Or anywhere else off planet for that matter. Jennifer Ouellette has an enlightening interview with Adam Becker, the author of a new book titled More Everything Forever: AI Overlords, Space Empires, and Silicon Valley’s Crusade to Control the Fate of Humanity, which sounds like my kind of book — he tears apart the claims of the tech billionaires. They’ve become increasingly detached from reality since the days when I first stumbled across Yudkowski and Kurzweil, who were patently bonkers then, and since then have only increased in both influence and insanity.
More Everything Forever covers the promise and potential pitfalls of AI, effective altruism, transhumanism, the space race to colonize Mars, human biodiversity, and the singularity, among many other topics—name-checking along the way such technological thought leaders as Eliezer Yudkowsky, Sam Altman, William MacAskill, Peter Singer, Marc Andreessen, Ray Kurzweil, Peter Thiel, Curtis Yarvin, Jeff Bezos, and yes, Elon Musk. It all boils down to what Becker calls the “ideology of technological salvation,” and while its uber-rich adherents routinely cite science to justify their speculative claims, Becker notes that “actual scientific concerns about the plausibility of these claims” are largely dismissed. For Becker, this ideology represents a profound threat, not the promise of a utopian future.
“More than anything, these visions of the future promise control by the billionaires over the rest of us,” Becker writes in his introduction. “But that control isn’t limited to the future—it’s here, now. Their visions of the future are news; they inform the limits of public imagination and political debate. Setting the terms of such conversations about the future carries power in the present. If we don’t want tech billionaires setting those terms, we need to understand their ideas about the future: their curious origins, their horrifying consequences, and their panoply of ethical gaps and scientific flaws.”
That list of “thought leaders” is damning in itself — they aren’t champions of thought and science and technology, they’re cheerleaders for fantasy and greed. Every one of them ought to be dismissed from any consideration of respectability. The lunatic fringe is running the show, and prospering greatly.
One of the points of the interview is that they’re all out of touch with reality. They’ve absorbed all these wild ideas from science fiction, but never consider the science part. For instance, they apparently don’t understand thermodynamics.
I’ve got a magnet on my fridge right now that says the heat death is coming. Certain Silicon Valley visionaries hate the laws of thermodynamics. Others claim that their ideas are thermodynamically inevitable because they’ve misunderstood thermodynamics. But either way, they’ve got to grapple with it because it’s the ultimate source of these limits. If nothing else stops you, thermodynamics will stop you because entropy is always going to increase.
They are all fanatical capitalists, a philosophy founded on the premise of infinite and eternal exponential growth, so of course they reject the science, or fall for twisted, perverse wish-fulfillment versions of the science.
Part of this bad science is Elon Musk’s hype about colonizing Mars. It’s not going to happen.
…all of the interesting places in space are really far apart. Living on Mars sucks. Mars isn’t even mid. Mars is just crappy. The gravity is too low. The radiation is too high. There’s no air. The dirt is made of poison. There’s very little water. It gets hit with asteroids more often than Earth does because it’s closer to the asteroid belt. And the prospects for terraforming technology in any meaningful way are not great. Making Mars as habitable as Antarctica during the polar night would be the greatest technological undertaking humanity has ever taken by many orders of magnitude, in order to create a place that nobody would want to live, and where the gravity would still be too low. It’s a deeply unpleasant place.
From a biological perspective, humans are not in any way adapted for life in space or on Mars. We come from a long line, 4 billion years of optimization for life on a planet the size of Earth, with air and water freely available, under certain narrow ranges of temperature and pressure, and we simply lack the biochemical and physiological equipment to cope with a totally alien environment. I wouldn’t say it’s impossible for life to find a way, but if we did artificially modify ourselves to produce descendants who could live on Mars, they wouldn’t be human anymore. We’d probably have to scrap sentience and all the other baggage we’ve accumulated, that we consider so important to the human experience, to generate an ecosystem of creatures that could survive in some way on a mostly airless and waterless frozen ball of rock. There isn’t any point in aspiring to such an artificial state.
Don’t even get me started on Ray Kurzweil. I first read one of his hopelessly delusional books over 20 years ago. Hated it. He was just making shit up about the technological progression he imagined was going to occur, all in service of his pathological fear of death. We’re also not ever going to be immortal.
