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Comment by hnews_account_1 | Hacker News Reader

GDP is not what people randomly think it is. It is a measure of the economic output of a country. It isn’t about equality or productivity or did the money build a ghost town etc. If we had the magical mathematics to encode that much in a single number, we’d be traveling the stars.

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GDP as it’s measured originally? Yes. It was a measurement of actual industrial strength. But since then it also includes made up stats such as investment risks and other ideological and fantastical things? No.

This is incorrect. It is gross economic output which includes investments. Investments is real net change in money. It’s not “made up”.

I disagree wholeheartedly with the sentiment that "traveling the stars" is a worthy goal, even more worthy than stewardship of the paradise we already have. We are living in heaven. We have a wonderful planet that nurtures us yet we continue to sabotage our favorable situation for the sake of growing worthless numbers like GDP, all while some people starve or are forced into lives of misery. And yes, I have read Parable of the {Sower|Talents}, who's primary lesson I take to be, we should prevent that terrible situation in the first place.

People can track GDP without optimizing for it at the expense of the environment. Although, metrics do seem to hack the human brain in such a way that we can't help but try to optimize them, no matter how useless they are.

Right, yet we do track all kinds of well-being related metrics, there are happiness indices and the like, yet it seems no one optimizes for them.

The earth is at best a temporary paradise, doomed to be burned up by a rogue asteroid or if it's exceedingly lucky its very own sun. Also incomprehensibly limited in the population and diversity of life it can support when compared with the universe.

How incredibly selfish of us to decide we shall be the select few that get to live on a single planet when the universe has the potential to support so many more lives.

Every second we delay, countless earth-like planets are being consumed by black holes, never to be seen again.

>Every second we delay, countless earth-like planets are being consumed by black holes, never to be seen again.

You don't know that. We don't know what happens to objects that fall into black holes. In fact, it's quite possible we're already inside a black hole.

I think what's selfish is romanticizing "so many more [hypothetical] lives" while real lives now are smothered for the sake of malignant capitalism. Perhaps the fact the the former takes no self sacrifice makes it an appealing viewpoint.

Given that humanity has only existed for ~200,000 years, and the threats you've mentioned are unknown but likely millions or billions of years in the future, is it fair to say it's a "temporary paradise?"

If we could live another ten, one hundred, or a thousand of humanity's lifetimes, that's not temporary in any meaningful sense.

To put it differently: making plans today for the earth's demise due to the sun's expansion is a rather extreme case of premature optimization.

It’s the next frontier and an area for expanding our technological prowess, even if we disregard the doomer psychology aspect of it. We have so much shit to do to even mine the asteroid belt that the next 100 years will look as different from now as we do from the Middle Ages. Not to mention when even further in the future we decide that interstellar travel must be attempted.

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