More Everything Forever (opens in new tab)

that's crazy to say. mars is very cold and very dry and not shielded from radiation and doesn't have much air and that air isn't breathable.

i wouldn't say we've settled antarctica, which is on our planet and has air.

100 years would be a wild amount of time for us to settle mars.

Colonizing Mars isn't a problem. Colonizing Mars is a goal. Making that happen requires addressing a ridiculous number of problems and sub-problems.

If history teaches us anything, the biggest problem is supply chains - and supply chains have been so difficult to get right that they've led to countless famines, lost wars, failed businesses and economic crises. And those have all been supply chains here on Earth, mostly between fixed locations at fixed distances with relatively few environmental hazards and risks compared to space travel.

If we want to create a sustainable multi-planetary future, we need to solve this incrementally. Colonizing the moon would be a logical stopgap. But as it stands now we haven't even established a presence on the moon - let alone a permanent one. The only presence we have off-planet is the ISS and that one's still in Low Earth Orbit, no different from regular communication satellites, so that only qualifies as "off-planet" by not being on the surface of the planet.

Remember that we can't just scale up space travel indepently either. Even if SpaceX figures out how to do space launches every other day, that still requires a supply chain for fuel, parts, refinement, resource extraction, etc, all of which also needs to be scaled up accordingly. And that's just for launching stuff into space, which so far has mostly meant LEO.

Have you read about the natural conditions on Mars?

I doubt there will be a permanent settlement in a thousand years.

Eh, it's a reasonable prior. The timeline is "it will never happen" until the leap forward happens that makes it "within 2 years." Basically the same as air flight.

You can't know when the leap will happen so it's basically picking a year that seems far enough off to be pretty darn sure.

I really think you are under estimating things here. The trip to mars is ~145x longer (at minimum!) than the trip to the moon. Let's say it only takes us twice the time to develop a rocket & ship that can do that (and come back ofc) - so that's 20 years (for 145x the distance). Then you gotta develop structures and building techniques, some of which you can look at with robots, but some of which will need human feedback. The trip itself takes 7~10 months, adding extra time.

If all of humanity devoted ourselves to setting up a mars base it would take less than 100 years! My timeline was based on NASA with 2-4x the budget, which I think is very reasonable. I think you are being foolish.

Rockets are the easy part. More:

The Shape of a Mars Mission: https://idlewords.com/2025/02/the_shape_of_a_mars_mission.ht...

Why Not Mars: https://idlewords.com/2023/1/why_not_mars.htm

We haven't created a self-sustaining human population in earth orbit yet. We need to constantly supply the space station and even when we do, the health impact of staying there is really serious. That's table stakes for a Mars mission and no improvements in rocketry will compensate for the fact we simply can't keep someone alive for that long outside of earth atmosphere.

Honestly, the number of people who think they know the ins and outs of living on Mars because they saw a Matt Damon movie is bizarre.

There is some evidence that street lights reduce crime! E.g. https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10940-020-09490-6

> Starship is just orders of magnitude less than this.

Starship does not exist.

Starship is the name given to a design for a fully reusable superheavy launch vehicle intended to take 100t to LEO.

The things being launched by SpaceX are not Starship.

They are impressive, but are not Starship.

They are called Starship, but are not Starship.

Let me be clear. I am not saying that Starship will not exist.

What I am saying is that today, right now, Starship does not exist and SLS does.

You implied that Starship does exist, and is cheaper.

Nobody, not you, not me, not Lord Ketamine, can predict when it will exist or how much it will cost with any degree of accuracy.

I genuinely, sincerely, and earnestly WANT Starship to exist, but as of today, April 24th, 2025 it does not.

For one, where is Starship and when did it last launch?

For another, this hypothetical spacecraft (which does not yet exist) would not be wherever it is in terms of completion had NASA not existed.

I agree that missions to colonize exoplanets should be low on the priority list per marginal dollar - and also I think we should fund such research because its popular and interesting. We should fund it on the lowest practical level, which probably means establishing a 'starter' base on the moon and a base on mars in the coming centuries.

