Perhaps you ought to look at the other eye-rolling in this thread. This is the sort of thing that gets collected every time it gets brought up.
This is Quantum Apostrophe, right? Why can't you use your arguments that make sense (particularly, the economic infeasibility arguments) rather than resorting to the one that is particularly idiotic.
I didn't think you were using the genuine definition of "mostly" as in more than 50%. If you are, then that's a remarkably lame thing to say. For example, I could note that mostly the Earth's surface is devoid of humans and their infrastructure. Yet there's a lot of us on Earth just the same. Similarly, observing that space is "mostly empty vacuum" ignores that there's a lot of stuff in space other than empty vacuum.
Overall, it's a fucking empty place
Which is obviously wrong since there's plenty of stuff in space, contrary to your assertion. This is just a logical fallacy.
How is a grade-school understanding of physical reality a "troll"?
You probably have been corrected on this matter numerous times, Yet you still insist on repeating this fallacy.
There's a lot more chance of well, getting his by micro meteorites up to big ones.
Not really. LEO is worse for that due to the higher relative velocity of LEO junk (and the considerable quantity up there). Now, if you blaze by a good sized asteroid at a few km/s, that could be a different story - though our unmanned probes have fared well when they do that.
Space station technology is what they should be working on, in particular self-sustaining environments.
Where are they going to get the mass for those "space stations" from? Asteroids remain one of the better sources of material for anything we do in space. Might as well figure out how to mine them.
Commercial R&D and exploration serves one purpose: to enrich the stockholders' portfolio. Yes, there's a trickle-down effect in that any technological or intellectual advances will become available to the public eventually, but at a cost whose primary concern is profit. That profit will be a margin applied to the research phase and the manufacture.
In other words, commercial R&D has to be useful. And the profit "cost" yields a strong incentive to insure that the R&D has positive return on investment. These are huge advantages over government R&D which neither has to be useful or provide more benefit than cost.
Public investment in R&D and exploration is to the direct benefit of the entire nation and its allies. Derivative products will eventually be sold for a profit but the profit margin will only be expected to cover the manufacture costs, not the research phase.
In other words, tremendous costs, paltry returns, and the real R&D gets disguised as "derivative products".
Ultimately we pay for everything we have, at the store or via taxes. The question is: do you want to pay profit mark-up on the research?
Of course. The real question is why do you think public research has any advantages at all? For example, when I pay at the store, I pay directly for the R&D and other costs that go into the stuff that I use. If I pay taxes, then they get burned on whatever the elite who controls that spending happens to decide is most useful for themselves with a modest portion used for face-saving stuff like NASA's high profile missions.
I have no say on what NASA spends money on (or more accurately, I can say plenty, but no one in charge of the spending listens). I have plenty of say on what I buy at the store. My money there speaks louder than words. The store is far more democratic and responsive than the space-industrial complex fueled by unaccountable public funding can be.
What can you explore in a mostly empty vacuum anyways? And how many times can you take pictures of desolate rocks that all look the same and still call it "exploration".
If "space" is a mostly empty vacuum, then it doesn't have "desolate rocks" or even pictures of "desolate rocks". You can't keep your troll straight.
Looks like Congress continues to have myopic space policy. I can't tell how much the bill "authorizes" (authorization is a lot weaker than appropriation which actually allocates money) for the Space Launch System (SLS), but any positive amount is too much IMHO. The proposed (which the bill would cancel) asteroid recovery mission sounded very promising as a technology demonstration, but at least that is something that private enterprise can do on a relatively small budget at a future time.
COTS (the program to supply the International Space Station via private vendors) is still chugging along for now, but I expect a number of congresspeople consider the proper number of COTS participants to be zero (they've been steadily whittling the number down from four). I see that they're proposing here to make Orion (which is Lockheed Martin's vehicle these days) the "backup" vehicle in case COTS doesn't work out.
As to the science portion, I'm not particularly enthused. The asteroid mission would probably, despite its reliance on manned activity (and the fact that zillions of meteorites fall on Earth every day), been more substantial in terms of science produced than most of NASA's missions.
