I really think water is the first place to go. Not only are there plenty of resources beneath the ocean, it's pretty clear that we *don't* yet have the technologies necessary for prolonged travel in space, let alone for colonization of hostile extraterrestrial environments. Mastering an aquatic existence will help to develop the strategies (both sociological and technical) required to leave the Earth entirely.
You mean under water, like colonizing Doggerland? I have often been thinking of building big ships and platforms for the oceans, but living under water hasn't really occurred to me as an option. It seems dark down there.
Humanity makes his home in a thin film atop the great planet-ship of Earth. Above, he sees infinity stretched out before his eyes, star beyond star beckoning to be explored. But he sees far because there is so little to obstruct his vision. Once he reaches other stars and other worlds, how long before he encounters impenetrable depths - densities of mass, gravity, and chemistry unknown to the emptiness of space? He recoils, momentarily disoriented; how can he negotiate with these extremes?
But then he realizes that such depths have never been far away. They await him within his own home, hidden by the foamy spray of the ocean, a fluid underworld where he must protect himself not from vacuum, but pressure; not arid lifelessness, but teeming alien biologies. While the stars may seem close and familiar to him, it is only emptiness that creates this illusion. His nearer frontier is the sea.
I was a stereotypical male. Now, not so much. The "hard science" technical problems are fairly intractable. Here is a report from old me.
In space you can't consider a person as just their body. There is also all their air, water, food, clothing, and other necessaries, and their waste products, and all the equipment required to produce and deal with all of those things, and more besides. Safety systems for dealing with air loss and similar. Medical equipment. Equipment to maintain the equipment. Power supplies and everything necessary to maintain them, and stuff to protect everything against radiation and extremes of cold and heat.
Very simplistically, to get humans outside low Earth orbit where conditions are benign, you're looking at a minimum payload of a hundred thousand tonnes (for a thick enough hull to protect against cosmic rays) and several hundred hundred tonnes of equipment and furnishings per person aboard. (Most of the Apollo astronauts, who spent an infinitesimal fraction of their lives outside LEO, developed cancers.)
With a payload that size, you need truly immense quantities of mass to eject from the rocket ("fuel"): the rocket equation is a pitiless ruler. Think trillions of tonnes, if you want to move a mere million people into space. (A million is probably below the number needed for a viable colony, because of the technologies needed.)
And then there are the extreme timescales involved. Space is big. Try to go anywhere too fast, and you melt your vessel from waste heat production, as well as needing ever-greater quantities of ejection mass. And you can't anyway. The speed of light, an absolute speed limit, is very slow compared to the distances in space. All your instruments will fail, and every machine with moving parts, and most structures with welds as well. You need a continuously operating industrial civilization inside your spacecraft. Continuously operating for tens of thousands of years. We've managed barely a hundred.
In your recent post "Basic human social structure" you made the optimistic statement that future societies will inevitably be more civilized and culturally evolved than our current ones. That made me think of space colonies. What will happen when children are born in isolated space colonies? Will they accept the concept of civilization as explained to them by their parents or will they adapt to an environment where "might is right" might be a more successful approach? Police officers on earth can be seen as impartial upholders of justice, but in a small isolated space colony noone will be impartial.
Very interesting question. I think that colonies in the past can act as role models here. Some colonies have indeed been very small-scale for a time. Still, colonists have mostly been very different from gangsters, not the least because of their strong level of organized religion.
I imagine that some space colonies will inevitably fail. That is the price of diversity. Some will also be culturally primitive or just weird - crazy sects, more or less. My guess is that just as on Earth, the culture that can produce the most attractive living conditions and the most children will spread the most, because people will both immigrate to it and grow up in it. The difference is that cultures will not be able to suppress each other by force as on Earth. Diversity will be higher. Both on the positive and the negative side: The only thing that can put an end to a space colony probably is that everyone in it dies or emigrates. That gives a lot of space to bad culture. Bad culture that would have been suppressed by surrounding cultures on Earth.
So in summary, I think that the idea that culture tends to move towards higher levels of civilization holds also in space. The difference is that badly adapted culture will not be exterminated to the same degree as on Earth. For good and for bad.
> Anders and I are the stereotypical male-female couple.
One of my first bosses was from eastern Europe (Hungary or Romania, I think) and actually survived living in a Nazi camp. His ironic take was "Men talk about important things like politics. Women talk about unimportant things like 'How will we feed the children'?" I got the impression it was the conventional wisdom of his homeland.
I haven't read the Dune series (I don't read much fiction at all). But Anders has and he has explained that it is about a more or less feudal social reality in an interplanetary environment. I'm hoping for the opposite: No feudal tendencies at all, because human labor will be the only significant resource. Feudalism was a thing because land was the main resource and it is easy to make way over land. As I have written elsewhere, https://open.substack.com/pub/woodfromeden/p/capitalism-put-an-end-to-systematic?r=rd1ej&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web it is difficult to make war over labor because in a modern economy, free labor is more efficient than slave labor.