Kurzweil tries to get around this by saying that you’re not going to be immortal, but you can live as long as you want to. Sure, that gets around some of it. But Kurzweil also thinks that we’re going to find a way around the second law of thermodynamics, which we’re not. I do think that fear of death is at the root of a lot of this, if not all of it. I don’t know if I would go as far as to say that death is what gives life meaning. I would say that the human experience is defined by the limitations that death imposes, the fact that our time is limited. If you remove that constraint, that would fundamentally alter the human condition in ways that very well might not be pleasant.
Silicon Valley isn’t about technology, it’s about selfishness and greed, and weird little gnomes with stupid ideas who have made a niche for themselves by burrowing into junk science. We’re not going to become near-immortal short of turning ourselves into jellyfish. Well, maybe Henrietta Lacks is immortal, but at a price no one would want to pay.
Maybe that explains what’s going on: the worst and richest people in the world are working hard to become mindless, cancerous jellyfish.
None of these people have contributed anything to our understanding of the world, but are experts at accumulating personal wealth by leeching off everyone else.
I would balk at lumping Kurzweil with Mencius Moldbug. Kurzweil at least has a forward looking upbeat vision. Yarvin wants to burn it all down to install a king/CEO. Kurzweil did contribute technology for disabled people. His immortality project (sensu Becker) is ridiculous.
Also Gates (pictured in the supervillain quartet) has been recently dissing Musk over USAID. Gates is a bit of a douche, but at least he understands the global ramifications of what’s happening per infectious disease.
I was attributing “immortality project” to Ernest Becker not Adam Becker.
I have so many questions regarding the colonization of other worlds. Assuming we ever manage to come up with a propulsion system that circumvents the light speed barrier (that in itself might be considered mankind’s greatest technological accomplishment), do we even have the right to do that? This is a question no one ever asks. If we were to discover an exoplanet with the right conditions to support our kind of biology, is it morally acceptable for us to move in, especially if there’s already a thriving ecosystem there? Imagine if an alien species had discovered earth a million years ago. They’d look around, see that Earth’s most advanced species were a few thousand hairy, stone tool making hominids eking out a living in Southern Africa, and say to themselves, this is a very nice planet, much too nice for those primitive apes. If someone like Elon Musk was calling the shots, he’d enthusiastically say it’s time to bring in boatloads of colonists. That would’ve put an end to the human experiment. Again, I have to ask, do we have the moral right to do that to another habitable world? I think many people would answer, yes, it’s perfectly legal and morally acceptable for us to colonize any world we want to. Mankind first. But, if that day ever arrives, the nations of the world will have to address our legal options. I hope that in the same way we have moved away from the Christian West’s brutal conquest and colonization of our planet, we will come to accept that we cannot be allowed to colonize other worlds. Let each planet go its own way without outside interference.
While I must agree that many tech billionaires should have considerably more expertise, I do think that on the occasion you’re shooting too wide. For instance, Peter Singer seems to be a completely normal ethicist. And Ray Kurzweil seems to be our fellow leftist, advocating for a universal basic income. In my view, that’s definitely not a “bonkers” idea!
What comes to mind is the first of Arthur C. Clarke’s three laws (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clarke's_three_laws): “When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong.”
In our case, we simply don’t know the basic laws of physics yet, and only with that knowledge could we determine for certain that any physical law holds in all circumstances.
@ ^ drdrdrdrdralhazeneuler : Yup!
You beat me to it with Clarke’s First Law.
Yet we have humans living in space right now on the International Space Station and on the Chinese Tiangong
station too wher e3 taikonauts currently live. See :. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tiangong_space_station
People aren’t adpate dfor living out at sea but we build ships. We’re not adapted for living in alot of places we live and yet we live there and I don’t think mars willbe any exception.
Also I do think eventually its likely we’ll terraform Mars and other worlds.
John Watts@3 one proposed faster than light travel technology is the Alcubierre drive. But the idea has all sorts of problems, ranging from requiring exotic matter that may not exist to the possibility that the operation of the drive itself may be dangerous to either the ship using it or the planet it’s travelling to.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alcubierre_drive
I was just listening to a biography of Rudolph Diesel. He was part of a coterie of tech bros including John Rockefeller, Henry Ford, etc. Diesel had the idea that his engines would be used everywhere to power factories and that every home would have its own generator, etc. Apparently he would go on lengthy riffs about how small power supplies were going to transform civilization for the better. Well, he made a lot of money. It seems that capitalism literally aggrandizes people who are very successful, and they jump from “being able to market their visionary first product” to “envisioning changing humanity”. The ones like Isaac Singer, who merely buy big mansions and carriages, are looked down upon, while the ones who buy big mansions and carriages, who talk a lot of shit remain capitalism’s darlings. (Btw, a Mr Porsche developed an electrical/petrol hybrid engine around the same time as Diesel developed his, and engines were the hot topic for engineers and inventors, from whom Diesel freely used ideas)
@ ^ timgueguen : Anything that can get ships travelling near lightspeed or even a significant percentage thereof is obvs going to pose a kinetic, energetic danger to any planets or anything else – very dense stars possibly excepted – in the way. That much speed provides that much energy for impact.
