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Alternatively, advanced megaprojects are only achievable through sophisticated large-scale cooperation. Aggression leads to infighting; infighting wastes resou

Alternatively, advanced megaprojects are only achievable through sophisticated large-scale cooperation. Aggression leads to infighting; infighting wastes resources on zero-sum conflict. >based on the current state of humanity, I'm not to optimistic. Which version of Earth culture has a better shot at building e.g. a megastructure for an interstellar beacon: Earth culture during the post-nationalist 90s moment, or Earth culture during the current dysfunctional moment? "Earlier this year, the White House proposed a nearly 24% cut to NASA's 2026 fiscal year budget, primarily aimed at the organization's fundamental science research. If the cuts come to fruition, they would be the largest in the agency's entire history." https://www.npr.org/2025/07/22/1266983866/trump-science-space-nasa-federal-cuts https://www.npr.org/2025/07/22/1266983866/trump-science-spac...

jcgrillo 1y ago
Not advocating for this approach, but maybe a fascist oligopoly will get the job done. Or something entirely stranger like a corporate theocracy. There's plenty of room for aggressive, murderous, backstabby species to achieve incredible things. We have a great existence proof right here on Earth. EDIT: Maybe even a future culture that reveres aggression and has achieved some success in their warlike ways will look back on the peaceful post nationalist 90s as an age of decadent sloth. It could be that massive sustained conflict actually drives humans to achieve greater technical heights than peace.
- binary132 1y ago
  The world wars drove more technical progress than the world has ever seen, before or since. (Making your iPhone better at doing the same thing worse and slower so the end result comes out basically the same isn’t “progress”.)
protocolture 1y ago
>Alternatively, advanced megaprojects are only achievable through sophisticated large-scale cooperation. Alternatively, megastructures are only achievable through massive amounts of low wage workers with terrible working conditions. Consider: Panama canal, most large railroads, Snowy hydro. As time rolls forward we appear to lose our ability to do large things, and in part that's because we are less and less accepting of risk.
- lnsru 1y ago
  Once I had well paid job at American company in Germany which paid nice salary. Consider Apple’s iPhone. You have it, I have it and it’s a technical mega project. When you do a teardown, there are hundreds of different components. There was dozen engineers working on the smallest part. Hundreds if not more on the processor. Thousands on manufacturing, logistics and retail. These people don’t dig dirt all day long. But trust me, design, build all the parts on time, assembly and ship the phones to stores on time is absolutely a mega project. But outsiders don’t see this. Imho that’s real large scale global project.
  - smus 1y ago
    Iphones are created by low wage workers with poor working conditions
- autoexec 1y ago
  There's no reason to think that megastructures are only achievable through slavery, but I think it's fair to say that it's a lot cheaper if you're willing to disregard the humanity of others and abuse them until you get what you want. The alternative is that you pay workers what they're worth and use enough of them that they aren't being overworked, but that eats into profits. I think we still take plenty of risks, still do big things, and still enslave and abuse a lot of workers. It's increasingly seen for the evil it is, but that hasn't stopped it from happening. I think the biggest reason you don't see as many massive projects these days