In sum, I'm hoping for a turbo-charged modernity consisting of self-governing charter cities populated by engineers. The opposite of the Dune series.
I agree the Dune series are dystopian. Also very complicated. The Golden Path is an idea that happens later in the series, after millennia of autocratic rule by a god emperor. Humanity spreads among the stars too far and wide to ever be contained again or brought under a single polity.
Jeff Koons is primarily a brand name ( as is Damien Hirst or Matthew Barney or Marina Abramovic [or Elon Musk -- why else buy twitter?]). Some have done some art when young (Koons not so much) but primarily subsist in the informational space (of the art world) by curating their own careers. The amount that each 'artist' utilises satire or earnestness or presence is a marketing decision. (I've been involved with some of these artists exhibtions).
I think it’s worth it to keep in mind that the most evolutionarily straightforward way to not expand is not the naïve one:
> A decade after the controversy, a biologist had a fascinating idea. The mathematical conditions for group selection overcoming individual selection were too extreme to be found in Nature. Why not create them artificially, in the laboratory? Michael J. Wade proceeded to do just that, repeatedly selecting populations of insects for low numbers of adults per subpopulation. And what was the result? Did the insects restrain their breeding and live in quiet peace with enough food for all?
>
> No; the adults adapted to cannibalize eggs and larvae, especially female larvae.
>
> Of course selecting for small subpopulation sizes would not select for individuals who restrained their own breeding; it would select for individuals who ate other individuals' children. Especially the girls.
>>No; the adults adapted to cannibalize eggs and larvae, especially female larvae.
I don't see why this would be an argument against group selection. Yes, it is an argument against the most romanticized, erroneous ideas of group selection. It is an argument against the idea that group selection somehow stops individual selection. But as a matter of fact, group selection did take place. It just wasn't as pretty as someone might have hoped for. And human reality is also that way. Group selection does take place. And it is in general not as pretty as most of us would wish for.
Okay! I read that post a long time ago (people tend to link it when I'm talking about group selection of humans) and found that the essence of it was that "some people who believed in group selection in the past were really naive". And they were, absolutely.
I really think water is the first place to go. Not only are there plenty of resources beneath the ocean, it's pretty clear that we *don't* yet have the technologies necessary for prolonged travel in space, let alone for colonization of hostile extraterrestrial environments. Mastering an aquatic existence will help to develop the strategies (both sociological and technical) required to leave the Earth entirely.
You mean under water, like colonizing Doggerland? I have often been thinking of building big ships and platforms for the oceans, but living under water hasn't really occurred to me as an option. It seems dark down there.
Humanity makes his home in a thin film atop the great planet-ship of Earth. Above, he sees infinity stretched out before his eyes, star beyond star beckoning to be explored. But he sees far because there is so little to obstruct his vision. Once he reaches other stars and other worlds, how long before he encounters impenetrable depths - densities of mass, gravity, and chemistry unknown to the emptiness of space? He recoils, momentarily disoriented; how can he negotiate with these extremes?
But then he realizes that such depths have never been far away. They await him within his own home, hidden by the foamy spray of the ocean, a fluid underworld where he must protect himself not from vacuum, but pressure; not arid lifelessness, but teeming alien biologies. While the stars may seem close and familiar to him, it is only emptiness that creates this illusion. His nearer frontier is the sea.
I was a stereotypical male. Now, not so much. The "hard science" technical problems are fairly intractable. Here is a report from old me.
In space you can't consider a person as just their body. There is also all their air, water, food, clothing, and other necessaries, and their waste products, and all the equipment required to produce and deal with all of those things, and more besides. Safety systems for dealing with air loss and similar. Medical equipment. Equipment to maintain the equipment. Power supplies and everything necessary to maintain them, and stuff to protect everything against radiation and extremes of cold and heat.
Very simplistically, to get humans outside low Earth orbit where conditions are benign, you're looking at a minimum payload of a hundred thousand tonnes (for a thick enough hull to protect against cosmic rays) and several hundred hundred tonnes of equipment and furnishings per person aboard. (Most of the Apollo astronauts, who spent an infinitesimal fraction of their lives outside LEO, developed cancers.)
With a payload that size, you need truly immense quantities of mass to eject from the rocket ("fuel"): the rocket equation is a pitiless ruler. Think trillions of tonnes, if you want to move a mere million people into space. (A million is probably below the number needed for a viable colony, because of the technologies needed.)
And then there are the extreme timescales involved. Space is big. Try to go anywhere too fast, and you melt your vessel from waste heat production, as well as needing ever-greater quantities of ejection mass. And you can't anyway. The speed of light, an absolute speed limit, is very slow compared to the distances in space. All your instruments will fail, and every machine with moving parts, and most structures with welds as well. You need a continuously operating industrial civilization inside your spacecraft. Continuously operating for tens of thousands of years. We've managed barely a hundred.
