I am surprised this obviously correct take is so controversial! The problem, essentially, is that the "more everything forever" crowd wants to get paid for the idea of the future today and then will never actually deliver what they promise. They are selling snake oil for the new millennium.
Yes, of course I support space travel and settling on mars. I expect that, if we doubled or tripled NASA's budget, we could get a few humans on mars within 100 years (optimistically). It will be hard! There are many problems to solve (as the book seems to note). There's a place there for SpaceX and all other competent private companies - I love public-private partnerships.
I actually think this kind of low-information escapism about the future (we will "fix it" with technology in a way that is impossible) is similar to religious faith in a coming apocalypse. Faith in an impossible event raising you up and casting down your doubters and opponents. Technology can do a lot! It has a lot of potential! But we cannot fix any of our big problems (climate change, eventually making humans multi-planet, equality) with technology alone and the people who tell you we can just want to scam you out of your money.
100 years optimistically!? That's an incredibly pessimistic timeline, maybe one of the most hardline "nothing ever happens" outlooks I've ever heard articulated.
We developed and flew the Saturn V in less than a decade.
We have plenty of rockets that can do one way trips to Mars that if we really, really needed to get a person there could do it with some modifications.
It's mainly a question of will. If the will existed, we could do it in a decade with doubled or tripled funding. Not a century.
These articles which are little more than blind scarequotes peppered with ad hominems invite little more meaningful discussion than more ad hominems. What is the value of a comments section filled with little but "this is stupid and anyone who believes it is a snake oil salesman"?
There is no pleasing the NYTs or other tech critics like Wired, Axios, or Arts Technica. Either tech is too profit-focused, too focused on mundane or minutia, violates user privacy, or its proposals are too far-fetched or unworkable. What would be the perfect tech or the perfect tech company? One that makes minimal profits , works on products that are not too outlandish, does not make big promises yet is able to secure large investments with modest proposals.
Climate change can near certainly be served with technology, if society didn't stand in the way. We could all switch to nuclear - France did it decades ago, technology is not a problem, society is - hence the subjects of these articles. Looks at solar in China or even Texas vs California. Everything is like that.
Putting humans on Mars is purely a technological problem.
Getting paid before delivery is clearly an Elon Musk strategy and in some cases it does mean that he (Tesla) will be able to deliver but he's clearly full of shit with crazy ideas like living on Mars because the Earth is doomrf or whatever. BS does also bring money or fame or whatever sometimes.
I will say that our discourse is weighted pretty heavily towards people who don’t deserve it. Most genuine experts are careful to only talk about things they know, not bloviate about everything under the sun.
I am sure Marc Andreesen is a very intelligent person but he built and sold a web browser. He isn’t an expert on every tech topic. Same with Peter Thiel and the rest of the PayPal mafia. PayPal isn’t revolutionary and getting rich off of that doesn’t make you an expert on (for example) AI.
I am sure Marc Andreesen is a very intelligent person but he built and sold a web browser. He isn’t an expert on every tech topic. Same with Peter Thiel and the rest of the PayPal mafia.
I would say it's similar to politicians. We won't really have your, I don't know, career Costco Manager in political leadership. We'll get AOC or a Vance (staying bipartisan to make the point, moving off this topic next sentence). The former knows more about basic commutes and the condition of public bathrooms than your average politician or tech mogul. Our tech leaders are not well-rounded or even representative. That's why they talk crazy shit because they are in a crazy rich insulated world. We tried some contrived way to get women and minorities to become CEOs, but I think it should start more grass roots and maybe think about stopping something like ycombinator (or Google for example) from constantly recruiting based on old boys club pedigree. Regular folks just don't get put into the mix for C-Level for whatever reason unless they are gifted at the ladder-climbing thing.
Exceptionalism dictates that we will never put them into the mix, and I think the world is probably missing out on some good practicality and humanity just based on sheer regular folk experience some people can bring.
Its not just tech bros though, anyone who's made lots of money from business is treated like they're the smartest person in the room by many people. 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.
I blame the experts. It's their responsibility to explain things to the public and engage in forums that the public is paying attention to (e.g. podcasts). They don't have to bloviate about everything under the sub, but they do have to be able to break down and communicate their ideas to the non-expert public. Failure to do so creates a vacuum that is filled by the Marc Andreesens and Peter Thiels of the world.
VCs won't be expert level in every area, but they are in a unique position to have a deep knowledge about a lot of different things. It's necessary to be able to invest effectively.
>“We are here now, in a world filled with more than we could ever reasonably ask for,” Becker writes. “We can take joy in that, and find satisfaction and meaning in making this world just a little bit better for everyone and everything on it, regardless of the ultimate fate of the cosmos.”
I don't like this mindset. Be grateful for what you have. Maybe the world is not that great yet for many people and we should aim to improve things substantially, not marginally. This is something that the shuffling around of ressources on a political level can never achieve. Those dreaded tech entrepreneurs have correctly identified technology to be the only way substantial improvements can happen. So then it all blils down if you can make things happen and here the article and some comments here just claim, well, they NEVER deliver!
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. I agree a lot of "nice" futures with AI will look like that, but the problem is that there are much more "nasty" futures than "nice". I don't see a path from AIs built for profit and national defense to a Culture-like future or any "nice" future at all. Or rather, there could be such a path but it would require AIs to be built for public interest already now.
On this point, 20+ years ago I had a chat with my uncle who managed a factory of rubber thingies for the car industry. I asked him what he thought of climate change: "Oh well, if it's ever an issue we'll just invent something to fix it, like carbon-sucking machines or whatever!".
