8 ms·

Tech barons like Jeff Bezos want to colonize space and the oceans

78 points by bezout 6y ago

sharemywin 6y ago
> SpaceX wants to shuttle settlers to Mars for $500,000 a ticket, with loans available that could be worked off. He forgot to mention it's $5M to fly back.
WalterBright 6y ago
> that sounds awfully like indentured servitude packaged as frontier life Frontiersmen historically have worked brutally hard and died young. It's an inevitable result of going somewhere where there is no infrastructure and no support structure. You have to do it all yourself. And you can't afford to bring anyone along who isn't going to work.
galacticaactual 6y ago
I don't understand this article. People with money want to do stuff with that money. Somehow the thesis is that people should intervene? Where does that stop? Should VC investment be subject to democratic vote? Perhaps we should first get good at demanding how our own tax dollars are being spent before making demands on how folks ought to spend their personal fortunes.
- paganel 6y ago
  > Should VC investment be subject to democratic vote? In an ideal world, yes, especially if those investments end up influencing the lives of millions/billions afterwards.
  - throwawaysea 6y ago
    Why? Those with wealth have typically earned it by creating value for others and getting paid for it. That money is theirs to spend as they see fit. Why should society intervene and have a say in what they earned through voluntary transactions? That seems unjust and arbitrary to me. Moreover there is no reason to believe that a democratic process will produce better outcomes than alternative (technocratic?) processes. The public is poorly informed, manipulable, and their sentiments aren’t optimal.
  - babesh 6y ago
    So much for freedom. If another person isn’t hurting you by building a colony, why should you have a say? Sounds like a society based on jealousy and envy. If you want a colony, go advocate for more funding for NASA. The US government’s budget is in the trillions and up till now it deficit spends like crazy. That is far larger than the entire net worth of any of these billionaires. The real issue is that government and society now is too fractured and inefficient to actually execute on such a project and people just want to commandeer things instead.
    - babesh 6y ago
      I swear to god, the future is here. We have the nincompoops of Atlas Shrugged combined with the doublespeak of 1984. Sad, sad world.
    - paganel 6y ago
      > So much for freedom. If another person isn’t hurting you by building a colony, Who said anything about "non-hurting"? Going back to tech investments, I'm pretty sure that if we were to put the initial investments into companies like Facebook, Twitter or even Google up to vote ("do they deserve the money or not given their future influence on society?") the results would be pretty close, given how much they actually did hurt part of our society. The same goes for these "colonies", which are basically just another tech investment with the potential to influence the life of millions/billions in the future, potentially for the worst.
      - babesh 6y ago
        You still have not shown a single way these colonies hurt. They don’t exist yet. You just read hypotheticals from one side. It is also known as pre-crime. Here are some examples. Look at the Pilgrims. They left because of religious persecution. It doesn’t matter at all if they were or were not rich. Why should you have a say as to why they should not be able to leave?
        babesh 6y ago
        So you are putting up to a vote whether a person or group of people get to leave?
- warent 6y ago
  It's a fair point. One thought that comes to mind is Mark Zuckerberg. No doubt Mark has grit, work ethic, and level of intelligence greater than most people. Even if he never founded Facebook, these are some of the key ingredients for above-average success and he still had a high likelihood to become very wealthy. Where things get weird is that he is one of the wealthiest people in the world by a large margin. It's weird because it's due to the most potent ingredient: luck. This doesn't invalidate how extraordinary he is, it's just an important factor. Right place, right time, right family, etc. So that has made him one of the wealthiest people in the world, meaning he can shape society and move governments. Do you think it makes sense for that kind of power to come down to a roll of the dice?
  - hntrader 6y ago
    That can be said for anyone, including our elected leaders. Obama was "lucky" to be gifted with high intelligence (genetic lottery), good public speaking skills and high extroversion, which eventually led to his election as POTUS. Does this mean his outsized influence was undeserving? We need a rubric that doesn't entail boiling people down to their causal antecedents, because doing so doesn't let us dismbiguate between worthy and unworthy - everyone and everything is a byproduct of this definition of luck.
  - chordalkeyboard 6y ago
    > Do you think it makes sense for that kind of power to come down to a roll of the dice? Yes. Do you think it makes sense to look at human prosperity and say “there’s a large random component to who gets wealthy and who does not. Lets change that from “random” to “I decide.”” Do you see why other people would rather have wealth distributed by a randomized meritorious process than by bureaucratic fiat?
    - deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
  - rado 6y ago
    Luck or Uncle Sam?
- hyko 6y ago
  People with money want to do stuff with that money. Somehow the thesis is that people should intervene? We do this already, they’re called laws. Nobody can buy their way out of civilisation, even if some people obviously dream of doing so. No man is an island entire of itself.
  - EvilEy3 6y ago
    > Nobody can buy their way out of civilisation, even if some people obviously dream of doing so. No man is an island entire of itself. Sure they can. Find a place which is not taken already, have enough money and you're on.
    - hyko 6y ago
      Find a place which is not taken already There isn’t anywhere, and if there is, there will be war over it. Things like seasteading and colonising the solar system are for the birds; these are not prime areas of real estate. You’re talking about places that we struggle to keep robotic probes alive for a significant amount of time, never mind people. If I was to attempt this, I’d probably go for Antarctica, but the challenges involved make the endeavour just seem absolutely ludicrous. have enough money Nobody on earth has enough money for this. This is all ignoring the fact that once you found a new nation, you’re just recreating what you were trying to escape from in the first place: the hell of other people. Probably worth just paying the parking fines instead.
  - onion2k 6y ago
    The whole point of seasteading like the MS Satoshi in the article, and space colonization to a lesser degree, is to remove yourself from the constraints of a country's laws and develop a society of your own.
    - hyko 6y ago
      Yeah, and I’m saying it’s not possible. Everything these people do and have done is with the blessing of established countries, they simply don’t have the resources to establish viable corporate colonies outside the reach of civilisation. The primary blocker is that the nations who have nurtured these characters will not take kindly to any assertion of independent sovereignty. They’re funny that way, and tend to start to start wars over such things. $200 billion is a lot of money for a person to posses, but it’s a rounding error in an international conflict. Best to stick to what they are good at: finding highly profitable niches (through profit and government subsidies) within existing civilisations (which I suspect is what they’re actually planning).
- madsbuch 6y ago
