person, lots of folks would be happy to call it a new kind of being. Some would argue its non-human. The proposal is to add disease resistance or other blood factors or cellular machinery, which are invisible and not obvious. But isn't it similar to adding wings?

"All humans that are possible" has to include the pig-human, and the winged-human, and so on. Clear to me, they are non-human.

See, to maximize uniqueness you would institute crazy eugenic policies to combat sexual selection, random culling (literally euthanized at random) in addition to randomizing wealth and power. (Sortition.) Conceivably this would result in a somewhat unstable society, but perhaps workable.

Fun sci-fi setting.