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People think about space travel exactly in the same terms as the History of European Colonialism. Like exactly. Every first contact movie "take me to your lea

People think about space travel exactly in the same terms as the History of European Colonialism. Like exactly. Every first contact movie "take me to your leader" is right out of the letters to the king written by Hernán Cortez and Francisco Pizarro, looting the Aztec and by far the most gigantic, the Kechwa fortune after taking the Inca hostage. That's like 200 years of Chile's current gold production, and this is a mining country with modern technology to the point it exports eg explosives for mining. Just an insane amount of gold whose accounting was not possible to do correctly. Like doing the accounting of a casino from the movie Casino. Gold like it was iron ingots. Fucking stupid stupid amounts of wealth, all for going overseas. So people think, OK, who plays the Europeans? Some movies say Earthlings do, other movies say aliens do. Either way, plunder and pillage. Like one movie, very enlightened, said the aliens just wanted our gold. That's wantable. But like think of it in terms of apes, like a primatologist. Aliens would be going somewhere with shit technology right? Well the real reason would be to get our nice biosphere, before we wreck it long-term ourselves. That they could want. So, for a rough handle for alien's interest in humans, look at primatology or study of cetaceans. Yeah we spend trillions on space travels, rockets, telescopes. I doubt we've even spent a billion on primatology. Cetaceans I think has cost more than a billion. There's just way more money and brains in whales than apes. I think space colonization will be similar to European Colonialism but only for the Solar System. After that, it sucks. And it doesn't stop sucking for at least 700 light-years.

ben_w 4y ago
> People think about space travel exactly in the same terms as the History of European Colonialism. Like exactly. This I agree with. > I think space colonization will be similar to European Colonialism but only for the Solar System. This I disagree. Without von Neumann machines, at best the initial colonisation of the Sol system will be like whichever human first found Iceland or Greenland, but only if they got there via a shipwreck. If we do get von Neumann replicators soon enough to avoid that, we may just Dyson this system and go directly to every galaxy in our future light cone.
- daniel-cussen 4y ago
  The von Neumann machines are a process. It has many different organs. von Neumann worked on the brain in particular, that was a big bottleneck and still is, others eg Henry Ford specialized in an analog of the muscle. The Industrial revolution at one point specialized in textiles, one of the many many things performed by the fingers of the only real unique organ humans possess, the human hand. But it took a huge amount of fingers finging, like people would spend so so so much time weaving, slaving away at the loom, replacing that function with machines to give everyone good clothes (everybody has good clothes), was worth I think...two fingers per person. It was also a finger-intensive process, the machine could remove fingers, machines still do, that's why that one industrialist specialized in hiring child labor for the machines and visited orphanage after orphanage, saying hey children have small fingers that's perfect for these machines. And that ties into why we have ten fingers, like we have thirty-two teeth at adulthood and need some removed, that is after losing the first round of teeth in childhood. There's replacements. Some monkeys used for experiments need to be kept in cages, watching cartoons (meant for human children, same ones, they don't make special cartoons for the monkeys), and the monkeys (I wish I remembered what species this was) stop and stare at the screen, paralized. Keeps them pretty happy while they're isolated from each other in cages. Normally they're not kept in cages, except for this experiment, you know why? This experiment required them having all ten fingers, like humans, but if left hanging around as a group they bite each others's fingers off like in the first three minutes. Just to figure out who gets to fuck, basic pecking order, right off the bat. Ten fingers is like ten shirts. In Utopia Thomas More...well one of his characters, he specifically wrote that book within a book to defray responsibility...said if you have ten shirts you are a clotheshorse. Too many clothes. Because they had such a huge cost. A cost of drudgery, then performed by the mechanical loom. That's one organ. von Neumann machine. Organ by organ. Like can you imagine a whale telling another whale e=mc^2? Who gives a shit! Want a Nobel Prize you blowhole? Gotta keep hunting squid every day, that's the bottom line, philosophy (don't know the whale word for this) is for when both us whales are full. The human hand is what gives that the power it has, humans are busting open a bottleneck of life with our hands. I'm typing this with all my fingers. I couldn't do this by voice. It would come out different, not as spinal. In fact my hands are writing faster than my inner monologue. They absolutely have a life of their own. Yeah shipwrecks. For sure there were people crossing the Atlantic via shipwreck, they could flat-out never make it back. Even then people could be disbelieving and say, "eh old Mariner's tale.". Nobody buys those stories, nobody buys the stories about sea monsters (whales intelligently ramming ships crossing their territory), everybody thinks sailors are full of shit. That's what happened with the Vikings, who did cross the Atlantic, but couldn't exploit it nicely (from the explorer's point of view) like the Hispanics. It's also because Vikings crossed before the Black Death, so they weren't infected with smallpox. Bioweapon. Back to the shipwrecks: this fact, that you can't make it back, was critical to the Atlantic Slave Trade: Africans had no hope of returning to Africa, once an African sold an enemy off to the Europeans headed for America, he had no worries of seeing that enemy return to Africa. That was key. A Colonial historian told me this.
ordu 4y ago
> I think space colonization will be similar to European Colonialism but only for the Solar System. I think not. European Colonialism for the Solar System will be the first phase of becoming a race of people in tin cans. When travel takes more time than building a working economy at the destination, it makes more sense to learn how to live a traveler's life then how to terraform planets to replicate Earth. Just think about it. Space ship traveled for tenths of thousands of years and has reached it's destination. Who are the people on the ship? They are for many generations lived on a space ship. When they were kids they heard stories about living under an open sky on an outside of a spherical surface in a gravity well, but it is all like fairy tales. Not because they are false, but it is a shadow of an ancient memory. No one experienced this first hand, and no one talked with people experienced it. It is like Bible's stories, but even further in time. So the question is: will these people think it is a good idea to leave space ship to try to build a fairy tale? They were content with living in a tin can not just for generations, but for whole epochs. Why they suddenly change their mind and decide that living under an open sky would be better than in a tin can? I think that there will be different opinions, so some people will jump to building a fairy tale, while others just chill a little here near the star, and then move away from it, to a life free from all this solar wind wearing down the outer shell of their ship. If humanity wants space colonization, then it needs to think about space ships where hundreds of thousands or millions of people can live. And these people pretty much will be space-ship people, believing that it is the true way to spend a life.
- Tepix 4y ago
  They will experience something like blue skies onboard thanks to sophisticated virtual reality.