Someone has to collect climate data from space (that seems by far the best quality large scale climatology data out there) and NASA seems to be the one in charge of that. The authorization bill would continue to authorize that.
But the climate talk is the first thing discussed. Same in the actual story. They give air time first to the guy with the climate conspiracy theory rather than the people who are pointing out the readily apparent alternatives. It's not as bad as I claimed, but there's still a bias towards the climate change-based explanation.
If there were just a way to extract energy from the ambient environment
There isn't. You can extract energy only by dumping the energy/heat of the ambient environment to a lower temperature or lower potential environment.
Having said that, most weather is due to a transfer of heat from the ambient environment (which in turn has been heated by considerable solar radiation) to space. And we can in turn harvest some of that energy transfer via wind or hydroelectric power.
My initial statement did not presume that the water disappeared, but water processed through biological systems pick up contaminants.
That ocean water has already been through a vast amount of biological systems whose extent is far greater than humanity probably can be on Earth (by mass). Where's those "contaminants"?
Technology hasn't yet stopped us from consuming natural resources faster than the Earth can replace them.
You seem to have a fundamental misunderstanding of the power of technology. It's primary use isn't to stop us from doing things, but enable us to do things. For example, we're developed technologies that allow us to consume those natural resources multiple times (that is, various forms of recycling and reuse).
I have an abiding suspicion that the grand scheme of things is basically nothing. Our activities probably are as close to a grand scheme as anything else.
I don't know why you think it's implausible. If old fertility (and food) still held, we'd see populations far larger than that.
Just a relatively successful effort with HIV in Africa probably explains most of that population difference. Currently, I think there's a window of opportunity here for Africa, the Middle East, and other high population growth areas to change before they experience one or more massive population die-offs.
No, it is required. You think food just falls from the sky and then magically appear in your supermarket? Productivity is required to create everything society needs to survive, let alone thrive.
I wonder what you think "productivity" is. Productivity isn't required. It's just a measure of how efficient work or a worker is. One doesn't require very efficient work in order to move food and other things around.
OTOH, infrastructure is required. But modern infrastructure doesn't require a high fraction of productive people in a population in order to work.
It's worth noting that capitalism tends to have a far more diverse ownership of capital than societies with only public-owned capital (even assuming one doesn't consider public owners as a monolithic blob). And separating ownership of capital from governance does weaken the power of each.
An opinion "seems". Both the "Idiocracy" scenario and mass die-offs would be your "normal evolution standard". Immortality and the ability to genetically modify offspring (and eventually adult humans as well) pretty much ends normal evolution.
we have used technological development to come up with new ways to take advantage of each other.
So? Why I should be denied from some sort of immortality because someone else recently figured out a new angle for exploitation?
i think the op was implying that rather than spending trillions of dollars trying to get into space and live forever against all the problems of humanity, developing genetic technology to eliminate negative human psychological traits (such as the seven sins) will create a much more cooperative and productive society to achieve goals like space exploration much more efficiently.
And why would we want to eliminate negative human psychological traits? They might increase the incident of exploitation of one another, but they also increase our resistance to exploitation. I don't see why I should be interested in building a cooperative and productive society of modified humans only to be ruthlessly exploited by the unmodified humans (or perhaps humans modified to amplify traits for exploiting others).
but that also introduces the possibility that we aren't really fit at all if we are stupid enough to engineer ourselves with unintended consequences that ultimately lead to our premature extinction.
Keep that in mind next time you feel the desire to remove "negative" human traits. Somehow those traits got into humans in the first place and they probably did because they provided survival or reproductive advantages. Those advantages might continue to be relevant in our future.
but no less a fairytale than thinking humans living forever would create a better world. it would actually make the world much much worse; medicines, food and clean water would very quickly become a scarcity, and in cities population density would skyrocket to the point where poilce would be overwhelmed by an explosion in crime rates. public transport would grind to a halt, queues for everything would extend ad infinitum to the point where even basic grocery shopping would eventually become impractical.
Why would that happen? Obviously, population can't grow without limit. Either humans would figure out how to limit population voluntarily or they wouldn't and there'd be a die-off with wiser survivors. Either way, you end up with a population of immortal people who control their population.