  I think a core realisation is how those money come around. Opposite to popular belief, it is not an individual that earn money, it is the society that awards money to an individual. We should think about how that works. As a democracy, we are free to think up tax schemes to ensure engaging activities, hope, and meaning for that masses. As a supporter of the democracy, I can not say that is happening when only a few govern the largest sums of wealth.
  - throwawaysea 6y ago
    Society doesn’t award money to individuals. Other individuals award money to individuals, through mutually beneficial exchange (wages, purchases, etc). Don’t make the mistake of giving society too much credit. Sure we need roads, power, and the basics to be able to build businesses at all. But society doesn’t do much more than that to fuel success - that is still largely built on the backs of a few intelligent, hardworking risk takers. Society is especially at its worst when they get in the way of individual freedoms and free market distribution of wealth. I think a good example of this is California, whose policies are bad for business, whose public services are terrible despite massive taxes, and whose overall economic size is more because of a lucky agglomeration in the Bay Area than because of intentional governmental policy.
    - madsbuch 6y ago
      I think you are mixing up society with governance.
- hliyan 6y ago
  One could argue that there is nothing fundamentally wrong with unlimited wealth and unlimited spending as long as there is no money-power equivalence. Unfortunately, there is (money-power equivalence). This is not a case of buying bigger and bigger yachts. This is a case of influencing the very fabric of society, including its laws, by a small minority.
- jtolmar 6y ago
  Those personal fortunes are also products of laws. Jeff Bezos is wealthy because he owns a huge number of shares in Amazon. He is able to do this because this is a legally recognized form of corporate governance. Imagine a bunch of Amazon workers suddenly decide to start ignoring directives from on high and pursuing goals other than enriching the shareholders. They're fired, naturally. They keep showing up to Amazon and using its resources. Some people from payroll are in on it. Why can't this happen? At some point the government gets involved and people start getting arrested. The idea that private wealth is somehow separate from public governance is common enough in our society, and it's easy to hold on to if your idea of government is always an interference with the status quo, but if you consider that the status quo is created by a system of government actions in the first place, it's clear that this idea doesn't actually make sense.
- ceilingcorner 6y ago
  > Somehow the thesis is that people should intervene? People already "intervene", by enacting laws and systems that subsidize the creation of individuals like Zuckerberg or Bezos in the first place.
WalterBright 6y ago
> We must envision more public-spirited, collective futures – ones in which the market alone isn’t allowed to dictate everything from housing to environmental regulation to mining rights. Both Plymouth Colony and Jamestown started out as communes. They starved. Plymouth Colony switched to free markets and prospered, Jamestown failed. As for environmentalism, you cannot afford that when it's a bitter struggle just to survive. Besides, what does environmentalism even mean on Mars? There is no biosphere.
- mattlondon 6y ago
  > what does environmentalism even mean on Mars? There is no biosphere. It means protecting the environment which is basically everything not just the flora and fauna. So I guess something like don't just brutally strip mine the entire surface of Mars for 4% cheaper cement or whatever at the cost of another planet's environment
  - WalterBright 6y ago
    > don't just brutally strip mine the entire surface of Mars What difference does it make? It's already rock and sand.
    - EvilEy3 6y ago
      FlOrA aNd FaUnA.
darawk 6y ago
You know what else isn't public spirited or democratic? The internet. The internet is a bunch of private fiefdoms. I think for the most part the internet works much better than the physical world, in large part because it is a collection of private fiefdoms with zero transaction costs for leaving. Reddit gets to run itself the way reddit wants, HN the way HN wants, etc. If you don't like it, you can start your own. There's infinite real estate, and exit is mostly costless. I'm perfectly happy with people doing this in the physical world. I think we could use a lot more experimentation with community design and rules, and most governments simply aren't willing to do this. As long as these communities are opt-in, and not forced on anyone, I think it's great.
- throwawaysea 6y ago
  This requires greater self determination than we grant today. America for example, was meant to be an experiment in limited federalism, with power and control located as locally as possible. Over time it has flipped, with the nation and states imposing one size fits all rules. I think the lack of locality and self determination is not much different from tyranny, and we have a phrase for it even: tyranny of the majority.
- neolog 6y ago
  The costs of leaving a big social network to start your own are huge -- you can't interact with anybody.
  - mjevans 6y ago
    I liked the old model of a beach of sands, maybe a couple stones, but still a rich ecosystem. Clinging to sands is lonely, and I refuse the big sites.
  - mayniac 6y ago
    You can set up a phpBB instance on a shared hosting provider for <$10/month. Interact with anyone who wants to interact with you. Don't even really need any technical knowlege, just a credit card. People do it all the time, but they keep themselves to themselves and you don't find out about it.
trhway 6y ago
is there a practically possible better way than what Musk is designing as humanity's future ? Unfortunately for one Musk we get a bunch of Zucks and Thiels...
poorslave 6y ago
I don't get why I should have a say about how someone wants to spend his money. It seems like the author assumes that a "public-spirited" future is better than "private-spirited" one. > SpaceX wants to shuttle settlers to Mars for $500,000 a ticket, with loans available that could be worked off. Why would this be something inherently "bad" ? > We must envision more public-spirited, collective futures I don't think I need to be an expert about the history of "collective" and "public-spirited" countries, to understand how dangerously authoritarian this can become.
- sharemywin 6y ago
  The problem is monopolies don't offer choices either. or limited choices in the case of cartels. There's a little bit of nuance there but not much. I've cut off your choices instead of telling you what to do.
ggm 6y ago
Money is a rationing system. For real world goods it makes some sense, absent central planning. For digital life, and intellectual property money is a bad fit. The disparities between rich and poor were getting smaller for much of the 20th century. Rich now has a new top bracket which is insane. And, its built on disruptive digital finance models. Bezos however, is an old school robber baron. His money directly correlates to the relative poverty of his workers and his opposition to unions has a rational basis which equals his wealth.
- throwawaysea 6y ago
  This sounds like hyperbole. Amazon has a $15/hour minimum wage and a number of benefits not offered by other companies for unskilled labor. It also applies to seasonal workers apparently: https://www.aboutamazon.com/news/workplace/amazon-raises-minimum-wage-to-15-for-all-u-s-employees https://www.aboutamazon.com/news/workplace/amazon-raises-min... I do think that this gesture may be something only they can afford, and I also think that Amazon should be broke up because they are immune to competition. But I feel like the characterization of Bezos as a robber baron and claim that his wealth is a result of his workers’ poverty has no basis in reality.
