I will say that our discourse is weighted pretty heavily towards people who don’t deserve it. Most genuine experts are careful to only talk about things they know, not bloviate about everything under the sun.
I am sure Marc Andreesen is a very intelligent person but he built and sold a web browser. He isn’t an expert on every tech topic. Same with Peter Thiel and the rest of the PayPal mafia. PayPal isn’t revolutionary and getting rich off of that doesn’t make you an expert on (for example) AI.
I am surprised this obviously correct take is so controversial! The problem, essentially, is that the "more everything forever" crowd wants to get paid for the idea of the future today and then will never actually deliver what they promise. They are selling snake oil for the new millennium.
Yes, of course I support space travel and settling on mars. I expect that, if we doubled or tripled NASA's budget, we could get a few humans on mars within 100 years (optimistically). It will be hard! There are many problems to solve (as the book seems to note). There's a place there for SpaceX and all other competent private companies - I love public-private partnerships.
I actually think this kind of low-information escapism about the future (we will "fix it" with technology in a way that is impossible) is similar to religious faith in a coming apocalypse. Faith in an impossible event raising you up and casting down your doubters and opponents. Technology can do a lot! It has a lot of potential! But we cannot fix any of our big problems (climate change, eventually making humans multi-planet, equality) with technology alone and the people who tell you we can just want to scam you out of your money.
We developed and flew the Saturn V in less than a decade.
We have plenty of rockets that can do one way trips to Mars that if we really, really needed to get a person there could do it with some modifications.
It's mainly a question of will. If the will existed, we could do it in a decade with doubled or tripled funding. Not a century.
I really think you are under estimating things here. The trip to mars is ~145x longer (at minimum!) than the trip to the moon. Let's say it only takes us twice the time to develop a rocket & ship that can do that (and come back ofc) - so that's 20 years (for 145x the distance). Then you gotta develop structures and building techniques, some of which you can look at with robots, but some of which will need human feedback. The trip itself takes 7~10 months, adding extra time.
If all of humanity devoted ourselves to setting up a mars base it would take less than 100 years! My timeline was based on NASA with 2-4x the budget, which I think is very reasonable. I think you are being foolish.
The goal was "get a few humans on Mars". Not the insane goal of "a million in 20 years".
Firstly, there's no reason the trip can't be one-way, or at least, temporarily one-way.
Secondly, there's not a huge need to develop a new rocket. We've delivered lots of one-way cargo to Mars using the Atlas V; something like the SLS could deliver much more, plenty for a couple humans to get there and not die. We've already launched SLS uncrewed around the moon, there's no reason to think it would take decades of dedication to launch one again 1-way to Mars.
We also haven't specified if we're sending live humans to Mars. Just shuck someone onto the next rover we send over and call it a night.
Sending a live human, or group of humans, on a suicide mission in the name of bragging rights as a species would be really bleak. I doubt you'd get much political support for a Mars mission without a return plan, or at least a sustainability plan.
I think you're imagining a limited mission that's pretty far outside the tradition of space travel up 'til today. Consider the public reaction to Apollo 13 or Vladimir Komarov. Certainly, we could deliver a one-way small number of people more quickly, but I didn't think that's what we were talking about (it's certainly not what the article is talking about).
Edit: I suppose I should have said "a few humans [permanently settled] on mars, [able to return whenever they like]" in 100 years.
Yes, the quote "a million earthlings will be living on Mars in 20 years", is hilarious. It would require us to start launching hundreds of SpaceX Starship rockets a day every day, now. It's just dumb.
I know that there can be an amazing level of self confidence and denial of current reality required to build a new company from scratch, but this stretches all bounds of credulity. I just don't believe that they believe what they're saying. It's so far beyond marketing hype and "self driving" being available in 2018. At some point, this moves from encouraging hype to pure cult level deceit.
I agree that missions to colonize exoplanets should be low on the priority list per marginal dollar - and also I think we should fund such research because its popular and interesting. We should fund it on the lowest practical level, which probably means establishing a 'starter' base on the moon and a base on mars in the coming centuries.
On this point, 20+ years ago I had a chat with my uncle who managed a factory of rubber thingies for the car industry. I asked him what he thought of climate change: "Oh well, if it's ever an issue we'll just invent something to fix it, like carbon-sucking machines or whatever!".
I take issue with this mindset where innovation is the cure-all silver bullet. Not because it says that technological progress can help (it can!), but because it also implies that there's nothing really wrong with everything else we do and that we shouldn't have to think if we had a hand in the endless crises we see.
Don't tell me about a future where Earth is such a dystopian wasteland that going to Mars looks like the right choice. I don't want to build penthouses for the few billionaires that actually enjoy the place. The best place on Mars is still worse than the worst place on Earth.
Tell me about the future where Earth is seen as a wonderful spaceship, where we learned to live in peace and where we have a good thing going on such that going elsewhere to see what's possible is appealing!
We are inventing things to fix it though. We have massive advancements in battery technology and solar cells and nuclear generators that will lead to cleaner energy.
If you have an alternative to growth as a viable path forward, that solves the global group decision problem which explains why Brazil must stop burning down their rainforests and India isn’t allowed to industrialize, I’d love to hear it.
That isn’t to say I support billionaire pet projects. I would call a lot of it a misallocation of resources.
Did this get removed from the home page? As I write this it was posted 2 hours ago with 48 points and 73 comments. Should definitely be on the home page. Why are we filtering content like this?
It is obviously true that technology allows us to modify nature to an ever greater extent. That is what technology is! I don't think we'll have a colony on mars anytime soon, but AI is obviously coming and will obviously be extremely disrupting (for better or for worse)
> It is obviously true that technology allows us to modify nature to an ever greater extent
I would dispute the relative significance or meaning of those changes though. We can build dams and tall buildings. We can cure diseases and develop elaborate communications infrastructure.
I don't see that these developments alter our essential humanity though. If you read any classic literature from 100, 200, or even 1000 years ago, the emotional truths resonate the same way.
This is, loosely speaking, the bundle of ideologies that Timnit Gebru and Émile P. Torres dubbed TESCREAL (transhumanism, Extropianism, singularitarianism, (modern) cosmism, Rationalism, Effective Altruism, and longtermism).
While these are largely associated with modern Silicon Valley esoteric techbros (and the odd Oxfordian like Nick Bostrom), they have very deep roots, which Becker excavates – like Nikolai Fyodorov's 18th century "cosmism," a project to "scientifically" resurrect everyone who ever lived inside of a simulation.
I think that I first heard of Fyodorov via SF author Charles Stross's writings. It was part of the world building in his early Singularity-oriented novels (Singularity Sky, Iron Sunrise, Accelerando, maybe Glasshouse). He also blogged about Fyodorov, as in "Federov's Rapture":
Colonizing Mars is such a dumb idea. I wish it was a strawman, not the stated goal of the world’s richest man.
