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>>Kind of depressing to realize we will never leave our own solar system True for our generation, but then think of how far we have come just in the past 100 y

>>Kind of depressing to realize we will never leave our own solar system True for our generation, but then think of how far we have come just in the past 100 years (Wright Brothers to Musk). The next advances will kinda be logarithmic.

krapp 6y ago
We're going to be spending the next thousand years just trying to avoid our own extinction after climate change leads to the collapse of global civilization, mass famine, world war and the erasure of most of humanity's collective knowledge from its fragile and ephemeral digital infrastructure. The next century's advances are going to be things like "rediscover calculus" and "build a working steam engine."
pbhjpbhj 6y ago
Or not. We've been using the energy stored up in the Earth over eons as if it's infinite, and now realised it's not. We've gone from Ader and Weisskopf to multiple nations having space programmes off the back of a dependency on fossil fuels. Those fuels are running out, and we have to stop using them in any case before we kill the planet. To my view the C19-20th has been a unique period of growth. We're going to need to be much more resource and energy conservative until {and even when} we develop new technologies (fusion? some sort of zero-point energy harvesting??). It seems renewables might be able to satisfy our current energy demands, as long as we don't do something like thinking we can continue along the curve we've been going on, particular wrt population growth, but also wrt our expectation of a bottomless pit of all elements. Our next revolution needs to be extreme longevity of goods/tools/appliances and full reuse/recycling. IMO that's incompatible with Capitalism, we need producers who are invested in _not_ selling more products than are needed and investors who want to achieve goals beyond extracting liquifiable value from our societal systems. Even going back to feudalism I fear we've fostered into power the sorts of people who will never choose the trajectories we need but will always go for personal wealth. It might already be too late to correct that.

krapp 6y ago

We're going to be spending the next thousand years just trying to avoid our own extinction after climate change leads to the collapse of global civilization, mass famine, world war and the erasure of most of humanity's collective knowledge from its fragile and ephemeral digital infrastructure. The next century's advances are going to be things like "rediscover calculus" and "build a working steam engine."

pbhjpbhj 6y ago

Or not. We've been using the energy stored up in the Earth over eons as if it's infinite, and now realised it's not. We've gone from Ader and Weisskopf to multiple nations having space programmes off the back of a dependency on fossil fuels. Those fuels are running out, and we have to stop using them in any case before we kill the planet. To my view the C19-20th has been a unique period of growth. We're going to need to be much more resource and energy conservative until {and even when} we develop new technologies (fusion? some sort of zero-point energy harvesting??). It seems renewables might be able to satisfy our current energy demands, as long as we don't do something like thinking we can continue along the curve we've been going on, particular wrt population growth, but also wrt our expectation of a bottomless pit of all elements. Our next revolution needs to be extreme longevity of goods/tools/appliances and full reuse/recycling. IMO that's incompatible with Capitalism, we need producers who are invested in _not_ selling more products than are needed and investors who want to achieve goals beyond extracting liquifiable value from our societal systems. Even going back to feudalism I fear we've fostered into power the sorts of people who will never choose the trajectories we need but will always go for personal wealth. It might already be too late to correct that.