  - ggm 6y ago
    Bezos' wealth absolutely relates to rates of pay and conditions of his workers. If you are working for amazon in an office, you're not the victim. If you like being tired all the time, wearing a daiper at work, and body searches, for minimum wage (yes, $15 is above legal minimum. Do you really think this is good pay?) Then go work in an Amazon fulfilment centre and report back. Bezos can't spend his money. He'll die before he can realise the value of his money. Gates is giving ALL of his money away. Whats Bezos doing?
- fiachamp 6y ago
  If central banks weren't on a mission to create 'inflation' by manipulating interest rates, tech would do what it was meant to do...deflate the price of everything. Instead governments try to make interest rates low to create inflation and achieve asset price inflation - pricing anyone who didn't own assets before their ingenious printing out of the market. Hence why millenials control so much less wealth per their age than boomers do. Boomers took us off the gold standard in 1971 and that is when you see the wealth gap begin to explode. Go do some actual research and look at the exponential wealth discrepancy curve starting in 1971.
fiachamp 6y ago
This author doesn't realize that 'people' don't care if someone is a billionaire if they became one by taking risk themselves. Yes, people will rightfully shit on the ones who inherited their wealth or achieved most of their success through backroom regulatory dealings but elon musk parlayed his whole lifetime earnings into Tesla and SpaceX while the US government printed money to subsidize investment banks and mortgage lenders. Did 'public' sector or 'private' sector generate the more useful innovation? I'm all for the rule of law and at the local level it makes sense to have democratic government. The most obvious trend in this era is that centralization of power is bad but most of it has occurred through politicians who are out of touch with the people they represent who live 1000s of miles away from them + central bankers manipulating interest rates and preventing an actual free market that would let shitty companies go bankrupt. So when people poo on where much of the world has arrived in wealth disparity, they should blame crony socialism in the public sector rather than free market capitalism (which to date only exists on the internet and in crypto). Instead governments are demolishing the currency employees get paid in to subsidize shitty companies and inflate asset prices. And that process is mostly not run by billionaire but by elected and appointed bureaucrats.... This writer has the nuance of a fart joke.
ceilingcorner 6y ago
This is the inevitable consequence of making society into consumers and not creators. When the average person can't write a short story, can't draw, can't do anything creative (in the generative sense), but instead relies on consuming pre-packaged experiences for entertainment, it's inevitable that those with the most resources will be the ones designing your future. This only accelerates as new media becomes both more popular and more expensive (i.e. $50 million Netflix series) as compared to the cost of writing a book (none, essentially.) It's like the old cliche: design your life or it will be designed for you.
- beckman466 6y ago
  > When the average person can't write a short story, can't draw, can't do anything creative (in the generative sense), but instead relies on consuming pre-packaged experiences for entertainment The cause of this is the continued capitalist enclosure and privatization of science and technology. "Place Silicon Valley in its proper historical context and you see that, despite its mythology, it’s far from unique. Rather, it fits into a pattern of rapid technological change which has shaped recent centuries. In this case, advances in information technology have unleashed a wave of new capabilities. Just as the internal combustion engine and the growth of the railroads created Rockefeller, and the telecommunications boom created AT&T, this breakthrough enabled a few well-placed corporations to reap the rewards. By capitalising on network effects, early mover advantage, and near-zero marginal costs of production, they have positioned themselves as gateways to information, giving them the power to extract rent from every transaction. Undergirding this state of affairs is a set of intellectual property rights explicitly designed to favour corporations. This system — the flip side of globalisation — is propagated by various trade agreements and global institutions at the behest of the nation states who benefit from it the most. It’s no accident that Silicon Valley is a uniquely American phenomenon; not only does it owe its success to the United States’ exceptionally high defence spending — the source of its research funding and foundational technological breakthroughs — that very military might is itself what implicitly secures the intellectual property regime." [1] Only a system that honours actual material scarcity of all resources (and thus the immaterial abundance of written/drawn knowledge: blueprints, trade secrets+patents ('intellectual property'), any other type of human knowledge; enabled through the zero-marginal cost of digital reproduction), can change this: hREA (by Mikorizal): http://mikorizal.org/futures.html http://mikorizal.org/futures.html + https://github.com/holo-rea/holo-rea https://github.com/holo-rea/holo-rea holochain: https://developer.holochain.org/docs/concepts/1_the_basics/ https://developer.holochain.org/docs/concepts/1_the_basics/ [1] https://tribunemag.co.uk/2019/01/abolish-silicon-valley https://tribunemag.co.uk/2019/01/abolish-silicon-valley
nexthash 6y ago
> SpaceX wants to shuttle settlers to Mars for $500,000 a ticket, with loans available that could be worked off. Woah. From the 15th - 18th century, colonization of the 'New World' was the equivalent of today's space ventures. There were innovations in funding (joint-stock ventures), technology (vessels that could cross dangerous ocean environments & navigation technology), and in the European perspective, a sense of mystery about a voyage into the unknown. It was seen as a way to start life over, and if you couldn't afford to pay the passage (5 pounds in 1650 is roughly $16030 - $307285 today) you would indenture for a master to work off the debt. Sound familiar?
- bohadi 6y ago
  > 5 pounds in 1650 is roughly $16030 - $307285 today Hello, I'm wondering how you calculated this figure
  - ulucs 6y ago
    yeah, https://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/currency-converter/ https://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/currency-converter/ gives out £517.59 instead
  - nexthash 6y ago
    Purchasing power calculator https://www.measuringworth.com/calculators/ppoweruk/ https://www.measuringworth.com/calculators/ppoweruk/
ve55 6y ago
It would be nicer if articles with this general tone focused more on alternative creation and positive action rather than on stopping others from creating things. It's reasonable to want to have more public sector involvement in many areas and alternative views for our future, but none of these require that you have to 'stop' people like Musk and Bezos from doing what they're doing. Building things is actually really hard. Much harder than complaining about the status quo.
sto_hristo 6y ago