Anyway, some of the utopian/distopian thinking, I get. We aren’t going to create an AI god, good or evil. That belief is probably a side effect of the facts that Millennials are (finally) grabbing the reins, and we grew up in an era where computers actually got, tangibly, twice as good every 18 months or so, so some sort of divine techno-ascension seemed plausible in 2005 or so.
But we live in the failure path of our plans. So, I’m quite worried that a group will try to create an omnipresent AI, run out of runway, and end up having to monetize a tool that’s only real use is scanning everybody’s social media posts for wrong-think (the type of wrong think that makes you unemployable will invert every four years in the US, so good luck).
You don't need AI to scan social media posts for wrongthink. AI may let you go deeper, detecting thoughtcrime based on certain patterns of otherwise acceptable speech. However, AI is already good enough for that and the sort of people who want this don't care about false positives (or really truth at all) and are probably already compiling lists. Historically these sorts of folks just make stuff up against their enemies if there is no real evidence, so I'm not sure AI does much at all here, except possibly adding some credibility for the less skeptical.
I see Mars as an inevitability. We need Mars. Our eggs are all in one basket and the only way to guarantee our future is to be a multi-planet species or to learn how to live in self-sustaining tin cans. Colonizing Mars would help us develop the tools for either one of these necessities. Colonizing Mars right now I'm a bit more skeptical about.
Mars is just a big dead rock really. The “self-sustaining tin cans” are the way to go IMO. We can learn how to do that in orbit around Earth (where aborting the mission isn’t automatic death), and then go colonize the asteroid belt, where the resources are just sitting there floating in space.
Mars offers: gravity, but the wrong amount. Air, but not enough. Sand and dust, but not the kind that grows anything, just the kind that gets in your filters. Also it is toxic. Not much magnetic field.
I can see the appeal of "colonizing mars as an extinction-proof backup plan", but I'm not convinced that it's a positive-EV play. Attempting to go to mars increases odds of our survival in case of earth going to shit by some amount, but it also increases the odds of earth going to shit due to the waste, energy expenditure, and missed opportunity cost of not solving pressing issues.
In the end all our eggs as in the same basket as long as the solar system, the galaxy or the universe would eventually disappear. Allowing billions of billions of human to live for the next thousands of year is quite irrelevant: nobody asked to be born, so nobody won't miss the opportunity. As for our legacy, 99.995% of us don't leave a trace meaningful enough to be remembered as individuals by our grand grand grand children.
So, OK to conquer Mars, but not at any cost because the ROI seems really low to me.
A back-of-the-napkin calculation puts humanity's total military expenditure at about $100 trillion (USD adjusted to 2022 $) since 1949. That's not accounting for lives lost, infrastructure destroyed, and all the other negatives that come from war. Humanity is spending unfathomable fortunes just to be able to kill each other. And you're saying colonizing Mars is a dumb idea? Humanity is wasting its potential on the stupidest shit you can imagine. Colonizing Mars is a galaxy-brained idea compared to most of what we're spending our money on.
And of course colonizing Mars is trivial compared to terraforming Mars, which you can make a stronger argument against. "If you can't terraform Earth, then you can't terraform Mars." Of course that argument misses the point that if you set terraforming Mars as a goal of humanity, then we focus our efforts on developing the technologies that would allow us to terraform Earth as well (long beforehand, I might add). Focusing humanity on a course to accomplish an immense feat of engineering always produces an immense amount of positive externalities.
You could have levied the same argument against the Apollo program, any of FDR's New Deal megaprojects, the national highway system, the Large Hadron Collider, ITER, etc. And of course people do say we shouldn't be "wasting" our money on such things. I say: how about we keep doing all those projects and more, and stop wasting the vast majority of our money on stupid shit like bombs that in the best case sit in a warehouse until they decompose into duds, and in the worst case kill some wedding attendees and set humanity back.
Mars is extremely terrible. I don't understand why we'd want to colonize it, versus any number of other things we could do with that immense effort. Visit it, sure, I guess, maybe, but colonize? LOL why?
The fact that we do dumb things does not make the specific plan of colonizing Mars a good idea. Hell, we could try to colonize the asteroid belt, at least that doesn’t involve dropping down some enormous gravity well to visit a dead planet.
> You could have levied the same argument against the Apollo program, any of FDR's New Deal megaprojects, the national highway system, the Large Hadron Collider, ITER, etc.
I’m not sure what “the argument” is here, I didn’t really present much of an argument (I think colonizing Mars is self-evidently dumb). But if the argument that is being levied against these things is that they are all too expensive—I disagree that it applies to some of the things in your list. The New Deal and the Highway system had positive effects for existing people. Maybe the Apollo program was frivolous on some level, but at least it had a plausible goal.
We have a finite budget, I agree that it would be better to spend less of it killing each other, but it will still be finite. We should try to do something more useful than Mars.
> You could have levied the same argument against the Apollo program, any of FDR's New Deal megaprojects, the national highway system, the Large Hadron Collider, ITER, etc
All of those had (and always had) far more obvious benefits than colonizing Mars, including the squishy benefit of "beating the Soviet Union to a contested goal."
You can disprove me by stating plainly what the benefits of colonizing Mars would be?
Yes, we waste a ton of money on military. Historically (middle ages) it’s been even higher as a percentage of GDP. A higher peace dividend would probably be good.
But not all military spending was wasteful. The military and military adjacent orgs have invested in tons of useful R&D with civilian applications.
That is a much darker tone that I’ve ever thought of that passage in.
On a slightly related note, I think a lot of people today don’t realize when Jesus talked about the “Kingdom of Heaven” many of his audience heard that as a real, physical kingdom which would overthrow Rome. I believe Jesus also believed this, which to me is why Jesus’ dying words (“My God, why have you forsaken me?”) is quite literally an admission that his political project had failed.
Jesus predicted his death several times, most explicitly in Matthew 20:17–19.
> Now Jesus, going up to Jerusalem, took the twelve disciples aside on the road and said to them, “Behold, we are going up to Jerusalem, and the Son of Man will be betrayed to the chief priests and to the scribes; and they will condemn Him to death, and deliver Him to the Gentiles to mock and to scourge and to crucify. And the third day He will rise again.”
It is known that the specifics of the story were modified.
The current text is kind of frozen by its own similarities to itself.
The use of extracted quotes is probably a mistake. You have to find the same event in a lot of other books beyond Matthew to be able to find a tiny whiff of historical information, very faint, very difficult to do with translated versions.
Luke 17:20-37 also seems to support the idea that Jesus was trying to tell people the kingdom was spiritual, not physical. The kingdom as a concept wasn't some novel idea, either. Jesus was claiming he was the fulfillment of the messianic prophecy in Judaism. He was reinterpreting the prophecy, though, as a spiritual rather than literal liberation.