In the short run any dream of setting up a thriving colony anywhere in the Solar System is bonkers. Eventually we can have – depending on how well we ‘do civilization’ here on Earth – technologies that solve most of the problems of living elsewhere (except for gravity and, at times, radiation) and will quite happily have a lot of people around the Solar System being curious primates and making (some) use of space-based resources. But that eventuality is – at best – centuries away….and if we screw up ‘doing civilization’ here on Earth (currently a disconcertingly high likelihood) it will be thousands or tens of thousands of years in the future. If Musk, et al, were serious about humanity having a future ‘in space’ their primary focus would be on making life on Earth as productive and pleasant for everyone (humans and others) as the laws of physics allow. The more we all advance together the more we can, and will, advance.
???
I’m sure people run when they see you coming.
Anyone who thinks Peter Singer is any thing like normal has something seriously wrong with them.
Peter Singer has advocated for killing the young and disabled and old people.
He isn’t someone you want around you when you are sick.
.1.
Peter Singer thinks it is a good idea to kill disabled infants and children and old people who can’t defend themselves.
Non-voluntary euthanasia is an euphemism for First degree murder under our laws.
.2.
Singer is one of the inventors of “effective altruism”.
If you just read that sentence, there is nothing wrong with “effective altruism”.
In practice, it has been co-opted by the worst of the techbros and no one takes it seriously any more.
One of the most prominent effective altruists, Samual Bankman-Fried is a conman who is serving a long prison term, i.e. the cryptocurrency fraud guy.
Another is William MacAskill, the wacko long termist guy who is just crazy and not in a good way.
Oxford recently shut down his Future of Humanity Institute.
In practice, effective altruism is just an excuse for terrible people to act horrible. Everyone avoids it these days.
Kelly and Zach Weinersmith, of Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal, did an extensive study of what would be required to colonize the moon or Mars — A City On Mars. It does not paint a very glowing picture of the idea.
Basically, every aspect of setting up self-sustaining human settlements off of Earth is complicated and requires solving problems we have no idea how to solve (not to mention all the problems we don’t even know about yet.) Yes, we have been able to keep a few humans alive in space stations — with an enormous amount of ongoing support from Earth, and for a few years at at time at most (and no health problems.)
PZ notes: From a biological perspective, humans are not in any way adapted for life in space or on Mars
I not only agree with that, I have observed the many ways that humans are not very well adapted to live on this planet! At least not without raping the environment for their own comfort and to satisfy their own greed.
As Professor Timothy Snyder says, ‘we don’t want your nazi cars, take a one-way trip to mars.
If we don’t drive ourselves to extinction, I think humans, or their descendants will eventually settle stuff like giant rotating space habitats and other worlds in our solar system, but only after probably, at minimum, hundreds of years of development in tech and, more importantly imo, hundreds of years of development in space infrastructure. The size and scale of medical and engineering issues to solve is not physically impossible, just not the sort of thing we cannot do in any near future.
I have a fantasy about faster than light travel: maybe some time in the future humanity discovers a way to just swap two bits of space-time as long as they have the same shape and extent in all four dimensions. It wouldn’t require much energy since no matter would change its momentum.
The danger, during the initial exploration phase, would be popping into existence somewhere with some mass barrelling down on us. We might want to do that part with robot ships. Once there, we could set out some kind of beacon. We’d need to match our velocity with the stuff around us; but we could do that more leisurly using a planet’s, or a star’s, gravitational well.
It would be useful to have some means of long-distance communication as well. Maybe we could do that with long skinny bits of space-time that contain the electromagnet waves that we’re transmitting. The bits of space-time wouldn’t have to be very long in the long space dimension since the swapping could happen every few milliseconds.
Would this be the beginning of a science fiction story?