> forward-thinking proposals of the past – produced by a “public” of academics, artists and government agencies yeah, the joy of Fascism, Communism, and all those other future gems produced by the infallible agencies, institutions, and academics. "Billionaires" don't design humanity's future. People with ideas do and only if these ideas are freely embraced by other members of the public. Freely is keyword here. And if that person's ideas prove widely embraced and successful, they possibly become a billionaire. It's an organic and natural process, fair and square; in direct opposition to this are the govt. agencies and academics who in most cases has to force their thinking on the public and as history has proven - to catastrophic results. Naturally some of these successful people become arrogant or simply delusional and start spawning other ideas and grand plans, but that is normal human flaws and nothing out of the ordinary. In such cases, the ultimate error correction mechanism - people's acceptance - kicks in and at best Mr. Future ends up with losses, useless inventory, and some media frowns. Author of the article has a sick and fundamentally broken perception of reality. By saying that successful people shouldn't be allowed to make things for others to possibly use (or not), he's taking away the very fundamental freedom that is responsible for making the better part of the civilized world today.
reilly3000 6y ago
People don't colonize space or the ocean already because we have lacked the technology. Working to help your species thrive in inhospitable environments seems rather prosocial to me, and squarely a technology problem. If given the option to watch innovation happen because of nation-states in an arms race, or billionaires duking egos, I'd rather the latter. My kids will outlive the ego, and may get to live in a new environ because of it. If we get the scalable collaboration thing down as a species, we wouldn't need billionaires or politicians to move big matters forward. I hope that gets borne out this decade, where we learn to think, code, and act in coordination over shared priorities, beyond the bounds of corporations and nation-states. I look to the open source model for spiritual inspiration there, but it doesn't offer many examples of large projects that can collaborate effectively over multiple generations without central control of a BDFL. Maybe our brains aren't wired that way, that we need a just do need a strongman to get anything done. I sure like to think otherwise. We can get machines to do distributed consensus pretty damn well these days, why can't we upgrade ourselves to do the same?
lifeisstillgood 6y ago
I love the Guardian - a beacon of journalistic integrity even if I don't agree with everything it says. I love Neal Stephenson - The Diamond Age is one of my youths defining books (as I suspect it is for the new owners of the ocean liner) But one is a fictional book twenty years old, and one is a newspaper at its best reporting on real problems right now, not imagined problems in the future Seasteading is a joke, and despite all the cool cyberpunks, we are not going to become 'phyles and tribes. Geography and demographics are still our destiny for the next few centuries. (Amazon passed some kind of event horizon - 1.3M employees makes it bigger than almost anything out there - armies etc. The thought of being head of HR for amazon flat out terrifies me. And this means we can find any amount of abuse in Amazon if we look hard enough.) Are there better ways for Bezos to spend all the money he got - in my view yes. If enough people like me agree we can do this democracy thing and tax it away from him and into better places. But the problem is not billionaires or seasteading. The problem is sensible democratic action. The problem is regulation (the 2020s call to arms) Write your congressman. Edit: Uncalled-for Advice to the Head of HR at Amazon: Unionise and Democratise Firstly 1.3 million - that's an insane number of employees - Walmart and Mcdonald's might just outstrip you, but I would not look to them for guidance - look at Indian Railways or the US military. At this sort of size Amazon will be a "safe place to work". Mothers will start to advise their sons to take work there because it's too big to fail. You know that's not true but you need to avoid large scale resentment - and that starts with employee welfare - and welfare starts with feeling they have support against the the man - unions. Yes they will make life harder - but you have fine from startup to being your own government - people will expect to spend their working lives in Amazon like they do in Walmart or the DoD or railways. As such they can either be part of the decision making process and protected from abuse - or they can be abused and powerless and work less effectively for you and eventually cause so much bad press that your name is mud. I guess you know all this - but democratising is not just unionising - I think it is coming - i think that companies are going to find it harder and harder to exist by fiat - that every decision will need to be published and publiscise like regulators do now - and this will lead to people wanting a say or a vote on such decisions - internal company referendums as it were. Anyway ranting too much.
Fishysoup 6y ago
Relevant: some interesting insight into the inhumanity of it all https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2021/feb/03/jeff-bezos-and-the-world-amazon-made https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2021/feb/03/jeff-bezo...
jl2718 6y ago
Seasteading and Bitcoin have an interesting shared memetic history. In 2007, ship prices were down to almost nothing. An almost-new first-rate cruise ship could be had for about 10% of original purchase price. I saw a 400-person seaworthy vessel selling for $500k, which was ~100x my wealth, but still interesting. The Seasteading Institute popped up around then, founded by Peter Thiel, whose libertarian bent was previously SV mainstream and now openly reviled by journalists, led by Milton Friedman’s grandson iirc, and rose to popularity with the Tea Party. But of course there were big gaps in any plans for offshore viability. For completely different reasons, I had spent a year learning about the ocean and how to live on it indefinitely (see “A Sea Vagabond’s World” by Bernard Moitessier), with less success actually doing it. But theoretically, it was freedom, and cryptocurrency was a big part of that. The big issue was connectivity to prevent double-spending. Okay, maybe this is more of my personal history, but I was making cubesats at the time, and in 2008 I met the NASA Ames center director (at a golf course bar I was told to go to), who was looking for nanosatellite concepts to fund, and I pitched a simple bent-pipe re-transmitter to the bitcoin gossip network enabling access to remote or censored users. The design itself was simple, but imagine the confusion about the concepts around that idea that one would have to explain when BTC was just an idea. He didn’t like it, but it was probably not a good idea anyway, because ground-ground HF is probably better than ground-LEO-ground ISM for the use case.
sergefaguet 6y ago
If you want to build a different future you should go and build one yourself instead of whine about how other people’s vision is going to shape it. Thankfully, destiny belongs to those who act.
TimTheTinker 6y ago
From the title of the article, "Billionaire capitalists are designing humanity's future. Don't let them", I was expecting a piece covering the World Economic Forum, which could be characterized as the left-leaning counterpart to the likes of Bezos, Musk, and would-be ocean colonizers. ... the difference being that the WEF wants to force everyone into a particular mould, not unlike 20th century socialist visions for a "better society". We all know how that worked out... But from an economic standpoint, I don't mind crazy, unrealistic visions for colonizing oceans and planets. At least such dreams give billionaires something to spend money on, which translates into more jobs and more families fed, not to mention the scientific and engineering advances that are funded along the way.

