It's such a cool idea, I can't wait to see it happen.
Imagine how cool it would be if technological advances could just be purely exciting advancements for humanity, and you didn't have to be wary of how every single one actually has some catch where on closer inspection it screws everyone over to enrich some asshole
Agreed, but if everyone were offered life extension (even if it was in exchange for, say, moving off planet or not having kids), it'd be amazing, transformative to the human condition in an almost entirely good way. We'd all have to start taking the long view, we could have 500-year plans.
Even being healthy and young until say 120 and then a fast decline would literally allow us to divert 20% of our total resources to something not based on aging or death.
No disagreement here. FALGSC is a necessary condition for ethical life extension, and I don't expect us to get there in my lifetime even if the revolution happened tomorrow, too many other things to do to set shit right.
Someone pointed out if humanity invented immortality, even just as AIs who could continue to own their wealth, we would just have 10,000-generation-old Trumps and Bezoses
Haha right? You think the dragons of today are bad? Wait until they live 1,000 times longer, have 1,000,000 time more wealth, and have lived across the span of multiple entire civilizations with whatever form of digital dementia the Gen Ones couldn't predict
Luckily capitalism is too unstable and self-limiting to lead to galactic god-emperors. We're a long way from that kinda tech, if it's even possible given our material conditions, and it certainly won't be capitalism that squeezes through that great filter
I'm not sure I agree with the idea that capitalism can't achieve spacefaring civilisations. They'll be horrible and bloody civilisations wracked by regular collapses, but IMO the same forces that kept the Cold War cold could help the capitalists manage this. Obviously mass death or even species extinction are horribly likely scenarios for such polities (and for our own) but they're not inevitable. We might actually get unstable space opera/cyberpunk dystopias!
When I look at capitalism, I see ‘systemic collapse due to internal contradictions’ or ‘self-limitation via ecological destruction’ before I see ‘limps into space’ but, I agree, there’s certainly no way to know with certainty!
For all we know, my descendants could be space-serfs, working their asses off in the soylent space factory to earn enough for their daily air subscription!
I mean, a tiny humanity which has successfully spread out across the solar system but regularly loses significant fractions of its population in stupid wars and cases of ecological/arcological collapse seems plausible to me. But hey, if you're part of the 1% (1% of the remaining seventy million humans alive) things are great! Who knows, maybe my descendants will be scrabbling to survive in the abandoned wreck of the lunar colonies, jealous of the space-serfs in the Uranus arcology who have actual breathable air for the low, low price of seventy hours of work a week!
Who am I kidding. My line will end with the collapse of earth's current climate and political order (and it might end with me, considering the speed of things).
I have a friend I argue with about this issue all the time. He firmly believes that we can be excited about tech advancement because eventually singularity will inevitably end scarcity and there will be no way for anyone to hoard that power. 🤷♂️
We already passed that singularity haha this is what that looks like under capitalism
wait til you see Elon Musk appropriating the idea and make you end up absolutely hating it
bold of you to assume he wont try and attempt some pseudo sci-fi technique to evade death
can't wait to see that fail miserably and have him trapped into a hell of his own making (or rather his employees lol)
We can play futbol with his cryogenically frozen head after the revolution
Yup, imagine being a bartender at a bar for asteroid miners or ship builders.
Fine, I'll be a robot bartender for all the robot miners and the robot ship builders.
This was a big part of Mars Trilogy, which is a book everyone should read.
Strip mining asteroids to build useless commodities on earth is lib shit. Transmorphing asteroids to build a (post) human societies is cool though.
It is, but it's not financially viable under capitalism. If you mine rare earths, it floods the market and drops the price below viable levels, and the capital costs are too high to wait out until it his equilibrium. Otherwise we'd have started in 1975, because using an unmanned probe to boost a rock into HEO is not that hard, we've got orbital mechanics pretty much nailed down.