Tangential, but you can interpret the anti-christ in christian belief to bring the alleged kingdom, as a sort of anti-fulfillment of the prophecy.
The phrase "grift behind AI doomerism" suggests that either the book author or the reviewer (or both) don't have a clue. AI will cause real and huge problems.
Cars have killed millions of people. Add to that the consequences of electricity, industrialization, urbanization, and even capitalism itself. But billions and billions of people are not only better off -- living lives of outrageous luxury when measured against recent history -- but they wouldn't have existed at all.
Everything good comes with tradeoffs. AI will likely also kill millions but will create and support and improve the lives of billions (if not trillions on a long enough time scale).
That's one vision of how things play out. But I do think it's possible that AI ends up killing every last person, in which case I think "everything good comes with tradeoffs" is a bit too much of an understatement.
Even if AI doesn't kill every last person, I think it will almost certainly increase the wealth gap. I agree that the tradeoffs will most likely not be worth it.
But the main figures behind the Ai doomerism are nutjobs either applying bayesian math in a bad way or right wing extremist believing that black people are inferior for genetics reason (I know it's an overreach that doesn't represent all the population of Ai doomers, but the most important people in that sphere are represented by what I said).
Furthermore, they're people without a history in academia or a specific past in philosophy. Although i do agree that investigating Ai dangers should be done, but in an academic context
Putting aside the nebulous notion "contribution to hard science"...
She became famous for adopting a strain of strident and problematic activism, using it to attack her colleagues and making claims just as wild as some of the ones she cherry picks to critique.
It's not at all surprising that she ended up an extremely divisive figure. And meanwhile, the state of the art sped far ahead of where she drew her line in the sand.
It's hard to find discussion of her that isn't strongly biased in one direction or another (surely, my own comment included). In my experience (sample size 1), when she gets brought up (or involved), the quality of the discussion usually plummets.
This book seems insufferable, at least based on the review. Half of the review is trying to poke holes in why people won't live on mars and the other half is about how people trying to pursue goals such as this are self-serving and corrupt.
I'm sure a market exists for this kind of book, but to me it's just exhausting. What's the harm in trying to go to mars if it results in decreasing the cost of space flight by 99%? Who cares if someone is trying to naively live forever if it results in a lot of money into longevity research? Would you rather this person be spending his money on yachts?
I wish we had more ambitious things. It's fine that the author doesn't believe in this stuff, but to mock and try to get rich off it seems like more of a grift than anybody trying to do ambitious things. I don't get it, this guy is literally an astrophysicist, surely he's looked up at the skies at one point and imagined what could be done. I guess the only difference is he never took his shot.
Maybe I misunderstand your comment as if we've run out of ambitious things besides those that border on science fiction.
In that case, I think the market is those of us who think there are more tangible ambitious things right in front of our faces. And in front of those with the resources to make a difference ie, fighting starvation, authoritarianism, inequality, disease, genocide.
Are these too boring?
No, they're not boring, but they're qualitatively different types of problems.
Going to Mars and living forever are primarily technical problems.
Starvation, authoritarianism, inequality, and genocide are primarily political problems.
The resources and skills used to solved the former set aren't broadly applicable to the latter set, though it is easy to find examples of people who are good at solving one of these sets of problems who assume that they'll be good at solving the other set as well.
I don't agree entirely. They are different types of problems but I think they all can benefit from people who are good at solving technical problems.
Going to Mars isn't a problem or a solution to a current problem. It's just a thing that hasn't been done.
I think starvation and disease could use some help from technical people.
And considering the damage done by technical people with regard to inequality and authoritarianism, I would hope technical people could also contribute towards fixing the issues.
Inevitable mortality is arguably a problem because if solved, would generate a whole other level of problems.
But yeah, political solutions would be amazing and technology is not the answer to everything. At least, that's how I see it.
> fighting authoritarianism, inequality, genocide. Are these too boring?
Right, have the tech guys spent their money on politics - that seems to be working out well.
> fighting starvation
We have enough food in the world: we don't choose to share it or distribute it. Politics.
> fighting disease
Politicised within the US (measles, birdflu, NHI, health insurance), and similarly politicised within my own country (US social media is only partly to blame).
Bill Gates put a lot of money towards helping fight Malaria and other health issues: I would guess no other rich dudes wish to get similarly tarred.
We should devise a system that gathers all human resources and applies them to a set of goals, like you mentioned. The smartest people in the world should get together, determine the most pressing issues and command all of humanities resources into those problems. We can remove a lot of waste like frivolous consumerism, endless choice and competition. Why has no one ever tried this before?
- Longevity research is bad/wasteful > In 1900 and prior, the global average life expectancy was around 32 years. Thanks to modern medicine, this has doubled to 70 years. This is a tremendous gift to every human alive today.
- Going to Mars is bad/extravagant/fruitless > Going to the moon, exploring new continents, these were all "extravagant/fruitless" undertakings in their own eras. In hindsight we take for granted how significant these are; e.g. I was born on a continent that my ancestors had never set foot on until a few hundred years prior.
What we want as a species is "portfolio" of pro-human bets. Some of this can be low-risk, low-reward social spending to alleviate here-and-now problems on Earth, but some of it can be high-risk, high-reward "moon-shots" (or "Mars-shots") which, if successful, unlock completely new/better modes of existence. The two are not mutually exclusive, they are both part of a balanced strategy.
I think the final paragraph of the article sums up the issue pretty well. The tech world spends a lot of thought and energy on trying to escape our current existence instead of trying to make it better. There's very real crises that are solvable like climate change and food security. But instead of working hard to fix those, tech billionaires are focusing on space travel, AI, etc. Things that are important and could have a large (currently vague) impact, but don't solve our long term relationship with our own planet.
Does it though? Maybe in absolute terms it spends "a lot" of thought on these things, but in relative terms it borders on nothing.
Measure it by VC dollars invested and what actual orgs at tech companies are assigned to. It's almost ALL on a 1-10 year horizon.
So, as gp notes... is it really that harmful to allocate <1% to "sci fi" ambitions, especially when most of what they actually produce is short-horizon, immediately-usable stuff?
I don't know, my life is made better by electric vehicles, Starlink, Amazon one day delivery and large language models.
What does "working on climate change" look like? The only thing I hear from climate change activists is that the government should extract more money from people and this will somehow change the climate. So I guess rich billionaires should be lobbying for politicians to tax me more?
Again, all this stuff is exhausting. Environment is the biggest problem so everything that uses energy is bad. It's just a formula for mass de-industrialization, making everyone poor, and eventually de-population.
So no, I don't think wealthy people should do more lobbying. I'm happy with them paying their taxes and trying to build tech that makes my life better.
