Actually, the Fermi paradox simply implies that the future will be extreme. Consider the alternative to our destruction: we are the first technological civilization to emerge in the Milky Way and we will spread across the galaxy, preventing any new civilizations from emerging through our meddling. There are no aliens because we are the first and we are the first because we will prevent them from arising in the future. By the way, this event hardly requires currently thought impossible sci-fi technology like FTL. Using slower than light colony ships makes a lot more sense with technology like nuclear fusion, molecular nanotechnology, and life extension.
Most importantly, the time it would take to colonize the galaxy using STL ships is not too long in geological/eveolutionary terms. Even using fusion engines it should be quite possible to colonize the entire galaxy in a million years. While that is a long time, it is nothing compared to the billions of years that life took to evolve. It is in the same ballpark as the entire time humans have been around (especially if we shorten the colonization time with better propulsion technology like antimatter engines). So, unless alien civilizations all appear around the same time for some reason, it seems very likely that the first civilization to emerge (and successfuly spread to space) would prevent all the others from emerging.
The only long-term future that the Fermi paradox argues against is one similar to the present day. We are almost certainly in a transition period, either to annihilation or a galaxy-spanning singularity-like future.
Oh, and one last thing, some of the taker states have resources that an independent CA would lose access to. New Mexico has a huge desert where large science and defense facilities can be set up cheaply, West VA has massive coal deposits, Hawaii is strategically important in the Pacific, etc. Here in TN, a facility such as ORNL can be set up which costs less than if it were located in CA (due to lower cost of living and property costs) because it's more economical to not cram everything into scarce territory near the ocean...while at the same time being located in a place that many talented people are interested in living in.
The point is that much of our federal spending is oriented towards efficiently exploiting national resources to strengthen the whole country.
Man, doing a good cost-benefit analysis is hard. It's so easy to miss or misjudge important factors such as these.
And that is why the argument of California getting less out than it puts in falls flat—not because it isn't true from a purely numbers point of view, but rather because there are unquantifiable externalities that the argument fails to take into account.
Extending this line of thought a bit further, another huge unquantifiable externality is the access California gets to research done using federal money. The state at the top of the Tax Foundation list, New Mexico, is home to Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. At $1.5 billion in funding, LLNL represents a surprisingly large percentage of the state's $74.3 billion GDP. Similarly, my current state of Tennessee has the slightly larger Oak Ridge National Laboratory, which skews TN more towards being a "taker" state without accounting for the nationwide benefits that come out of the research being done there.
When it comes to security benefits, another thing to consider is the stabilizing effect the US military has on international trade. Even if one considers US defense spending levels to be excessive, if seems quite plausible that if it fell below a certain level then several other nations would step in to fill the power vaccuum. It also seems unlikely that any one nation would come to dominate at the same level as the US. The EU, US, China, Russia, India, and Brazil would all be regional superpowers that would have their own ideas about how to run things. It could also easily lead to situations like a nuclear-armed Japan, a re-ignition of the Korean War, or an invasion of Taiwan. Overall, these factors would make nations worldwide spend more money on hardening their defenses and thus make trade harder for everyone. Worst case, the superpowers could directly clash and set off WWIII, which would ruin everyone's day.
Another hard to quantify factor is "free" benefits like open trade with the other states, better access to much other non-federal research, a lack of immigration restrictions between the US states, a lack of worry about being invaded by the US, access to military bases in the eastern US and abroad, and other benefits that derive from the simple cooperation of the other states.
I wonder how things stacks up when these hard to quantify factors are taken into consideration. It could go either way, but I suspect that the free benefits push it over the edge into being beneficial. Standing together makes us strong...I simply hope that we can keep up the trust needed to keep standing together.
I agree that it is a huge mistake to dismiss China because it is "communist". However, the main reason it's a mistake is because present-day China is closer to fascist than communist. Primarily, China's economy is much closer to those of the classic fascist states than the economies of the classic communist states (including its past self). As such, China's economy is on equal footing with capitalist economies, unhindered by communist economic insanities like the inter-factory barter system that emerged in the USSR or attempts to meet shoe quotas with minimal leather by producing only shoes for children.
I think the kind of communism we saw in the USSR is probably stable in isolation. However, capitalism substantially out-competed it leading to predictable results. How is this any different than final fall of the ancient monarchies in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century? A more competitive system came along and people living under the less competitive system started to adopt the trappings of the new system and push their governments towards adopting it. In some countries there was a collapse when the disparity got wide enough...in others (such as Imperial Japan) the government and people successfully adopted the new system, making it competitive again.
This way of looking at it accentuates your concern. The US is not immune to these pressures and if China begins to outcompete us (either because China grows very strong or the US becomes weak), it could lead to an economic collapse of the US one day...or the US adopting a more China-like way of doing things. We have to stay competitive.
I wouldn't go so far as saying that economics is pseudoscience. First of all, there's a gross division between micro-economics and macro-economics. Micro is substantially scientific, relying heavily on controlled experiments. A lot of good results have come out of micro which are useful to individuals and companies. Of course, a lot of the most interesting questions are in the realm of macro, which is much less scientific in nature simply because it is very difficult to run controlled experiments.
That said, it is possible to apply scientific methods to large scale things. After all, Earth science suffers from many of the same issues as macro-economics but the field of Earth science as a whole is rarely derided as being outright pseudoscientific (even when some people find some of their findings controversial). In both macro-economics and Earth science, there's issues with chaotic dynamics and poorly measured starting conditions that make accurate predictions of specific events impossible in practice, but it is possible to apply scientific thought to help us better understand the big picture and make gross predictions.
Now the really big issue that macro-economics has to deal with that other large-scale scientific areas do not have to deal with is that their observations have a major and immediate impact on the system that they are studying. Lets say someone published a perfect global macro-economic theory tomorrow...the system would promptly fly off the rails as people started exploiting the new theory, at which point it would look as though the theory was full of holes even though it was initially correct. Of course, the real situation is even worse, since we don't start with perfect theories. Earth science doesn't have to deal with this issue (presently): while the human impact on the planet may be growing larger, we hardly control it at this point, so human-caused changes to the Earth are slow and theories have time to play out.
This may seem like a hopeless situation...and in one sense it is. In order to truly understand the system, you'd have to understand the parts that make up the system: humans. Unfortunately, understanding humans is not possible. Our minds are Turing-complete, so there are many undecidable problems associated with them. As it boils down, a complete and consistent theory of the mind is impossible, and as such so is any theory that relies on understanding the human mind. You can see hints of the Godel and Turing's theorems in the problems with macro-economics that I pointed out earlier...to be successful, macro-economic theories must account for their own impact.
However, we should not give up hope entirely. We can't truly understand the system...but we can come up with pretty good theories and methods. These issues haven't stopped mathematicians from continuing their studies...or software engineers from striving for quality in software. We can understand economic systems reasonably well using scientific and mathematical ideas...what's so pseudoscientific about that?
That said, the thing to look out for is proponents of economic theories that overstate the effectiveness of their pet theory. Claims of extraordinary accuracy should require extraordinary proof. Even the best macro-economic theories out there these days leave a lot to be desired. Plus, some of the stuff out there is indeed pseudoscience. There is great incentive to create false theories for various reasons, ranging from get-rich-quick schemes to political expediency. I'm simply arguing against the idea that economics is necessarily a pseudoscience.
How did they calculate those values? There's no explanation or sources.
The two plastic recycling entries are particularly confusing. Do we save 76% of the energy compared to manufacturing downcycled PET from scratch? or is that number for making recycled PET bottles? Why does it say we're saving 88% of the energy costs on PS but then turn around and say it's not viable in practice? Does that mean that these numbers do not account for the cost of collection and sorting? What about cleaning? If so, the amount of energy saved by the whole process may be much lower in practice and maybe even negative for some types of recycling.
By the way, I'm not anti-recycling. I think we'll be recycling everything one day and it certainly doesn't hurt to develop techniques and use those techniques that make economic sense. However, it hurts us if we're wasting valuable energy on feel good measures and I think Popular Mechanic's analysis isn't deep enough to prove that most forms of recycling aren't just feel good measures.
That's not entirely correct. Experiments show that either any hidden variable theory OR the principle of locality is incorrect. It could be that there is a non-local hidden variable theory that is correct.
While I agree that the US is dealing with medical care costs particularly badly, I don't think the way other countries handle medical care costs is the panacea you seem to think it is.
Health care spending is consistently growing faster than GDP in all of these countries, and GDP growth is already exponential so the growth of health care in developed nations is growing faster than exponentially. The top spending countries are already reaching the point that the US was at by the end of the 1980's. If this long term trend continues, then these countries will eventually be facing a medical finance situation of the same magnitude as the US, it will simply take longer.