I'll tell you the problem with the scientific power that you're using here, it didn't require any discipline to attain it.
That's the problem with movie quotes. They're made in the context of a fantasy. In reality, it requires considerable discipline to get scientific "power".
One of the things that is ignored here is that an immortal population of humans has by its nature a much longer view of things than current humans do. For example, it has often been complained about that people today aren't interested in the affairs of people who will be living on Earth a century or two down the road. If everyone today was expecting to be alive in two centuries, then suddenly you have a lot more interest in what happens.
Another thing that is ignored is the vast pool of experience that would build up in an immortal society and the ability for small groups to do projects that span long periods of time. The prior mentioned space travel thing is one such thing, but there are many things that people could do, if they had the time and resources.
Keeping freedom in a entirely new challenge, requiring virtuous behavior over the long term.
I think the strategy of dividing would-be sources of tyranny against each other has already turned out to be more effective than requiring good behavior.
That's exactly how you sound to anyone who has examined the copious amounts of data with climate change.
I have too. I don't sound like that to me. One thing I've done, which apparently you haven't, is to examine both the reliability of the "copious" data in question and the conflicts of interest present in the field of climatology.
The theory of gravity can be studied in a hallway and I have personally confirmed a couple of its predictions (particularly, the strength of the effect) to about 20% for a university lab. Predictions in climatology are based on sophisticated and opaque models which in turn are based on nebulous and subjective interpretations of temperature proxy data.
We've only been measuring global mean temperature for about three decades. Before that, we've used progressively weaker temperature proxies.
So where is the hallway experiment that confirms global warming predictions? Even radiative forcing by carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases, the most solid part of the theory are distorted profoundly by effects that climatologists don't understand well - such as cloud cover, albedo changes from snow cover, and increased heat loss from storms. It is stupid, as well as insulting to the reader, to claim that confidence in climate change theories should be on the level of the confidence in the theory of gravity.
As to the conflicts of interest, it's worth noting that the lion's share and most influential of climatology research is done by groups funded by governments which have a large interest in promoting anything, such as carbon emissions reduction, which increase their power and control over society.
. In short, there is a dead-line by which sentient AI must be born in order to carry the human spirit of exploration and science onward.
In other words, you haven't actually undertaken these activities in question. Sure, maybe you think you have. But you're suffering from the extrapolation fallacy. If we were to use your methods, then we would have concluded that all life became extinct after the Permian extinction - if not much earlier!
And we ignore here that there's plenty of life that has adapted quite well to a human presence and human changes, such as the numerous species of coffee plants.
Necessary, prevalent, or valuable does not turn an activity into a right.
If a state passed a law that driver license holders of that state had to waive all constitutional rights in order to hold a license and drive, what would you say then? It's an extreme, but that's the sort of onerous and unconstitutional burden I was thinking of.
My view is that, while government should have some authority to regulate privileges that have considerable potential to harm others, the argument that we shouldn't object to regulation of privileges on the basis that they aren't rights is inherently bankrupt. It's not hard to regulate privileges in ways that favor certain groups over others or that increase the power of the state or an elite over the individual.
For example, in the US, recreational drug use is not a right. And for whatever reasons, it has been mostly outlawed at the federal level aside from a number of legal choices (such as alcohol, nicotine, and caffeine). One interesting legal quirk is that illegal drugs which are more likely to be consumed by blacks than whites or lower class people, most notably, the preparation of cocaine known as "crack", tend to carry harsher federal sentences. One can argue that recreational drug use is not a right as justification for its prohibition, but that leaves still unexplained why certain groups are punished more for these activities than other groups.
What makes unproductive people? People aren't inherently extremely productive. Nor are they required to be in order for a society to thrive. There's a pretty low threshold for someone to be "unproductive" in a society. So if your society happens to have a lot of so-called "unproductive" people, it makes sense to ask why they're unproductive.
I disagree, because as above: the Greek people are not competitive to survive under capitalism. [...] You know, things that government is an expert at.
You seem to be proposing that we "fix" what you see as the problem not by forcing them to grow up and becoming "competitive", but by adding factors that would make the perceived problem worse.
Slashdot Mirror
He's an off-the-scale delusional nutjob.
