Comment by bko
1 day ago
This book seems insufferable, at least based on the review. Half of the review is trying to poke holes in why people won't live on mars and the other half is about how people trying to pursue goals such as this are self-serving and corrupt.
I'm sure a market exists for this kind of book, but to me it's just exhausting. What's the harm in trying to go to mars if it results in decreasing the cost of space flight by 99%? Who cares if someone is trying to naively live forever if it results in a lot of money into longevity research? Would you rather this person be spending his money on yachts?
I wish we had more ambitious things. It's fine that the author doesn't believe in this stuff, but to mock and try to get rich off it seems like more of a grift than anybody trying to do ambitious things. I don't get it, this guy is literally an astrophysicist, surely he's looked up at the skies at one point and imagined what could be done. I guess the only difference is he never took his shot.
I think the final paragraph of the article sums up the issue pretty well. The tech world spends a lot of thought and energy on trying to escape our current existence instead of trying to make it better. There's very real crises that are solvable like climate change and food security. But instead of working hard to fix those, tech billionaires are focusing on space travel, AI, etc. Things that are important and could have a large (currently vague) impact, but don't solve our long term relationship with our own planet.
Does it though? Maybe in absolute terms it spends "a lot" of thought on these things, but in relative terms it borders on nothing.
Measure it by VC dollars invested and what actual orgs at tech companies are assigned to. It's almost ALL on a 1-10 year horizon.
So, as gp notes... is it really that harmful to allocate <1% to "sci fi" ambitions, especially when most of what they actually produce is short-horizon, immediately-usable stuff?
Nobody wants to be told that they have to install solar panels to save climate change.
Picking a problem like space flight avoids all the "nimbyism" from say actual nimbys but also from say Exxon.
There's an interesting fight every 4 years in Texas where billionaires who want to own a casino in Texas flood money into the state to get it approved and billionaires outside of the state who don't want to share the market flood money to counteract it. If you pick something that doesn't have a billionaire that will oppose you then your live is much easier.
I don't know, my life is made better by electric vehicles, Starlink, Amazon one day delivery and large language models.
What does "working on climate change" look like? The only thing I hear from climate change activists is that the government should extract more money from people and this will somehow change the climate. So I guess rich billionaires should be lobbying for politicians to tax me more?
Again, all this stuff is exhausting. Environment is the biggest problem so everything that uses energy is bad. It's just a formula for mass de-industrialization, making everyone poor, and eventually de-population.
So no, I don't think wealthy people should do more lobbying. I'm happy with them paying their taxes and trying to build tech that makes my life better.
There are thousands of people and billions of dollars of capital deployed, right now, solving hard engineering, social and political problems to:
- electrify everything, including industrial processes
- replace and upgrade hard infrastructure to enable said electrification
- completely decarbonize the supply of electricity while massively increasing the total amount of available electricity generation
- restore and in some cases engineer ecosystems to draw down and store existing carbon from the atmosphere
It is a massive multidisciplinary effort that will require immeasurable person-hours of serious engineering work, among other things.
I promise you, if you think that any of these things are reducible to a simple answer, like e.g. “just build nuclear,” the actual work involved is more complex than you realize, and contains many as-yet unsolved problems.
I work in a small corner of this effort, building software to enable utilities to design electricity rates to support decarbonization. It’s a tiny piece of a gigantic puzzle.
Start at https://climatebase.org if you want to actually understand what “work on climate” means.
> What does "working on climate change" look like?
There’s probably room for some engineering work and a business innovation in the smartgrid space. It seems like a big communication/optimization problem that could use similar muscles that the AI sector uses (but it doesn’t actually compete for talent because there’s no way in hell utilities will ever be able to pay tech startup salaries).
>I'm happy with them paying their taxes and trying to build tech that makes my life better.
But neither of those things is their goal. If they happen to build tech that makes your life better, it's because it makes them money (that, generally speaking, they try not to pay taxes on)
Well, I think you articulate the situation quite neatly with, "I don't know, my life is made better..." As long as you yourself are either benefiting or not immediately suffering you are content. That many contrary positions in this thread are thinking about humanity as a whole is why you will not be swayed. You do not seem interested in thinking outside of your own comforts, and therefore all of the anxiety and alarm over the fate of billions outside of yourself just comes across as "exhausting."
I, for one, find the endless selfishness of ultra rich people and their enablers to be exhausting, and happily root for anyone trying to break through to the uncertain that this is a moment for action, not idle ignorance.
Elon has done more to help stave of climate change than every climate activist and non profit org on this planet combined. He's a megalomaniacal douche who has undone all of that goodwill, but it doesn't change the fact that he did that against all odds.
Capitalism will solve the world's problems as it always has, no matter how much do-nothing authors, journalists and "social scientists" will bloviate to the contrary.
"Why don't they stop focusing on space and solve world hunger" they say, not considering the utter priviledge that they can live a safe, happy life while writing tripe contributing nothing, which is only thanks to the miracle of consumer capitalism.