One of the main problems with extraterrestrial colonization is that we’re made out of meat (https://www.mit.edu/people/dpolicar/writing/prose/text/thinkingMeat.html) and meat doesn’t have a very long shelf life. I don’t know if we’ll ever reach the point that we can transfer human consciousness to a computer, but that seems to me the only way we’ll ever get off this planet in meaningful numbers. In a lot of ways the body is just a vessel for carrying the brain around and feeding it sensations and nutrients: that body might as well be a robot as a meatsack.
How so?
Anybody though of what happens to the CMB when getting close to lightspeed?
Blueshifted to gamma rays.
As you get closer and closer to light speed, the universe in front of you gets increasingly dangerous; you’re plowing into what looks like a bath of high-energy radiation.
To paraphrase Neil DeGrasse Tyson, “If we could terraform Mars, why not terraform Earth. Should be easier and a helluva lot cheaper.” But this isn’t about terraforming any place or even going there. It’s about creating a funnel with billions of dollars flowing through it and sucking off some of that moolah. Should be good for another 20 or 30 years which is longer than many of these middle-aged guys will be around. Elon is 53…do the math frat boys. No matter how much they invest in life extension technology, they are still going to die. And if they do extend their lives to 100+, they’ll be so miserable and bored that their success is their punishment.
“…fanatical capitalists, a philosophy founded on the premise of infinite and eternal exponential growth” … true of “fanatical” capitalism, but I’m not sure all breeds of capitalism are based on that premise. That nicety aside, it’s clear that the very “successful” capitalists of today, as in the past, want to monopolize. And yeah, capitalism even in it’s more benign forms, may engender greed.
@16 John Morales asks, how do these visions of the future promise control by billionaires.
I reply: One way we are already seeing that is how the manipulations of these corrupt tech billionaires are already profiting from them obscenely. Here is just the tip of the iceberg.
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-politics/musk-government-contracts-spacex-tesla-taxes-b2703141.html
tRUMP is pressuring countries he put huge tariffs on to put billions into contracts with muskrats starlink
https://all-hat-no-cattle.blogspot.com/ scroll down 3 pages and an image shows the muskrat is sucking money out of 70% of the gov’t agencies doge targeted.
https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/elon-musk/trump-musk-tesla-white-house-showroom-buys-car-rcna195905
Mar 11, 2025 President Donald Trump turned the South Lawn of the White House into a temporary Tesla showroom
p.s. John used the correct word ‘visions’ because these frauds don’t really do any work, don’t invent anything, they are just hucksters who buy others work, mark it up and sell it as their own.
shermanj, none of your alleged examples constitute control over me (never mind over us) via their visions.
(Wishes ain’t fishes)
Also, whether they do or don’t do work, whether they invent or are just hucksters, that has nothing to do with controlling us.
John, I agree, they probably don’t reach you. But we have collected documentation on all of them that show they have a stranglehold on the government in this country and in others, too. I see (and I personally feel) that as destructive, abusive control over all of us that pay taxes which are then ‘generously’ doled out to them without benefit to the populace.
One example that hits our organization (and consequently all those we work with) is that gate’s microsoft has bullied computer manufacturers into putting proprietary restrictions into their ‘bios’ systems that prevent us from using other operating systems on those computers. (We, and linux, have created workarounds, but they aren’t easy)
One other point, government officials are using X (xhitter) owned by the muskrat. He controls who gets to post, what they post, and he often censors and makes vicious attacks on those ‘semi-official’ posts by government officials on a whim. HE CONTROLS THE NARRATIVE there.
Mega rich and powerful people, especially oligarchs, have done that since forever.
Regulatory capture is nothing new.
—
As for the BIOS and computers, well… don’t use that BIOS.
It’s just firmware.
(I think you’re thinking of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UEFI)
@3:John Watts
Good question, but we have to remember that our very presence here on Earth, even before we started polluting the environment to any degree, has essentially put a stop to the natural course of evolution of new species for as long as we persist on this planet. Our technologically driven changes are outpacing and will continue to outpace evolutionary change by several orders of magnitude.
So in that context, what about other planets? It really depends on how abundant life is in the galaxy. If we discover that the vast majority of Earth-like exoplanets are barren, then there’s nothing to discuss. We’re not waiting around for a billion years to see if a planet is going to spawn life sometime.
It’s quite likely that even if life is relatively abundant, it is almost all single celled life, as existed on Earth for 3 billion years before it discovered the trick of multi-celled lifeforms. Again, only the most hardline ethical stance would demand we leave such planets alone.