There are thousands of people and billions of dollars of capital deployed, right now, solving hard engineering, social and political problems to:
- electrify everything, including industrial processes
- replace and upgrade hard infrastructure to enable said electrification
- completely decarbonize the supply of electricity while massively increasing the total amount of available electricity generation
- restore and in some cases engineer ecosystems to draw down and store existing carbon from the atmosphere
It is a massive multidisciplinary effort that will require immeasurable person-hours of serious engineering work, among other things.
I promise you, if you think that any of these things are reducible to a simple answer, like e.g. “just build nuclear,” the actual work involved is more complex than you realize, and contains many as-yet unsolved problems.
I work in a small corner of this effort, building software to enable utilities to design electricity rates to support decarbonization. It’s a tiny piece of a gigantic puzzle.
Start at https://climatebase.org if you want to actually understand what “work on climate” means.
> What does "working on climate change" look like?
There’s probably room for some engineering work and a business innovation in the smartgrid space. It seems like a big communication/optimization problem that could use similar muscles that the AI sector uses (but it doesn’t actually compete for talent because there’s no way in hell utilities will ever be able to pay tech startup salaries).
Well, I think you articulate the situation quite neatly with, "I don't know, my life is made better..." As long as you yourself are either benefiting or not immediately suffering you are content. That many contrary positions in this thread are thinking about humanity as a whole is why you will not be swayed. You do not seem interested in thinking outside of your own comforts, and therefore all of the anxiety and alarm over the fate of billions outside of yourself just comes across as "exhausting."
I, for one, find the endless selfishness of ultra rich people and their enablers to be exhausting, and happily root for anyone trying to break through to the uncertain that this is a moment for action, not idle ignorance.
>I'm happy with them paying their taxes and trying to build tech that makes my life better.
But neither of those things is their goal. If they happen to build tech that makes your life better, it's because it makes them money (that, generally speaking, they try not to pay taxes on)
What's the harm in trying to go to mars if it results in decreasing the cost of space flight by 99%?
IMO, the harm is that the weirdo billionaire who wants to do this has said that he needs a trillion dollars to accomplish it and subsequently embedded himself within an incompetent, would-be-authoritarian regime.
I want humanity to colonize Mars and space. I don't want it happening at the whim of a madman whose only concern is going down in history as the man who made it possible at any cost to society.
Because a lot of these stuffs like longevity and advanced AI are going to break the human society?
I'd rather NOT have that kind of technical advancement before we figure out how to make the human society a bit more equal.
With the whole world turning to the right, we are further, not closer, from that objective. I guess not everyone believes in that, but hey I'm just talking about myself.
> He encourages us not to get hung up on galaxies far, far away but to pay more attention to our own fragile planet and the frail humans around us.
While I don't necessarily agree with the motives of the Silicon Valley billionaires you must have a really basic imagination to hate on the future, and the answers to Man's oldest questions which may be on Mars and beyond. Of course, like a broken record, out comes the trope of "Why don't you solve poverty on Earth (with all that money)".
For once, can the malthusians come up with a single unique idea or viewpoint rather than recycling the same content? People criticize AI for producing slop but look at what makes the NYT.
I don't see how solving poverty on earth can't be more important than the endeavor of trying with the current rather limited tech to inhabit an as good as inhabitable planet.
Space exploration is merely a _technological_ problem. Solving poverty is a _political_ problem, one that is resistant to just throwing money at the problem.
As others in the thread mention, these are problems of political economy that no person or mega corp or even nation state can solve.
So, continuing to also work on other things is both rational and morally sound.
Progress in one area unlocks new possibilities in other areas. E.g. abundant near-free energy would make eliminating poverty a more tractable political problem than it has proven to be.
It depends on how you answer the question "why are we here?"
Is the goal is to create an earthly utopia with minimum suffering and maximum happiness? Is it aggressive progress so that we can't be wiped out by a random cosmic event? Or should we be eschewing all of that and living harmoniously with nature and dying spiritually content when our time is up?
There is also the argument that if we had focused on solving poverty 150 years ago instead of prioritizing rapid industrialization and economic growth more people would be in poverty today. A 50 year period of scarcity would completely erase all progress we have made towards lifting people out of poverty, regardless of how equitably we distributed the scarce goods.
Even if we solve poverty, we can always turn right around and un-solve poverty. Something like this has happened in quite recent memory with a whole lot of other "solved" problems. Luckily, we can come back from that failure and solve those problems all over again, as long as we don't go extinct.
There are large swathes of earth that are too inhospitable, like deserts. They're more accessible and easier to support life in than Mars, and yet no one lives there.
I'm just making the basic point that we have a wealth of much more hospitable places to live on earth, and somehow they're not viable candidates as "backup plans" for humanity.
Going a little further, living in the ocean is easier than living on Mars. As far as I can tell there are no billionaire-funded submarine civilisation programs.
They're not viable candidates as backup plans for humanity because they have the same vulnerabilities to comet strikes, global nuclear war and pandemic as the rest of the Earth.
OTOH, if one of those took out human life on Earth, people living on Mars could re-colonize Earth.
There are approaches to solving hunger and housing, however extremist capitalism & avoidance of paying taxes by oligarchs and their corporations are standing in the way of it.
Gift link: https://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/23/books/review/more-everyth...
https://archive.ph/liq8S
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I will say that our discourse is weighted pretty heavily towards people who don’t deserve it. Most genuine experts are careful to only talk about things they know, not bloviate about everything under the sun.
I am sure Marc Andreesen is a very intelligent person but he built and sold a web browser. He isn’t an expert on every tech topic. Same with Peter Thiel and the rest of the PayPal mafia. PayPal isn’t revolutionary and getting rich off of that doesn’t make you an expert on (for example) AI.
If you like optimistic Sci-Fi, I would recommend the Culture Series. It really changed me when I read it in university.
I am surprised this obviously correct take is so controversial! The problem, essentially, is that the "more everything forever" crowd wants to get paid for the idea of the future today and then will never actually deliver what they promise. They are selling snake oil for the new millennium.
Yes, of course I support space travel and settling on mars. I expect that, if we doubled or tripled NASA's budget, we could get a few humans on mars within 100 years (optimistically). It will be hard! There are many problems to solve (as the book seems to note). There's a place there for SpaceX and all other competent private companies - I love public-private partnerships.
I actually think this kind of low-information escapism about the future (we will "fix it" with technology in a way that is impossible) is similar to religious faith in a coming apocalypse. Faith in an impossible event raising you up and casting down your doubters and opponents. Technology can do a lot! It has a lot of potential! But we cannot fix any of our big problems (climate change, eventually making humans multi-planet, equality) with technology alone and the people who tell you we can just want to scam you out of your money.
100 years optimistically?
We developed and flew the Saturn V in less than a decade.
We have plenty of rockets that can do one way trips to Mars that if we really, really needed to get a person there could do it with some modifications.