I take issue with this mindset where innovation is the cure-all silver bullet. Not because it says that technological progress can help (it can!), but because it also implies that there's nothing really wrong with everything else we do and that we shouldn't have to think if we had a hand in the endless crises we see.
Don't tell me about a future where Earth is such a dystopian wasteland that going to Mars looks like the right choice. I don't want to build penthouses for the few billionaires that actually enjoy the place. The best place on Mars is still worse than the worst place on Earth.
Tell me about the future where Earth is seen as a wonderful spaceship, where we learned to live in peace and where we have a good thing going on such that going elsewhere to see what's possible is appealing!
The only thing "wrong" with it is that both parties are being intentionally vauge and operating at a "higher level" than the actual problem they are dealing with.
You can immediately rule out "carbon-sucking machines or whatever" because it will take at least as much energy to capture and sequester the carbon as you got from burning it and spent extracting it. Which directly brings us to the actual solution of getting energy from a renewable resource that is cheaper.
Over time all tech will cause issues but if it's well designed the issues won't be exorbitantly expensive to fix compared to the benefits. innovation will always be a cure-all, cause otherwise the problem is already solved, showing or educating people about which solutions are already optimal energy-wise will do more than enough to set their expectations straight, or at least convince them that they don't want to carry around tnt in their pocket.
Making Mars habitable will be a thousand year project which implies that the earth is not uninhabitable. Nobody except a conman will tell you that we have to "escape" earth to go live on mars.
We are inventing things to fix it though. We have massive advancements in battery technology and solar cells and nuclear generators that will lead to cleaner energy.
If you have an alternative to growth as a viable path forward, that solves the global group decision problem which explains why Brazil must stop burning down their rainforests and India isn’t allowed to industrialize, I’d love to hear it.
That isn’t to say I support billionaire pet projects. I would call a lot of it a misallocation of resources.
Without the hope of technological progress, human expansion and economic growth the world becomes zero-sum.
In such a world, humanity will soon arrive at their self-imposed limits, after which no-one can hope to create wealth and prosperity but only to take it from someone else.
The pre-industrial world was like this and it is characterised by millenia of warfare and slavery. Human suffering on a scale that we struggle to comprehend.
Of course, some people are overly optimistic about the near-term possibilities of technology, but I much prefer that to the alternative.
It is obviously true that technology allows us to modify nature to an ever greater extent. That is what technology is! I don't think we'll have a colony on mars anytime soon, but AI is obviously coming and will obviously be extremely disrupting (for better or for worse)
> It is obviously true that technology allows us to modify nature to an ever greater extent
I would dispute the relative significance or meaning of those changes though. We can build dams and tall buildings. We can cure diseases and develop elaborate communications infrastructure.
I don't see that these developments alter our essential humanity though. If you read any classic literature from 100, 200, or even 1000 years ago, the emotional truths resonate the same way.
Did this get removed from the home page? As I write this it was posted 2 hours ago with 48 points and 73 comments. Should definitely be on the home page. Why are we filtering content like this?
being critical about the messaging and the timeline of achieving these goals is fair. however the rest of the thesis seems too harsh, despite the author's credentials.
there is nothing wrong with "shoot for the moon, even if you miss, you'll land amongst the stars" aspect about these literal moonshot projects. regardless of what you think about the people running them, but these initiatives tend to bring out a lot of innovation.
This is, loosely speaking, the bundle of ideologies that Timnit Gebru and Émile P. Torres dubbed TESCREAL (transhumanism, Extropianism, singularitarianism, (modern) cosmism, Rationalism, Effective Altruism, and longtermism).
While these are largely associated with modern Silicon Valley esoteric techbros (and the odd Oxfordian like Nick Bostrom), they have very deep roots, which Becker excavates – like Nikolai Fyodorov's 18th century "cosmism," a project to "scientifically" resurrect everyone who ever lived inside of a simulation.
I think that I first heard of Fyodorov via SF author Charles Stross's writings. It was part of the world building in his early Singularity-oriented novels (Singularity Sky, Iron Sunrise, Accelerando, maybe Glasshouse). He also blogged about Fyodorov, as in "Federov's Rapture":
This also illustrates the bad research that goes into this sort of thing. There are no deep roots of 'TESCREAL' (which doesn't exist to begin with) in Russian Cosmism, because there are no roots of any of those ingredients separately in Russian Cosmism.
Stross just made that up, as pure post hoc ergo propter hoc. There are no sources, and he got it from Hannu: https://gwern.net/review/quantum-thief#fn2 Stross has chosen to never revisit the topic to try to substantiate his suggestion.
This quote winds up being rather exemplary: for example, that one parenthetical description manages to make at least 3 errors: 1. Fyodorov was born in 1823, so he obviously could not have invented anything in the '18th century' (ie. 1700s); 2. Cosmism included many things, not just the 'Great Common Task', and the Great Common Task itself went far beyond reviving ancestors, including many overall more important things like colonizing the entire universe or conquering death; 3. and further, the revival part was not about computer simulation at all (that's Hannu's _Quantum Thief_ fictional version of the idea that he came up with for his Sobornosts!) but reviving them physically, in the body, possibly using cloning - and was no more about "inside of a simulation" than Jesus reviving the dead was.
You're right that Hannu made great use of Cosmism as world-building in the Quantum Thief trilogy which I highly recommend (see my review above) - but that could only work because the ideas of Cosmism are so novel & exotic, and not part of Western transhumanism. If they really were as foundational as Stross claims, the 'taproot' of Western ideas, they would make about as exciting fictional worldbuilding as suggesting that you have some sort of 'laws' for AIs, starting with 'An AI may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm."...