Well said, I can’t imagine what the perfect tech company to the NyT journalist is, I assume it is something run by committee that uses 100’s of their journalists opinions to make every simple decision.

Most of the criticism on display here is the outrageous, implausible lies that the tech industry leaders are telling to stupid people who believe it for propaganda purposes to avoid regulation and scrutiny.

None of the bullshit coming out of Musk, for example, is real, it’s not even plausible, it’s just lies for dumb people.

I think the ideal foundation of democracy consists of:

1) All citizens get mandatory high education on Math, Science, Language and Logic (what level is high enough is open to debate. I'd say college level), regardless of career -> This is to make sure they have the basic knowledge to participate in meaningful discussions;

2) All citizens are encouraged, and by law mandated to attend and organize political stuffs -> This is to ensure that they can speak out when they are not happy about anything;

You know AOC was a bartender before running for congress right? While most reps are lawyers, many come from a diverse range of backgrounds, there probably is in fact someone in congress who used to manage a supermarket. This diversity of backgrounds is generally seen as a good thing when it comes to understanding the impact of upcoming legislation.

> The person who made millions from making a sugary drink and marketed it as something healthy is not necessarily pretty smart and more than likely isn't someone you want in charge of anything.

Quite literally in the case of former Apple CEO John Sculley.

"not necessarily pretty smart" is a very nice way of putting it.

I don't know where the threshold ought to be, but beyond a certain size a pile of money can only indicate bad things about its owner. Either they're too unimaginative to turn that potential into action, or their designs are so against the will of the people that it's going to take gargantuan amounts of coercion to get them done. Either way, a billionaire is an individual of dubious merit.

If you go on Marc’s Twitter he spends most of his time subtweeting with emojis and one word responses. And he has millions of followers (for what reason?).

A scientist, aside from their day job, is now also supposed to spend time debunking whatever half baked topic of the day is?

The only world where that works is one in which MA’s reputation is built on not saying dumb stuff all the time, like a scientist’s reputation is. If his follower count dropped for example. But it’s not, and that’s not how it works. People like him will move on to the next thing tomorrow.

I've gone on a science communication podcast to talk about my work: https://braininspired.co/podcast/202/

This does not seem to have stopped anyone bullshitting to the media about AI.

Absolutely not. That turns the experts into politicians and pundits. Experts should stay in their lane and provide accurate and trustworthy information.

Yes, it should be accessible and digestible, but should not be pushed.

Even if they were, they have absolutely no incentive to tell you their expert analysis. A16Z spent the cryptocurrency mania years pumping and dumping shitcoins. They weren't telling the world these scams were revolutionary because they had any inherent value, but because saying that made them the most money. They are just people with money trying to turn it into more money.

Most VCs I know are just people with too much money throwing it at anything and everything they can hoping to get that 1 unicorn that multiplies their investment by 100.

I'm sure there's plenty of very intelligent ones, but there's also plenty of morons who started life off with an advantage and have managed to keep it up

They really aren’t. And I know a lot of them personally.

Is there any optimistic sci-fi that doesn't have something like superpowerful perfect AI?

It feels like such a thing is a bit of a cop-out as it removes all the problems that arise from human imperfections and yet our own history is that of an improving standard of living despite these imperfections.

> but the problem is that there are much more "nasty" futures than "nice".

How do you know that?

> The Culture is a world of AIs that are far better than humans at every task, and keep humans as basically pets out of sentimentality.

The difference is that there's no need to build AIs with "motivation". Computers don't view us as anything right now, even if they're better at working with bits than us. What would change this in your mind?

Naturally, we will anyway because that's a short-cut and we're not very imaginative. But any kind of AI that would want anything will have to be explicitly built by us.

AM for example could plausibly be trained on 4chan and war footage.

>We are inventing things to fix it though. We have massive advancements in battery technology and solar cells and nuclear generators that will lead to cleaner energy.