While I more or less agree with your assessment, capitalism won't solve the problem of negative externalities like CO2 emissions unless private actors are provided incentives by public actors like governments. Tesla has done a lot to reduce CO2 emissions from personal vehicles, but they wouldn't be where they are today without loans from the DOE or tax credits on electric vehicles.
Maybe I misunderstand your comment as if we've run out of ambitious things besides those that border on science fiction. In that case, I think the market is those of us who think there are more tangible ambitious things right in front of our faces. And in front of those with the resources to make a difference ie, fighting starvation, authoritarianism, inequality, disease, genocide. Are these too boring?
No, they're not boring, but they're qualitatively different types of problems.
Going to Mars and living forever are primarily technical problems.
Starvation, authoritarianism, inequality, and genocide are primarily political problems.
The resources and skills used to solved the former set aren't broadly applicable to the latter set, though it is easy to find examples of people who are good at solving one of these sets of problems who assume that they'll be good at solving the other set as well.
I don't agree entirely. They are different types of problems but I think they all can benefit from people who are good at solving technical problems.
Going to Mars isn't a problem or a solution to a current problem. It's just a thing that hasn't been done. I think starvation and disease could use some help from technical people. And considering the damage done by technical people with regard to inequality and authoritarianism, I would hope technical people could also contribute towards fixing the issues. Inevitable mortality is arguably a problem because if solved, would generate a whole other level of problems.
But yeah, political solutions would be amazing and technology is not the answer to everything. At least, that's how I see it.
The longevity people are very much into preventing disease, and they're going after the most significant root cause rather than playing whack-a-mole with individual conditions. Which somehow results in them being vilified.
> fighting authoritarianism, inequality, genocide. Are these too boring?
Right, have the tech guys spent their money on politics - that seems to be working out well.
> fighting starvation
We have enough food in the world: we don't choose to share it or distribute it. Politics.
> fighting disease
Politicised within the US (measles, birdflu, NHI, health insurance), and similarly politicised within my own country (US social media is only partly to blame).
Bill Gates put a lot of money towards helping fight Malaria and other health issues: I would guess no other rich dudes wish to get similarly tarred.
We should devise a system that gathers all human resources and applies them to a set of goals, like you mentioned. The smartest people in the world should get together, determine the most pressing issues and command all of humanities resources into those problems. We can remove a lot of waste like frivolous consumerism, endless choice and competition. Why has no one ever tried this before?
[deleted]. Not funny
1 reply →
We can back-test the mentality of this book:
- Longevity research is bad/wasteful > In 1900 and prior, the global average life expectancy was around 32 years. Thanks to modern medicine, this has doubled to 70 years. This is a tremendous gift to every human alive today.
- Going to Mars is bad/extravagant/fruitless > Going to the moon, exploring new continents, these were all "extravagant/fruitless" undertakings in their own eras. In hindsight we take for granted how significant these are; e.g. I was born on a continent that my ancestors had never set foot on until a few hundred years prior.
What we want as a species is "portfolio" of pro-human bets. Some of this can be low-risk, low-reward social spending to alleviate here-and-now problems on Earth, but some of it can be high-risk, high-reward "moon-shots" (or "Mars-shots") which, if successful, unlock completely new/better modes of existence. The two are not mutually exclusive, they are both part of a balanced strategy.
> exploring new continents, these were all "extravagant/fruitless" undertakings in their own eras.
Was this ever true?
Within a few decades of the European discovery of the Americas they had already subjugated both the Aztec and Inca empires and were able to extract vast amounts of wealth.
I agree with you though.
Columbus struggled to get funding for his first voyage, and many expeditions/colonies in the new world ended in disaster. In hindsight yes over the centuries it was all incredibly lucrative but doubt it felt that way for the first pioneers.
Because the author's worldview requires him to compel other people to do what he wants, and if they're not doing what he wants that's a problem.
What's the harm in trying to go to mars if it results in decreasing the cost of space flight by 99%?
IMO, the harm is that the weirdo billionaire who wants to do this has said that he needs a trillion dollars to accomplish it and subsequently embedded himself within an incompetent, would-be-authoritarian regime.
I want humanity to colonize Mars and space. I don't want it happening at the whim of a madman whose only concern is going down in history as the man who made it possible at any cost to society.
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Because a lot of these stuffs like longevity and advanced AI are going to break the human society?
I'd rather NOT have that kind of technical advancement before we figure out how to make the human society a bit more equal.
With the whole world turning to the right, we are further, not closer, from that objective. I guess not everyone believes in that, but hey I'm just talking about myself.
The media has taken an orchestrated turn to the right. The people just fall in lockstep behind because that is what they’re used to doing.
The public is and has always been played like a fiddle.
Well it is the leading elites that matters. The public, as you said, does not really mean much.
We are just human resources.