Colonizing Mars is such a dumb idea. I wish it was a strawman, not the stated goal of the world’s richest man.
Anyway, some of the utopian/distopian thinking, I get. We aren’t going to create an AI god, good or evil. That belief is probably a side effect of the facts that Millennials are (finally) grabbing the reins, and we grew up in an era where computers actually got, tangibly, twice as good every 18 months or so, so some sort of divine techno-ascension seemed plausible in 2005 or so.
But we live in the failure path of our plans. So, I’m quite worried that a group will try to create an omnipresent AI, run out of runway, and end up having to monetize a tool that’s only real use is scanning everybody’s social media posts for wrong-think (the type of wrong think that makes you unemployable will invert every four years in the US, so good luck).
You don't need AI to scan social media posts for wrongthink. AI may let you go deeper, detecting thoughtcrime based on certain patterns of otherwise acceptable speech. However, AI is already good enough for that and the sort of people who want this don't care about false positives (or really truth at all) and are probably already compiling lists. Historically these sorts of folks just make stuff up against their enemies if there is no real evidence, so I'm not sure AI does much at all here, except possibly adding some credibility for the less skeptical.
I see Mars as an inevitability. We need Mars. Our eggs are all in one basket and the only way to guarantee our future is to be a multi-planet species or to learn how to live in self-sustaining tin cans. Colonizing Mars would help us develop the tools for either one of these necessities. Colonizing Mars right now I'm a bit more skeptical about.
A back-of-the-napkin calculation puts humanity's total military expenditure at about $100 trillion (USD adjusted to 2022 $) since 1949. That's not accounting for lives lost, infrastructure destroyed, and all the other negatives that come from war. Humanity is spending unfathomable fortunes just to be able to kill each other. And you're saying colonizing Mars is a dumb idea? Humanity is wasting its potential on the stupidest shit you can imagine. Colonizing Mars is a galaxy-brained idea compared to most of what we're spending our money on.
And of course colonizing Mars is trivial compared to terraforming Mars, which you can make a stronger argument against. "If you can't terraform Earth, then you can't terraform Mars." Of course that argument misses the point that if you set terraforming Mars as a goal of humanity, then we focus our efforts on developing the technologies that would allow us to terraform Earth as well (long beforehand, I might add). Focusing humanity on a course to accomplish an immense feat of engineering always produces an immense amount of positive externalities.
You could have levied the same argument against the Apollo program, any of FDR's New Deal megaprojects, the national highway system, the Large Hadron Collider, ITER, etc. And of course people do say we shouldn't be "wasting" our money on such things. I say: how about we keep doing all those projects and more, and stop wasting the vast majority of our money on stupid shit like bombs that in the best case sit in a warehouse until they decompose into duds, and in the worst case kill some wedding attendees and set humanity back.
> They would require regular shipments of food and water from Earth
That's one of the core challenges techno-optimists like Musk constantly handwave and ignore when grandstanding about humanity becoming a "multi-planetary species". Yes, we can settle Mars. We could probably even do so with the technology we have today, certainly if we invest resources into further research and development with that specific goal in mind. But we can't do so in the political and economical landscape we have today.
We have a massive resource allocation problem here on Earth. We're overproducing goods because it's less economically damaging to destroy surplus products than to sell at cost or only produce to meet actual demand. We build for planned obsolesence and encourage wasteful competition between ten different companies owning a hundred different brands of the same product just to perpetuate an artificial demand via "FOMO". We're siphoning global wealth into the hands of a few people who waste our resources on superyachts like Bezos or actively prevent public infrastructure projects like Musk's attacks[0] on public mass transit. We're subsidizing legacy fossil fuel production and consumption instead of developing more efficient energy use and storage technologies. Meanwhile Russia suicide-bombed the European economy by invading Ukraine and now the US rapidly disassembles its decades old network of allies and trading partners. None of this is stabilizing let alone sustainable - and we need a sustainable human presence on Earth before we can build out a persistent presence elsewhere.
If Musk truly believed in making humanity a multi-planetary species to ensure the survival of our species, his main focus would be terraforming Earth, not Mars. Instead he sells visions of a future that only considers the extremely wealthy, with point-to-point rocket shuttles and hermetically sealed self-driving underground robotaxis. Just like Bezos uses his dildo rocket[1] for a girlboss publicity stunt after getting visibly upset when William Shatner had a genuine moment of realizing the fragile beauty of Earth and humanity[2] because Bezos' vision is to send all the unsightly refuse, industry and laborers into space so the rich and beautiful can have Earth to themselves[3].
But people like Musk aren't actually interested in making a multi-planetary species a reality. It's just a sexy mission statement that justifies their business ventures. He may actually believe in it but if he thinks that's what he's doing, he's not nearly as smart as people claim he is.
[0]: The Hyperloop concept was infamously pushed by Musk to sabotage the public infrastructure proposal of a highspeed rail network but this isn't the only example. A lot of his mass transit concepts boil down to "busses but smaller" or "trains/trams/metros but on wheels". When he first pitched the idea of FSD allowing Tesla owners to let their cars "work for them" as robotaxis, he also floated the idea that this could be used to pay for the cost of the car, which would allow Tesla to run a form of car sharing that offloads the actual risks and maintenance costs to the "owners" of the cars. Tesla's early vision also explicitly included the goal of making EVs affordable to the general public, which Musk no longer seems to be interested in.