78 points by bezout 6y ago

> SpaceX wants to shuttle settlers to Mars for $500,000 a ticket, with loans available that could be worked off. He forgot to mention it's $5M to fly back.

WalterBright 6y ago

> that sounds awfully like indentured servitude packaged as frontier life Frontiersmen historically have worked brutally hard and died young. It's an inevitable result of going somewhere where there is no infrastructure and no support structure. You have to do it all yourself. And you can't afford to bring anyone along who isn't going to work.

galacticaactual 6y ago

I don't understand this article. People with money want to do stuff with that money. Somehow the thesis is that people should intervene? Where does that stop? Should VC investment be subject to democratic vote? Perhaps we should first get good at demanding how our own tax dollars are being spent before making demands on how folks ought to spend their personal fortunes.

paganel 6y ago
> Should VC investment be subject to democratic vote? In an ideal world, yes, especially if those investments end up influencing the lives of millions/billions afterwards.
- throwawaysea 6y ago
  Why? Those with wealth have typically earned it by creating value for others and getting paid for it. That money is theirs to spend as they see fit. Why should society intervene and have a say in what they earned through voluntary transactions? That seems unjust and arbitrary to me. Moreover there is no reason to believe that a democratic process will produce better outcomes than alternative (technocratic?) processes. The public is poorly informed, manipulable, and their sentiments aren’t optimal.
- babesh 6y ago
  So much for freedom. If another person isn’t hurting you by building a colony, why should you have a say? Sounds like a society based on jealousy and envy. If you want a colony, go advocate for more funding for NASA. The US government’s budget is in the trillions and up till now it deficit spends like crazy. That is far larger than the entire net worth of any of these billionaires. The real issue is that government and society now is too fractured and inefficient to actually execute on such a project and people just want to commandeer things instead.
  - babesh 6y ago
    I swear to god, the future is here. We have the nincompoops of Atlas Shrugged combined with the doublespeak of 1984. Sad, sad world.
  - paganel 6y ago
    > So much for freedom. If another person isn’t hurting you by building a colony, Who said anything about "non-hurting"? Going back to tech investments, I'm pretty sure that if we were to put the initial investments into companies like Facebook, Twitter or even Google up to vote ("do they deserve the money or not given their future influence on society?") the results would be pretty close, given how much they actually did hurt part of our society. The same goes for these "colonies", which are basically just another tech investment with the potential to influence the life of millions/billions in the future, potentially for the worst.
    - babesh 6y ago
      You still have not shown a single way these colonies hurt. They don’t exist yet. You just read hypotheticals from one side. It is also known as pre-crime. Here are some examples. Look at the Pilgrims. They left because of religious persecution. It doesn’t matter at all if they were or were not rich. Why should you have a say as to why they should not be able to leave?
      - babesh 6y ago
        So you are putting up to a vote whether a person or group of people get to leave?
warent 6y ago
It's a fair point. One thought that comes to mind is Mark Zuckerberg. No doubt Mark has grit, work ethic, and level of intelligence greater than most people. Even if he never founded Facebook, these are some of the key ingredients for above-average success and he still had a high likelihood to become very wealthy. Where things get weird is that he is one of the wealthiest people in the world by a large margin. It's weird because it's due to the most potent ingredient: luck. This doesn't invalidate how extraordinary he is, it's just an important factor. Right place, right time, right family, etc. So that has made him one of the wealthiest people in the world, meaning he can shape society and move governments. Do you think it makes sense for that kind of power to come down to a roll of the dice?
- hntrader 6y ago
  That can be said for anyone, including our elected leaders. Obama was "lucky" to be gifted with high intelligence (genetic lottery), good public speaking skills and high extroversion, which eventually led to his election as POTUS. Does this mean his outsized influence was undeserving? We need a rubric that doesn't entail boiling people down to their causal antecedents, because doing so doesn't let us dismbiguate between worthy and unworthy - everyone and everything is a byproduct of this definition of luck.
- chordalkeyboard 6y ago
  > Do you think it makes sense for that kind of power to come down to a roll of the dice? Yes. Do you think it makes sense to look at human prosperity and say “there’s a large random component to who gets wealthy and who does not. Lets change that from “random” to “I decide.”” Do you see why other people would rather have wealth distributed by a randomized meritorious process than by bureaucratic fiat?
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
- rado 6y ago
  Luck or Uncle Sam?
hyko 6y ago
People with money want to do stuff with that money. Somehow the thesis is that people should intervene? We do this already, they’re called laws. Nobody can buy their way out of civilisation, even if some people obviously dream of doing so. No man is an island entire of itself.
- EvilEy3 6y ago
  > Nobody can buy their way out of civilisation, even if some people obviously dream of doing so. No man is an island entire of itself. Sure they can. Find a place which is not taken already, have enough money and you're on.
  - hyko 6y ago
    Find a place which is not taken already There isn’t anywhere, and if there is, there will be war over it. Things like seasteading and colonising the solar system are for the birds; these are not prime areas of real estate. You’re talking about places that we struggle to keep robotic probes alive for a significant amount of time, never mind people. If I was to attempt this, I’d probably go for Antarctica, but the challenges involved make the endeavour just seem absolutely ludicrous. have enough money Nobody on earth has enough money for this. This is all ignoring the fact that once you found a new nation, you’re just recreating what you were trying to escape from in the first place: the hell of other people. Probably worth just paying the parking fines instead.
- onion2k 6y ago
  The whole point of seasteading like the MS Satoshi in the article, and space colonization to a lesser degree, is to remove yourself from the constraints of a country's laws and develop a society of your own.
  - hyko 6y ago
    Yeah, and I’m saying it’s not possible. Everything these people do and have done is with the blessing of established countries, they simply don’t have the resources to establish viable corporate colonies outside the reach of civilisation. The primary blocker is that the nations who have nurtured these characters will not take kindly to any assertion of independent sovereignty. They’re funny that way, and tend to start to start wars over such things. $200 billion is a lot of money for a person to posses, but it’s a rounding error in an international conflict. Best to stick to what they are good at: finding highly profitable niches (through profit and government subsidies) within existing civilisations (which I suspect is what they’re actually planning).
madsbuch 6y ago
I think a core realisation is how those money come around. Opposite to popular belief, it is not an individual that earn money, it is the society that awards money to an individual. We should think about how that works. As a democracy, we are free to think up tax schemes to ensure engaging activities, hope, and meaning for that masses. As a supporter of the democracy, I can not say that is happening when only a few govern the largest sums of wealth.
- throwawaysea 6y ago
  Society doesn’t award money to individuals. Other individuals award money to individuals, through mutually beneficial exchange (wages, purchases, etc). Don’t make the mistake of giving society too much credit. Sure we need roads, power, and the basics to be able to build businesses at all. But society doesn’t do much more than that to fuel success - that is still largely built on the backs of a few intelligent, hardworking risk takers. Society is especially at its worst when they get in the way of individual freedoms and free market distribution of wealth. I think a good example of this is California, whose policies are bad for business, whose public services are terrible despite massive taxes, and whose overall economic size is more because of a lucky agglomeration in the Bay Area than because of intentional governmental policy.
  - madsbuch 6y ago
    I think you are mixing up society with governance.
hliyan 6y ago
One could argue that there is nothing fundamentally wrong with unlimited wealth and unlimited spending as long as there is no money-power equivalence. Unfortunately, there is (money-power equivalence). This is not a case of buying bigger and bigger yachts. This is a case of influencing the very fabric of society, including its laws, by a small minority.
jtolmar 6y ago
Those personal fortunes are also products of laws. Jeff Bezos is wealthy because he owns a huge number of shares in Amazon. He is able to do this because this is a legally recognized form of corporate governance. Imagine a bunch of Amazon workers suddenly decide to start ignoring directives from on high and pursuing goals other than enriching the shareholders. They're fired, naturally. They keep showing up to Amazon and using its resources. Some people from payroll are in on it. Why can't this happen? At some point the government gets involved and people start getting arrested. The idea that private wealth is somehow separate from public governance is common enough in our society, and it's easy to hold on to if your idea of government is always an interference with the status quo, but if you consider that the status quo is created by a system of government actions in the first place, it's clear that this idea doesn't actually make sense.
ceilingcorner 6y ago
> Somehow the thesis is that people should intervene? People already "intervene", by enacting laws and systems that subsidize the creation of individuals like Zuckerberg or Bezos in the first place.

