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).
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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).