[1]: Blue Origin's rockets have rightfully been criticized for being excessively phallic. While rockets necessarily have a phallic tendency, Bezos' rockets stand out for looking specifically dildo-like even by rocket standards. Given that there is no technical necessity for making it look this much like a dick and that the design hasn't been modified to make it any less dildo-like, the appearance can be considered deliberate even if we grant the benefit of the doubt and assume it wasn't originally intended to be so blatantly phallic - at some point everyone in charge agreed that the rocket should continue to look the way it does now.
[2]: There's a widely circulated video clip of Shatner having a moment and being interrupted by Bezos fetching and spraying a champagne bottle. Shatner stated that he went on the trip expecting to be overwhelmed by the endless possibilities of space because he had always been fascinated by it but that the experience had fundamentally changed his outlook by showing him the contrast of the vast emptiness of space and the vulnerability of Earth containing all that ever has and and ever will matter to him - an experience he apparently shares with many others who got to see Earth from space. Of course this isn't why Bezos took him on the ride and isn't a message Bezos cares for - the vapid girlboss soundbites by the more recent ride carrying female influencers is a much better match for his intented PR, especially the insistence on referring to the space tourists as "astronauts".
[3]: Although Bezos hasn't been in the news much over his visions (probably because when Musk did so he had a more receptive audience because there was a general pop culture of space optimism which largely seems to be gone now) he has floated the ideas of launching Earth's waste into space (presumably especially radioactive waste, which might be a bad idea if there's a chance of rocket malfunction) and of moving dirty industry into space to reduce pollution on Earth - the latter included the idea of creating habitats for the laborers, which had certain undertones.
We already invented that. It was called the 20th century. Tried wealth caps, nationalizations, revolutions - you name it. Usually ended with gulags, breadlines, or both.
Billionaires are a symptom, not the disease. You don’t cure a fever by smashing thermometers. If we want fewer billionaires, we need systems that don’t reward monopoly power ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
I would like to mention Bill Gates as a tech bro who has been doing "good works". Like fighting malaria, funding vaccine development (yes), Na reactors, and so forth. He was the nasty tech bro in the 90's and early 00's but evolved into a good tech bro.
I agree with the author about the other big tech bros. They're evil.
That is a much darker tone that I’ve ever thought of that passage in.
On a slightly related note, I think a lot of people today don’t realize when Jesus talked about the “Kingdom of Heaven” many of his audience heard that as a real, physical kingdom which would overthrow Rome. I believe Jesus also believed this, which to me is why Jesus’ dying words (“My God, why have you forsaken me?”) is quite literally an admission that his political project had failed.
The phrase "grift behind AI doomerism" suggests that either the book author or the reviewer (or both) don't have a clue. AI will cause real and huge problems.
This book seems insufferable, at least based on the review. Half of the review is trying to poke holes in why people won't live on mars and the other half is about how people trying to pursue goals such as this are self-serving and corrupt.
I'm sure a market exists for this kind of book, but to me it's just exhausting. What's the harm in trying to go to mars if it results in decreasing the cost of space flight by 99%? Who cares if someone is trying to naively live forever if it results in a lot of money into longevity research? Would you rather this person be spending his money on yachts?
I wish we had more ambitious things. It's fine that the author doesn't believe in this stuff, but to mock and try to get rich off it seems like more of a grift than anybody trying to do ambitious things. I don't get it, this guy is literally an astrophysicist, surely he's looked up at the skies at one point and imagined what could be done. I guess the only difference is he never took his shot.
- Longevity research is bad/wasteful > In 1900 and prior, the global average life expectancy was around 32 years. Thanks to modern medicine, this has doubled to 70 years. This is a tremendous gift to every human alive today.
- Going to Mars is bad/extravagant/fruitless > Going to the moon, exploring new continents, these were all "extravagant/fruitless" undertakings in their own eras. In hindsight we take for granted how significant these are; e.g. I was born on a continent that my ancestors had never set foot on until a few hundred years prior.
What we want as a species is "portfolio" of pro-human bets. Some of this can be low-risk, low-reward social spending to alleviate here-and-now problems on Earth, but some of it can be high-risk, high-reward "moon-shots" (or "Mars-shots") which, if successful, unlock completely new/better modes of existence. The two are not mutually exclusive, they are both part of a balanced strategy.
I think the final paragraph of the article sums up the issue pretty well. The tech world spends a lot of thought and energy on trying to escape our current existence instead of trying to make it better. There's very real crises that are solvable like climate change and food security. But instead of working hard to fix those, tech billionaires are focusing on space travel, AI, etc. Things that are important and could have a large (currently vague) impact, but don't solve our long term relationship with our own planet.
Maybe I misunderstand your comment as if we've run out of ambitious things besides those that border on science fiction.
In that case, I think the market is those of us who think there are more tangible ambitious things right in front of our faces. And in front of those with the resources to make a difference ie, fighting starvation, authoritarianism, inequality, disease, genocide.
Are these too boring?
What's the harm in trying to go to mars if it results in decreasing the cost of space flight by 99%?
IMO, the harm is that the weirdo billionaire who wants to do this has said that he needs a trillion dollars to accomplish it and subsequently embedded himself within an incompetent, would-be-authoritarian regime.
I want humanity to colonize Mars and space. I don't want it happening at the whim of a madman whose only concern is going down in history as the man who made it possible at any cost to society.
Because a lot of these stuffs like longevity and advanced AI are going to break the human society?
I'd rather NOT have that kind of technical advancement before we figure out how to make the human society a bit more equal.
With the whole world turning to the right, we are further, not closer, from that objective. I guess not everyone believes in that, but hey I'm just talking about myself.
> He encourages us not to get hung up on galaxies far, far away but to pay more attention to our own fragile planet and the frail humans around us.