is because we've already got a ton of infrastructure in place, major technological advances are getting harder to come by as we've covered a lot of the "easy" stuff already, and the emphasis on short term/immediate profits. When we suddenly need a massive structure to house a major sporting event like the world cup or Olympics where a small number of people are basically certain to make a fortune you'll find we're still perfectly willing to construct it on the backs and corpses of forced labor and migrant workers suffering abuse, only to abandon it afterwards until it's time to build a new one somewhere else.
- anonzzzies 1y ago
  Advanced aliens (and we 'almost') will have robots for that. And they would also have less resource issues than us, so, they would have trillions of them.
immibis 1y ago
I am to my dorsal-most heart muscle cell what society is to me. All my cells mostly cooperate. Certainly they cooperate long enough to build a megaproject called a human, so large-scale cooperation is possible. But there are also lots of bacteria in the world. Way more than animal cells. And they're doing okay on average.
- gausswho 1y ago
  Indeed. Some of those bacteria would love to consume your megproject. As you soon as you lose power to resist, they get a banquet of a lifetime!
Telemakhos 1y ago
> Alternatively, advanced megaprojects are only achievable through sophisticated large-scale cooperation. In that sense, war is a megaproject. War organized the Manhattan Project, which is still the metaphor we use for any massive scale, sophisticated project. The space race was a cold war endeavor to make ICBMs that weren't obviously ICBMs, and the Soviets were terrified that the Space Shuttle was a nuclear dive-bomber (actually it was for deploying and returning recon satellites) [0]. Cooperation does not necessarily imply peace or post-nationalism: war is strong cooperation on each side of the war, with competition between the two sides. In fact, the cooperation is so strong that actions taken against that cooperation end up being punished as treason much more strenuously than in peace time. [0] https://www.thespacereview.com/article/3855/1 https://www.thespacereview.com/article/3855/1
- nradov 1y ago
  The Space Race was partly a Cold War propaganda program but it diverged almost completely from the ICBM programs. ICBMs have to be solid fueled to minimize launch time. But manned orbital launchers have to be liquid fueled (for the core) for efficiency and safety.
  - binary132 1y ago
    obviously the space race was about weaponizing space in many people’s minds
- 0xDEAFBEAD 1y ago
  On a species level, you can imagine an aggression/cooperation "species personality" axis. Humans are in the middle, with chimps more on the aggressive side, and bonobos to the cooperation side. Being in the middle, humans have a bit of a split personality. We cooperate on a large scale during warfare. But consider the Cold War. Both the US and the USSR were continent-spanning countries with multiple ethnicities. I would argue that cooperation on that scale just isn't that different from cooperation on a planet-wide scale. A species that's capable of one is very likely to be capable of the other. That's part of why I'm not terminally pessimistic about humanity, or starfaring species more generally. I don't think we can rule out starfaring for a species that's a little more bonobo-like, and defaults to a post-national outlook.
wslh 1y ago
Humans are emotional, and have other attributes so aggression is a possibility, wasting resources is part of the world.
binary132 1y ago
How is it not obvious that a one-world empire ruled by totalitarian futurists would have been vastly more motivated and funded to do Big Engineering Stuff than 1990s liberal late-capitalism?

