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It doesn't quite work like that. 1000 years ago Europeans (you may say) only traveled routinely within 1 continent. Today, they travel routinely to all 7 contin

It doesn't quite work like that. 1000 years ago Europeans (you may say) only traveled routinely within 1 continent. Today, they travel routinely to all 7 continents. You can't say in another 1000 years anyone will travel to 14 continents -- there's only so much Earth to discover :) We can know Earth in better detail, but it's inherently limited. In the same vein, there's no guarantee we will continue to discover revolutionary engineering strategies, and certainly no guarantee of discovering (or not discovering) new physics. In fact, physics has seen a slower pace of discoveries since mid-20th century. This kind of (not necessarily justifiable) optimism is in fact quite a risk when evaluating some technologies on sustainability.

ben_w 5y ago
I get the point, I just don’t think we can justify that level of confidence. We might be just about to reach a grand unified theory of everything and then science just becomes collecting butterflies or whatever that quote was; or it might turn out that uncovering dark energy reveals 10^80 new kinds of fundamental particles and a way to construct pocket universes we can engineer to extract Big Bang energy levels or dump equivalent levels of entropy. I wouldn’t want to put money on which; and I say that as someone hopeful for life extension tech that would allow me to wait and find out.
- gnramires 5y ago
  The thing is, we can't avoid putting money somewhere -- we are forced to make bets all the time (do nothing is also a bet). I would put the likelihood of pocket universes at something like 0.00000001% chance. Not zero, but really low.
  - ben_w 5y ago
    Sure, but I wouldn’t make a 1000 year bet, nor accept that not making one in this particular case is itself a bet as the infrastructure we make today isn’t likely to still be around in even a third of that time. All the stuff that I am currently in favour of for global energy supply and environment are mainly focused on the 50-100 year horizon for capability. I only care about longer timescales than that for damage on the grounds that kicking cans down the road seems both unfair and, given both how governments and civilisations fall, likely to make rebuilding unnecessarily difficult. (I believe, but do not know, that this will change if we get radical life extension)

ben_w 5y ago

I get the point, I just don’t think we can justify that level of confidence. We might be just about to reach a grand unified theory of everything and then science just becomes collecting butterflies or whatever that quote was; or it might turn out that uncovering dark energy reveals 10^80 new kinds of fundamental particles and a way to construct pocket universes we can engineer to extract Big Bang energy levels or dump equivalent levels of entropy. I wouldn’t want to put money on which; and I say that as someone hopeful for life extension tech that would allow me to wait and find out.

gnramires 5y ago
The thing is, we can't avoid putting money somewhere -- we are forced to make bets all the time (do nothing is also a bet). I would put the likelihood of pocket universes at something like 0.00000001% chance. Not zero, but really low.
- ben_w 5y ago
  Sure, but I wouldn’t make a 1000 year bet, nor accept that not making one in this particular case is itself a bet as the infrastructure we make today isn’t likely to still be around in even a third of that time. All the stuff that I am currently in favour of for global energy supply and environment are mainly focused on the 50-100 year horizon for capability. I only care about longer timescales than that for damage on the grounds that kicking cans down the road seems both unfair and, given both how governments and civilisations fall, likely to make rebuilding unnecessarily difficult. (I believe, but do not know, that this will change if we get radical life extension)