While I don't necessarily agree with the motives of the Silicon Valley billionaires you must have a really basic imagination to hate on the future, and the answers to Man's oldest questions which may be on Mars and beyond. Of course, like a broken record, out comes the trope of "Why don't you solve poverty on Earth (with all that money)".
For once, can the malthusians come up with a single unique idea or viewpoint rather than recycling the same content? People criticize AI for producing slop but look at what makes the NYT.
I don't see how solving poverty on earth can't be more important than the endeavor of trying with the current rather limited tech to inhabit an as good as inhabitable planet.
There are large swathes of earth that are too inhospitable, like deserts. They're more accessible and easier to support life in than Mars, and yet no one lives there.
There are approaches to solving hunger and housing, however extremist capitalism & avoidance of paying taxes by oligarchs and their corporations are standing in the way of it.
owlninja|10 months ago
neonate|10 months ago
Narciss|10 months ago
[deleted]
aeturnum|10 months ago
Yes, of course I support space travel and settling on mars. I expect that, if we doubled or tripled NASA's budget, we could get a few humans on mars within 100 years (optimistically). It will be hard! There are many problems to solve (as the book seems to note). There's a place there for SpaceX and all other competent private companies - I love public-private partnerships.
I actually think this kind of low-information escapism about the future (we will "fix it" with technology in a way that is impossible) is similar to religious faith in a coming apocalypse. Faith in an impossible event raising you up and casting down your doubters and opponents. Technology can do a lot! It has a lot of potential! But we cannot fix any of our big problems (climate change, eventually making humans multi-planet, equality) with technology alone and the people who tell you we can just want to scam you out of your money.
aoeusnth1|10 months ago
margalabargala|10 months ago
We developed and flew the Saturn V in less than a decade.
We have plenty of rockets that can do one way trips to Mars that if we really, really needed to get a person there could do it with some modifications.
It's mainly a question of will. If the will existed, we could do it in a decade with doubled or tripled funding. Not a century.
shipp02|10 months ago
I think this is called techno-utopianism. The "leaders" in technology have been doing this ever since the industrial revolution.
People sold the idea that street lights would fix "public morals" and eliminate crime.
Also see the progress trap and professor Simon Penny's work and what he calls the end of the anthropocene.
FL33TW00D|10 months ago
Starship is just orders of magnitude less than this. NASA is a moribund jobs program.
xnx|10 months ago
"of course"? Why? Putting people in space, on the moon, or on Mars seems like a huge waste of resources.
We could have (conservatively) 100 JWST or 1000 Pathfinders for the price of a human mission to Mars.
Veedrac|10 months ago
DavidPiper|10 months ago
What a great way to describe it.
It's like a good sci-fi or fantasy novel, but for people who don't read.
paulpauper|10 months ago
gsf_emergency|10 months ago
One response (also by an abundance crowd?) to a similar sentiment:
https://www.chemistryworld.com/news/serbia-limits-academics-...
"Serbia limits academics’ research time to just one hour a day"
stevage|10 months ago
sershe|10 months ago
Putting humans on Mars is purely a technological problem.
Inequality is not a real problem.
dominicrose|10 months ago
janalsncm|10 months ago
I am sure Marc Andreesen is a very intelligent person but he built and sold a web browser. He isn’t an expert on every tech topic. Same with Peter Thiel and the rest of the PayPal mafia. PayPal isn’t revolutionary and getting rich off of that doesn’t make you an expert on (for example) AI.
ivape|10 months ago
I would say it's similar to politicians. We won't really have your, I don't know, career Costco Manager in political leadership. We'll get AOC or a Vance (staying bipartisan to make the point, moving off this topic next sentence). The former knows more about basic commutes and the condition of public bathrooms than your average politician or tech mogul. Our tech leaders are not well-rounded or even representative. That's why they talk crazy shit because they are in a crazy rich insulated world. We tried some contrived way to get women and minorities to become CEOs, but I think it should start more grass roots and maybe think about stopping something like ycombinator (or Google for example) from constantly recruiting based on old boys club pedigree. Regular folks just don't get put into the mix for C-Level for whatever reason unless they are gifted at the ladder-climbing thing.
Exceptionalism dictates that we will never put them into the mix, and I think the world is probably missing out on some good practicality and humanity just based on sheer regular folk experience some people can bring.
Funny:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ru8WeRqB0ts
chadcmulligan|10 months ago
jacamera|10 months ago
unknown|10 months ago
[deleted]
grogers|10 months ago
golol|10 months ago
I don't like this mindset. Be grateful for what you have. Maybe the world is not that great yet for many people and we should aim to improve things substantially, not marginally. This is something that the shuffling around of ressources on a political level can never achieve. Those dreaded tech entrepreneurs have correctly identified technology to be the only way substantial improvements can happen. So then it all blils down if you can make things happen and here the article and some comments here just claim, well, they NEVER deliver!
aethrum|10 months ago
cousin_it|10 months ago
blaze33|10 months ago
On this point, 20+ years ago I had a chat with my uncle who managed a factory of rubber thingies for the car industry. I asked him what he thought of climate change: "Oh well, if it's ever an issue we'll just invent something to fix it, like carbon-sucking machines or whatever!".
I take issue with this mindset where innovation is the cure-all silver bullet. Not because it says that technological progress can help (it can!), but because it also implies that there's nothing really wrong with everything else we do and that we shouldn't have to think if we had a hand in the endless crises we see.
Don't tell me about a future where Earth is such a dystopian wasteland that going to Mars looks like the right choice. I don't want to build penthouses for the few billionaires that actually enjoy the place. The best place on Mars is still worse than the worst place on Earth.