You have a name? Most of the people who think that about me have the balls to post under a name.
Perhaps you ought to look at the other eye-rolling in this thread. This is the sort of thing that gets collected every time it gets brought up.
This is Quantum Apostrophe, right? Why can't you use your arguments that make sense (particularly, the economic infeasibility arguments) rather than resorting to the one that is particularly idiotic.
Overall, it's a fucking empty place
Which is obviously wrong since there's plenty of stuff in space, contrary to your assertion. This is just a logical fallacy.
How is a grade-school understanding of physical reality a "troll"?
You probably have been corrected on this matter numerous times, Yet you still insist on repeating this fallacy.
There's a lot more chance of well, getting his by micro meteorites up to big ones.
Not really. LEO is worse for that due to the higher relative velocity of LEO junk (and the considerable quantity up there). Now, if you blaze by a good sized asteroid at a few km/s, that could be a different story - though our unmanned probes have fared well when they do that.
Space station technology is what they should be working on, in particular self-sustaining environments.
Where are they going to get the mass for those "space stations" from? Asteroids remain one of the better sources of material for anything we do in space. Might as well figure out how to mine them.
Commercial R&D and exploration serves one purpose: to enrich the stockholders' portfolio. Yes, there's a trickle-down effect in that any technological or intellectual advances will become available to the public eventually, but at a cost whose primary concern is profit. That profit will be a margin applied to the research phase and the manufacture.
In other words, commercial R&D has to be useful. And the profit "cost" yields a strong incentive to insure that the R&D has positive return on investment. These are huge advantages over government R&D which neither has to be useful or provide more benefit than cost.
Public investment in R&D and exploration is to the direct benefit of the entire nation and its allies. Derivative products will eventually be sold for a profit but the profit margin will only be expected to cover the manufacture costs, not the research phase.
In other words, tremendous costs, paltry returns, and the real R&D gets disguised as "derivative products".
Ultimately we pay for everything we have, at the store or via taxes. The question is: do you want to pay profit mark-up on the research?
Of course. The real question is why do you think public research has any advantages at all? For example, when I pay at the store, I pay directly for the R&D and other costs that go into the stuff that I use. If I pay taxes, then they get burned on whatever the elite who controls that spending happens to decide is most useful for themselves with a modest portion used for face-saving stuff like NASA's high profile missions.
I have no say on what NASA spends money on (or more accurately, I can say plenty, but no one in charge of the spending listens). I have plenty of say on what I buy at the store. My money there speaks louder than words. The store is far more democratic and responsive than the space-industrial complex fueled by unaccountable public funding can be.
What can you explore in a mostly empty vacuum anyways? And how many times can you take pictures of desolate rocks that all look the same and still call it "exploration".
If "space" is a mostly empty vacuum, then it doesn't have "desolate rocks" or even pictures of "desolate rocks". You can't keep your troll straight.
The original post could have been dropped on almost any story and be just as irrelevant.
Looks like Congress continues to have myopic space policy. I can't tell how much the bill "authorizes" (authorization is a lot weaker than appropriation which actually allocates money) for the Space Launch System (SLS), but any positive amount is too much IMHO. The proposed (which the bill would cancel) asteroid recovery mission sounded very promising as a technology demonstration, but at least that is something that private enterprise can do on a relatively small budget at a future time.
COTS (the program to supply the International Space Station via private vendors) is still chugging along for now, but I expect a number of congresspeople consider the proper number of COTS participants to be zero (they've been steadily whittling the number down from four). I see that they're proposing here to make Orion (which is Lockheed Martin's vehicle these days) the "backup" vehicle in case COTS doesn't work out.
As to the science portion, I'm not particularly enthused. The asteroid mission would probably, despite its reliance on manned activity (and the fact that zillions of meteorites fall on Earth every day), been more substantial in terms of science produced than most of NASA's missions. Someone has to collect climate data from space (that seems by far the best quality large scale climatology data out there) and NASA seems to be the one in charge of that. The authorization bill would continue to authorize that.
Eh, true. I was wrong there.