WalterBright 6y ago

> We must envision more public-spirited, collective futures – ones in which the market alone isn’t allowed to dictate everything from housing to environmental regulation to mining rights. Both Plymouth Colony and Jamestown started out as communes. They starved. Plymouth Colony switched to free markets and prospered, Jamestown failed. As for environmentalism, you cannot afford that when it's a bitter struggle just to survive. Besides, what does environmentalism even mean on Mars? There is no biosphere.

mattlondon 6y ago
> what does environmentalism even mean on Mars? There is no biosphere. It means protecting the environment which is basically everything not just the flora and fauna. So I guess something like don't just brutally strip mine the entire surface of Mars for 4% cheaper cement or whatever at the cost of another planet's environment
- WalterBright 6y ago
  > don't just brutally strip mine the entire surface of Mars What difference does it make? It's already rock and sand.
  - EvilEy3 6y ago
    FlOrA aNd FaUnA.

darawk 6y ago

You know what else isn't public spirited or democratic? The internet. The internet is a bunch of private fiefdoms. I think for the most part the internet works much better than the physical world, in large part because it is a collection of private fiefdoms with zero transaction costs for leaving. Reddit gets to run itself the way reddit wants, HN the way HN wants, etc. If you don't like it, you can start your own. There's infinite real estate, and exit is mostly costless. I'm perfectly happy with people doing this in the physical world. I think we could use a lot more experimentation with community design and rules, and most governments simply aren't willing to do this. As long as these communities are opt-in, and not forced on anyone, I think it's great.

throwawaysea 6y ago
This requires greater self determination than we grant today. America for example, was meant to be an experiment in limited federalism, with power and control located as locally as possible. Over time it has flipped, with the nation and states imposing one size fits all rules. I think the lack of locality and self determination is not much different from tyranny, and we have a phrase for it even: tyranny of the majority.
neolog 6y ago
The costs of leaving a big social network to start your own are huge -- you can't interact with anybody.
- mjevans 6y ago
  I liked the old model of a beach of sands, maybe a couple stones, but still a rich ecosystem. Clinging to sands is lonely, and I refuse the big sites.
- mayniac 6y ago
  You can set up a phpBB instance on a shared hosting provider for <$10/month. Interact with anyone who wants to interact with you. Don't even really need any technical knowlege, just a credit card. People do it all the time, but they keep themselves to themselves and you don't find out about it.

trhway 6y ago

is there a practically possible better way than what Musk is designing as humanity's future ? Unfortunately for one Musk we get a bunch of Zucks and Thiels...

poorslave 6y ago

I don't get why I should have a say about how someone wants to spend his money. It seems like the author assumes that a "public-spirited" future is better than "private-spirited" one. > SpaceX wants to shuttle settlers to Mars for $500,000 a ticket, with loans available that could be worked off. Why would this be something inherently "bad" ? > We must envision more public-spirited, collective futures I don't think I need to be an expert about the history of "collective" and "public-spirited" countries, to understand how dangerously authoritarian this can become.

sharemywin 6y ago
The problem is monopolies don't offer choices either. or limited choices in the case of cartels. There's a little bit of nuance there but not much. I've cut off your choices instead of telling you what to do.

ggm 6y ago

Money is a rationing system. For real world goods it makes some sense, absent central planning. For digital life, and intellectual property money is a bad fit. The disparities between rich and poor were getting smaller for much of the 20th century. Rich now has a new top bracket which is insane. And, its built on disruptive digital finance models. Bezos however, is an old school robber baron. His money directly correlates to the relative poverty of his workers and his opposition to unions has a rational basis which equals his wealth.