Tell me about the future where Earth is seen as a wonderful spaceship, where we learned to live in peace and where we have a good thing going on such that going elsewhere to see what's possible is appealing!
casey2|10 months ago
You can immediately rule out "carbon-sucking machines or whatever" because it will take at least as much energy to capture and sequester the carbon as you got from burning it and spent extracting it. Which directly brings us to the actual solution of getting energy from a renewable resource that is cheaper.
Over time all tech will cause issues but if it's well designed the issues won't be exorbitantly expensive to fix compared to the benefits. innovation will always be a cure-all, cause otherwise the problem is already solved, showing or educating people about which solutions are already optimal energy-wise will do more than enough to set their expectations straight, or at least convince them that they don't want to carry around tnt in their pocket.
Making Mars habitable will be a thousand year project which implies that the earth is not uninhabitable. Nobody except a conman will tell you that we have to "escape" earth to go live on mars.
janalsncm|10 months ago
If you have an alternative to growth as a viable path forward, that solves the global group decision problem which explains why Brazil must stop burning down their rainforests and India isn’t allowed to industrialize, I’d love to hear it.
That isn’t to say I support billionaire pet projects. I would call a lot of it a misallocation of resources.
schnitzelstoat|10 months ago
In such a world, humanity will soon arrive at their self-imposed limits, after which no-one can hope to create wealth and prosperity but only to take it from someone else.
The pre-industrial world was like this and it is characterised by millenia of warfare and slavery. Human suffering on a scale that we struggle to comprehend.
Of course, some people are overly optimistic about the near-term possibilities of technology, but I much prefer that to the alternative.
red-iron-pine|10 months ago
what you're talking about is capitalism becoming unsustainable
iNic|10 months ago
moolcool|10 months ago
I would dispute the relative significance or meaning of those changes though. We can build dams and tall buildings. We can cure diseases and develop elaborate communications infrastructure.
I don't see that these developments alter our essential humanity though. If you read any classic literature from 100, 200, or even 1000 years ago, the emotional truths resonate the same way.
thingsilearned|10 months ago
bryanlarsen|10 months ago
m463|10 months ago
Which reminds me of the "Dogma of Otherness" by the scifi author David Brin:
"Think about it. 'There's always another way of looking at things' is a basic assumption of a great many Americans."
https://www.davidbrin.com/nonfiction/dogmaofotherness.html
unknown|10 months ago
[deleted]
11101010001100|10 months ago
thelastgallon|10 months ago
https://www.youtube.com/shorts/5D-0xrhwbR8
https://www.youtube.com/shorts/kOwTtxgcYeg
e40|10 months ago
ur-whale|10 months ago
rldjbpin|10 months ago
there is nothing wrong with "shoot for the moon, even if you miss, you'll land amongst the stars" aspect about these literal moonshot projects. regardless of what you think about the people running them, but these initiatives tend to bring out a lot of innovation.
philipkglass|10 months ago
While these are largely associated with modern Silicon Valley esoteric techbros (and the odd Oxfordian like Nick Bostrom), they have very deep roots, which Becker excavates – like Nikolai Fyodorov's 18th century "cosmism," a project to "scientifically" resurrect everyone who ever lived inside of a simulation.
I think that I first heard of Fyodorov via SF author Charles Stross's writings. It was part of the world building in his early Singularity-oriented novels (Singularity Sky, Iron Sunrise, Accelerando, maybe Glasshouse). He also blogged about Fyodorov, as in "Federov's Rapture":
https://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2011/07/federov...
Fyodorov/Federov also shows up in Hannu Rajaniemi's "Quantum Thief" trilogy.
It's a bundle of ideas that has produced some very good science fiction, but I wouldn't reorganize my life around it.
gwern|10 months ago
Stross just made that up, as pure post hoc ergo propter hoc. There are no sources, and he got it from Hannu: https://gwern.net/review/quantum-thief#fn2 Stross has chosen to never revisit the topic to try to substantiate his suggestion.
This quote winds up being rather exemplary: for example, that one parenthetical description manages to make at least 3 errors: 1. Fyodorov was born in 1823, so he obviously could not have invented anything in the '18th century' (ie. 1700s); 2. Cosmism included many things, not just the 'Great Common Task', and the Great Common Task itself went far beyond reviving ancestors, including many overall more important things like colonizing the entire universe or conquering death; 3. and further, the revival part was not about computer simulation at all (that's Hannu's _Quantum Thief_ fictional version of the idea that he came up with for his Sobornosts!) but reviving them physically, in the body, possibly using cloning - and was no more about "inside of a simulation" than Jesus reviving the dead was.
You're right that Hannu made great use of Cosmism as world-building in the Quantum Thief trilogy which I highly recommend (see my review above) - but that could only work because the ideas of Cosmism are so novel & exotic, and not part of Western transhumanism. If they really were as foundational as Stross claims, the 'taproot' of Western ideas, they would make about as exciting fictional worldbuilding as suggesting that you have some sort of 'laws' for AIs, starting with 'An AI may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm."...
arduanika|10 months ago
https://pluralistic.net/2025/04/22/vinges-bastards/#cyberpun...
The NYT article does not mention the dreaded T word, and is not clear to me whether this notional acronym plays any large role in Becker's book.
unknown|10 months ago
[deleted]
fullstackchris|10 months ago
Perhaps better is to kindly refer everyone to a physics 101 text book.
bee_rider|10 months ago
Anyway, some of the utopian/distopian thinking, I get. We aren’t going to create an AI god, good or evil. That belief is probably a side effect of the facts that Millennials are (finally) grabbing the reins, and we grew up in an era where computers actually got, tangibly, twice as good every 18 months or so, so some sort of divine techno-ascension seemed plausible in 2005 or so.