It's mainly a question of will. If the will existed, we could do it in a decade with doubled or tripled funding. Not a century.
I really think you are under estimating things here. The trip to mars is ~145x longer (at minimum!) than the trip to the moon. Let's say it only takes us twice the time to develop a rocket & ship that can do that (and come back ofc) - so that's 20 years (for 145x the distance). Then you gotta develop structures and building techniques, some of which you can look at with robots, but some of which will need human feedback. The trip itself takes 7~10 months, adding extra time.
If all of humanity devoted ourselves to setting up a mars base it would take less than 100 years! My timeline was based on NASA with 2-4x the budget, which I think is very reasonable. I think you are being foolish.
The goal was "get a few humans on Mars". Not the insane goal of "a million in 20 years".
Firstly, there's no reason the trip can't be one-way, or at least, temporarily one-way.
Secondly, there's not a huge need to develop a new rocket. We've delivered lots of one-way cargo to Mars using the Atlas V; something like the SLS could deliver much more, plenty for a couple humans to get there and not die. We've already launched SLS uncrewed around the moon, there's no reason to think it would take decades of dedication to launch one again 1-way to Mars.
We also haven't specified if we're sending live humans to Mars. Just shuck someone onto the next rover we send over and call it a night.
Sending a live human, or group of humans, on a suicide mission in the name of bragging rights as a species would be really bleak. I doubt you'd get much political support for a Mars mission without a return plan, or at least a sustainability plan.
I think you're imagining a limited mission that's pretty far outside the tradition of space travel up 'til today. Consider the public reaction to Apollo 13 or Vladimir Komarov. Certainly, we could deliver a one-way small number of people more quickly, but I didn't think that's what we were talking about (it's certainly not what the article is talking about).
Edit: I suppose I should have said "a few humans [permanently settled] on mars, [able to return whenever they like]" in 100 years.
Yes, the quote "a million earthlings will be living on Mars in 20 years", is hilarious. It would require us to start launching hundreds of SpaceX Starship rockets a day every day, now. It's just dumb.
I know that there can be an amazing level of self confidence and denial of current reality required to build a new company from scratch, but this stretches all bounds of credulity. I just don't believe that they believe what they're saying. It's so far beyond marketing hype and "self driving" being available in 2018. At some point, this moves from encouraging hype to pure cult level deceit.
> Yes, of course I support space travel and settling on mars. I expect that,
"of course"? Why? Putting people in space, on the moon, or on Mars seems like a huge waste of resources.
We could have (conservatively) 100 JWST or 1000 Pathfinders for the price of a human mission to Mars.
I agree that missions to colonize exoplanets should be low on the priority list per marginal dollar - and also I think we should fund such research because its popular and interesting. We should fund it on the lowest practical level, which probably means establishing a 'starter' base on the moon and a base on mars in the coming centuries.
> The “ideology of technological salvation”
On this point, 20+ years ago I had a chat with my uncle who managed a factory of rubber thingies for the car industry. I asked him what he thought of climate change: "Oh well, if it's ever an issue we'll just invent something to fix it, like carbon-sucking machines or whatever!".
I take issue with this mindset where innovation is the cure-all silver bullet. Not because it says that technological progress can help (it can!), but because it also implies that there's nothing really wrong with everything else we do and that we shouldn't have to think if we had a hand in the endless crises we see.
Don't tell me about a future where Earth is such a dystopian wasteland that going to Mars looks like the right choice. I don't want to build penthouses for the few billionaires that actually enjoy the place. The best place on Mars is still worse than the worst place on Earth.
Tell me about the future where Earth is seen as a wonderful spaceship, where we learned to live in peace and where we have a good thing going on such that going elsewhere to see what's possible is appealing!
We are inventing things to fix it though. We have massive advancements in battery technology and solar cells and nuclear generators that will lead to cleaner energy.
If you have an alternative to growth as a viable path forward, that solves the global group decision problem which explains why Brazil must stop burning down their rainforests and India isn’t allowed to industrialize, I’d love to hear it.
That isn’t to say I support billionaire pet projects. I would call a lot of it a misallocation of resources.
Did this get removed from the home page? As I write this it was posted 2 hours ago with 48 points and 73 comments. Should definitely be on the home page. Why are we filtering content like this?
There's a "controversy filter" that downrates articles with more comments than points.
Explains a lot, there's no such thing as substance without controversy.
It is obviously true that technology allows us to modify nature to an ever greater extent. That is what technology is! I don't think we'll have a colony on mars anytime soon, but AI is obviously coming and will obviously be extremely disrupting (for better or for worse)
> It is obviously true that technology allows us to modify nature to an ever greater extent
I would dispute the relative significance or meaning of those changes though. We can build dams and tall buildings. We can cure diseases and develop elaborate communications infrastructure.
I don't see that these developments alter our essential humanity though. If you read any classic literature from 100, 200, or even 1000 years ago, the emotional truths resonate the same way.
I had a deadly childhood cancer, Retinoblastoma, which would have killed me without modern medicine. I'm pretty fond of existing.
These developments sure altered my humanity. By making it possible.
This is, loosely speaking, the bundle of ideologies that Timnit Gebru and Émile P. Torres dubbed TESCREAL (transhumanism, Extropianism, singularitarianism, (modern) cosmism, Rationalism, Effective Altruism, and longtermism).
While these are largely associated with modern Silicon Valley esoteric techbros (and the odd Oxfordian like Nick Bostrom), they have very deep roots, which Becker excavates – like Nikolai Fyodorov's 18th century "cosmism," a project to "scientifically" resurrect everyone who ever lived inside of a simulation.
I think that I first heard of Fyodorov via SF author Charles Stross's writings. It was part of the world building in his early Singularity-oriented novels (Singularity Sky, Iron Sunrise, Accelerando, maybe Glasshouse). He also blogged about Fyodorov, as in "Federov's Rapture":
https://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2011/07/federov...
Fyodorov/Federov also shows up in Hannu Rajaniemi's "Quantum Thief" trilogy.
It's a bundle of ideas that has produced some very good science fiction, but I wouldn't reorganize my life around it.
Colonizing Mars is such a dumb idea. I wish it was a strawman, not the stated goal of the world’s richest man.
Anyway, some of the utopian/distopian thinking, I get. We aren’t going to create an AI god, good or evil. That belief is probably a side effect of the facts that Millennials are (finally) grabbing the reins, and we grew up in an era where computers actually got, tangibly, twice as good every 18 months or so, so some sort of divine techno-ascension seemed plausible in 2005 or so.
But we live in the failure path of our plans. So, I’m quite worried that a group will try to create an omnipresent AI, run out of runway, and end up having to monetize a tool that’s only real use is scanning everybody’s social media posts for wrong-think (the type of wrong think that makes you unemployable will invert every four years in the US, so good luck).