ben_w 4y ago

> People think about space travel exactly in the same terms as the History of European Colonialism. Like exactly. This I agree with. > I think space colonization will be similar to European Colonialism but only for the Solar System. This I disagree. Without von Neumann machines, at best the initial colonisation of the Sol system will be like whichever human first found Iceland or Greenland, but only if they got there via a shipwreck. If we do get von Neumann replicators soon enough to avoid that, we may just Dyson this system and go directly to every galaxy in our future light cone.

daniel-cussen 4y ago
The von Neumann machines are a process. It has many different organs. von Neumann worked on the brain in particular, that was a big bottleneck and still is, others eg Henry Ford specialized in an analog of the muscle. The Industrial revolution at one point specialized in textiles, one of the many many things performed by the fingers of the only real unique organ humans possess, the human hand. But it took a huge amount of fingers finging, like people would spend so so so much time weaving, slaving away at the loom, replacing that function with machines to give everyone good clothes (everybody has good clothes), was worth I think...two fingers per person. It was also a finger-intensive process, the machine could remove fingers, machines still do, that's why that one industrialist specialized in hiring child labor for the machines and visited orphanage after orphanage, saying hey children have small fingers that's perfect for these machines. And that ties into why we have ten fingers, like we have thirty-two teeth at adulthood and need some removed, that is after losing the first round of teeth in childhood. There's replacements. Some monkeys used for experiments need to be kept in cages, watching cartoons (meant for human children, same ones, they don't make special cartoons for the monkeys), and the monkeys (I wish I remembered what species this was) stop and stare at the screen, paralized. Keeps them pretty happy while they're isolated from each other in cages. Normally they're not kept in cages, except for this experiment, you know why? This experiment required them having all ten fingers, like humans, but if left hanging around as a group they bite each others's fingers off like in the first three minutes. Just to figure out who gets to fuck, basic pecking order, right off the bat. Ten fingers is like ten shirts. In Utopia Thomas More...well one of his characters, he specifically wrote that book within a book to defray responsibility...said if you have ten shirts you are a clotheshorse. Too many clothes. Because they had such a huge cost. A cost of drudgery, then performed by the mechanical loom. That's one organ. von Neumann machine. Organ by organ. Like can you imagine a whale telling another whale e=mc^2? Who gives a shit! Want a Nobel Prize you blowhole? Gotta keep hunting squid every day, that's the bottom line, philosophy (don't know the whale word for this) is for when both us whales are full. The human hand is what gives that the power it has, humans are busting open a bottleneck of life with our hands. I'm typing this with all my fingers. I couldn't do this by voice. It would come out different, not as spinal. In fact my hands are writing faster than my inner monologue. They absolutely have a life of their own. Yeah shipwrecks. For sure there were people crossing the Atlantic via shipwreck, they could flat-out never make it back. Even then people could be disbelieving and say, "eh old Mariner's tale.". Nobody buys those stories, nobody buys the stories about sea monsters (whales intelligently ramming ships crossing their territory), everybody thinks sailors are full of shit. That's what happened with the Vikings, who did cross the Atlantic, but couldn't exploit it nicely (from the explorer's point of view) like the Hispanics. It's also because Vikings crossed before the Black Death, so they weren't infected with smallpox. Bioweapon. Back to the shipwrecks: this fact, that you can't make it back, was critical to the Atlantic Slave Trade: Africans had no hope of returning to Africa, once an African sold an enemy off to the Europeans headed for America, he had no worries of seeing that enemy return to Africa. That was key. A Colonial historian told me this.

ordu 4y ago

> I think space colonization will be similar to European Colonialism but only for the Solar System. I think not. European Colonialism for the Solar System will be the first phase of becoming a race of people in tin cans. When travel takes more time than building a working economy at the destination, it makes more sense to learn how to live a traveler's life then how to terraform planets to replicate Earth. Just think about it. Space ship traveled for tenths of thousands of years and has reached it's destination. Who are the people on the ship? They are for many generations lived on a space ship. When they were kids they heard stories about living under an open sky on an outside of a spherical surface in a gravity well, but it is all like fairy tales. Not because they are false, but it is a shadow of an ancient memory. No one experienced this first hand, and no one talked with people experienced it. It is like Bible's stories, but even further in time. So the question is: will these people think it is a good idea to leave space ship to try to build a fairy tale? They were content with living in a tin can not just for generations, but for whole epochs. Why they suddenly change their mind and decide that living under an open sky would be better than in a tin can? I think that there will be different opinions, so some people will jump to building a fairy tale, while others just chill a little here near the star, and then move away from it, to a life free from all this solar wind wearing down the outer shell of their ship. If humanity wants space colonization, then it needs to think about space ships where hundreds of thousands or millions of people can live. And these people pretty much will be space-ship people, believing that it is the true way to spend a life.

Tepix 4y ago
They will experience something like blue skies onboard thanks to sophisticated virtual reality.