But we live in the failure path of our plans. So, I’m quite worried that a group will try to create an omnipresent AI, run out of runway, and end up having to monetize a tool that’s only real use is scanning everybody’s social media posts for wrong-think (the type of wrong think that makes you unemployable will invert every four years in the US, so good luck).
cgriswald|10 months ago
I see Mars as an inevitability. We need Mars. Our eggs are all in one basket and the only way to guarantee our future is to be a multi-planet species or to learn how to live in self-sustaining tin cans. Colonizing Mars would help us develop the tools for either one of these necessities. Colonizing Mars right now I'm a bit more skeptical about.
feoren|10 months ago
A back-of-the-napkin calculation puts humanity's total military expenditure at about $100 trillion (USD adjusted to 2022 $) since 1949. That's not accounting for lives lost, infrastructure destroyed, and all the other negatives that come from war. Humanity is spending unfathomable fortunes just to be able to kill each other. And you're saying colonizing Mars is a dumb idea? Humanity is wasting its potential on the stupidest shit you can imagine. Colonizing Mars is a galaxy-brained idea compared to most of what we're spending our money on.
And of course colonizing Mars is trivial compared to terraforming Mars, which you can make a stronger argument against. "If you can't terraform Earth, then you can't terraform Mars." Of course that argument misses the point that if you set terraforming Mars as a goal of humanity, then we focus our efforts on developing the technologies that would allow us to terraform Earth as well (long beforehand, I might add). Focusing humanity on a course to accomplish an immense feat of engineering always produces an immense amount of positive externalities.
You could have levied the same argument against the Apollo program, any of FDR's New Deal megaprojects, the national highway system, the Large Hadron Collider, ITER, etc. And of course people do say we shouldn't be "wasting" our money on such things. I say: how about we keep doing all those projects and more, and stop wasting the vast majority of our money on stupid shit like bombs that in the best case sit in a warehouse until they decompose into duds, and in the worst case kill some wedding attendees and set humanity back.
unknown|10 months ago
[deleted]
hnbad|10 months ago
That's one of the core challenges techno-optimists like Musk constantly handwave and ignore when grandstanding about humanity becoming a "multi-planetary species". Yes, we can settle Mars. We could probably even do so with the technology we have today, certainly if we invest resources into further research and development with that specific goal in mind. But we can't do so in the political and economical landscape we have today.
We have a massive resource allocation problem here on Earth. We're overproducing goods because it's less economically damaging to destroy surplus products than to sell at cost or only produce to meet actual demand. We build for planned obsolesence and encourage wasteful competition between ten different companies owning a hundred different brands of the same product just to perpetuate an artificial demand via "FOMO". We're siphoning global wealth into the hands of a few people who waste our resources on superyachts like Bezos or actively prevent public infrastructure projects like Musk's attacks[0] on public mass transit. We're subsidizing legacy fossil fuel production and consumption instead of developing more efficient energy use and storage technologies. Meanwhile Russia suicide-bombed the European economy by invading Ukraine and now the US rapidly disassembles its decades old network of allies and trading partners. None of this is stabilizing let alone sustainable - and we need a sustainable human presence on Earth before we can build out a persistent presence elsewhere.
If Musk truly believed in making humanity a multi-planetary species to ensure the survival of our species, his main focus would be terraforming Earth, not Mars. Instead he sells visions of a future that only considers the extremely wealthy, with point-to-point rocket shuttles and hermetically sealed self-driving underground robotaxis. Just like Bezos uses his dildo rocket[1] for a girlboss publicity stunt after getting visibly upset when William Shatner had a genuine moment of realizing the fragile beauty of Earth and humanity[2] because Bezos' vision is to send all the unsightly refuse, industry and laborers into space so the rich and beautiful can have Earth to themselves[3].
But people like Musk aren't actually interested in making a multi-planetary species a reality. It's just a sexy mission statement that justifies their business ventures. He may actually believe in it but if he thinks that's what he's doing, he's not nearly as smart as people claim he is.
[0]: The Hyperloop concept was infamously pushed by Musk to sabotage the public infrastructure proposal of a highspeed rail network but this isn't the only example. A lot of his mass transit concepts boil down to "busses but smaller" or "trains/trams/metros but on wheels". When he first pitched the idea of FSD allowing Tesla owners to let their cars "work for them" as robotaxis, he also floated the idea that this could be used to pay for the cost of the car, which would allow Tesla to run a form of car sharing that offloads the actual risks and maintenance costs to the "owners" of the cars. Tesla's early vision also explicitly included the goal of making EVs affordable to the general public, which Musk no longer seems to be interested in.
[1]: Blue Origin's rockets have rightfully been criticized for being excessively phallic. While rockets necessarily have a phallic tendency, Bezos' rockets stand out for looking specifically dildo-like even by rocket standards. Given that there is no technical necessity for making it look this much like a dick and that the design hasn't been modified to make it any less dildo-like, the appearance can be considered deliberate even if we grant the benefit of the doubt and assume it wasn't originally intended to be so blatantly phallic - at some point everyone in charge agreed that the rocket should continue to look the way it does now.
[2]: There's a widely circulated video clip of Shatner having a moment and being interrupted by Bezos fetching and spraying a champagne bottle. Shatner stated that he went on the trip expecting to be overwhelmed by the endless possibilities of space because he had always been fascinated by it but that the experience had fundamentally changed his outlook by showing him the contrast of the vast emptiness of space and the vulnerability of Earth containing all that ever has and and ever will matter to him - an experience he apparently shares with many others who got to see Earth from space. Of course this isn't why Bezos took him on the ride and isn't a message Bezos cares for - the vapid girlboss soundbites by the more recent ride carrying female influencers is a much better match for his intented PR, especially the insistence on referring to the space tourists as "astronauts".