You don't need AI to scan social media posts for wrongthink. AI may let you go deeper, detecting thoughtcrime based on certain patterns of otherwise acceptable speech. However, AI is already good enough for that and the sort of people who want this don't care about false positives (or really truth at all) and are probably already compiling lists. Historically these sorts of folks just make stuff up against their enemies if there is no real evidence, so I'm not sure AI does much at all here, except possibly adding some credibility for the less skeptical.
I see Mars as an inevitability. We need Mars. Our eggs are all in one basket and the only way to guarantee our future is to be a multi-planet species or to learn how to live in self-sustaining tin cans. Colonizing Mars would help us develop the tools for either one of these necessities. Colonizing Mars right now I'm a bit more skeptical about.
Mars is just a big dead rock really. The “self-sustaining tin cans” are the way to go IMO. We can learn how to do that in orbit around Earth (where aborting the mission isn’t automatic death), and then go colonize the asteroid belt, where the resources are just sitting there floating in space.
Mars offers: gravity, but the wrong amount. Air, but not enough. Sand and dust, but not the kind that grows anything, just the kind that gets in your filters. Also it is toxic. Not much magnetic field.
I can see the appeal of "colonizing mars as an extinction-proof backup plan", but I'm not convinced that it's a positive-EV play. Attempting to go to mars increases odds of our survival in case of earth going to shit by some amount, but it also increases the odds of earth going to shit due to the waste, energy expenditure, and missed opportunity cost of not solving pressing issues.
In the end all our eggs as in the same basket as long as the solar system, the galaxy or the universe would eventually disappear. Allowing billions of billions of human to live for the next thousands of year is quite irrelevant: nobody asked to be born, so nobody won't miss the opportunity. As for our legacy, 99.995% of us don't leave a trace meaningful enough to be remembered as individuals by our grand grand grand children.
So, OK to conquer Mars, but not at any cost because the ROI seems really low to me.
> Colonizing Mars is such a dumb idea.
A back-of-the-napkin calculation puts humanity's total military expenditure at about $100 trillion (USD adjusted to 2022 $) since 1949. That's not accounting for lives lost, infrastructure destroyed, and all the other negatives that come from war. Humanity is spending unfathomable fortunes just to be able to kill each other. And you're saying colonizing Mars is a dumb idea? Humanity is wasting its potential on the stupidest shit you can imagine. Colonizing Mars is a galaxy-brained idea compared to most of what we're spending our money on.
And of course colonizing Mars is trivial compared to terraforming Mars, which you can make a stronger argument against. "If you can't terraform Earth, then you can't terraform Mars." Of course that argument misses the point that if you set terraforming Mars as a goal of humanity, then we focus our efforts on developing the technologies that would allow us to terraform Earth as well (long beforehand, I might add). Focusing humanity on a course to accomplish an immense feat of engineering always produces an immense amount of positive externalities.
You could have levied the same argument against the Apollo program, any of FDR's New Deal megaprojects, the national highway system, the Large Hadron Collider, ITER, etc. And of course people do say we shouldn't be "wasting" our money on such things. I say: how about we keep doing all those projects and more, and stop wasting the vast majority of our money on stupid shit like bombs that in the best case sit in a warehouse until they decompose into duds, and in the worst case kill some wedding attendees and set humanity back.
Mars is extremely terrible. I don't understand why we'd want to colonize it, versus any number of other things we could do with that immense effort. Visit it, sure, I guess, maybe, but colonize? LOL why?
The fact that we do dumb things does not make the specific plan of colonizing Mars a good idea. Hell, we could try to colonize the asteroid belt, at least that doesn’t involve dropping down some enormous gravity well to visit a dead planet.
> You could have levied the same argument against the Apollo program, any of FDR's New Deal megaprojects, the national highway system, the Large Hadron Collider, ITER, etc.
I’m not sure what “the argument” is here, I didn’t really present much of an argument (I think colonizing Mars is self-evidently dumb). But if the argument that is being levied against these things is that they are all too expensive—I disagree that it applies to some of the things in your list. The New Deal and the Highway system had positive effects for existing people. Maybe the Apollo program was frivolous on some level, but at least it had a plausible goal.
We have a finite budget, I agree that it would be better to spend less of it killing each other, but it will still be finite. We should try to do something more useful than Mars.
> You could have levied the same argument against the Apollo program, any of FDR's New Deal megaprojects, the national highway system, the Large Hadron Collider, ITER, etc
All of those had (and always had) far more obvious benefits than colonizing Mars, including the squishy benefit of "beating the Soviet Union to a contested goal."
You can disprove me by stating plainly what the benefits of colonizing Mars would be?
Yes, we waste a ton of money on military. Historically (middle ages) it’s been even higher as a percentage of GDP. A higher peace dividend would probably be good.
But not all military spending was wasteful. The military and military adjacent orgs have invested in tons of useful R&D with civilian applications.
"Blessed are the meek: for they shall inherit the earth."
The rest of us can meet up every couple millennia around Alpha Centauri for an old-home week.
That is a much darker tone that I’ve ever thought of that passage in.
On a slightly related note, I think a lot of people today don’t realize when Jesus talked about the “Kingdom of Heaven” many of his audience heard that as a real, physical kingdom which would overthrow Rome. I believe Jesus also believed this, which to me is why Jesus’ dying words (“My God, why have you forsaken me?”) is quite literally an admission that his political project had failed.
> I believe Jesus also believed this
Jesus predicted his death several times, most explicitly in Matthew 20:17–19.
> Now Jesus, going up to Jerusalem, took the twelve disciples aside on the road and said to them, “Behold, we are going up to Jerusalem, and the Son of Man will be betrayed to the chief priests and to the scribes; and they will condemn Him to death, and deliver Him to the Gentiles to mock and to scourge and to crucify. And the third day He will rise again.”
- Matthew 20:17–19
It is known that the specifics of the story were modified.
The current text is kind of frozen by its own similarities to itself.
The use of extracted quotes is probably a mistake. You have to find the same event in a lot of other books beyond Matthew to be able to find a tiny whiff of historical information, very faint, very difficult to do with translated versions.
Luke 17:20-37 also seems to support the idea that Jesus was trying to tell people the kingdom was spiritual, not physical. The kingdom as a concept wasn't some novel idea, either. Jesus was claiming he was the fulfillment of the messianic prophecy in Judaism. He was reinterpreting the prophecy, though, as a spiritual rather than literal liberation.
Tangential, but you can interpret the anti-christ in christian belief to bring the alleged kingdom, as a sort of anti-fulfillment of the prophecy.
Also reviewed by Cory Doctorow: https://pluralistic.net/2025/04/22/vinges-bastards/#cyberpun...
The phrase "grift behind AI doomerism" suggests that either the book author or the reviewer (or both) don't have a clue. AI will cause real and huge problems.