I just want to say that make-work labor ("those sorts of jobs are where we stick people to say they have a job") is one of the worst ideas ever.
Work (as opposed to productive play) is a degrading part of human life. With the exception of a few people who love their jobs (and are thus spending their days playing), the time a person spends working drains from the precious little time they have on this Earth. Work has always been an awful necessity in the past, something that had to get done or else things would collapse into an even worse state of poverty. Nobody should be required to work if it can be avoided without even more dire consequences.
Make-work is the worst kind of work, because it inflicts the harm of work without the purpose that accompanies productive work. The only purpose of make-work is to maintain an outdated system. It is a form of slavery and should be fought wherever and whenever it appears.
Note that "productive work" that exists due to a willful stunting of technology to maintain the need for work is make-work as well. It should be fought with the same intensity.
As a consequence, it is our duty to push full steam ahead with no less than the goal of the abolition of work. The process of getting there will be immensely tumultuous, but so was the abolition of slavery.
By the way, while there will always be a need for some labor, we should eventually be able to use automation to reduce it down to a level where our labor needs can be completely met with play. That is, those who wish to do the things that need to be done will be plentiful enough that we won't need to force people who do not wish to do these things into doing them. In those few cases where productive work ends up being needed again, compensation above and beyond the norm or social recognition will attract plenty of volunteers.
I think you're not accounting for a lot of important factors in the cost.
Even without accounting for the new technology, such a rail system would realistically cost in the tens of billions. Consider the San Fransisco-Anaheim segment of the California High-Speed Rail project, which was initially estimated to cost around $42.6 billion. It covers a bit less than twice the distance between Chicago and Detroit, so even a more conventional Chicago-Detroit railroad would probably cost a good percentage of that, not $5 billion.
When it comes to the solar portion, keep in mind that the efficiency will be poorer than the best case. Between the relatively poor siting and the lack of features available in a dedicated solar plant (ex. concentrators), the solar panels will not perform at their maximum. You also have a possible issue with the passing trains blocking the sunlight on one side for the solar panels. Lastly, for this particular rail line there essentially won't be any solar energy available during the winter months and clearing snow off the panels will be an issue. Plus, Illinois has an average of 51 thunderstorms a year, so that's a lot of rainy days too. This might be a better idea in a drier, sunnier climate.
Another big issue has to do with uncertainty. Sure, the payloads will eventually get to the other side, but there's no guarantee that it will get there in a timely fashion. You could be having bad weather anywhere along the line, which would strand trains there until the weather cleared up. If you add non-trivial energy storage or transmission to alleviate this problem, expect the up-front costs to increase even further. Also, even in the best case, the train line would still have to reduce capacity or shut down anytime there was not enough energy available overall.
I wonder how this idea would compare to other possibilities: situating the solar plants in a centralized plant (in Arizona for instance) and transmitting the power to the track, using solar power to charge an electric train at the station, turning the solar energy into a different form (like hydrogen, ethanol, or diesel) and feeding it to a train powered by that source, etc.
There's plenty of land. Build more houses of the appropriate type.
Also, what matters most when it comes to age comparisons is the relative difference. A 2 year old is as much less mature than a 6 year old as a 20 year old is compared to a 60 year old. However, a 24 year old is generally not much more mature than a 20 year old. As the absolute numbers get higher, the number of years needed to make a substantial difference become wider and wider. This principle is very obvious in dating, where several years age difference raises eyebrows when one of the participants is 18 but is considered normal if both participants are middle aged or older.
What this means is that the "wise old men" group will encompass a larger age range than it does today, so instead of adding the extra years directly, you're adding a shorter time. As lifespans get longer, the extra years added get shorter and shorter as lifespans get longer and longer. If people live to be 800 on average (about 10x what they do today), then you'll have lived 75% the lifespan of a 800 year old by the time you get to 600. As a bonus for those who desire it, it also means more years spent in the "wise old men" category when you do get there (that 600 year old will get to live around 200 years as an elder, compared to a modern 60 year old only getting to live in that situation around 20 years). It must be admitted that 600 years is a long time to wait...but it's not nearly as bad as 780 years.
By the way, the distribution of felony crimes is skewed heavily towards people in their 20's, you're not accounting for repeat offenses, and your math is off (according to your logic, if most people lived to be 500, then 150% of the population would be felons). The felony situation wouldn't be nearly as dire as you make it out to be (especially since if nearly everyone was a felon then there would not be such a heavy stigma on being a felon). However, I do have to admit that the older the population got, the more felons there would be as a percentage of the population. Since the mark of felony never leaves, older people are much more likely to be felons even if the chance of them becoming a felon at their current age is very low (most of them being dogged by felonies they committed decades or centuries ago). If this is the case, it would probably be best to clear felonies entirely after several decades.
Relying on your employees to buy their own products is never a workable strategy.
Imagine you are a farmer that owns a large farm and that by yourself you can only farm half of the overall land. You make enough for yourself plus some surplus that you sell to outsiders for a profit. In this case it makes sense to hire a worker that can farm the other half of the land for you because you can make as much as twice as much profit selling the combined surpluses to outsiders.
Now imagine instead that the owner and the worker are the entire economy. Since there are no outsiders to sell the surplus to and buy non-farm goods from, it no longer makes sense to hire the worker or even make any surplus because the needs of the owner are already covered by the work he does on the farm (and making more would incur other costs like additional labor on the part of the owner or soil depletion). The only remaining non-altruistic reason for the owner to hire the worker is so that the owner can do less work, in which case the worker will produce enough food for both of them while the owner can kick up his feet and relax. In this case, the owner is paying the worker to provide him with the privilege of a labor free life and the owner is not relying on the worker to provide him with a consumer base to sell his products to. Also note that this doesn't scale well...if a second worker showed up to do farm labor, then the owner would have no reason to hire this new worker because the owner already makes what he needs without having to work. Without access to a means of production (farmland in this case), this new worker is powerless to produce even enough for himself.
What this means is that (discounting altruism and the use of force) in a closed economic system the owners will only hire the minimum number of workers required to provide the owners with everything they need (which includes by necessity workers working to provide for the workers that provide for the owners and the workers providing for those workers and so on, which is why there appears to be a wider consumer base). This is where rising labor productivity comes in: higher productivity leads to a lower number of workers required to provide for the owners. In the past this effect transformed into new goods and services becoming available instead (job losses in one area would be canceled out by job gains in a newly formed area). However, nowadays this is not enough. Most of the new jobs that are being created these days are creative jobs that most people can't handle...or at the very least are radically different from old jobs (it used to be that buggy whip makers would move into car assembly but now factory workers and managers need to move into medicine, engineering, etc.). Routine work of all sorts is becoming increasingly automated and this trend will only get more pronounced as disruptive technologies like automated cars/trucks arrive on the scene.
Only owners have any economic power. The only source of power non-owners have is the capacity for violence. Ultimately there are only three outcomes as society becomes heavily automated: 1. Everyone becomes an owner, removing the tension and allowing us all to prosper (but how do we transition to this situation? how do we maintain it?) 2. Force is employed to prop up the non-owners permanently without making them into owners. However, the form and source of this force can vary substantially. It may take the form of violent flare ups (riots, looting, revolution, civil war) or it may be more civil (legislation, heavy taxation, etc.). It may come from the more altruistic owners who do not want to see outcome #3 occur, or it could come from the non-owners themselves. It's also difficult to say how good such a situation would be for the non-owners, as it could range from a dystopian existence packed into concrete projects with no hope of a better life all the way to a nearly utopian situation. One thing is for sure though, as long as most people are non-owners, the pro-non-owner faction and the anti-non-owner faction would be in a never-ending state of conflict with each other. 3. The non-owners lose their livelihoods and die out, leaving a small core economy of owners supported by robots.
Fear of this outcome is a poor reason to cause millions of excess deaths.
Realistically though, this will not happen (at the very least not for long). Do you really think these methods will stay expensive forever? Technologies that are not dependent on some naturally scarce resource will eventually drop in price dramatically.
Furthermore, there is a great incentive to use these methods to improve public health and therefore reduce medical costs put on the state. Even if such a procedure is fairly costly in the first place, there will be a decrease in the lifetime costs that the state has to pay. So, unless the state completely abandons the medical needs of the lower class there will be a strong incentive for the state to provide this service to those who cannot afford it.