Yet the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere has never been higher nor has the rate of increase.

I had a deadly childhood cancer, Retinoblastoma, which would have killed me without modern medicine. I'm pretty fond of existing.

These developments sure altered my humanity. By making it possible.

Technological developments have massively changed our morals. I think it is even likely that without technological progress we would barely have any moral progress! Humanity was more anarchist back when we were foragers. Becoming farmers made us sedentary and allowed morals to focus more on "family values" and religion. Similarly moving from a pre-printing press world to a post-printing press world forced civilization into a more "free-speech" stance and brought about massive religious and cultural changes. We might still have the same emotions, but they are now shaped by different environments and I really believe that that makes a difference. Check out Foragers Farmers and Fossil Fuels by Ian Morris.

> I don't see that these developments alter our essential humanity though. If you read any classic literature from 100, 200, or even 1000 years ago, the emotional truths resonate the same way.

That just means that field can be static (or just updated for modern references). It doesn't mean there aren't lots of things to improve in other areas.

I wonder if the "active" link lets those articles come to the top:

https://news.ycombinator.com/active

Explains a lot, there's no such thing as substance without controversy.

Good counterpoints. They prompted me to search through the old Extropians mailing list archive. Fedorov was discussed there in the early 2000s, but those discussions were much too late to be foundational of Western transhumanism. One of the messages pointed me to this now-long-dead link, helpfully preserved via Wayback Machine:

https://web.archive.org/web/20010211141901/http://members.nb...

I probably hadn't read that page in 20+ years, but it was familiar as soon as I saw it.

I agree this is somewhat manufactured. Both Hugo de Garis and Ben Goertzel identified as Cosmists in the mid to late 00s, but I don't remember it ever coming up on SL4/singularitarian/transhumanist mailing lists as a major source of ideas at their peak.

Yes, you're right. I read both articles but I should have placed my original comment as a reply to the Pluralistic link.

Mars is just a big dead rock really. The “self-sustaining tin cans” are the way to go IMO. We can learn how to do that in orbit around Earth (where aborting the mission isn’t automatic death), and then go colonize the asteroid belt, where the resources are just sitting there floating in space.

Mars offers: gravity, but the wrong amount. Air, but not enough. Sand and dust, but not the kind that grows anything, just the kind that gets in your filters. Also it is toxic. Not much magnetic field.

In the end all our eggs as in the same basket as long as the solar system, the galaxy or the universe would eventually disappear. Allowing billions of billions of human to live for the next thousands of year is quite irrelevant: nobody asked to be born, so nobody won't miss the opportunity. As for our legacy, 99.995% of us don't leave a trace meaningful enough to be remembered as individuals by our grand grand grand children.

So, OK to conquer Mars, but not at any cost because the ROI seems really low to me.

I can see the appeal of "colonizing mars as an extinction-proof backup plan", but I'm not convinced that it's a positive-EV play. Attempting to go to mars increases odds of our survival in case of earth going to shit by some amount, but it also increases the odds of earth going to shit due to the waste, energy expenditure, and missed opportunity cost of not solving pressing issues.

The fact that we do dumb things does not make the specific plan of colonizing Mars a good idea. Hell, we could try to colonize the asteroid belt, at least that doesn’t involve dropping down some enormous gravity well to visit a dead planet.

> You could have levied the same argument against the Apollo program, any of FDR's New Deal megaprojects, the national highway system, the Large Hadron Collider, ITER, etc.

I’m not sure what “the argument” is here, I didn’t really present much of an argument (I think colonizing Mars is self-evidently dumb). But if the argument that is being levied against these things is that they are all too expensive—I disagree that it applies to some of the things in your list. The New Deal and the Highway system had positive effects for existing people. Maybe the Apollo program was frivolous on some level, but at least it had a plausible goal.

We have a finite budget, I agree that it would be better to spend less of it killing each other, but it will still be finite. We should try to do something more useful than Mars.