I think that depends on whether your definition of “doomerism” is the same as theirs.
Cars have killed millions of people. Add to that the consequences of electricity, industrialization, urbanization, and even capitalism itself. But billions and billions of people are not only better off -- living lives of outrageous luxury when measured against recent history -- but they wouldn't have existed at all.
Everything good comes with tradeoffs. AI will likely also kill millions but will create and support and improve the lives of billions (if not trillions on a long enough time scale).
That's one vision of how things play out. But I do think it's possible that AI ends up killing every last person, in which case I think "everything good comes with tradeoffs" is a bit too much of an understatement.
Even if AI doesn't kill every last person, I think it will almost certainly increase the wealth gap. I agree that the tradeoffs will most likely not be worth it.
But the main figures behind the Ai doomerism are nutjobs either applying bayesian math in a bad way or right wing extremist believing that black people are inferior for genetics reason (I know it's an overreach that doesn't represent all the population of Ai doomers, but the most important people in that sphere are represented by what I said).
Furthermore, they're people without a history in academia or a specific past in philosophy. Although i do agree that investigating Ai dangers should be done, but in an academic context
Yesterday I had someone here tell me timnit gebru didn't contribute to hard science
She has a PhD in electrical engineering and has worked at Google before researching on Ai with a more philosophical approach
Putting aside the nebulous notion "contribution to hard science"...
She became famous for adopting a strain of strident and problematic activism, using it to attack her colleagues and making claims just as wild as some of the ones she cherry picks to critique.
It's not at all surprising that she ended up an extremely divisive figure. And meanwhile, the state of the art sped far ahead of where she drew her line in the sand.
It's hard to find discussion of her that isn't strongly biased in one direction or another (surely, my own comment included). In my experience (sample size 1), when she gets brought up (or involved), the quality of the discussion usually plummets.
Oh, and I don't necessarily agree with all what she says, I don't want to know what happens when someone which 100% agrees with her enters the room
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This book seems insufferable, at least based on the review. Half of the review is trying to poke holes in why people won't live on mars and the other half is about how people trying to pursue goals such as this are self-serving and corrupt.
I'm sure a market exists for this kind of book, but to me it's just exhausting. What's the harm in trying to go to mars if it results in decreasing the cost of space flight by 99%? Who cares if someone is trying to naively live forever if it results in a lot of money into longevity research? Would you rather this person be spending his money on yachts?
I wish we had more ambitious things. It's fine that the author doesn't believe in this stuff, but to mock and try to get rich off it seems like more of a grift than anybody trying to do ambitious things. I don't get it, this guy is literally an astrophysicist, surely he's looked up at the skies at one point and imagined what could be done. I guess the only difference is he never took his shot.
https://www.visualcapitalist.com/the-cost-of-space-flight/
Maybe I misunderstand your comment as if we've run out of ambitious things besides those that border on science fiction. In that case, I think the market is those of us who think there are more tangible ambitious things right in front of our faces. And in front of those with the resources to make a difference ie, fighting starvation, authoritarianism, inequality, disease, genocide. Are these too boring?
No, they're not boring, but they're qualitatively different types of problems.
Going to Mars and living forever are primarily technical problems.
Starvation, authoritarianism, inequality, and genocide are primarily political problems.
The resources and skills used to solved the former set aren't broadly applicable to the latter set, though it is easy to find examples of people who are good at solving one of these sets of problems who assume that they'll be good at solving the other set as well.
I don't agree entirely. They are different types of problems but I think they all can benefit from people who are good at solving technical problems.
Going to Mars isn't a problem or a solution to a current problem. It's just a thing that hasn't been done. I think starvation and disease could use some help from technical people. And considering the damage done by technical people with regard to inequality and authoritarianism, I would hope technical people could also contribute towards fixing the issues. Inevitable mortality is arguably a problem because if solved, would generate a whole other level of problems.
But yeah, political solutions would be amazing and technology is not the answer to everything. At least, that's how I see it.
> fighting authoritarianism, inequality, genocide. Are these too boring?
Right, have the tech guys spent their money on politics - that seems to be working out well.
> fighting starvation
We have enough food in the world: we don't choose to share it or distribute it. Politics.
> fighting disease
Politicised within the US (measles, birdflu, NHI, health insurance), and similarly politicised within my own country (US social media is only partly to blame).
Bill Gates put a lot of money towards helping fight Malaria and other health issues: I would guess no other rich dudes wish to get similarly tarred.
We should devise a system that gathers all human resources and applies them to a set of goals, like you mentioned. The smartest people in the world should get together, determine the most pressing issues and command all of humanities resources into those problems. We can remove a lot of waste like frivolous consumerism, endless choice and competition. Why has no one ever tried this before?
[deleted]. Not funny
Yes, that was the joke.
We can back-test the mentality of this book:
- Longevity research is bad/wasteful > In 1900 and prior, the global average life expectancy was around 32 years. Thanks to modern medicine, this has doubled to 70 years. This is a tremendous gift to every human alive today.
- Going to Mars is bad/extravagant/fruitless > Going to the moon, exploring new continents, these were all "extravagant/fruitless" undertakings in their own eras. In hindsight we take for granted how significant these are; e.g. I was born on a continent that my ancestors had never set foot on until a few hundred years prior.
What we want as a species is "portfolio" of pro-human bets. Some of this can be low-risk, low-reward social spending to alleviate here-and-now problems on Earth, but some of it can be high-risk, high-reward "moon-shots" (or "Mars-shots") which, if successful, unlock completely new/better modes of existence. The two are not mutually exclusive, they are both part of a balanced strategy.
I think the final paragraph of the article sums up the issue pretty well. The tech world spends a lot of thought and energy on trying to escape our current existence instead of trying to make it better. There's very real crises that are solvable like climate change and food security. But instead of working hard to fix those, tech billionaires are focusing on space travel, AI, etc. Things that are important and could have a large (currently vague) impact, but don't solve our long term relationship with our own planet.
Does it though? Maybe in absolute terms it spends "a lot" of thought on these things, but in relative terms it borders on nothing.
Measure it by VC dollars invested and what actual orgs at tech companies are assigned to. It's almost ALL on a 1-10 year horizon.
So, as gp notes... is it really that harmful to allocate <1% to "sci fi" ambitions, especially when most of what they actually produce is short-horizon, immediately-usable stuff?
I don't know, my life is made better by electric vehicles, Starlink, Amazon one day delivery and large language models.
What does "working on climate change" look like? The only thing I hear from climate change activists is that the government should extract more money from people and this will somehow change the climate. So I guess rich billionaires should be lobbying for politicians to tax me more?
Again, all this stuff is exhausting. Environment is the biggest problem so everything that uses energy is bad. It's just a formula for mass de-industrialization, making everyone poor, and eventually de-population.
