Comment by Nifty3929
4 months ago
I am super excited for the future! Medical advancements are accelerating, fusion power is on the horizon, space travel is exciting again. This is really an amazing moment in human history.
I think we really can conquer cancer, Alzheimer's and maybe even senescence in the next 20-30 years.
> I think we really can conquer cancer, Alzheimer's and maybe even senescence in the next 20-30 years.
Hopefully, but there is something we know we cannot change in the next decade, and that's climate change. Heard of the heatwaves happening right now? That's only the beginning.
The only way it could stay as bad as it is today would be to reduce the emissions to 0 right now. There is no coming back, once the CO2 is in the atmosphere it stays there for much longer than your lifespan.
Of course we won't cut the emissions in the next few years (kind reminder that they keep increasing actually), so every year will be worse.
And I'm not talking about the energy crisis that's coming. Nor about the current mass extinction we are living: biodiversity is measurably dropping, and until now it was NOT due to climate change (only human activity and habitat loss). Now climate change adds up as a bonus.
It's probably time to enjoy seeing insects and the occasional wild life. We probably won't go to Mars, but we're making the Earth look like Mars, so we may all get to live in a "bunker" and have to were a suit outside before the end of our life.
You seem to think you’ll have access to the benefits, heh
That’ll all be really cool if you’re in the 5% of the planet that can afford it.
5% is awfully optimistic! More like the 0.01%.
> maybe even senescence
To me the really disturbing thing is; if the rich stop dying we’re fucked forever. At least now when they die their wealth gets distributed to their heirs and sometimes squandered. Elon and Bezos and their kind will simply continue to accumulate.
I genuinely wonder: in those monarchies in the past, were the kings as rich and powerful as Elon and Bezos? It feels like there have been revolutions for less than what we accept today.
I doubt it. With globalization the ability of the ultra-wealthy to extract resources is so much greater than whichever King ruling over his kingdom.
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.
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.
3 replies →
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.
Didn't the Combine give humans immortality?
Nah that was just Breen’s propaganda. They do however disable humanity’s ability to reproduce with the “suppression field”.
[flagged]