Lastly, the technology you should really fear for creating this scenario is not genetic engineering...but automation. Weak AI automation is a disruptive technology that will soon outperform human workers in something like 90% of productive occupations (mostly through reduced costs rather than improved quality). Will everyone be able to find new jobs that aren't in competition with robots? (that is to say, can they all find non-routine jobs, which require creativity and/or a high degree of mental flexibility) In such a society the value of labor is degraded to the point where it doesn't matter how hard you work. There are *no* jobs outside of a few specific areas that robots haven't taken over (yet). Only owners can survive and thrive in this system without government assistance or private charity. Unlike genetic engineering, this is happening right now on a gargantuan scale. Society will have to change soon...and by the time we get to genetically engineering babies on a large scale these issues will already be resolved one way or another.
The emergence of superior forms of artificial life is inevitable. We should embrace this change instead of fighting it. If we do this right, our creations will treat us better than we treat each other...and maybe one day we can join them...
I agree with your post and think that these are all good ideas. In particular, getting such a kid into athletics is a great idea as is letting such a smart kid largely guide their own education (provided they can show they have the basics down).
However, I don't think it's all that necessary to focus on socializing the kid with what would normally be their peer group. There's some need of course, they need to be able to interact with others their age on occasion without creating conflict. That said, a prodigy might fit in much better with an older group that is more mature (that is, less likely to be mean about the kid's gift) and which more closely matches their mental level. As added pluses, the kid will learn more from an older peer group and will make more useful social connections. Such a group will also be more likely to encourage the kid's gift instead of making it into something they need to hide.
Of course there are some downsides. When the kid reaches sexual maturity, older peers will not be nearly as helpful in finding them a mate. Older peers will dominate the kid at athletic pursuits (unless they're very old). Older peers will have different concerns due to their later life stage, making it harder to relate. Older people tend to demand much respect and politeness from younger people, which could lead to them being less of a peer group and more of a dominant group. etc. Overall though, I don't think the disadvantages outweigh the advantages.
My recommendation is to initially get the kid involved in both types of peer groups and then let them decide how much they want to interact with the two groups. Hopefully they'll find both groups interesting in different ways and get the advantages of both.
I base this idea partially on my own experiences. I was by no means a child prodigy, but I'm pretty smart and I've always been much more mature than most of my peers. For instance, my mother remarked that she'd trust me with the car at 13 (which thanks to my fast physical growth I would have been able to handle). I was programming at 14. At 16 I was taking college classes at the local community college. Now at 26 I am saving and investing money for the future.
I've always gotten along great with my parents and teachers and bosses. For the most part they have a much better grasp on reality than my nominal peers. I relate to them much better and it hasn't really hurt me as these are the people who generally hold the keys to most areas of success. I do have some high quality friends from my nominal peer group and I can successfully interact with the rest when needed, but my social circle composition is definitely skewed towards older, wiser individuals.
Of course, I haven't been too successful in the romance department...
I didn't say that Russian oil production would continue indefinitely. You're right that the recent discoveries aren't a repeatable event and in fact it seems they reached a new peak around 2009. What I was saying is that there's some pretty decent evidence that the original Soviet-era Russian oil peak was caused by factors other than availability.
I suppose your hypothesis about the 1980's oil glut being a plot to take down the oil exporting Soviet Union is possible...but if true it undermines your original idea that the Soviet collapse was caused by thermodynamic limits. Plenty of energy was available to the Soviet Union, either through domestic production (that they had previously been exporting) or low-cost imports. Thus it must have been other factors that mainly caused the Soviet collapse.
As for technological growth, I have to admit I'm pretty optimistic overall. That said, I don't think that any particular technology is a "holy grail". I'm not some sort of oracle that can see the future course of technological progress and pick the winners. Most likely some of them will fail or at least not pay off nearly as much as expected. In particular from the three you mentioned, I'm skeptical about the benefits that graphene will provide and our ability to get fusion going anytime soon (nanotechnology is too broad to be specific about, though really awesome stuff like molecular nanotechnology is probably pretty far away, and there's no guarantee it will surpass the naturally existing example of biological life).
However, do you think these technologies will all fail? What about the emerging technologies I didn't mention? What about technological ideas that haven't even emerged yet? It would be overly pessimistic to think that technological growth will grind to a sudden halt when all of these possibilities are within view. My point is that there is still a lot we can do to improve upon energy efficiency/labor productivity and energy input with new technology. We're not yet at the pinnacle of technological growth, so we can continue to climb for now.
1. Although I used this as an example, it's irrelevant to my argument because I foresaw this and used the stronger example of pre-industrial societies.
That said, I believe there is more to poor resource-rich countries than just external exploitation (though I'm sure this is a factor in some cases). Internal political corruption is a serious problem in most of these countries, and this factor greases the wheels of external exploitation too. However, you also have issues unrelated to exploitation such as populations that have a largely pre-industrial mindset and lifestyle. People hate change and going from subsistence farming to factory work to service work is a traumatic transition that takes many years even in the best case. Further, not much can get done in countries with high levels of internal violence, not all of which is due to outside factors. It should be noted that there's a low hanging fruit effect here too...all the easy to industrialize nations have already industrialized, leaving only the hardest cases. Lastly, there are poor resource-poor nations too (Bangladesh and Cambodia for instance), so who's exploiting them?
2. While thermodynamic limitations are indeed an issue, and an energy crisis could cause us some serious harm in the near future, I think the situation isn't nearly as bad as you suggest.
On the improving energy input front, we've really limited ourselves. We may be near the maximum conversion efficiency (for steam engine-based electricity generation), but we're essentially not making use of nuclear power. The amount of energy we could be extracting from nuclear sources is enormous, and we're basically letting it sit there unused for non-technical reasons. Furthermore, in the future there may be breakthroughs in fusion technology that give us access to vast quantities of energy. I don't know when this will occur, but conservatively ITER will be producing 450MW using D-T by 2026, and this example will lead to the construction of many more fusion plants. There could also be a paradigm shift in electricity generation technology that ditches the steam engine for something better (one such route is already suggested by photovoltaics).
More importantly though, your analysis ignores increases in energy efficiency on the user's end. The energy efficiency of devices and practices has been improving greatly, and this seems unlikely to grind to a halt anytime soon due to the broad nature of such improvements. Whenever the efficiency improvement of one area slows down, other areas pick up the slack. Here's some examples of what's in store: Nanotechnology promises to greatly improve efficiency by allowing the formation of perfect structures (like graphene) with exceptional properties that were impossible before. Computer hardware and software are also continuing to improve dramatically for the time being. Robotics promises to dramatically increase labor productivity and reduce waste compared to human workers. 3D printing could reduce shipping and waste costs. In vitro meat could dramatically improve the efficiency of food production. etc.
I admit that one day we will reach thermodynamic limits to growth, but I see nothing particularly limiting on the horizon. I feel that most of our current limitations stem from socio-political issues (nuclear fear, resistance to change, etc.) rather than technical issues.
By the way, for your Soviet example there is an alternative explanation. Here's some data on what happened afterwards: http://pubs.acs.org/stoken/presspac/presspac/full/10.1021/ef901240p Russian oil production has dramatically recovered since Soviet times and they are now one of the world's top producers. The Soviet economic crisis and Soviet oil peak are correlated due to their closeness in time, but it is possible that the causation is backwards...the Soviet economic crisis (driven by non-thermodynamic factors) could have caused the Soviet oil industry to tank. It should come as no s
After thinking about this for a bit, I partially agree with you. The input of resources is critical to modern economies, and any reduction in resource input will have a proportionate impact on output (say 50% less resources would mean 50% output even if population stayed the same). This is a huge determinant, and almost certainly the biggest determinant in the short term.
However, I disagree that the importance of ingenuity is a fable. The first sign that this isn't quite right is that many resource-rich nations are poverty-stricken (there are many examples in Africa and the Middle East) when compared to resource-poor nations that are successfully channeling their population's ingenuity (most advanced economies are resource poor with occasional exceptions). Now one could explain this away by saying that there's essentially a resource racket going on (advanced nations breaking the legs of resource rich nations and taking their resources)...but consider an even stronger example: pre-industrial societies.
Despite having more resources available in the ground, even the kings of such societies lived in poorer conditions than middle class people living in a modern economy. Why? Ignorance. This ignorance led to poor input of resources and poor use of resources. There may have been more aluminum in the ground in medieval Europe than modern Europe, but there was no good way to process bauxite ore until human ingenuity made it possible in 1888, so these resources went unused. On the resource use front, scarce arable land was badly misused in Medieval times compared to today. There was plenty of resource input, but the output per resource was terrible. Since then, human ingenuity has made it possible to produce far more output with the same resources.