It’s really only if we come across planets with a flourishing multicellular ecosystem with or without intelligent life that the ethical questions become harder, and there will be a strong case for preserving the status quo on those planets since by that time, life and its products will probably be the only interesting things left for us to study in a Universe that is so homogeneous. Doubly so if there’s intelligent life.
Will we leave well alone? Almost certainly not, but if there is any kind of ethical restraint, then any exploitation will attempt to limit the harm even if it’s mostly in our self interest to continue studying its unique biosphere to see how to exploit it further.
There’s also the fact that if we don’t discover any shortcuts, travel to another exosystem will be so time consuming and costly that it would only be undertaken if there was something to exploit once you get there. If it’s an intelligent civilization then trade is possible, but if not then the only option is to interfere.
Bottom line is that even if people will care about the current species living on an exoplanet, nobody’s going to worry about any potential future species. We don’t even worry about that here on Earth.
“One other point, government officials are using X (xhitter) owned by the muskrat. He controls who gets to post, what they post, and he [stuff]”
So very many were chortling ever so hard at his stupidity in wasting his money on purchasing Twitter and thus impoverishing himself and losing his power.
When one thinks of him as an idiot, it’s kinda hard to see that ourcome, right?
(Hobnobbing with the klepto-prez, wielding power, bossing others: that’s what he bought, in hindsight)
PS Bill Gates is not like those others in the image.
cf. https://www.gatesfoundation.org/ideas/science-innovation-technology
@23 John Morales wrote: Regulatory capture is nothing new.
I reply: You are correct there. However, I see that distinctly as a form of control that prevents honest government and harms the populace.
and John wrote: As for the BIOS and computers, well… don’t use that BIOS.
It’s just firmware.
I reply: We have workarounds for both bios and UEFI. There are even a few versions of linux that can work around ‘safe boot’. However, the only other firmware that we can flash onto those computers (without bricking them) is still captive to those same constraints and still requires complex workarounds.
@25 John Morales wrote: When one thinks of him as an idiot, it’s kinda hard to see that outcome, right?
I reply: I agree to some extent. Butm that still doesn’t prevent his control of that most massive of social media sites from causing false beliefs and sowing public chaos and damage. To re-use the phrase, ‘he is a wasteful clown, but he is a clown with a flame thrower’.
@26 John Morales wrote: Bill Gates is not like those others
I reply: In that sense I agree with you. However, I’ve read lots of his work pushing expensive destructive corporate agriculture ‘fixes’ on small countries that can’t afford the ruin of their farmland or financial burden they impose. And, the small farmers of those countries are impoverished when they can’t afford to implement those corporate tech ‘fixes’. And, I don’t like his disingenuous P.R. stunt of ‘giving away his wealth’ when he has gained more wealth as a result of the way he created those foundations.
In those senses I can’t revere gates.
@24 tacitus wrote: nobody’s going to worry about any potential future species. We don’t even worry about that here on Earth.
I reply: That is true. My mind extends that concept to societal realms that anger and sadden me. When the new world was ‘discovered’ that led to massive theft, destruction and murder of the tribes already there. And, that was justified by ‘oh, they are only savages’ and ‘we must achieve our manifest destiny’.
shermanj, re #26, I was addressing this claim in the OP’s caption: .
Gates certainly has; that link I provided is an existence proof.
(I was not revering him, I was correcting an erroneous claim)
I keep nagging about how places in space that are awful to humans will be good for AI/robots.
Cold means less corrosion. The dust on Mars is a problem for moving parts, so let’s increase the atmosphere and change its chemistry so the smallest particles are destroyed or absorbed by biofilms of simple organisms.
Legacy humans are (mostly) stuck on Earth but minds do not have to use an organic substrate forever, just as life did not have to be confined to single cells forever.
.
An aspect Musk et al are ignoring is how metal ores were mostly formed in Earth crust created during the neoproterozoic.
The crust on other planets did apparently not form by plate tectonics; there is no evidence there are rich ore bodies. The closest thing so far is the presumed comosition of the asteroid Psyche, which may be the remnant of the core of a metal-rich planetoid.
The average planetary surface has trace amounts of most elements mixed with the rocks at low abundances. Not good for astronauts.
But the Minds (I am using the spelling from Ian Bank’s Culture) of the future will find ways around the problems.
As for Musk and his ilk, they will not fit into a post-scarcity society anyway.
I suspect, as in many cases, that
a: The pessimists who claim it can’t be done/will never happen are wrong
b: The optimists’ timescale is wildly, well, optimistic.
It will happen, and it will take centuries or longer.
