Hacker News Reader

If you covered all land with nuclear powered greenhouses we could have enough food for a trillion people. Not that we should, but it's a thought exercise showing that food isn't the limiting factor for population. I'm really glad that we've found another limiter, because imagining life on an Earth with a trillion people.

View on HN

I hope the solar system is someday home to a trillion people. We need more minds working on the problems the universe presents to us. If humans won’t step up to that challenge then maybe our silicon offspring will.

I used to have similar hopes, but I think our first priority must be increasing efficiency of research. Consider the transition to open access; it is still a minority of research effort so many researchers waste untold resources reinventing the wheel. Also the incentives to publish mean a lot of fields consist of people writing papers for the sake of writing papers, without much progress towards anything resembling novel ideas

Reply on news.ycombinator.com