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Comment by sverona | Hacker News Reader

> Butler saw the push to the stars as something that could give humans a common purpose and save us from the terminal infighting that happens when we lack one.

This will only happen after we do something about capitalism, if we ever do.

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This kind of does happen in the part of the Parable series of books, at least the two that she finished, one can see the outline of what the heroine starts. It's one of the more hopeful dystopian future apocalypse books I've read, and a lot of bad stuff happens to get to that point. Xenogenesis gets there a totally different way.

You mean inventing something better, ie some AI mix? Because anything else mankind tried so far was a disaster and suffering of much bigger proportions.

Some portion of that suffering was thanks to capitalist ideologues who actively worked to undermine the success of alternative systems. We don’t really know how well other systems work in the modern world because we haven’t really given any of them a fair shake.

A successful system is robust to tampering from external and internal actors.

This is a Just So Story. "The fact that I killed him proves that he was weak and deserved to die." You can do better.

Andre the Giant wasn't such a tough guy as a newborn, but that doesn't mean I could've wrestled him at his prime.

Given what the US did to the socialist South American states in Operation Condor, this is equivalent to "might makes right," which is no good basis for a political system.

by that logic, US democracy and capitalism arent successful either (see Russian election tampering and OPEC influence on US/global economy)

And yet, the US and capitalism are both still around, and their continued existence ensures we don't get people in comments sections claiming that we don't know how capitalism works as a system because _real_ capitalism still hasn't been tried.

This is like the spiderman meme where they're all pointing at each other. One flavor of capitalism fights another, is it any surprise that a capitalist wins or that the overall result is a strengthening of the military-industrial complex due to increased defense spending?

How about a more interesting question. Do you believe capitalism is the best or most just way to organize an economy which is possible, that it is "the end of history?" Do you think on an infinite timeline, assuming no extinction of the species or any other confounding factors, humanity will never come up with a better way to organize our economy?

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