Science and technology have not diminished the importance of resources, a farmer today still needs arable land to produce food. Halving the amount of arable land would halve the amount of food we can produce. Resources are just as critical as they were in the past...but at the same time we are wealthier and more flexible due to our ingenuity.
Responsible for nearly everything going on today in advanced economies is the increase in labor productivity. After thinking about this for a bit, it seems to me that "labor productivity" is actually poorly named. Labor productivity is at its core about the reduction of resource use, not just labor use. Reducing the use of labor also reduces the use of resources as a side effect...because there is no need to spend as many resources on laborers. However, lumped into this metric is pure resource reduction (such as reducing the amount of arable land needed to make food, the amount of steel used to make an appliance, or the amount of paper and ink needed to make a piece of artwork by using Photoshop) that as a side effect either reduces the amount of labor spent on those secondary items or increases output per unit of labor spent on those resources dramatically.
You asked "if the creative industry is largely rent-seeking instead of producing, where is the money coming from to pay them?" The answer is that it's coming from the owners of essential industries and the laborers that they employ. They hold the keys to the entire economy because everyone else cannot go on without their products and services. They produce things such as energy, food, shelter, water, sanitation, clothing, medicine, etc. Surrounding them and nearly as powerful are the industries these core industries rely on for high labor productivity (the support industries) which provide things such as tool-making, mining, computers & industrial software, communication, transportation, retail, etc. Much further out are peripheral services that are demanded by the people that own or are employed by these core industries and their families, such as restaurants, entertainment, fashion, etc. Of course, the people working for these peripheral industries also demand the goods produced by peripheral industries, driving even more demand than just core industry a
I'm wondering how the US government has been "rapidly getting out of the way for 3 decades plus" when their spending as a percentage of GDP has been reasonably stable for those three decades. If they're "getting out of the way", then what are they spending all that money on?
Also, you seem to have confused libertarians for anarchists. The two types are about as closely related as socialists and communists.
Transporting the first stage back by sea is not a big deal cost-savings-wise. The cost of building the rocket is most of the launch cost (something like >90% if I remember correctly). The Falcon 9 costs around $50 million USD to launch. Therefore one of the stages costs something like $20 million (or more) to build. Unless the cost of shipping a used first stage back to the launch site exceeds $20 million, then it makes economic sense to recover it even if it has to land somewhere inconvenient. Having it land somewhere nicer shaves a tiny percentage off the total cost of the launch, and so other concerns may dominate (such as regulatory issues, the location of existing launch pads, or increasing payload).
Forget scrubbing CO2 from the Earth's atmosphere for a moment and consider a smaller-scale application: life-support systems for underwater colonies, underground colonies, and space ships/stations/colonies.
From what I've heard, scrubbing CO2 from the enclosed atmosphere is one of the more difficult challenges of designing such systems for long-term human habitation. It sounds like this material could be very useful for building such CO2 scrubbing systems cheaply and simply.
A simple design would be to have 2 chambers full of this stuff, one of which is connected to the internal atmosphere while the other is connected to the external atmosphere/vacuum (which is assumed to have low concentrations of CO2). When the inward-facing chamber is full, they swap and the now outward-facing chamber can dissipate the collected CO2 outside. Rinse and repeat. Of course, this would eventually lead to a lack of O2 (and C) unless there was some nearby source that could be exploited.
Another use would be reducing CO2 variation by having a large reservoir of the stuff in the enclosed environment. If CO2 levels were getting too high, the material would absorb some of it (at least up to the point it became saturated with CO2) and if the CO2 levels were getting too low, the material would release some of the CO2 stored in it (at least until it ran out of CO2). Though this wouldn't be sustainable by itself, it would prevent CO2 spikes in small environments. For instance, if a separate CO2 recycling system could handle the 24 hour CO2 output of a human crew but couldn't handle the peak demand during the middle of the day, then this would allow that system to be used without needing to scale it up to handle the peak demand (which would save on both energy and production costs).
Because a black market will develop to avoid the taxes and other government controls, and we will be back to square one.
Well, this depends on the exact incentives at play. For instance, the cigarette black market works by moving cigarettes from low tax states to high tax states. The main incentive for criminals is that it is nearly as profitable but far less dangerous than illegal drugs. Only the most high tax states have problems and there'd probably be far less cigarette trafficking if it carried the same penalties as illegal drug trafficking.
Overall though, the black markets for legal drugs seem to be not nearly as destructive and the less restrictive the laws are, the less problematic they will be.
Controlled substances are most often controlled for good reasons, even if the enforcement is misguided. The self-destructive will drag others down with them (i.e. their own kids). Allowing easy access to satisfy curiosity is a very bad idea with highly addictive and ultimately destructive substances.
If this is the rationale, then why is alcohol legal? Why is financial irresponsibility by parents legal?
Perhaps instead of trying to our hardest to stop self-destructive people (who will try to bypass our restrictions anyway) for the sake of the children, we should rely on child protection agencies to help them. We can use the tax revenue generated for this.
What would likely result from legalization is more addicts and more drug-related crime. Crimes like possesion and distribution might go down, but fighting the black market would offset this gain. More addicts would yield more crimes committed by people with no other means to feed their addiction.
More addicts, yes. More drug-related crime? Not so likely. Most drug-related crimes today have to do with the illegality (and as a side-effect scarcity) of the drugs. Drug prices will drop dramatically after legalization, because: 1. Industrial scale production of drugs will be possible 2. Transportation will be much easier 3. Retail will be easier and much less risky As such, it will be possible to have a drug habit on an ordinary wage and not have to resort to theft and other crimes. Most smokers and alcoholics aren't out committing crimes to "feed their addiction", so why would other drug users do so if their drugs were legal?
Accounting for a higher number of workers per terawatt isn't that important. Even if the excess deaths were primarily driven by the number of workers, the fact that it puts so many more workers in danger is still a problem.
Also, as you mention, solar-related deaths are probably almost all due to just plain everyday accidents. This sets a nice baseline level of danger and implies that the deaths in the bottom four entries are probably driven mostly by workers per terawatt. This makes sense because of the energy density of solar vs nuclear. In any case, in order for coal deaths to be driven by this factor alone there would have to be 366 times as many workers working in coal production per terawatt than solar (34 times as many if you restrict it to the US alone). This heavily implies that the extra deaths are due to a higher level of danger rather than simply more workers.
All problems of real import today are not technical problems, but sociological problems. Certainly improving technology is valuable and as a trend it is something I hope will continue progressing apace. However, technology doesn't solve problems...people solve problems (possibly using technology). Furthermore, technology doesn't cause problems...people cause problems.
Anything approaching utopia is impossible as long as unmodified humans are running the show. The ignorance and greed at a high level that you mention are a natural result of our individual human frailties. We have thousands of years of data showing this and the recent burst of technology has had only a minor impact insofar as it has externalized some things.
Only by becoming better individuals can we form a better society. You can see this to some extent in areas where we have improved the average individual, such as through education or cultural pressure. Unfortunately though, even a newborn human is not a tabula rasa, let alone their elders. Again and again attempts have been made to create a new culture from scratch, in the hope that this new environment could lead to a new kind of person that would fit naturally into this new and better culture...and every time it has failed due to human nature. The closest we've ever come to success on a large scale is the mainstream cultures that first arose in the US and UK and have since spread to many other areas...and these cultures are far from utopian.
Soon AI and biotechnology will hit a threshold where we can literally create a new and better species of man. Imagine taking all of the positive attributes of humankind and amping them up to 11 while at the same time removing or minimizing the worse parts of our nature. Super-intelligent and naturally rational, highly altruistic and empathetic, self-motivated and self-sufficient, beautiful, athletic, highly creative, untiring, uninterested in personal gain beyond what is needed for success, honest, loyal, able to have an extremely wide circle of friends, unenvious, naturally happy, able to switch between friendly competitiveness and solid cooperation, mentally flexible, long living, forgiving, tolerant, etc. A society composed of such creatures would be a utopia almost regardless of how it was structured...unlike human society, which must struggle bitterly to remain at a tolerably functional level.
It should also be noted that I'm not talking about creating a clone-stamped race of supermen. Most likely there will be many different types that each have different strengths and weaknesses. For instance, huge immobile AI minds could do impressive mental feats that lead to a harmonious society while many smaller autonomous entities with various bodies and minds make up that society.
Those of us who wish to do so will one day be able to join their ranks...while those of us who choose to stay behind will benefit from their loving care and guidance.
If you truly want a utopia, instead of something that is just slightly better, this is the only real way towards that goal.