jcgrillo 1y ago

Not advocating for this approach, but maybe a fascist oligopoly will get the job done. Or something entirely stranger like a corporate theocracy. There's plenty of room for aggressive, murderous, backstabby species to achieve incredible things. We have a great existence proof right here on Earth. EDIT: Maybe even a future culture that reveres aggression and has achieved some success in their warlike ways will look back on the peaceful post nationalist 90s as an age of decadent sloth. It could be that massive sustained conflict actually drives humans to achieve greater technical heights than peace.

binary132 1y ago
The world wars drove more technical progress than the world has ever seen, before or since. (Making your iPhone better at doing the same thing worse and slower so the end result comes out basically the same isn’t “progress”.)

protocolture 1y ago

>Alternatively, advanced megaprojects are only achievable through sophisticated large-scale cooperation. Alternatively, megastructures are only achievable through massive amounts of low wage workers with terrible working conditions. Consider: Panama canal, most large railroads, Snowy hydro. As time rolls forward we appear to lose our ability to do large things, and in part that's because we are less and less accepting of risk.

lnsru 1y ago
Once I had well paid job at American company in Germany which paid nice salary. Consider Apple’s iPhone. You have it, I have it and it’s a technical mega project. When you do a teardown, there are hundreds of different components. There was dozen engineers working on the smallest part. Hundreds if not more on the processor. Thousands on manufacturing, logistics and retail. These people don’t dig dirt all day long. But trust me, design, build all the parts on time, assembly and ship the phones to stores on time is absolutely a mega project. But outsiders don’t see this. Imho that’s real large scale global project.
- smus 1y ago
  Iphones are created by low wage workers with poor working conditions
autoexec 1y ago
There's no reason to think that megastructures are only achievable through slavery, but I think it's fair to say that it's a lot cheaper if you're willing to disregard the humanity of others and abuse them until you get what you want. The alternative is that you pay workers what they're worth and use enough of them that they aren't being overworked, but that eats into profits. I think we still take plenty of risks, still do big things, and still enslave and abuse a lot of workers. It's increasingly seen for the evil it is, but that hasn't stopped it from happening. I think the biggest reason you don't see as many massive projects these days is because we've already got a ton of infrastructure in place, major technological advances are getting harder to come by as we've covered a lot of the "easy" stuff already, and the emphasis on short term/immediate profits. When we suddenly need a massive structure to house a major sporting event like the world cup or Olympics where a small number of people are basically certain to make a fortune you'll find we're still perfectly willing to construct it on the backs and corpses of forced labor and migrant workers suffering abuse, only to abandon it afterwards until it's time to build a new one somewhere else.
anonzzzies 1y ago
Advanced aliens (and we 'almost') will have robots for that. And they would also have less resource issues than us, so, they would have trillions of them.

immibis 1y ago

I am to my dorsal-most heart muscle cell what society is to me. All my cells mostly cooperate. Certainly they cooperate long enough to build a megaproject called a human, so large-scale cooperation is possible. But there are also lots of bacteria in the world. Way more than animal cells. And they're doing okay on average.

gausswho 1y ago
Indeed. Some of those bacteria would love to consume your megproject. As you soon as you lose power to resist, they get a banquet of a lifetime!

Telemakhos 1y ago

> Alternatively, advanced megaprojects are only achievable through sophisticated large-scale cooperation. In that sense, war is a megaproject. War organized the Manhattan Project, which is still the metaphor we use for any massive scale, sophisticated project. The space race was a cold war endeavor to make ICBMs that weren't obviously ICBMs, and the Soviets were terrified that the Space Shuttle was a nuclear dive-bomber (actually it was for deploying and returning recon satellites) [0]. Cooperation does not necessarily imply peace or post-nationalism: war is strong cooperation on each side of the war, with competition between the two sides. In fact, the cooperation is so strong that actions taken against that cooperation end up being punished as treason much more strenuously than in peace time. [0] https://www.thespacereview.com/article/3855/1 https://www.thespacereview.com/article/3855/1

nradov 1y ago
The Space Race was partly a Cold War propaganda program but it diverged almost completely from the ICBM programs. ICBMs have to be solid fueled to minimize launch time. But manned orbital launchers have to be liquid fueled (for the core) for efficiency and safety.
- binary132 1y ago
  obviously the space race was about weaponizing space in many people’s minds
0xDEAFBEAD 1y ago
On a species level, you can imagine an aggression/cooperation "species personality" axis. Humans are in the middle, with chimps more on the aggressive side, and bonobos to the cooperation side. Being in the middle, humans have a bit of a split personality. We cooperate on a large scale during warfare. But consider the Cold War. Both the US and the USSR were continent-spanning countries with multiple ethnicities. I would argue that cooperation on that scale just isn't that different from cooperation on a planet-wide scale. A species that's capable of one is very likely to be capable of the other. That's part of why I'm not terminally pessimistic about humanity, or starfaring species more generally. I don't think we can rule out starfaring for a species that's a little more bonobo-like, and defaults to a post-national outlook.

wslh 1y ago

Humans are emotional, and have other attributes so aggression is a possibility, wasting resources is part of the world.

binary132 1y ago

How is it not obvious that a one-world empire ruled by totalitarian futurists would have been vastly more motivated and funded to do Big Engineering Stuff than 1990s liberal late-capitalism?