The 1899-era techbros give a good example of what to expect. The pessimist response in their time would have been something like “get used to candlelight and horse carriages”. Obviously that was wrong. The optimists were undoubtedly wrong about how long it would take, then as now. Vannevar Bush thought up something akin to computers and the Internet, but it took half a century before something like Bush’s “memex” actually was practical to build. And as soon as it was, it did get built.
the level of “dream think” in ideas of off earth colonization that occurs is wow.
I just can not take serious the idea of “Cities” on Mars or the moons of Jupiter. Landing there with live humans in numbers over 10 maybe in 10 or 20 years if we are lucky. I doubt we will have much more then that until we can really actually manage this planet and we will not be able to do that while we a system of nation states all balanced against each other so precariously that the possibility of complete annihilation looms over everyone
The numbers of would be kings of the world some incredibly wealthy, some just absolutely ruthless
is not a good thing and will likely delay any advanced civilization here for some time.
To die: to sleep;
No more; and by a sleep to say we end
The heart-ache and the thousand natural shocks
That flesh is heir to, ’tis a consummation
Devoutly to be wish’d. To die, to sleep;
To sleep: perchance to dream:
drdrdrdrdralhazeneuler@4–
I agree that Peter Singer should not be included in the list of tech billionaires since he is neither a techie nor rich, but he is far from a “completely normal ethicist.” He is a fundamentalist utilitarian to the point that he creates what I consider to be reductio ad absurdums of the worst utilitarian arguments and then insists they should be implemented. (See his “we should kill disabled children” argument.)
In his animal rights philosophy, he realised that he had to come up with a demarcation line between organisms that should have rights to self-determination and organisms that are not neurologically complex enough warrant it, based on capacity for suffering (a concept that goes all the way back to Mill and Bentham, so hardly novel). If there were no such demarcation, it would be unethical to treat bacterial infections. Instead of researching it well, or even stating this is a difficult problem, he simply drew the line at vertebrates. Anyone with a glancing knowledge of biology is aware that many invertebrates are intelligent and many engage in complex social behaviour. There is no reason to believe an octopus is less capable of suffering than a newt or a male anglerfish. Even single-celled creatures display avoidance to injurious exposures. This was just Singer’s way of making a broad-brush simplification rather than solve the problem, or at least acknowledge its current insolubility.
Even “effective altruism” refuses to deal with utilitarian issues that have been explored in bioethics for decades before Singer. And while it’s not Singer’s fault that techbros abuse the philosophy to justify their personal glory-seeking fixations and fetishes, it is definitely his fault that he created yet another simplistic moral philosophy, this one encouraging “altruism”-by-spreadsheet, and it is undeniable that he continues to defend it even after its deficiencies have been laid bare and doesn’t want to grapple with the weaknesses exposed by the techbros.
Note that I am very much in favour of utilitarianism when the ethical problem is suited to it, such as who should receive organ transplants when there is limited supply. But as one bioethicist put it (I can’t find the original quote, sorry), “the problem with utilitarianism is that nobody can say how many headaches are worth a broken leg.”
chrislawson, ah yes.
I note that all utilitarians are consequentialists, but not all consequentialists are utilitarians; utilitarians seek to maximise weal — thing is, that is quite subjective.
(Your typical sadist probably is not happy taking punishment, unlike the typical masochist)
I suspect if someone were to set foot on a Earth-like planet without a full hazmat suit, they would go into anaphylaxis in short order. Inhaling lungfuls of alien biologicals would likely do the trick.
I’ve been reading science fiction ever since I sneaked under the rope in the Bookmobile to get to the adult section. Saw The Day the Earth Stood Still three times at the Saturday Matinee, enough to memorize Klaatu Barada Nikto. Reading science fiction, I suspend all belief and just enjoy the story.
As much as I relish the idea of warp drive, transporters and food replicators, I am firmly in the camp that holds sending biology into space is ridiculous. We need to bury the hubris and start building machines.
I, Robot.
@35:jimzy
The idea that an alien biosphere (assuming a breathable atmosphere) will be filled with fatally toxic viruses and bacteria is an invention of science fiction. Odds are that those “alien biologicals” won’t even recognize us as biological targets.
This is very different to Native Americans dying from the virus and bacteria brought by European explorers that were already highly adapted to take advantage of human biology.
There’s no chance alien pathogens would recognize us as targets, a small chance alien decomposers would be able to break us down, but a good chance alien spores would be made of compounds that you don’t want sitting in your lungs.
