Comment by kelnos | Hacker News Reader

Comment by kelnos | Hacker News Reader

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I wish I could be as optimistic as you are about this stuff.

I agree with you on medical advancements, but I am skeptical about curing cancer (which is really curing hundreds of different diseases) any time soon. Alzheimer's might be nearer and a cure could come from a big breakthrough, but that's still in "I'll believe it when I see it" territory.

Senescence... oof, I think we're a good century or so from figuring that out, at best. And even if you're right, I expect this to be a closely-guarded medical technology, with near-immortality only available to the super-wealthy.

Fusion power has been constantly "on the horizon" since before I was born, and I'm not convinced it's any closer just yet.

Space travel is... mixed. It's amazing that the costs to getting things into space have been going down, and amazing that we have things like the JWST and so many different organizations and countries sending stuff up, but it's depressing that one single company (run by a megalomaniac) is so far ahead and owns all the technology to bring those costs down. The commercialization of space is not something I'm looking forward to, and I expect governments to do their typically shitty stuff when it comes to space.

Ugh, writing this all out made me sad.

> Fusion power has been constantly "on the horizon" since before I was born, and I'm not convinced it's any closer just yet.

I think it's too late for that anyway. Peak oil, climate change, biodiversity loss (we are measurably living in a mass extinction era), those problems are here and now. Fusion may help (?) slightly reduce climate change but the only thing that can stop it is the end of fossil fuels (every time we emit CO2 we make the climate worse for the next generations). But fusion couldn't change the fact that we are living in a mass extinction that is orders of magnitude faster than the one of the dinosaurs: this one is unrelated to CO2 or climate change, just humans destroying wildlife habitat. Fusion may actually allow us to make it worse.

> Space travel is... mixed

Space travel is a big joke. The only advantage of looking for solutions to survive at scale on Mars is that we are rapidly transforming Earth into something that is as bad as Mars, and we many need suits and bunkers to survive here before the end of our lives. That's a bit ironic.

Fusion: well even if we had a reactor that could produce 5Q, just look at the power demands of the tech sector... They have an infinite appetite. Unless we demand/enforce optimization on them, their businesses, their code, their hardware... Any additional green MW we build, will just be eaten by the inefficiencies of silicon valley.

Mars: more like we are rapidly transforming earth into Venus.

Yes, it's important to leave the solar system...but we have 4 billion years to think about it.

We can do a little bit each year. We don't have to tap into all of our social services, cops on the street, clean water, and create an entire surveillance and surveillance capital infrastructure to get there by 2050 or even 2100.

We can aim to get there by, say, the year 100,000, and still have 4000x headroom.

Meanwhile we live healthy, safe, low-stress lives, where fun, outdoor activity, swimming in rivers, picking fruit from trees, having all night parties outdoors, swilling beer, reading great books, napping in hammocks, camping in the mountains are all freely available.

Genuinely not sure what you are trying to say. We as a species may collapse in the next few decades (that is, while I am alive). I couldn't care less about what happens in 4 billion years.

The fact is: we are failing to survive on Earth. I don't see how you can live a "low-stress life" given what's coming. Unless you have fun enjoying a nature where everything is dead. Maybe attaching the hammock to the cybertruck? I don't know.

I am generally agreeing with you. IIUC, your point is we can't survive like this, so why are we even pretending to go to Mars?

and i'm saying: let's not wreck ourselves trying to get to Mars/beyond the solar system in the next century. Let's background it. Live gently in the meantime.

I think the disagreement is you believe we're already kinda screwed? I haven't commented on that possibility previously. I'm not fully qualified nor informed enough to make a decisive opinion. But it does seem like it will very uncomfortable for a long time. And it's very difficult to get people to change their minds when the surveillance capital propaganda continuously shapes our conscious imagination to its own constraints.

Right, yeah I think we generally agree then.

> I think the disagreement is you believe we're already kinda screwed?

Well it depends on what we mean by "screwed". Society will change, that's a fact. Maybe we choose to change it to save as much as we can (e.g. drastically reduce our CO2 emissions, choose to degrow and adapt) or we don't, and we will end up drastically reducing our CO2 emissions anyway (we've passed/are passing peak production for fossil fuels, they are not infinite so emissions will get lower in the next years/decades, that is absolutely certain). And if we don't adapt, the day fossil energy becomes sparse, the degrowth will be harder.

Some say "no but wait, they (someone else, not me) will find infinite clean energy, so we're saved". Which is naive because probably they will not, even if they did it would take enough time to screw the climate even more, and that would not solve the biodiversity issue we have. We have lost 80% of insects in 20 years (we measure it), we are emptying the oceans. We are living in a mass extinction (we measure it) that is happening orders of magnitudes faster than the one of the dinosaurs. And this mass extinction is NOT due to climate change, only to the human activity (whatever humans do when they have energy, like destroying habitats). Climate change is just adding to the fun.

Right now we're losing insects and emptying the oceans, eventually it will have an impact on the crops we can grow, and hence on our food. "But wait, they (someone else, not me) may find a pill so that we don't need to eat anymore!" doesn't work for me: I don't want to live on a planet without nature like Mars, I want to live on Earth. Not to mention that the Amazon is pretty much lost at this point, most coral reefs are pretty much lost already (or will soon be?).

That's not super fun. Are we screwed? Depends on what it means. Life will get more complicated for most people, that's for sure.

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