5 ms·

It doesn't change the fundamental structure of the problem. Eventually the generation ships of the original core are flying shoulder-to-shoulder with the ships

It doesn't change the fundamental structure of the problem. Eventually the generation ships of the original core are flying shoulder-to-shoulder with the ships from the colonies founded by the earlier waves. Eventually the free space settlements are packed together like eggs in a cartoon. Dyson spheres around every star, Dyson spheres like sand, whole galaxies glowing in infrared, only in infrared, raising the background temperature of space itself, accelerating the heat death. This isn't going to take millions of years. If it take 2500 years to reach a trillion, it takes only another 2500 years to reach a trillion trillion. The point is that the OP's thinking is fundamentally unrealistic, in the sense that it's not real: it doesn't take into account basic thermodynamics and the structure of local space (Earth with it's atmosphere, etc.) It's a cartoon.

philwelch 4y ago
We're centuries, if not millennia, away from running into that problem. Artificially curbing ourselves, at the expense of creating self-inflicted problems in the here and now, seems like a bad tradeoff.
- carapace 4y ago
  People who argue for artificially curbing ourselves are counter productive (no pun intended) but they're also not worth arguing with. (Have you met an environmentalist who doesn't wear mass-produced clothing? I've met one. One.) The whole point of curbing energy use is not to live in the dark in a hovel. Vaclav Smil points out that people in the USA in the 1960's had a pretty good standard of living, that we haven't appreciably exceeded, despite using a much more sustainable level of energy back then. Most of our problems today are already the result of unimaginable power. Stripping the oceans of fish while filling them with plastic, poisoning the entire atmosphere in a variety of ways (CFCs depleting the ozone layer, lead in the petrol, etc...), destruction of natural habitat leading to breakdowns in large-scale ecosystems (salmon bring nutrients from the oceans deep into the land, etc...) I could go on and on. Energy without wisdom will eventually fail. Sure we should have interstellar travel and colonization, we should have maglev super-fast trains that crisscross the globe, flying cities, etc. Those things are neat, and I am on board. That doesn't change the fact that, to date, our energy systems are hugely wasteful and polluting. We're already heating the oceans! We've got to do better, and I feel that the OP is talking past the point, not helping, y'know?
  - philwelch 4y ago
    None of these problems are the result of using too much energy. Many of them are a consequence of how we produce the energy we have. Most of them can be solved by using even more energy. Maybe you're right that there's some point where we need to restrict energy consumption because the universe is going to run out of hydrogen too quickly if we don't, but we have a lot of problems to solve before we get there, and the solutions to those problems require energy.
    - carapace 4y ago
      I think we largely agree. FWIW, I'm not against using energy, I'm against wasting energy.

philwelch 4y ago

We're centuries, if not millennia, away from running into that problem. Artificially curbing ourselves, at the expense of creating self-inflicted problems in the here and now, seems like a bad tradeoff.

carapace 4y ago
People who argue for artificially curbing ourselves are counter productive (no pun intended) but they're also not worth arguing with. (Have you met an environmentalist who doesn't wear mass-produced clothing? I've met one. One.) The whole point of curbing energy use is not to live in the dark in a hovel. Vaclav Smil points out that people in the USA in the 1960's had a pretty good standard of living, that we haven't appreciably exceeded, despite using a much more sustainable level of energy back then. Most of our problems today are already the result of unimaginable power. Stripping the oceans of fish while filling them with plastic, poisoning the entire atmosphere in a variety of ways (CFCs depleting the ozone layer, lead in the petrol, etc...), destruction of natural habitat leading to breakdowns in large-scale ecosystems (salmon bring nutrients from the oceans deep into the land, etc...) I could go on and on. Energy without wisdom will eventually fail. Sure we should have interstellar travel and colonization, we should have maglev super-fast trains that crisscross the globe, flying cities, etc. Those things are neat, and I am on board. That doesn't change the fact that, to date, our energy systems are hugely wasteful and polluting. We're already heating the oceans! We've got to do better, and I feel that the OP is talking past the point, not helping, y'know?
- philwelch 4y ago
  None of these problems are the result of using too much energy. Many of them are a consequence of how we produce the energy we have. Most of them can be solved by using even more energy. Maybe you're right that there's some point where we need to restrict energy consumption because the universe is going to run out of hydrogen too quickly if we don't, but we have a lot of problems to solve before we get there, and the solutions to those problems require energy.
  - carapace 4y ago
    I think we largely agree. FWIW, I'm not against using energy, I'm against wasting energy.