Slashdot Mirror
Actually, the Fermi paradox simply implies that the future will be extreme. Consider the alternative to our destruction: we are the first technological civilization to emerge in the Milky Way and we will spread across the galaxy, preventing any new civilizations from emerging through our meddling. There are no aliens because we are the first and we are the first because we will prevent them from arising in the future. By the way, this event hardly requires currently thought impossible sci-fi technology like FTL. Using slower than light colony ships makes a lot more sense with technology like nuclear fusion, molecular nanotechnology, and life extension.
Most importantly, the time it would take to colonize the galaxy using STL ships is not too long in geological/eveolutionary terms. Even using fusion engines it should be quite possible to colonize the entire galaxy in a million years. While that is a long time, it is nothing compared to the billions of years that life took to evolve. It is in the same ballpark as the entire time humans have been around (especially if we shorten the colonization time with better propulsion technology like antimatter engines). So, unless alien civilizations all appear around the same time for some reason, it seems very likely that the first civilization to emerge (and successfuly spread to space) would prevent all the others from emerging.
The only long-term future that the Fermi paradox argues against is one similar to the present day. We are almost certainly in a transition period, either to annihilation or a galaxy-spanning singularity-like future.
Oh, and one last thing, some of the taker states have resources that an independent CA would lose access to. New Mexico has a huge desert where large science and defense facilities can be set up cheaply, West VA has massive coal deposits, Hawaii is strategically important in the Pacific, etc. Here in TN, a facility such as ORNL can be set up which costs less than if it were located in CA (due to lower cost of living and property costs) because it's more economical to not cram everything into scarce territory near the ocean...while at the same time being located in a place that many talented people are interested in living in.
The point is that much of our federal spending is oriented towards efficiently exploiting national resources to strengthen the whole country.
Man, doing a good cost-benefit analysis is hard. It's so easy to miss or misjudge important factors such as these.
And that is why the argument of California getting less out than it puts in falls flat—not because it isn't true from a purely numbers point of view, but rather because there are unquantifiable externalities that the argument fails to take into account.
Extending this line of thought a bit further, another huge unquantifiable externality is the access California gets to research done using federal money. The state at the top of the Tax Foundation list, New Mexico, is home to Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. At $1.5 billion in funding, LLNL represents a surprisingly large percentage of the state's $74.3 billion GDP. Similarly, my current state of Tennessee has the slightly larger Oak Ridge National Laboratory, which skews TN more towards being a "taker" state without accounting for the nationwide benefits that come out of the research being done there.
When it comes to security benefits, another thing to consider is the stabilizing effect the US military has on international trade. Even if one considers US defense spending levels to be excessive, if seems quite plausible that if it fell below a certain level then several other nations would step in to fill the power vaccuum. It also seems unlikely that any one nation would come to dominate at the same level as the US. The EU, US, China, Russia, India, and Brazil would all be regional superpowers that would have their own ideas about how to run things. It could also easily lead to situations like a nuclear-armed Japan, a re-ignition of the Korean War, or an invasion of Taiwan. Overall, these factors would make nations worldwide spend more money on hardening their defenses and thus make trade harder for everyone. Worst case, the superpowers could directly clash and set off WWIII, which would ruin everyone's day.
Another hard to quantify factor is "free" benefits like open trade with the other states, better access to much other non-federal research, a lack of immigration restrictions between the US states, a lack of worry about being invaded by the US, access to military bases in the eastern US and abroad, and other benefits that derive from the simple cooperation of the other states.
I wonder how things stacks up when these hard to quantify factors are taken into consideration. It could go either way, but I suspect that the free benefits push it over the edge into being beneficial. Standing together makes us strong...I simply hope that we can keep up the trust needed to keep standing together.
I agree that it is a huge mistake to dismiss China because it is "communist". However, the main reason it's a mistake is because present-day China is closer to fascist than communist. Primarily, China's economy is much closer to those of the classic fascist states than the economies of the classic communist states (including its past self). As such, China's economy is on equal footing with capitalist economies, unhindered by communist economic insanities like the inter-factory barter system that emerged in the USSR or attempts to meet shoe quotas with minimal leather by producing only shoes for children.
I think the kind of communism we saw in the USSR is probably stable in isolation. However, capitalism substantially out-competed it leading to predictable results. How is this any different than final fall of the ancient monarchies in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century? A more competitive system came along and people living under the less competitive system started to adopt the trappings of the new system and push their governments towards adopting it. In some countries there was a collapse when the disparity got wide enough...in others (such as Imperial Japan) the government and people successfully adopted the new system, making it competitive again.
This way of looking at it accentuates your concern. The US is not immune to these pressures and if China begins to outcompete us (either because China grows very strong or the US becomes weak), it could lead to an economic collapse of the US one day...or the US adopting a more China-like way of doing things. We have to stay competitive.
I wouldn't go so far as saying that economics is pseudoscience. First of all, there's a gross division between micro-economics and macro-economics. Micro is substantially scientific, relying heavily on controlled experiments. A lot of good results have come out of micro which are useful to individuals and companies. Of course, a lot of the most interesting questions are in the realm of macro, which is much less scientific in nature simply because it is very difficult to run controlled experiments.
That said, it is possible to apply scientific methods to large scale things. After all, Earth science suffers from many of the same issues as macro-economics but the field of Earth science as a whole is rarely derided as being outright pseudoscientific (even when some people find some of their findings controversial). In both macro-economics and Earth science, there's issues with chaotic dynamics and poorly measured starting conditions that make accurate predictions of specific events impossible in practice, but it is possible to apply scientific thought to help us better understand the big picture and make gross predictions.
Now the really big issue that macro-economics has to deal with that other large-scale scientific areas do not have to deal with is that their observations have a major and immediate impact on the system that they are studying. Lets say someone published a perfect global macro-economic theory tomorrow...the system would promptly fly off the rails as people started exploiting the new theory, at which point it would look as though the theory was full of holes even though it was initially correct. Of course, the real situation is even worse, since we don't start with perfect theories. Earth science doesn't have to deal with this issue (presently): while the human impact on the planet may be growing larger, we hardly control it at this point, so human-caused changes to the Earth are slow and theories have time to play out.
This may seem like a hopeless situation...and in one sense it is. In order to truly understand the system, you'd have to understand the parts that make up the system: humans. Unfortunately, understanding humans is not possible. Our minds are Turing-complete, so there are many undecidable problems associated with them. As it boils down, a complete and consistent theory of the mind is impossible, and as such so is any theory that relies on understanding the human mind. You can see hints of the Godel and Turing's theorems in the problems with macro-economics that I pointed out earlier...to be successful, macro-economic theories must account for their own impact.
However, we should not give up hope entirely. We can't truly understand the system...but we can come up with pretty good theories and methods. These issues haven't stopped mathematicians from continuing their studies...or software engineers from striving for quality in software. We can understand economic systems reasonably well using scientific and mathematical ideas...what's so pseudoscientific about that?
That said, the thing to look out for is proponents of economic theories that overstate the effectiveness of their pet theory. Claims of extraordinary accuracy should require extraordinary proof. Even the best macro-economic theories out there these days leave a lot to be desired. Plus, some of the stuff out there is indeed pseudoscience. There is great incentive to create false theories for various reasons, ranging from get-rich-quick schemes to political expediency. I'm simply arguing against the idea that economics is necessarily a pseudoscience.
How did they calculate those values? There's no explanation or sources.
The two plastic recycling entries are particularly confusing. Do we save 76% of the energy compared to manufacturing downcycled PET from scratch? or is that number for making recycled PET bottles? Why does it say we're saving 88% of the energy costs on PS but then turn around and say it's not viable in practice? Does that mean that these numbers do not account for the cost of collection and sorting? What about cleaning? If so, the amount of energy saved by the whole process may be much lower in practice and maybe even negative for some types of recycling.
By the way, I'm not anti-recycling. I think we'll be recycling everything one day and it certainly doesn't hurt to develop techniques and use those techniques that make economic sense. However, it hurts us if we're wasting valuable energy on feel good measures and I think Popular Mechanic's analysis isn't deep enough to prove that most forms of recycling aren't just feel good measures.
That's not entirely correct. Experiments show that either any hidden variable theory OR the principle of locality is incorrect. It could be that there is a non-local hidden variable theory that is correct.
While I agree that the US is dealing with medical care costs particularly badly, I don't think the way other countries handle medical care costs is the panacea you seem to think it is.
Take a look at this:
http://economix.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/07/08/us-health-spending-breaks-from-the-pack/
The data is from the OECD.
Health care spending is consistently growing faster than GDP in all of these countries, and GDP growth is already exponential so the growth of health care in developed nations is growing faster than exponentially. The top spending countries are already reaching the point that the US was at by the end of the 1980's. If this long term trend continues, then these countries will eventually be facing a medical finance situation of the same magnitude as the US, it will simply take longer.