throwawaysea 6y ago
This sounds like hyperbole. Amazon has a $15/hour minimum wage and a number of benefits not offered by other companies for unskilled labor. It also applies to seasonal workers apparently: https://www.aboutamazon.com/news/workplace/amazon-raises-minimum-wage-to-15-for-all-u-s-employees https://www.aboutamazon.com/news/workplace/amazon-raises-min... I do think that this gesture may be something only they can afford, and I also think that Amazon should be broke up because they are immune to competition. But I feel like the characterization of Bezos as a robber baron and claim that his wealth is a result of his workers’ poverty has no basis in reality.
- ggm 6y ago
  Bezos' wealth absolutely relates to rates of pay and conditions of his workers. If you are working for amazon in an office, you're not the victim. If you like being tired all the time, wearing a daiper at work, and body searches, for minimum wage (yes, $15 is above legal minimum. Do you really think this is good pay?) Then go work in an Amazon fulfilment centre and report back. Bezos can't spend his money. He'll die before he can realise the value of his money. Gates is giving ALL of his money away. Whats Bezos doing?
fiachamp 6y ago
If central banks weren't on a mission to create 'inflation' by manipulating interest rates, tech would do what it was meant to do...deflate the price of everything. Instead governments try to make interest rates low to create inflation and achieve asset price inflation - pricing anyone who didn't own assets before their ingenious printing out of the market. Hence why millenials control so much less wealth per their age than boomers do. Boomers took us off the gold standard in 1971 and that is when you see the wealth gap begin to explode. Go do some actual research and look at the exponential wealth discrepancy curve starting in 1971.

fiachamp 6y ago

This author doesn't realize that 'people' don't care if someone is a billionaire if they became one by taking risk themselves. Yes, people will rightfully shit on the ones who inherited their wealth or achieved most of their success through backroom regulatory dealings but elon musk parlayed his whole lifetime earnings into Tesla and SpaceX while the US government printed money to subsidize investment banks and mortgage lenders. Did 'public' sector or 'private' sector generate the more useful innovation? I'm all for the rule of law and at the local level it makes sense to have democratic government. The most obvious trend in this era is that centralization of power is bad but most of it has occurred through politicians who are out of touch with the people they represent who live 1000s of miles away from them + central bankers manipulating interest rates and preventing an actual free market that would let shitty companies go bankrupt. So when people poo on where much of the world has arrived in wealth disparity, they should blame crony socialism in the public sector rather than free market capitalism (which to date only exists on the internet and in crypto). Instead governments are demolishing the currency employees get paid in to subsidize shitty companies and inflate asset prices. And that process is mostly not run by billionaire but by elected and appointed bureaucrats.... This writer has the nuance of a fart joke.

ceilingcorner 6y ago

This is the inevitable consequence of making society into consumers and not creators. When the average person can't write a short story, can't draw, can't do anything creative (in the generative sense), but instead relies on consuming pre-packaged experiences for entertainment, it's inevitable that those with the most resources will be the ones designing your future. This only accelerates as new media becomes both more popular and more expensive (i.e. $50 million Netflix series) as compared to the cost of writing a book (none, essentially.) It's like the old cliche: design your life or it will be designed for you.

beckman466 6y ago
> When the average person can't write a short story, can't draw, can't do anything creative (in the generative sense), but instead relies on consuming pre-packaged experiences for entertainment The cause of this is the continued capitalist enclosure and privatization of science and technology. "Place Silicon Valley in its proper historical context and you see that, despite its mythology, it’s far from unique. Rather, it fits into a pattern of rapid technological change which has shaped recent centuries. In this case, advances in information technology have unleashed a wave of new capabilities. Just as the internal combustion engine and the growth of the railroads created Rockefeller, and the telecommunications boom created AT&T, this breakthrough enabled a few well-placed corporations to reap the rewards. By capitalising on network effects, early mover advantage, and near-zero marginal costs of production, they have positioned themselves as gateways to information, giving them the power to extract rent from every transaction. Undergirding this state of affairs is a set of intellectual property rights explicitly designed to favour corporations. This system — the flip side of globalisation — is propagated by various trade agreements and global institutions at the behest of the nation states who benefit from it the most. It’s no accident that Silicon Valley is a uniquely American phenomenon; not only does it owe its success to the United States’ exceptionally high defence spending — the source of its research funding and foundational technological breakthroughs — that very military might is itself what implicitly secures the intellectual property regime." [1] Only a system that honours actual material scarcity of all resources (and thus the immaterial abundance of written/drawn knowledge: blueprints, trade secrets+patents ('intellectual property'), any other type of human knowledge; enabled through the zero-marginal cost of digital reproduction), can change this: hREA (by Mikorizal): http://mikorizal.org/futures.html http://mikorizal.org/futures.html + https://github.com/holo-rea/holo-rea https://github.com/holo-rea/holo-rea holochain: https://developer.holochain.org/docs/concepts/1_the_basics/ https://developer.holochain.org/docs/concepts/1_the_basics/ [1] https://tribunemag.co.uk/2019/01/abolish-silicon-valley https://tribunemag.co.uk/2019/01/abolish-silicon-valley

nexthash 6y ago

> SpaceX wants to shuttle settlers to Mars for $500,000 a ticket, with loans available that could be worked off. Woah. From the 15th - 18th century, colonization of the 'New World' was the equivalent of today's space ventures. There were innovations in funding (joint-stock ventures), technology (vessels that could cross dangerous ocean environments & navigation technology), and in the European perspective, a sense of mystery about a voyage into the unknown. It was seen as a way to start life over, and if you couldn't afford to pay the passage (5 pounds in 1650 is roughly $16030 - $307285 today) you would indenture for a master to work off the debt. Sound familiar?

bohadi 6y ago
> 5 pounds in 1650 is roughly $16030 - $307285 today Hello, I'm wondering how you calculated this figure
- ulucs 6y ago
  yeah, https://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/currency-converter/ https://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/currency-converter/ gives out £517.59 instead
- nexthash 6y ago
  Purchasing power calculator https://www.measuringworth.com/calculators/ppoweruk/ https://www.measuringworth.com/calculators/ppoweruk/

ve55 6y ago

It would be nicer if articles with this general tone focused more on alternative creation and positive action rather than on stopping others from creating things. It's reasonable to want to have more public sector involvement in many areas and alternative views for our future, but none of these require that you have to 'stop' people like Musk and Bezos from doing what they're doing. Building things is actually really hard. Much harder than complaining about the status quo.