So no, I don't think wealthy people should do more lobbying. I'm happy with them paying their taxes and trying to build tech that makes my life better.
There are thousands of people and billions of dollars of capital deployed, right now, solving hard engineering, social and political problems to:
- electrify everything, including industrial processes
- replace and upgrade hard infrastructure to enable said electrification
- completely decarbonize the supply of electricity while massively increasing the total amount of available electricity generation
- restore and in some cases engineer ecosystems to draw down and store existing carbon from the atmosphere
It is a massive multidisciplinary effort that will require immeasurable person-hours of serious engineering work, among other things.
I promise you, if you think that any of these things are reducible to a simple answer, like e.g. “just build nuclear,” the actual work involved is more complex than you realize, and contains many as-yet unsolved problems.
I work in a small corner of this effort, building software to enable utilities to design electricity rates to support decarbonization. It’s a tiny piece of a gigantic puzzle.
Start at https://climatebase.org if you want to actually understand what “work on climate” means.
> What does "working on climate change" look like?
There’s probably room for some engineering work and a business innovation in the smartgrid space. It seems like a big communication/optimization problem that could use similar muscles that the AI sector uses (but it doesn’t actually compete for talent because there’s no way in hell utilities will ever be able to pay tech startup salaries).
Well, I think you articulate the situation quite neatly with, "I don't know, my life is made better..." As long as you yourself are either benefiting or not immediately suffering you are content. That many contrary positions in this thread are thinking about humanity as a whole is why you will not be swayed. You do not seem interested in thinking outside of your own comforts, and therefore all of the anxiety and alarm over the fate of billions outside of yourself just comes across as "exhausting."
I, for one, find the endless selfishness of ultra rich people and their enablers to be exhausting, and happily root for anyone trying to break through to the uncertain that this is a moment for action, not idle ignorance.
>I'm happy with them paying their taxes and trying to build tech that makes my life better.
But neither of those things is their goal. If they happen to build tech that makes your life better, it's because it makes them money (that, generally speaking, they try not to pay taxes on)
Because the author's worldview requires him to compel other people to do what he wants, and if they're not doing what he wants that's a problem.
What's the harm in trying to go to mars if it results in decreasing the cost of space flight by 99%?
IMO, the harm is that the weirdo billionaire who wants to do this has said that he needs a trillion dollars to accomplish it and subsequently embedded himself within an incompetent, would-be-authoritarian regime.
I want humanity to colonize Mars and space. I don't want it happening at the whim of a madman whose only concern is going down in history as the man who made it possible at any cost to society.
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Because a lot of these stuffs like longevity and advanced AI are going to break the human society?
I'd rather NOT have that kind of technical advancement before we figure out how to make the human society a bit more equal.
With the whole world turning to the right, we are further, not closer, from that objective. I guess not everyone believes in that, but hey I'm just talking about myself.
The media has taken an orchestrated turn to the right. The people just fall in lockstep behind because that is what they’re used to doing.
The public is and has always been played like a fiddle.
Well it is the leading elites that matters. The public, as you said, does not really mean much.
We are just human resources.
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> He encourages us not to get hung up on galaxies far, far away but to pay more attention to our own fragile planet and the frail humans around us.
While I don't necessarily agree with the motives of the Silicon Valley billionaires you must have a really basic imagination to hate on the future, and the answers to Man's oldest questions which may be on Mars and beyond. Of course, like a broken record, out comes the trope of "Why don't you solve poverty on Earth (with all that money)".
For once, can the malthusians come up with a single unique idea or viewpoint rather than recycling the same content? People criticize AI for producing slop but look at what makes the NYT.
I don't see how solving poverty on earth can't be more important than the endeavor of trying with the current rather limited tech to inhabit an as good as inhabitable planet.
Space exploration is merely a _technological_ problem. Solving poverty is a _political_ problem, one that is resistant to just throwing money at the problem.
It is more important. We spend > $2T per year fighting climate change. We spend > $10T per year on social welfare programs.
We spend less than $10B per year on going back to the moon and trying to inhabit Mars.
And both of these amounts seem to not be enough based on the resulting state of the world.
As others in the thread mention, these are problems of political economy that no person or mega corp or even nation state can solve.
So, continuing to also work on other things is both rational and morally sound.
Progress in one area unlocks new possibilities in other areas. E.g. abundant near-free energy would make eliminating poverty a more tractable political problem than it has proven to be.
> seem to not be enough
This is an impossible way to get to a useful conclusion. Provide stats if you're going to make a claim like "the world is bad"
Given that world GDP is only $100T, it's impossible to spend significantly more. (where significant is defined as an order of magnitude).
It depends on how you answer the question "why are we here?"
Is the goal is to create an earthly utopia with minimum suffering and maximum happiness? Is it aggressive progress so that we can't be wiped out by a random cosmic event? Or should we be eschewing all of that and living harmoniously with nature and dying spiritually content when our time is up?
There is also the argument that if we had focused on solving poverty 150 years ago instead of prioritizing rapid industrialization and economic growth more people would be in poverty today. A 50 year period of scarcity would completely erase all progress we have made towards lifting people out of poverty, regardless of how equitably we distributed the scarce goods.
Even if we solve poverty, we can always turn right around and un-solve poverty. Something like this has happened in quite recent memory with a whole lot of other "solved" problems. Luckily, we can come back from that failure and solve those problems all over again, as long as we don't go extinct.
There are large swathes of earth that are too inhospitable, like deserts. They're more accessible and easier to support life in than Mars, and yet no one lives there.
The deserts even have breathable air.
But there are people living in the inhospitable deserts that have useful resources like oil. Or artificial resources like legalized gambling.
Antarctica is even more inhospitable than deserts, and there are people living there for research purposes.
I'm just making the basic point that we have a wealth of much more hospitable places to live on earth, and somehow they're not viable candidates as "backup plans" for humanity.
Going a little further, living in the ocean is easier than living on Mars. As far as I can tell there are no billionaire-funded submarine civilisation programs.
They're not viable candidates as backup plans for humanity because they have the same vulnerabilities to comet strikes, global nuclear war and pandemic as the rest of the Earth.
OTOH, if one of those took out human life on Earth, people living on Mars could re-colonize Earth.
I will say the compelling thing about Mars is that you wouldn't be disrupting an ecosystem to terraform it.
That said, I'm definitely on the side of making Fresno a paradise before we try mars.
I know what happens in Vegas stays in Vegas, but really? We're going this far with it? It doesn't even exist anymore?
Of course, why use our limited resources to improve the lives of human beings on Earth? That lacks imagination.
Let's funnel those resources to some ridiculous endeavor to put some people in an arid bleak red wasteland instead.
There are approaches to solving hunger and housing, however extremist capitalism & avoidance of paying taxes by oligarchs and their corporations are standing in the way of it.