I just want to say that make-work labor ("those sorts of jobs are where we stick people to say they have a job") is one of the worst ideas ever.
Work (as opposed to productive play) is a degrading part of human life. With the exception of a few people who love their jobs (and are thus spending their days playing), the time a person spends working drains from the precious little time they have on this Earth. Work has always been an awful necessity in the past, something that had to get done or else things would collapse into an even worse state of poverty. Nobody should be required to work if it can be avoided without even more dire consequences.
Make-work is the worst kind of work, because it inflicts the harm of work without the purpose that accompanies productive work. The only purpose of make-work is to maintain an outdated system. It is a form of slavery and should be fought wherever and whenever it appears.
Note that "productive work" that exists due to a willful stunting of technology to maintain the need for work is make-work as well. It should be fought with the same intensity.
As a consequence, it is our duty to push full steam ahead with no less than the goal of the abolition of work. The process of getting there will be immensely tumultuous, but so was the abolition of slavery.
By the way, while there will always be a need for some labor, we should eventually be able to use automation to reduce it down to a level where our labor needs can be completely met with play. That is, those who wish to do the things that need to be done will be plentiful enough that we won't need to force people who do not wish to do these things into doing them. In those few cases where productive work ends up being needed again, compensation above and beyond the norm or social recognition will attract plenty of volunteers.
I think you're not accounting for a lot of important factors in the cost.
Even without accounting for the new technology, such a rail system would realistically cost in the tens of billions. Consider the San Fransisco-Anaheim segment of the California High-Speed Rail project, which was initially estimated to cost around $42.6 billion. It covers a bit less than twice the distance between Chicago and Detroit, so even a more conventional Chicago-Detroit railroad would probably cost a good percentage of that, not $5 billion.
When it comes to the solar portion, keep in mind that the efficiency will be poorer than the best case. Between the relatively poor siting and the lack of features available in a dedicated solar plant (ex. concentrators), the solar panels will not perform at their maximum. You also have a possible issue with the passing trains blocking the sunlight on one side for the solar panels. Lastly, for this particular rail line there essentially won't be any solar energy available during the winter months and clearing snow off the panels will be an issue. Plus, Illinois has an average of 51 thunderstorms a year, so that's a lot of rainy days too. This might be a better idea in a drier, sunnier climate.
Another big issue has to do with uncertainty. Sure, the payloads will eventually get to the other side, but there's no guarantee that it will get there in a timely fashion. You could be having bad weather anywhere along the line, which would strand trains there until the weather cleared up. If you add non-trivial energy storage or transmission to alleviate this problem, expect the up-front costs to increase even further. Also, even in the best case, the train line would still have to reduce capacity or shut down anytime there was not enough energy available overall.
I wonder how this idea would compare to other possibilities: situating the solar plants in a centralized plant (in Arizona for instance) and transmitting the power to the track, using solar power to charge an electric train at the station, turning the solar energy into a different form (like hydrogen, ethanol, or diesel) and feeding it to a train powered by that source, etc.
N2
Water
Helium Gas
O2
Vampire Trek!
There's plenty of land. Build more houses of the appropriate type.
Also, what matters most when it comes to age comparisons is the relative difference. A 2 year old is as much less mature than a 6 year old as a 20 year old is compared to a 60 year old. However, a 24 year old is generally not much more mature than a 20 year old. As the absolute numbers get higher, the number of years needed to make a substantial difference become wider and wider. This principle is very obvious in dating, where several years age difference raises eyebrows when one of the participants is 18 but is considered normal if both participants are middle aged or older.
What this means is that the "wise old men" group will encompass a larger age range than it does today, so instead of adding the extra years directly, you're adding a shorter time. As lifespans get longer, the extra years added get shorter and shorter as lifespans get longer and longer. If people live to be 800 on average (about 10x what they do today), then you'll have lived 75% the lifespan of a 800 year old by the time you get to 600. As a bonus for those who desire it, it also means more years spent in the "wise old men" category when you do get there (that 600 year old will get to live around 200 years as an elder, compared to a modern 60 year old only getting to live in that situation around 20 years). It must be admitted that 600 years is a long time to wait...but it's not nearly as bad as 780 years.
By the way, the distribution of felony crimes is skewed heavily towards people in their 20's, you're not accounting for repeat offenses, and your math is off (according to your logic, if most people lived to be 500, then 150% of the population would be felons). The felony situation wouldn't be nearly as dire as you make it out to be (especially since if nearly everyone was a felon then there would not be such a heavy stigma on being a felon). However, I do have to admit that the older the population got, the more felons there would be as a percentage of the population. Since the mark of felony never leaves, older people are much more likely to be felons even if the chance of them becoming a felon at their current age is very low (most of them being dogged by felonies they committed decades or centuries ago). If this is the case, it would probably be best to clear felonies entirely after several decades.
Relying on your employees to buy their own products is never a workable strategy.
Imagine you are a farmer that owns a large farm and that by yourself you can only farm half of the overall land. You make enough for yourself plus some surplus that you sell to outsiders for a profit. In this case it makes sense to hire a worker that can farm the other half of the land for you because you can make as much as twice as much profit selling the combined surpluses to outsiders.
Now imagine instead that the owner and the worker are the entire economy. Since there are no outsiders to sell the surplus to and buy non-farm goods from, it no longer makes sense to hire the worker or even make any surplus because the needs of the owner are already covered by the work he does on the farm (and making more would incur other costs like additional labor on the part of the owner or soil depletion). The only remaining non-altruistic reason for the owner to hire the worker is so that the owner can do less work, in which case the worker will produce enough food for both of them while the owner can kick up his feet and relax. In this case, the owner is paying the worker to provide him with the privilege of a labor free life and the owner is not relying on the worker to provide him with a consumer base to sell his products to. Also note that this doesn't scale well...if a second worker showed up to do farm labor, then the owner would have no reason to hire this new worker because the owner already makes what he needs without having to work. Without access to a means of production (farmland in this case), this new worker is powerless to produce even enough for himself.
What this means is that (discounting altruism and the use of force) in a closed economic system the owners will only hire the minimum number of workers required to provide the owners with everything they need (which includes by necessity workers working to provide for the workers that provide for the owners and the workers providing for those workers and so on, which is why there appears to be a wider consumer base). This is where rising labor productivity comes in: higher productivity leads to a lower number of workers required to provide for the owners. In the past this effect transformed into new goods and services becoming available instead (job losses in one area would be canceled out by job gains in a newly formed area). However, nowadays this is not enough. Most of the new jobs that are being created these days are creative jobs that most people can't handle...or at the very least are radically different from old jobs (it used to be that buggy whip makers would move into car assembly but now factory workers and managers need to move into medicine, engineering, etc.). Routine work of all sorts is becoming increasingly automated and this trend will only get more pronounced as disruptive technologies like automated cars/trucks arrive on the scene.
Only owners have any economic power. The only source of power non-owners have is the capacity for violence. Ultimately there are only three outcomes as society becomes heavily automated:
1. Everyone becomes an owner, removing the tension and allowing us all to prosper (but how do we transition to this situation? how do we maintain it?)
2. Force is employed to prop up the non-owners permanently without making them into owners. However, the form and source of this force can vary substantially. It may take the form of violent flare ups (riots, looting, revolution, civil war) or it may be more civil (legislation, heavy taxation, etc.). It may come from the more altruistic owners who do not want to see outcome #3 occur, or it could come from the non-owners themselves. It's also difficult to say how good such a situation would be for the non-owners, as it could range from a dystopian existence packed into concrete projects with no hope of a better life all the way to a nearly utopian situation. One thing is for sure though, as long as most people are non-owners, the pro-non-owner faction and the anti-non-owner faction would be in a never-ending state of conflict with each other.
3. The non-owners lose their livelihoods and die out, leaving a small core economy of owners supported by robots.
Fear of this outcome is a poor reason to cause millions of excess deaths.
Realistically though, this will not happen (at the very least not for long). Do you really think these methods will stay expensive forever? Technologies that are not dependent on some naturally scarce resource will eventually drop in price dramatically.
Furthermore, there is a great incentive to use these methods to improve public health and therefore reduce medical costs put on the state. Even if such a procedure is fairly costly in the first place, there will be a decrease in the lifetime costs that the state has to pay. So, unless the state completely abandons the medical needs of the lower class there will be a strong incentive for the state to provide this service to those who cannot afford it.