> You could have levied the same argument against the Apollo program, any of FDR's New Deal megaprojects, the national highway system, the Large Hadron Collider, ITER, etc

All of those had (and always had) far more obvious benefits than colonizing Mars, including the squishy benefit of "beating the Soviet Union to a contested goal."

You can disprove me by stating plainly what the benefits of colonizing Mars would be?

Mars is extremely terrible. I don't understand why we'd want to colonize it, versus any number of other things we could do with that immense effort. Visit it, sure, I guess, maybe, but colonize? LOL why?

Yes, we waste a ton of money on military. Historically (middle ages) it’s been even higher as a percentage of GDP. A higher peace dividend would probably be good.

But not all military spending was wasteful. The military and military adjacent orgs have invested in tons of useful R&D with civilian applications.

> I believe Jesus also believed this

Jesus predicted his death several times, most explicitly in Matthew 20:17–19.

> Now Jesus, going up to Jerusalem, took the twelve disciples aside on the road and said to them, “Behold, we are going up to Jerusalem, and the Son of Man will be betrayed to the chief priests and to the scribes; and they will condemn Him to death, and deliver Him to the Gentiles to mock and to scourge and to crucify. And the third day He will rise again.”

- Matthew 20:17–19

I’m assuming you read The Passover Plot?

I think that depends on whether your definition of “doomerism” is the same as theirs.

Cars have killed millions of people. Add to that the consequences of electricity, industrialization, urbanization, and even capitalism itself. But billions and billions of people are not only better off -- living lives of outrageous luxury when measured against recent history -- but they wouldn't have existed at all.

Everything good comes with tradeoffs. AI will likely also kill millions but will create and support and improve the lives of billions (if not trillions on a long enough time scale).

But the main figures behind the Ai doomerism are nutjobs either applying bayesian math in a bad way or right wing extremist believing that black people are inferior for genetics reason (I know it's an overreach that doesn't represent all the population of Ai doomers, but the most important people in that sphere are represented by what I said).

Furthermore, they're people without a history in academia or a specific past in philosophy. Although i do agree that investigating Ai dangers should be done, but in an academic context

Putting aside the nebulous notion "contribution to hard science"...

She became famous for adopting a strain of strident and problematic activism, using it to attack her colleagues and making claims just as wild as some of the ones she cherry picks to critique.

It's not at all surprising that she ended up an extremely divisive figure. And meanwhile, the state of the art sped far ahead of where she drew her line in the sand.

It's hard to find discussion of her that isn't strongly biased in one direction or another (surely, my own comment included). In my experience (sample size 1), when she gets brought up (or involved), the quality of the discussion usually plummets.

> exploring new continents, these were all "extravagant/fruitless" undertakings in their own eras.

Was this ever true?

Within a few decades of the European discovery of the Americas they had already subjugated both the Aztec and Inca empires and were able to extract vast amounts of wealth.

I agree with you though.

Does it though? Maybe in absolute terms it spends "a lot" of thought on these things, but in relative terms it borders on nothing.

Measure it by VC dollars invested and what actual orgs at tech companies are assigned to. It's almost ALL on a 1-10 year horizon.

So, as gp notes... is it really that harmful to allocate <1% to "sci fi" ambitions, especially when most of what they actually produce is short-horizon, immediately-usable stuff?

I don't know, my life is made better by electric vehicles, Starlink, Amazon one day delivery and large language models.

What does "working on climate change" look like? The only thing I hear from climate change activists is that the government should extract more money from people and this will somehow change the climate. So I guess rich billionaires should be lobbying for politicians to tax me more?

Again, all this stuff is exhausting. Environment is the biggest problem so everything that uses energy is bad. It's just a formula for mass de-industrialization, making everyone poor, and eventually de-population.

So no, I don't think wealthy people should do more lobbying. I'm happy with them paying their taxes and trying to build tech that makes my life better.

Nobody wants to be told that they have to install solar panels to save climate change.

