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We need to die. Old ideas die when the old people who hold them die. I'm willing to accept that I will be old one day and die to allow newcomers to take my plac
by CMCDragonkai 4y ago
We need to die. Old ideas die when the old people who hold them die. I'm willing to accept that I will be old one day and die to allow newcomers to take my place. I've seen too many old people holding onto old ideas.
- ETH_start 4y agoThere is space, and resources, for trillions upon trillions of people, in just our solar system. There are ways of giving new people spaces of their own, to experiment on new ideas, without people slowly dying over a course of a few decades, against their will.
- tgv 4y ago1000x the current population? There's no way that fits in our solar system under any idea of adequate living. But you're assuming a state of affairs that we dare not even dream about yet, and spending it all on your hobby horse. There are other, more urgent needs, right now, on this planet. We should not allocate resources to the whimsical needs of a hedonistic few.
- ETH_start 4y ago>>1000x the current population? There's no way that fits in our solar system under any idea of adequate living. All humans on Earth could fit in a city with NYC's population density covering an area the size of Texas, which is only 0.48% of the Earth's land area. We could massively increase living space on a given area of land by building vertically as well. And outside of Earth, in the rest of the solar system, I think you don't understand how much space and matter there is. In terms of energy, I suggest this: https://planetocracy.substack.com/p/space-for-8-billion-people https://planetocracy.substack.com/p/space-for-8-billion-peop... >>For each photon of light that strikes the Earth from the Sun, around two billion miss it. Say that, using the materials of the solar system, we can practically harvest only 1/1000th of that solar output. That would still leave an opportunity to increase our energy budget as a civilisation by a factor of 2,000,000 - a population of 16 trillion each consuming 1000 times as much energy as the average person on Earth does. That figure includes the energy required to power the biospheres on which they depend. Once seeded with payloads from Earth, further growth in the solar system would not have an impact on the Earth’s biosphere at all. There would no longer be a conflict between human and environmental needs. We could allow the population to rise, fall, or remain steady as we wished based purely on social preference, not under a perceived or real physical constraint. And an upper limit of harvesting only a thousandths of the sun's energy is extremely conservative. >>We should not allocate resources to the whimsical needs of a hedonistic few. 1. Wanting to live is not hedonism. It is the most basic human drive, and it should not be stigmatized out of an unrealistically pessimistic assessment of humanity's potential combined with a misapprehension that life and prosperity are zero sum, and thus wanting more of them for one's self is immoral. 2. Solving aging is a need for all humanity, not just a few. Almost all medical expenses essentially go to forestalling its effects.