Lastly, the technology you should really fear for creating this scenario is not genetic engineering...but automation. Weak AI automation is a disruptive technology that will soon outperform human workers in something like 90% of productive occupations (mostly through reduced costs rather than improved quality). Will everyone be able to find new jobs that aren't in competition with robots? (that is to say, can they all find non-routine jobs, which require creativity and/or a high degree of mental flexibility) In such a society the value of labor is degraded to the point where it doesn't matter how hard you work. There are *no* jobs outside of a few specific areas that robots haven't taken over (yet). Only owners can survive and thrive in this system without government assistance or private charity. Unlike genetic engineering, this is happening right now on a gargantuan scale. Society will have to change soon...and by the time we get to genetically engineering babies on a large scale these issues will already be resolved one way or another.
The emergence of superior forms of artificial life is inevitable. We should embrace this change instead of fighting it. If we do this right, our creations will treat us better than we treat each other...and maybe one day we can join them...
I agree with your post and think that these are all good ideas. In particular, getting such a kid into athletics is a great idea as is letting such a smart kid largely guide their own education (provided they can show they have the basics down).
However, I don't think it's all that necessary to focus on socializing the kid with what would normally be their peer group. There's some need of course, they need to be able to interact with others their age on occasion without creating conflict. That said, a prodigy might fit in much better with an older group that is more mature (that is, less likely to be mean about the kid's gift) and which more closely matches their mental level. As added pluses, the kid will learn more from an older peer group and will make more useful social connections. Such a group will also be more likely to encourage the kid's gift instead of making it into something they need to hide.
Of course there are some downsides. When the kid reaches sexual maturity, older peers will not be nearly as helpful in finding them a mate. Older peers will dominate the kid at athletic pursuits (unless they're very old). Older peers will have different concerns due to their later life stage, making it harder to relate. Older people tend to demand much respect and politeness from younger people, which could lead to them being less of a peer group and more of a dominant group. etc. Overall though, I don't think the disadvantages outweigh the advantages.
My recommendation is to initially get the kid involved in both types of peer groups and then let them decide how much they want to interact with the two groups. Hopefully they'll find both groups interesting in different ways and get the advantages of both.
I base this idea partially on my own experiences. I was by no means a child prodigy, but I'm pretty smart and I've always been much more mature than most of my peers. For instance, my mother remarked that she'd trust me with the car at 13 (which thanks to my fast physical growth I would have been able to handle). I was programming at 14. At 16 I was taking college classes at the local community college. Now at 26 I am saving and investing money for the future.
I've always gotten along great with my parents and teachers and bosses. For the most part they have a much better grasp on reality than my nominal peers. I relate to them much better and it hasn't really hurt me as these are the people who generally hold the keys to most areas of success. I do have some high quality friends from my nominal peer group and I can successfully interact with the rest when needed, but my social circle composition is definitely skewed towards older, wiser individuals.
Of course, I haven't been too successful in the romance department...
I didn't say that Russian oil production would continue indefinitely. You're right that the recent discoveries aren't a repeatable event and in fact it seems they reached a new peak around 2009. What I was saying is that there's some pretty decent evidence that the original Soviet-era Russian oil peak was caused by factors other than availability.
I suppose your hypothesis about the 1980's oil glut being a plot to take down the oil exporting Soviet Union is possible...but if true it undermines your original idea that the Soviet collapse was caused by thermodynamic limits. Plenty of energy was available to the Soviet Union, either through domestic production (that they had previously been exporting) or low-cost imports. Thus it must have been other factors that mainly caused the Soviet collapse.
As for technological growth, I have to admit I'm pretty optimistic overall. That said, I don't think that any particular technology is a "holy grail". I'm not some sort of oracle that can see the future course of technological progress and pick the winners. Most likely some of them will fail or at least not pay off nearly as much as expected. In particular from the three you mentioned, I'm skeptical about the benefits that graphene will provide and our ability to get fusion going anytime soon (nanotechnology is too broad to be specific about, though really awesome stuff like molecular nanotechnology is probably pretty far away, and there's no guarantee it will surpass the naturally existing example of biological life).
However, do you think these technologies will all fail? What about the emerging technologies I didn't mention? What about technological ideas that haven't even emerged yet? It would be overly pessimistic to think that technological growth will grind to a sudden halt when all of these possibilities are within view. My point is that there is still a lot we can do to improve upon energy efficiency/labor productivity and energy input with new technology. We're not yet at the pinnacle of technological growth, so we can continue to climb for now.
1. Although I used this as an example, it's irrelevant to my argument because I foresaw this and used the stronger example of pre-industrial societies.
That said, I believe there is more to poor resource-rich countries than just external exploitation (though I'm sure this is a factor in some cases). Internal political corruption is a serious problem in most of these countries, and this factor greases the wheels of external exploitation too. However, you also have issues unrelated to exploitation such as populations that have a largely pre-industrial mindset and lifestyle. People hate change and going from subsistence farming to factory work to service work is a traumatic transition that takes many years even in the best case. Further, not much can get done in countries with high levels of internal violence, not all of which is due to outside factors. It should be noted that there's a low hanging fruit effect here too...all the easy to industrialize nations have already industrialized, leaving only the hardest cases. Lastly, there are poor resource-poor nations too (Bangladesh and Cambodia for instance), so who's exploiting them?
2. While thermodynamic limitations are indeed an issue, and an energy crisis could cause us some serious harm in the near future, I think the situation isn't nearly as bad as you suggest.
On the improving energy input front, we've really limited ourselves. We may be near the maximum conversion efficiency (for steam engine-based electricity generation), but we're essentially not making use of nuclear power. The amount of energy we could be extracting from nuclear sources is enormous, and we're basically letting it sit there unused for non-technical reasons. Furthermore, in the future there may be breakthroughs in fusion technology that give us access to vast quantities of energy. I don't know when this will occur, but conservatively ITER will be producing 450MW using D-T by 2026, and this example will lead to the construction of many more fusion plants. There could also be a paradigm shift in electricity generation technology that ditches the steam engine for something better (one such route is already suggested by photovoltaics).
More importantly though, your analysis ignores increases in energy efficiency on the user's end. The energy efficiency of devices and practices has been improving greatly, and this seems unlikely to grind to a halt anytime soon due to the broad nature of such improvements. Whenever the efficiency improvement of one area slows down, other areas pick up the slack. Here's some examples of what's in store: Nanotechnology promises to greatly improve efficiency by allowing the formation of perfect structures (like graphene) with exceptional properties that were impossible before. Computer hardware and software are also continuing to improve dramatically for the time being. Robotics promises to dramatically increase labor productivity and reduce waste compared to human workers. 3D printing could reduce shipping and waste costs. In vitro meat could dramatically improve the efficiency of food production. etc.
I admit that one day we will reach thermodynamic limits to growth, but I see nothing particularly limiting on the horizon. I feel that most of our current limitations stem from socio-political issues (nuclear fear, resistance to change, etc.) rather than technical issues.
By the way, for your Soviet example there is an alternative explanation. Here's some data on what happened afterwards: http://pubs.acs.org/stoken/presspac/presspac/full/10.1021/ef901240p
Russian oil production has dramatically recovered since Soviet times and they are now one of the world's top producers. The Soviet economic crisis and Soviet oil peak are correlated due to their closeness in time, but it is possible that the causation is backwards...the Soviet economic crisis (driven by non-thermodynamic factors) could have caused the Soviet oil industry to tank. It should come as no s
After thinking about this for a bit, I partially agree with you. The input of resources is critical to modern economies, and any reduction in resource input will have a proportionate impact on output (say 50% less resources would mean 50% output even if population stayed the same). This is a huge determinant, and almost certainly the biggest determinant in the short term.
However, I disagree that the importance of ingenuity is a fable. The first sign that this isn't quite right is that many resource-rich nations are poverty-stricken (there are many examples in Africa and the Middle East) when compared to resource-poor nations that are successfully channeling their population's ingenuity (most advanced economies are resource poor with occasional exceptions). Now one could explain this away by saying that there's essentially a resource racket going on (advanced nations breaking the legs of resource rich nations and taking their resources)...but consider an even stronger example: pre-industrial societies.
Despite having more resources available in the ground, even the kings of such societies lived in poorer conditions than middle class people living in a modern economy. Why? Ignorance. This ignorance led to poor input of resources and poor use of resources. There may have been more aluminum in the ground in medieval Europe than modern Europe, but there was no good way to process bauxite ore until human ingenuity made it possible in 1888, so these resources went unused. On the resource use front, scarce arable land was badly misused in Medieval times compared to today. There was plenty of resource input, but the output per resource was terrible. Since then, human ingenuity has made it possible to produce far more output with the same resources.