Picking a problem like space flight avoids all the "nimbyism" from say actual nimbys but also from say Exxon.

There's an interesting fight every 4 years in Texas where billionaires who want to own a casino in Texas flood money into the state to get it approved and billionaires outside of the state who don't want to share the market flood money to counteract it. If you pick something that doesn't have a billionaire that will oppose you then your live is much easier.

Elon has done more to help stave of climate change than every climate activist and non profit org on this planet combined. He's a megalomaniacal douche who has undone all of that goodwill, but it doesn't change the fact that he did that against all odds.

Capitalism will solve the world's problems as it always has, no matter how much do-nothing authors, journalists and "social scientists" will bloviate to the contrary.

"Why don't they stop focusing on space and solve world hunger" they say, not considering the utter priviledge that they can live a safe, happy life while writing tripe contributing nothing, which is only thanks to the miracle of consumer capitalism.

No, they're not boring, but they're qualitatively different types of problems.

Going to Mars and living forever are primarily technical problems.

Starvation, authoritarianism, inequality, and genocide are primarily political problems.

The resources and skills used to solved the former set aren't broadly applicable to the latter set, though it is easy to find examples of people who are good at solving one of these sets of problems who assume that they'll be good at solving the other set as well.

The longevity people are very much into preventing disease, and they're going after the most significant root cause rather than playing whack-a-mole with individual conditions. Which somehow results in them being vilified.

> fighting authoritarianism, inequality, genocide. Are these too boring?

Right, have the tech guys spent their money on politics - that seems to be working out well.

> fighting starvation

We have enough food in the world: we don't choose to share it or distribute it. Politics.

> fighting disease

Politicised within the US (measles, birdflu, NHI, health insurance), and similarly politicised within my own country (US social media is only partly to blame).

Bill Gates put a lot of money towards helping fight Malaria and other health issues: I would guess no other rich dudes wish to get similarly tarred.

We should devise a system that gathers all human resources and applies them to a set of goals, like you mentioned. The smartest people in the world should get together, determine the most pressing issues and command all of humanities resources into those problems. We can remove a lot of waste like frivolous consumerism, endless choice and competition. Why has no one ever tried this before?

> Everyone should die equally rather than some of us being able to live longer

The media has taken an orchestrated turn to the right. The people just fall in lockstep behind because that is what they’re used to doing.

The public is and has always been played like a fiddle.

It is more important. We spend > $2T per year fighting climate change. We spend > $10T per year on social welfare programs.

We spend less than $10B per year on going back to the moon and trying to inhabit Mars.

Space exploration is merely a _technological_ problem. Solving poverty is a _political_ problem, one that is resistant to just throwing money at the problem.

Even if we solve poverty, we can always turn right around and un-solve poverty. Something like this has happened in quite recent memory with a whole lot of other "solved" problems. Luckily, we can come back from that failure and solve those problems all over again, as long as we don't go extinct.

It depends on how you answer the question "why are we here?"

Is the goal is to create an earthly utopia with minimum suffering and maximum happiness? Is it aggressive progress so that we can't be wiped out by a random cosmic event? Or should we be eschewing all of that and living harmoniously with nature and dying spiritually content when our time is up?

There is also the argument that if we had focused on solving poverty 150 years ago instead of prioritizing rapid industrialization and economic growth more people would be in poverty today. A 50 year period of scarcity would completely erase all progress we have made towards lifting people out of poverty, regardless of how equitably we distributed the scarce goods.

But there are people living in the inhospitable deserts that have useful resources like oil. Or artificial resources like legalized gambling.

Antarctica is even more inhospitable than deserts, and there are people living there for research purposes.

I will say the compelling thing about Mars is that you wouldn't be disrupting an ecosystem to terraform it.

That said, I'm definitely on the side of making Fresno a paradise before we try mars.

I know what happens in Vegas stays in Vegas, but really? We're going this far with it? It doesn't even exist anymore?