But the climate talk is the first thing discussed. Same in the actual story. They give air time first to the guy with the climate conspiracy theory rather than the people who are pointing out the readily apparent alternatives. It's not as bad as I claimed, but there's still a bias towards the climate change-based explanation.
I disagree. Divided would-be tyrants often fight each other, and the collateral damage turns the environment to one not conductive to freedom.
It's more conducive than if one tyrant is in charge.
If there were just a way to extract energy from the ambient environment
There isn't. You can extract energy only by dumping the energy/heat of the ambient environment to a lower temperature or lower potential environment.
Having said that, most weather is due to a transfer of heat from the ambient environment (which in turn has been heated by considerable solar radiation) to space. And we can in turn harvest some of that energy transfer via wind or hydroelectric power.
My initial statement did not presume that the water disappeared, but water processed through biological systems pick up contaminants.
That ocean water has already been through a vast amount of biological systems whose extent is far greater than humanity probably can be on Earth (by mass). Where's those "contaminants"?
Technology hasn't yet stopped us from consuming natural resources faster than the Earth can replace them.
You seem to have a fundamental misunderstanding of the power of technology. It's primary use isn't to stop us from doing things, but enable us to do things. For example, we're developed technologies that allow us to consume those natural resources multiple times (that is, various forms of recycling and reuse).
I have an abiding suspicion that the grand scheme of things is basically nothing. Our activities probably are as close to a grand scheme as anything else.
I don't know why you think it's implausible. If old fertility (and food) still held, we'd see populations far larger than that.
Just a relatively successful effort with HIV in Africa probably explains most of that population difference. Currently, I think there's a window of opportunity here for Africa, the Middle East, and other high population growth areas to change before they experience one or more massive population die-offs.
No, it is required. You think food just falls from the sky and then magically appear in your supermarket? Productivity is required to create everything society needs to survive, let alone thrive.
I wonder what you think "productivity" is. Productivity isn't required. It's just a measure of how efficient work or a worker is. One doesn't require very efficient work in order to move food and other things around.
OTOH, infrastructure is required. But modern infrastructure doesn't require a high fraction of productive people in a population in order to work.
It's worth noting that capitalism tends to have a far more diverse ownership of capital than societies with only public-owned capital (even assuming one doesn't consider public owners as a monolithic blob). And separating ownership of capital from governance does weaken the power of each.
except for the fact that you seem
An opinion "seems". Both the "Idiocracy" scenario and mass die-offs would be your "normal evolution standard". Immortality and the ability to genetically modify offspring (and eventually adult humans as well) pretty much ends normal evolution.
what fairytale are you living in?
The same one you're living in.
we have used technological development to come up with new ways to take advantage of each other.
So? Why I should be denied from some sort of immortality because someone else recently figured out a new angle for exploitation?
i think the op was implying that rather than spending trillions of dollars trying to get into space and live forever against all the problems of humanity, developing genetic technology to eliminate negative human psychological traits (such as the seven sins) will create a much more cooperative and productive society to achieve goals like space exploration much more efficiently.
And why would we want to eliminate negative human psychological traits? They might increase the incident of exploitation of one another, but they also increase our resistance to exploitation. I don't see why I should be interested in building a cooperative and productive society of modified humans only to be ruthlessly exploited by the unmodified humans (or perhaps humans modified to amplify traits for exploiting others).
but that also introduces the possibility that we aren't really fit at all if we are stupid enough to engineer ourselves with unintended consequences that ultimately lead to our premature extinction.
Keep that in mind next time you feel the desire to remove "negative" human traits. Somehow those traits got into humans in the first place and they probably did because they provided survival or reproductive advantages. Those advantages might continue to be relevant in our future.
but no less a fairytale than thinking humans living forever would create a better world. it would actually make the world much much worse; medicines, food and clean water would very quickly become a scarcity, and in cities population density would skyrocket to the point where poilce would be overwhelmed by an explosion in crime rates. public transport would grind to a halt, queues for everything would extend ad infinitum to the point where even basic grocery shopping would eventually become impractical.
Why would that happen? Obviously, population can't grow without limit. Either humans would figure out how to limit population voluntarily or they wouldn't and there'd be a die-off with wiser survivors. Either way, you end up with a population of immortal people who control their population.