Science and technology have not diminished the importance of resources, a farmer today still needs arable land to produce food. Halving the amount of arable land would halve the amount of food we can produce. Resources are just as critical as they were in the past...but at the same time we are wealthier and more flexible due to our ingenuity.
Responsible for nearly everything going on today in advanced economies is the increase in labor productivity. After thinking about this for a bit, it seems to me that "labor productivity" is actually poorly named. Labor productivity is at its core about the reduction of resource use, not just labor use. Reducing the use of labor also reduces the use of resources as a side effect...because there is no need to spend as many resources on laborers. However, lumped into this metric is pure resource reduction (such as reducing the amount of arable land needed to make food, the amount of steel used to make an appliance, or the amount of paper and ink needed to make a piece of artwork by using Photoshop) that as a side effect either reduces the amount of labor spent on those secondary items or increases output per unit of labor spent on those resources dramatically.
You asked "if the creative industry is largely rent-seeking instead of producing, where is the money coming from to pay them?" The answer is that it's coming from the owners of essential industries and the laborers that they employ. They hold the keys to the entire economy because everyone else cannot go on without their products and services. They produce things such as energy, food, shelter, water, sanitation, clothing, medicine, etc. Surrounding them and nearly as powerful are the industries these core industries rely on for high labor productivity (the support industries) which provide things such as tool-making, mining, computers & industrial software, communication, transportation, retail, etc. Much further out are peripheral services that are demanded by the people that own or are employed by these core industries and their families, such as restaurants, entertainment, fashion, etc. Of course, the people working for these peripheral industries also demand the goods produced by peripheral industries, driving even more demand than just core industry a
I'm wondering how the US government has been "rapidly getting out of the way for 3 decades plus" when their spending as a percentage of GDP has been reasonably stable for those three decades. If they're "getting out of the way", then what are they spending all that money on?
Also, you seem to have confused libertarians for anarchists. The two types are about as closely related as socialists and communists.
Transporting the first stage back by sea is not a big deal cost-savings-wise. The cost of building the rocket is most of the launch cost (something like >90% if I remember correctly). The Falcon 9 costs around $50 million USD to launch. Therefore one of the stages costs something like $20 million (or more) to build. Unless the cost of shipping a used first stage back to the launch site exceeds $20 million, then it makes economic sense to recover it even if it has to land somewhere inconvenient. Having it land somewhere nicer shaves a tiny percentage off the total cost of the launch, and so other concerns may dominate (such as regulatory issues, the location of existing launch pads, or increasing payload).
Also, the Dragon capsule does have a parachute.
Forget scrubbing CO2 from the Earth's atmosphere for a moment and consider a smaller-scale application: life-support systems for underwater colonies, underground colonies, and space ships/stations/colonies.
From what I've heard, scrubbing CO2 from the enclosed atmosphere is one of the more difficult challenges of designing such systems for long-term human habitation. It sounds like this material could be very useful for building such CO2 scrubbing systems cheaply and simply.
A simple design would be to have 2 chambers full of this stuff, one of which is connected to the internal atmosphere while the other is connected to the external atmosphere/vacuum (which is assumed to have low concentrations of CO2). When the inward-facing chamber is full, they swap and the now outward-facing chamber can dissipate the collected CO2 outside. Rinse and repeat. Of course, this would eventually lead to a lack of O2 (and C) unless there was some nearby source that could be exploited.
Another use would be reducing CO2 variation by having a large reservoir of the stuff in the enclosed environment. If CO2 levels were getting too high, the material would absorb some of it (at least up to the point it became saturated with CO2) and if the CO2 levels were getting too low, the material would release some of the CO2 stored in it (at least until it ran out of CO2). Though this wouldn't be sustainable by itself, it would prevent CO2 spikes in small environments. For instance, if a separate CO2 recycling system could handle the 24 hour CO2 output of a human crew but couldn't handle the peak demand during the middle of the day, then this would allow that system to be used without needing to scale it up to handle the peak demand (which would save on both energy and production costs).
Because a black market will develop to avoid the taxes and other government controls, and we will be back to square one.
Well, this depends on the exact incentives at play. For instance, the cigarette black market works by moving cigarettes from low tax states to high tax states. The main incentive for criminals is that it is nearly as profitable but far less dangerous than illegal drugs. Only the most high tax states have problems and there'd probably be far less cigarette trafficking if it carried the same penalties as illegal drug trafficking.
Overall though, the black markets for legal drugs seem to be not nearly as destructive and the less restrictive the laws are, the less problematic they will be.
Controlled substances are most often controlled for good reasons, even if the enforcement is misguided. The self-destructive will drag others down with them (i.e. their own kids). Allowing easy access to satisfy curiosity is a very bad idea with highly addictive and ultimately destructive substances.
If this is the rationale, then why is alcohol legal? Why is financial irresponsibility by parents legal?
Perhaps instead of trying to our hardest to stop self-destructive people (who will try to bypass our restrictions anyway) for the sake of the children, we should rely on child protection agencies to help them. We can use the tax revenue generated for this.
What would likely result from legalization is more addicts and more drug-related crime. Crimes like possesion and distribution might go down, but fighting the black market would offset this gain. More addicts would yield more crimes committed by people with no other means to feed their addiction.
More addicts, yes. More drug-related crime? Not so likely. Most drug-related crimes today have to do with the illegality (and as a side-effect scarcity) of the drugs. Drug prices will drop dramatically after legalization, because:
1. Industrial scale production of drugs will be possible
2. Transportation will be much easier
3. Retail will be easier and much less risky
As such, it will be possible to have a drug habit on an ordinary wage and not have to resort to theft and other crimes. Most smokers and alcoholics aren't out committing crimes to "feed their addiction", so why would other drug users do so if their drugs were legal?
Accounting for a higher number of workers per terawatt isn't that important. Even if the excess deaths were primarily driven by the number of workers, the fact that it puts so many more workers in danger is still a problem.
Also, as you mention, solar-related deaths are probably almost all due to just plain everyday accidents. This sets a nice baseline level of danger and implies that the deaths in the bottom four entries are probably driven mostly by workers per terawatt. This makes sense because of the energy density of solar vs nuclear. In any case, in order for coal deaths to be driven by this factor alone there would have to be 366 times as many workers working in coal production per terawatt than solar (34 times as many if you restrict it to the US alone). This heavily implies that the extra deaths are due to a higher level of danger rather than simply more workers.
All problems of real import today are not technical problems, but sociological problems. Certainly improving technology is valuable and as a trend it is something I hope will continue progressing apace. However, technology doesn't solve problems...people solve problems (possibly using technology). Furthermore, technology doesn't cause problems...people cause problems.
Anything approaching utopia is impossible as long as unmodified humans are running the show. The ignorance and greed at a high level that you mention are a natural result of our individual human frailties. We have thousands of years of data showing this and the recent burst of technology has had only a minor impact insofar as it has externalized some things.
Only by becoming better individuals can we form a better society. You can see this to some extent in areas where we have improved the average individual, such as through education or cultural pressure. Unfortunately though, even a newborn human is not a tabula rasa, let alone their elders. Again and again attempts have been made to create a new culture from scratch, in the hope that this new environment could lead to a new kind of person that would fit naturally into this new and better culture...and every time it has failed due to human nature. The closest we've ever come to success on a large scale is the mainstream cultures that first arose in the US and UK and have since spread to many other areas...and these cultures are far from utopian.
Soon AI and biotechnology will hit a threshold where we can literally create a new and better species of man. Imagine taking all of the positive attributes of humankind and amping them up to 11 while at the same time removing or minimizing the worse parts of our nature. Super-intelligent and naturally rational, highly altruistic and empathetic, self-motivated and self-sufficient, beautiful, athletic, highly creative, untiring, uninterested in personal gain beyond what is needed for success, honest, loyal, able to have an extremely wide circle of friends, unenvious, naturally happy, able to switch between friendly competitiveness and solid cooperation, mentally flexible, long living, forgiving, tolerant, etc. A society composed of such creatures would be a utopia almost regardless of how it was structured...unlike human society, which must struggle bitterly to remain at a tolerably functional level.
It should also be noted that I'm not talking about creating a clone-stamped race of supermen. Most likely there will be many different types that each have different strengths and weaknesses. For instance, huge immobile AI minds could do impressive mental feats that lead to a harmonious society while many smaller autonomous entities with various bodies and minds make up that society.
Those of us who wish to do so will one day be able to join their ranks...while those of us who choose to stay behind will benefit from their loving care and guidance.
If you truly want a utopia, instead of something that is just slightly better, this is the only real way towards that goal.