sto_hristo 6y ago

> forward-thinking proposals of the past – produced by a “public” of academics, artists and government agencies yeah, the joy of Fascism, Communism, and all those other future gems produced by the infallible agencies, institutions, and academics. "Billionaires" don't design humanity's future. People with ideas do and only if these ideas are freely embraced by other members of the public. Freely is keyword here. And if that person's ideas prove widely embraced and successful, they possibly become a billionaire. It's an organic and natural process, fair and square; in direct opposition to this are the govt. agencies and academics who in most cases has to force their thinking on the public and as history has proven - to catastrophic results. Naturally some of these successful people become arrogant or simply delusional and start spawning other ideas and grand plans, but that is normal human flaws and nothing out of the ordinary. In such cases, the ultimate error correction mechanism - people's acceptance - kicks in and at best Mr. Future ends up with losses, useless inventory, and some media frowns. Author of the article has a sick and fundamentally broken perception of reality. By saying that successful people shouldn't be allowed to make things for others to possibly use (or not), he's taking away the very fundamental freedom that is responsible for making the better part of the civilized world today.

reilly3000 6y ago

People don't colonize space or the ocean already because we have lacked the technology. Working to help your species thrive in inhospitable environments seems rather prosocial to me, and squarely a technology problem. If given the option to watch innovation happen because of nation-states in an arms race, or billionaires duking egos, I'd rather the latter. My kids will outlive the ego, and may get to live in a new environ because of it. If we get the scalable collaboration thing down as a species, we wouldn't need billionaires or politicians to move big matters forward. I hope that gets borne out this decade, where we learn to think, code, and act in coordination over shared priorities, beyond the bounds of corporations and nation-states. I look to the open source model for spiritual inspiration there, but it doesn't offer many examples of large projects that can collaborate effectively over multiple generations without central control of a BDFL. Maybe our brains aren't wired that way, that we need a just do need a strongman to get anything done. I sure like to think otherwise. We can get machines to do distributed consensus pretty damn well these days, why can't we upgrade ourselves to do the same?

lifeisstillgood 6y ago

I love the Guardian - a beacon of journalistic integrity even if I don't agree with everything it says. I love Neal Stephenson - The Diamond Age is one of my youths defining books (as I suspect it is for the new owners of the ocean liner) But one is a fictional book twenty years old, and one is a newspaper at its best reporting on real problems right now, not imagined problems in the future Seasteading is a joke, and despite all the cool cyberpunks, we are not going to become 'phyles and tribes. Geography and demographics are still our destiny for the next few centuries. (Amazon passed some kind of event horizon - 1.3M employees makes it bigger than almost anything out there - armies etc. The thought of being head of HR for amazon flat out terrifies me. And this means we can find any amount of abuse in Amazon if we look hard enough.) Are there better ways for Bezos to spend all the money he got - in my view yes. If enough people like me agree we can do this democracy thing and tax it away from him and into better places. But the problem is not billionaires or seasteading. The problem is sensible democratic action. The problem is regulation (the 2020s call to arms) Write your congressman. Edit: Uncalled-for Advice to the Head of HR at Amazon: Unionise and Democratise Firstly 1.3 million - that's an insane number of employees - Walmart and Mcdonald's might just outstrip you, but I would not look to them for guidance - look at Indian Railways or the US military. At this sort of size Amazon will be a "safe place to work". Mothers will start to advise their sons to take work there because it's too big to fail. You know that's not true but you need to avoid large scale resentment - and that starts with employee welfare - and welfare starts with feeling they have support against the the man - unions. Yes they will make life harder - but you have fine from startup to being your own government - people will expect to spend their working lives in Amazon like they do in Walmart or the DoD or railways. As such they can either be part of the decision making process and protected from abuse - or they can be abused and powerless and work less effectively for you and eventually cause so much bad press that your name is mud. I guess you know all this - but democratising is not just unionising - I think it is coming - i think that companies are going to find it harder and harder to exist by fiat - that every decision will need to be published and publiscise like regulators do now - and this will lead to people wanting a say or a vote on such decisions - internal company referendums as it were. Anyway ranting too much.

Fishysoup 6y ago

Relevant: some interesting insight into the inhumanity of it all https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2021/feb/03/jeff-bezos-and-the-world-amazon-made https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2021/feb/03/jeff-bezo...

jl2718 6y ago

Seasteading and Bitcoin have an interesting shared memetic history. In 2007, ship prices were down to almost nothing. An almost-new first-rate cruise ship could be had for about 10% of original purchase price. I saw a 400-person seaworthy vessel selling for $500k, which was ~100x my wealth, but still interesting. The Seasteading Institute popped up around then, founded by Peter Thiel, whose libertarian bent was previously SV mainstream and now openly reviled by journalists, led by Milton Friedman’s grandson iirc, and rose to popularity with the Tea Party. But of course there were big gaps in any plans for offshore viability. For completely different reasons, I had spent a year learning about the ocean and how to live on it indefinitely (see “A Sea Vagabond’s World” by Bernard Moitessier), with less success actually doing it. But theoretically, it was freedom, and cryptocurrency was a big part of that. The big issue was connectivity to prevent double-spending. Okay, maybe this is more of my personal history, but I was making cubesats at the time, and in 2008 I met the NASA Ames center director (at a golf course bar I was told to go to), who was looking for nanosatellite concepts to fund, and I pitched a simple bent-pipe re-transmitter to the bitcoin gossip network enabling access to remote or censored users. The design itself was simple, but imagine the confusion about the concepts around that idea that one would have to explain when BTC was just an idea. He didn’t like it, but it was probably not a good idea anyway, because ground-ground HF is probably better than ground-LEO-ground ISM for the use case.

sergefaguet 6y ago

If you want to build a different future you should go and build one yourself instead of whine about how other people’s vision is going to shape it. Thankfully, destiny belongs to those who act.

TimTheTinker 6y ago

From the title of the article, "Billionaire capitalists are designing humanity's future. Don't let them", I was expecting a piece covering the World Economic Forum, which could be characterized as the left-leaning counterpart to the likes of Bezos, Musk, and would-be ocean colonizers. ... the difference being that the WEF wants to force everyone into a particular mould, not unlike 20th century socialist visions for a "better society". We all know how that worked out... But from an economic standpoint, I don't mind crazy, unrealistic visions for colonizing oceans and planets. At least such dreams give billionaires something to spend money on, which translates into more jobs and more families fed, not to mention the scientific and engineering advances that are funded along the way.