[3]: Although Bezos hasn't been in the news much over his visions (probably because when Musk did so he had a more receptive audience because there was a general pop culture of space optimism which largely seems to be gone now) he has floated the ideas of launching Earth's waste into space (presumably especially radioactive waste, which might be a bad idea if there's a chance of rocket malfunction) and of moving dirty industry into space to reduce pollution on Earth - the latter included the idea of creating habitats for the laborers, which had certain undertones.
unknown|10 months ago
[deleted]
nektro|10 months ago
rudolftheone|10 months ago
Billionaires are a symptom, not the disease. You don’t cure a fever by smashing thermometers. If we want fewer billionaires, we need systems that don’t reward monopoly power ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
CommenterPerson|10 months ago
I agree with the author about the other big tech bros. They're evil.
unknown|10 months ago
[deleted]
ctoth|10 months ago
The rest of us can meet up every couple millennia around Alpha Centauri for an old-home week.
janalsncm|10 months ago
On a slightly related note, I think a lot of people today don’t realize when Jesus talked about the “Kingdom of Heaven” many of his audience heard that as a real, physical kingdom which would overthrow Rome. I believe Jesus also believed this, which to me is why Jesus’ dying words (“My God, why have you forsaken me?”) is quite literally an admission that his political project had failed.
unknown|10 months ago
[deleted]
c0rtex|10 months ago
cousin_it|10 months ago
amarcheschi|10 months ago
She has a PhD in electrical engineering and has worked at Google before researching on Ai with a more philosophical approach
unknown|10 months ago
[deleted]
unknown|10 months ago
[deleted]
golemiprague|10 months ago
[deleted]
bko|10 months ago
I'm sure a market exists for this kind of book, but to me it's just exhausting. What's the harm in trying to go to mars if it results in decreasing the cost of space flight by 99%? Who cares if someone is trying to naively live forever if it results in a lot of money into longevity research? Would you rather this person be spending his money on yachts?
I wish we had more ambitious things. It's fine that the author doesn't believe in this stuff, but to mock and try to get rich off it seems like more of a grift than anybody trying to do ambitious things. I don't get it, this guy is literally an astrophysicist, surely he's looked up at the skies at one point and imagined what could be done. I guess the only difference is he never took his shot.
https://www.visualcapitalist.com/the-cost-of-space-flight/
dudeinjapan|10 months ago
- Longevity research is bad/wasteful > In 1900 and prior, the global average life expectancy was around 32 years. Thanks to modern medicine, this has doubled to 70 years. This is a tremendous gift to every human alive today.
- Going to Mars is bad/extravagant/fruitless > Going to the moon, exploring new continents, these were all "extravagant/fruitless" undertakings in their own eras. In hindsight we take for granted how significant these are; e.g. I was born on a continent that my ancestors had never set foot on until a few hundred years prior.
What we want as a species is "portfolio" of pro-human bets. Some of this can be low-risk, low-reward social spending to alleviate here-and-now problems on Earth, but some of it can be high-risk, high-reward "moon-shots" (or "Mars-shots") which, if successful, unlock completely new/better modes of existence. The two are not mutually exclusive, they are both part of a balanced strategy.
f1yght|10 months ago
fnordlord|10 months ago
snozolli|10 months ago
IMO, the harm is that the weirdo billionaire who wants to do this has said that he needs a trillion dollars to accomplish it and subsequently embedded himself within an incompetent, would-be-authoritarian regime.
I want humanity to colonize Mars and space. I don't want it happening at the whim of a madman whose only concern is going down in history as the man who made it possible at any cost to society.
hotep99|10 months ago
oldpersonintx|10 months ago
[deleted]
unknown|10 months ago
[deleted]
ferguess_k|10 months ago
I'd rather NOT have that kind of technical advancement before we figure out how to make the human society a bit more equal.
With the whole world turning to the right, we are further, not closer, from that objective. I guess not everyone believes in that, but hey I'm just talking about myself.
stefantalpalaru|10 months ago
[deleted]
varelse|10 months ago
[deleted]
Lamad1234|10 months ago
[deleted]
unknown|10 months ago
[deleted]
glitchc|10 months ago
[deleted]
unknown|10 months ago
[deleted]
deadbabe|10 months ago
[deleted]
unknown|10 months ago
[deleted]
datadrivenangel|10 months ago
[deleted]
unknown|10 months ago
[deleted]
oceanplexian|10 months ago
While I don't necessarily agree with the motives of the Silicon Valley billionaires you must have a really basic imagination to hate on the future, and the answers to Man's oldest questions which may be on Mars and beyond. Of course, like a broken record, out comes the trope of "Why don't you solve poverty on Earth (with all that money)".
For once, can the malthusians come up with a single unique idea or viewpoint rather than recycling the same content? People criticize AI for producing slop but look at what makes the NYT.
nuancebydefault|10 months ago
colonelspace|10 months ago
The deserts even have breathable air.
surgical_fire|10 months ago
Let's funnel those resources to some ridiculous endeavor to put some people in an arid bleak red wasteland instead.
IOT_Apprentice|10 months ago
kazinator|10 months ago
Any vessel taking water away from Earth should be shot down with extreme prejudice.
mikhailfranco|10 months ago
Solar energy electrolysis can turn water into rocket fuel.
In an emergency, you could burn that rocket fuel to get energy and water.