What comes to mind re colonizing Mars is that even on Earth it’s hard to live on an island without constantly shipping in supplies. I don’t know what the cost is to run the ISS but the Moon is going to be another order of magnitude. Mars? ROFL
My hunch is that there may be inhabited bases on the Moon – probably a Chinese one first – with scientific teams rotated in and out as in Antarctica, but that even there, most of the work will be done by robots. Beyond that, all robotic. Of course all that depends on the increasingly remote possibility that there’s no complete civilizational collapse first.
@Marcus Ranum #7
“a Mr Porsche”
Since we’re discussing rich Nazis tech bros, don’t forget noted Nazi Party member, WWII tank and rocket designer and honorary Oberführer of the Allgemeine SS, Ferdinand Porsche.
=8)-DX
But this is true of any species entering a new environment! I’m not a biologist, so you tell me what our last common species was with ocean dwelling species, but isn’t it true they lacked “the biochemical and physiological equipment to cope with a totally alien environment”?! It must have been true or they already would have been living on dry land.
And? We’re not Australopithecus afarensis anymore. Is this supposed to be a problem? Why?
This is very weird coming from a guy living in Minnesota. X-D
Are you saying we can’t live in a place unless we can run around naked 24/7/365 in the outdoors? Isn’t it true you have things called houses, and heating, and clothes, and enclosed vehicles that protect you from the environment?
Also, define “waterless”.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Water_on_Mars
PZ:
This is Luddism. The point of aspiring to an artificial state is living. People with pacemakers or prosthetics or taking insulin are “living in an artificial state”. So what? What’s with the “appeal to nature” fallacy?
Anyway, since Arthur C Clarke has already been evoked, here’s another thing he said: People invariably overestimate technological progress in the short-term, but also invariably underestimate technological progress in the long-term. Musk is obviously doing the former (because he’s a grifter), PZ is doing the latter. “We will never colonize Mars”. Bold statement coming from an individual with a 3.8 billion year evolutionary history, when his species went from patenting the electric light bulb to landing on the Moon in less than a century. Never, you say? Uh huh
@ 40 KG
Whenever people say why don’t we just send robots I wonder if instead of going on vacation, they send a robot to go on vacation for them and send back pictures. And then, of course, another robot to look at the pictures. And when a friend recommends some music, or TV show, they just get a robot to listen to the music or watch the TV show. I mean you can already do this with your phone. Point the camera to the TV, press record, and go to bed. Job done. X-D
There seems to a fundamental misunderstanding that robots are meant to assist us in living our lives. Not live them for us.
@18. robro : “To paraphrase Neil DeGrasse Tyson, “If we could terraform Mars, why not terraform Earth. Should be easier and a helluva lot cheaper.”
Why not both?
Actually we’re currently de-terraforming – cythereoforming (?) Earth into a planet that more closely resembles Venus due to our consumption of fossil fuels and consequent Greenhouse Gas Emissions and Global Overheating. It seems inevitable now esp given Trump’s election and the implications of that that we will have to geoengineer our planet and trying to develop sustainable, survivable habitats in space and working on terraforming Mars may help us do that better. Its as usual both / and rather than either / or in my view.
@17. Robert Westbrook :
Perhaps that can be turned to the crafts advantage and harvested somehow roughly analogous to the Ramscoop interstellar craft idea?
( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bussard_ramjet )
@ billseymour : “Would this be the beginning of a science fiction story?”
Quite possibly – have you started writing it? Also good world-building for future tech in such an SF novel, series or franchise.
@ Matthew Ostergren : Yes, I agree this is stuff that will take hundreds of years to develop and occur. In the near-future just getting to Mars for the first time is going to be probly a decade at least away and now will probly be done by the Chinese or an international group NOT as usually predicted by SF works (Western ones anyhow) the now fast collapsing former United States of America.
This is not true. The first terrestrial animals evolved from a lineage that was occupying an intermediate environment — living in a shallow water, brackish swamp was a precursor to moving on to a muddy shore, and adapting to a moist place on land was a prerequisite to evolving the features that allowed them to colonize deserts. Point me to the in-between place that could be a viable long-term staging place for the transition from a planet with oxygen and water to a rock with vacuum and radiation.
Also, Minnesota is not Mars. This was a prairie with rich soil and a diverse population of big game animals living here. People with stone age technology thrived here.
@ ^ PZ Myers : Um, Mars has an atmosphere – much thinner than ours, sure but still an atmosphere not a vacuum and we also have radiation on Earth. Less, sure but still.
