Comment by palata
4 months ago
> 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.
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.
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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.