> space colonies would boost cultural evolution
In your recent post "Basic human social structure" you made the optimistic statement that future societies will inevitably be more civilized and culturally evolved than our current ones. That made me think of space colonies. What will happen when children are born in isolated space colonies? Will they accept the concept of civilization as explained to them by their parents or will they adapt to an environment where "might is right" might be a more successful approach? Police officers on earth can be seen as impartial upholders of justice, but in a small isolated space colony noone will be impartial.
Very interesting question. I think that colonies in the past can act as role models here. Some colonies have indeed been very small-scale for a time. Still, colonists have mostly been very different from gangsters, not the least because of their strong level of organized religion.
I imagine that some space colonies will inevitably fail. That is the price of diversity. Some will also be culturally primitive or just weird - crazy sects, more or less. My guess is that just as on Earth, the culture that can produce the most attractive living conditions and the most children will spread the most, because people will both immigrate to it and grow up in it. The difference is that cultures will not be able to suppress each other by force as on Earth. Diversity will be higher. Both on the positive and the negative side: The only thing that can put an end to a space colony probably is that everyone in it dies or emigrates. That gives a lot of space to bad culture. Bad culture that would have been suppressed by surrounding cultures on Earth.
So in summary, I think that the idea that culture tends to move towards higher levels of civilization holds also in space. The difference is that badly adapted culture will not be exterminated to the same degree as on Earth. For good and for bad.
Thank you for making me think a bit further.
> Anders and I are the stereotypical male-female couple.
One of my first bosses was from eastern Europe (Hungary or Romania, I think) and actually survived living in a Nazi camp. His ironic take was "Men talk about important things like politics. Women talk about unimportant things like 'How will we feed the children'?" I got the impression it was the conventional wisdom of his homeland.
From the technical point of view, a touchstone for me:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_High_Frontier%3A_Human_Colonies_in_Space
I'm not well-read on the subject of space settlement but I very much enjoyed the 80,000 Hours Podcast's episodes on the topic:
Reasons space settlement is really difficult: https://pca.st/ypldjeo1
Space engineering projects in the far future, and other topics: https://pca.st/b96mgf3f
The Golden Path
I haven't read the Dune series (I don't read much fiction at all). But Anders has and he has explained that it is about a more or less feudal social reality in an interplanetary environment. I'm hoping for the opposite: No feudal tendencies at all, because human labor will be the only significant resource. Feudalism was a thing because land was the main resource and it is easy to make way over land. As I have written elsewhere, https://open.substack.com/pub/woodfromeden/p/capitalism-put-an-end-to-systematic?r=rd1ej&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web it is difficult to make war over labor because in a modern economy, free labor is more efficient than slave labor.
In sum, I'm hoping for a turbo-charged modernity consisting of self-governing charter cities populated by engineers. The opposite of the Dune series.
I agree the Dune series are dystopian. Also very complicated. The Golden Path is an idea that happens later in the series, after millennia of autocratic rule by a god emperor. Humanity spreads among the stars too far and wide to ever be contained again or brought under a single polity.
Jeff Koons is primarily a brand name ( as is Damien Hirst or Matthew Barney or Marina Abramovic [or Elon Musk -- why else buy twitter?]). Some have done some art when young (Koons not so much) but primarily subsist in the informational space (of the art world) by curating their own careers. The amount that each 'artist' utilises satire or earnestness or presence is a marketing decision. (I've been involved with some of these artists exhibtions).
So ... KILL CONSUME MULTIPLY CONQUER (<https://slatestarcodex.com/2015/08/17/the-goddess-of-everything-else-2/>).
I think it’s worth it to keep in mind that the most evolutionarily straightforward way to not expand is not the naïve one:
> A decade after the controversy, a biologist had a fascinating idea. The mathematical conditions for group selection overcoming individual selection were too extreme to be found in Nature. Why not create them artificially, in the laboratory? Michael J. Wade proceeded to do just that, repeatedly selecting populations of insects for low numbers of adults per subpopulation. And what was the result? Did the insects restrain their breeding and live in quiet peace with enough food for all?
>
> No; the adults adapted to cannibalize eggs and larvae, especially female larvae.
>
> Of course selecting for small subpopulation sizes would not select for individuals who restrained their own breeding; it would select for individuals who ate other individuals' children. Especially the girls.
<https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/QsMJQSFj7WfoTMNgW/the-tragedy-of-group-selectionism>
>>No; the adults adapted to cannibalize eggs and larvae, especially female larvae.
I don't see why this would be an argument against group selection. Yes, it is an argument against the most romanticized, erroneous ideas of group selection. It is an argument against the idea that group selection somehow stops individual selection. But as a matter of fact, group selection did take place. It just wasn't as pretty as someone might have hoped for. And human reality is also that way. Group selection does take place. And it is in general not as pretty as most of us would wish for.
The post does not say otherwise.
Okay! I read that post a long time ago (people tend to link it when I'm talking about group selection of humans) and found that the essence of it was that "some people who believed in group selection in the past were really naive". And they were, absolutely.