I'll tell you the problem with the scientific power that you're using here, it didn't require any discipline to attain it.
That's the problem with movie quotes. They're made in the context of a fantasy. In reality, it requires considerable discipline to get scientific "power".
One of the things that is ignored here is that an immortal population of humans has by its nature a much longer view of things than current humans do. For example, it has often been complained about that people today aren't interested in the affairs of people who will be living on Earth a century or two down the road. If everyone today was expecting to be alive in two centuries, then suddenly you have a lot more interest in what happens.
Another thing that is ignored is the vast pool of experience that would build up in an immortal society and the ability for small groups to do projects that span long periods of time. The prior mentioned space travel thing is one such thing, but there are many things that people could do, if they had the time and resources.
Keeping freedom in a entirely new challenge, requiring virtuous behavior over the long term.
I think the strategy of dividing would-be sources of tyranny against each other has already turned out to be more effective than requiring good behavior.
That's exactly how you sound to anyone who has examined the copious amounts of data with climate change.
I have too. I don't sound like that to me. One thing I've done, which apparently you haven't, is to examine both the reliability of the "copious" data in question and the conflicts of interest present in the field of climatology.
The theory of gravity can be studied in a hallway and I have personally confirmed a couple of its predictions (particularly, the strength of the effect) to about 20% for a university lab. Predictions in climatology are based on sophisticated and opaque models which in turn are based on nebulous and subjective interpretations of temperature proxy data.
We've only been measuring global mean temperature for about three decades. Before that, we've used progressively weaker temperature proxies.
So where is the hallway experiment that confirms global warming predictions? Even radiative forcing by carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases, the most solid part of the theory are distorted profoundly by effects that climatologists don't understand well - such as cloud cover, albedo changes from snow cover, and increased heat loss from storms. It is stupid, as well as insulting to the reader, to claim that confidence in climate change theories should be on the level of the confidence in the theory of gravity.
As to the conflicts of interest, it's worth noting that the lion's share and most influential of climatology research is done by groups funded by governments which have a large interest in promoting anything, such as carbon emissions reduction, which increase their power and control over society.
. In short, there is a dead-line by which sentient AI must be born in order to carry the human spirit of exploration and science onward.
In other words, you haven't actually undertaken these activities in question. Sure, maybe you think you have. But you're suffering from the extrapolation fallacy. If we were to use your methods, then we would have concluded that all life became extinct after the Permian extinction - if not much earlier!
And we ignore here that there's plenty of life that has adapted quite well to a human presence and human changes, such as the numerous species of coffee plants.
Necessary, prevalent, or valuable does not turn an activity into a right.
If a state passed a law that driver license holders of that state had to waive all constitutional rights in order to hold a license and drive, what would you say then? It's an extreme, but that's the sort of onerous and unconstitutional burden I was thinking of.
My view is that, while government should have some authority to regulate privileges that have considerable potential to harm others, the argument that we shouldn't object to regulation of privileges on the basis that they aren't rights is inherently bankrupt. It's not hard to regulate privileges in ways that favor certain groups over others or that increase the power of the state or an elite over the individual.
For example, in the US, recreational drug use is not a right. And for whatever reasons, it has been mostly outlawed at the federal level aside from a number of legal choices (such as alcohol, nicotine, and caffeine). One interesting legal quirk is that illegal drugs which are more likely to be consumed by blacks than whites or lower class people, most notably, the preparation of cocaine known as "crack", tend to carry harsher federal sentences. One can argue that recreational drug use is not a right as justification for its prohibition, but that leaves still unexplained why certain groups are punished more for these activities than other groups.
No, the problem is due to unproductive people.
What makes unproductive people? People aren't inherently extremely productive. Nor are they required to be in order for a society to thrive. There's a pretty low threshold for someone to be "unproductive" in a society. So if your society happens to have a lot of so-called "unproductive" people, it makes sense to ask why they're unproductive.
I disagree, because as above: the Greek people are not competitive to survive under capitalism. [...] You know, things that government is an expert at.
You seem to be proposing that we "fix" what you see as the problem not by forcing them to grow up and becoming "competitive", but by adding factors that would make the perceived problem worse.