Comment by ddingus | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ddingus | Hacker News Reader

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I like the simple, humble message.

My own take is similar. Truth is, we are young, we shit where we eat, we spend considerable resources killing one another, we do not take good care of our own, and we reproduce like rabbits.

For all we know there is a signpost some parsecs out there that reads: Do not yet approach. These things have not yet become ready for what contact could likely mean. We must pass tests to come. Tests that arise as an artifact of our current human condition.

Trying to survive our time is so damn spot on too! Real as it gets, and for that record, real as it needs to be.

Once we do get to really living, thriving on a scale we imagine others farther along in their journey as beings could maybe be, we might look back in awe that we managed it! Others may look toward us with some hope and anticipation of a meeting being worth it one day, should we succeed.

Maybe, just maybe that scrappy little world and it's people some how grow enlightened enough to endure through and become peers of a sort, likely young, but maybe ready sort.

A whole lot went into those short phrases. Damn good stuff.

We don't even have a world government yet! It's very disorganized still at home to receive guests, I agree.

Human diversity being what it is, I doubt a world government is desirable at all.

But maybe we can agree on some basics around fairly sharing food and toys and not trying to steal the other kids toys (or even half their yard).

In my opinion it's just a problem of scale. You could say the same thing about neighbour tribes of the same region 10k years ago - that they would never get along. We share the most important thing of all, the planet, and our humanity. And now the internet connects us all in real time, it's just a matter of letting time pass as our outlooks get more and more similar and what we share becomes bigger than what differentiates us, even if there needs to be some more wars along the way.

One way to picture it is, imagine if there's a planet somewhere in the universe with life. Given enough time, do you expect it to have a unified government that fractally subdivides (like states, regions, city governments), or do you expect it to have multiple heads? I think it's way more likely that a dominant culture at some point appears, itself being a mesh of different cultures from the different regions, but at some point unifies. I just don't see another way.

Even if we look at history, while there's periods of fragmentation after periods of consolidation, in general things trend towards consolidation. We're more consolidated than ever before and I think it only goes in one direction. I'm talking here on the scale of thousands of years by the way. So like, in the year 5000, is there one world government or not? That would be the bet.

I'm not even saying it's desirable or not, just that it's likely to happen. For example if one country suddenly discovers a major technological advance, it's likely to exploit it by starting wars to consolidate, as it has happened all through history. And that only has to happen a few times over the course of thousands of years to get us to a world government. There aren't even 200 countries in the world!

One important consideration is that many of the larger countries are technically unified entities, but in reality they consist of many smaller governments with significant power (eg states in the US, Canada and India). They are tolerable because ultimately they still mostly recognize that people would rather be governed by an entity that has your local interests in mind, with the role of higher levels being to manage interactions between them.

Thus, I don't see a world government happening until we're so well into colonizing other worlds that it's more practical to deal in terms of planets than with individual countries. Even at that point though, I'd expect something similar to countries to continue to exist.

Put differently, I think a single entity with governance over the entirety of humanity is never going to happen (assuming we don't suffer some sort of near extinction level collapse).

I agree, and I think our biggest challenge is actually Mutual understanding and respect. We don't need one government to organize as a species and get to where we could become a peer with other advanced ones that we are imagining today. But we need to understand ourselves well enough to get along at a bare minimum.

Have you noticed this correlation that all the governments people find desirable are of tiny little populations? And that the larger a governed population becomes the more of a mixture of dysfunctional, corrupt, and/or authoritarian the government seems to become?

I don't really think it's a correlation. It's tough for any given entity to truly represent 10 people, let alone 10 million. And by the time you start speaking of the hundreds of millions, any meaningful notion of representation is just out the window. And now imagine this on a scale of billions, with countless groups that all have largely mutually exclusive views?

And this will become even more true in the future. Imagine what will happen as we start to be able to reach out and colonize other planets. The cultures, ideals, interests, and even language on those places will tend to constantly diverge from that on Earth. To have somebody try to represent somebody without even sharing the same fundamental values is a system doomed to trend towards authoritarianism at first, and ultimately to complete collapse and failure.

I think you're just making stuff up. Eg.

CCP approval rate: 89%

https://www.statista.com/statistics/1116013/china-trust-in-g...

I suspect the number is that high because Chinese people are scared what their government would do to them if they criticized it.

You can't have statistics on a website without /s

China's well into the authoritarian phase, but I think they also have an even more unique issue driving their success. Just 60 years ago you also had tens of millions of Chinese literally starving to death in the Great Leap Forward. Since then they've become the largest (PPP) economy, and continue to grow rapidly with widespread visible quality of life improvements. That's going to drive a tremendous amount of good will. The problem is that while they still have plenty of room to grow, it's completely and absolutely unsustainable. And what happens once it does eventually end?

Everything comes down to motivation. When it's you and three other people, you can figure out a system. It's very easy to enforce the system because you all know each other. Not working well lets them down and lets them beat you down.

When it's you and a village, it's still relatively easy to enforce things because you have families and relationships. There's some inefficiency and some corruption from individuals but you can still try and monitor everything.

When it's you and a hundred million people, you could never even meet everyone let alone know them. So you need a thousand steps between. And every step and every system can have corruption and inefficiency. Unless you have some sort of central mandate like religion, it's very hard to motivate people because everyone is so separated. Even if you do, you still get corruption like in china.

I had a dream a few days ago: our overlords cancelled the experiment (us), nah it's not working, but here's a new specimen with the "tribal" bit switched off. We suspect it might go better this time.

The Futurama meme "I don't want to live on this planet any more" comes to mind way too often these days...

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