Put a human being unprotected in the middle of the ocean – 2/3rds of our planet – or unprotected one of our planet’s polar ice caps and sheets and they’ll die pretty quickly. They’ll freeze or burn or be eaten by sharks or polar bears, etc.. Humans are NOT evolved to live in the middle of the ocean or our polar regions. But people are there anyhow because of our ingenuity and engineering and technology. Have been for many millennia with the Inuit and Polynesians and then others in ever increasingly more advanced vessels and with increasingly sophisticated technology.
Same for Mars. We’ll get there by co-operatively building ships and shelters and setting up bases to learn and develop and progress.
Having technological intelligence and capability means it’s not a question of our evolution and which conditions we evolved in because we’ll make and bring with us those conditions suitable for ourselves. At least we can do if we so choose and are sufficiently determined to do so.
PS. “Also, Minnesota is not Mars.”
Not yet anyhow. Give the Repugs & Trumpists a few more years or decades tho’..
mannn… people get fucking weird when this topic comes up.
Mars is fucking far away, far enough we have to time when we throw fucking robots at it.
And robots don’t need any food, water, air, clothing, etc. for the journey, let alone when they get there.
How many pre-trip supply runs will be needed to put months (or more likely years) worth of food, water, air, clothing, supplies, equipment, etc. on site, before trying to send a human or two there? And any one of those trips could be used to send a robot instead.
Just getting into Earth orbit requires an incredible amount of energy/resources. Leaving Earth orbit even more so.
Yeah, it might be technically feasible, but unless some drastic about our understanding of physics, chemistry, and biology changes, it’s going to be so resource intensive and logistically difficult to make it effectively impossible. (especially when we have the option of chucking ever improving robots at it).
And can we please stop comparing outer space to the age of sail? Like, the two aren’t even in the same boardgame shop, let alone the same table…
OK. Go take a deep breath of the Martian atmosphere — 95% CO2, pressure 0.6% of Earth’s, at a temperature between -60°C and maybe, if you’re lucky, 0°C — and then you can talk to me. Or try to, before you drop dead.
True, there is radiation on Earth. We get about 0.6 rads per year. On Mars you’ll get about 20 rads per year, while solar events will bathe you in about 5 rads/day a couple of times a year. Trivial, right?
What’s weird is people who ignore the quantitative aspects of the problem. Mars has an atmosphere, Earth has an atmosphere, they’re the same, plus/minus a few points!
Why on earth would you wonder anything so ridiculous? How many people do you think are going to be going to the Moon, let alone Mars, in any plausible scenario of the next couple of centuries? The vast majority will get far more out of robotic exploration, if we stop wasting resources by sending people to places where they have to be protected at vast expense.
There seems to be a fundamental misunderstanding that living on the Moon or Mars would be enjoyable. Even science fiction will tell you – those working there would be at the mercy of giant corporations and their corrupt private police, because they would have to out-compete robots.
Truly desperate stuff. First, the timescales are completely wrong: to avoid civilizational collapse we need to make fundamental changes on Earth within the next few decades – being optimistic. Sustainable space habitats, let alone terraforming Mars, are centuries in the future if possible at all. Second, have you not noticed who Trump is in league with? Have you asked yourself why Musk is in league with Trump? I get your emotional commitment to people living off-Earth. But face it – if it happens, it will be under the aegis of psychopathic trillionaires, mega-corporations or totalitarian states.
My perspective: We’re getting farther away from being able to colonize space, not closer. We need more knowledge of ecology and medicine to build a self-sustaining environment to even dream of extended human stays on other worlds, and we’re in a nation that’s burning down existing science institutions and rattling sabers against our neighbors. Even if all the science and engineering obstacles can be surmounted, the US is a growing political obstacle.
@ ^ KG : or you now run the robots, use them, work with them. Also do science, learn, advance and develop technology plus art, culture, etc.
Also I’m talking centuries here but starting from now. Because we’re here now so the question of How do we go there or forward from here seems to me a legitimate one and saying either / or is the false binary fallacy and lacks imagination. We can and are well advised to do more than one thing at once.
Musk is temporary here and I think I’ve already noted that its likely going to be the Chinese doing this now or Europeans if we’re lucky – and they work to make it so.. Probly using scientists that have fled the now collapsed USA.(Seems like America is now pretty much a corpse that’s still walking and hasn’t quite realised it’s dead yet. Metaphorically speaking Thanks MuskTrump & the likes of beholder that installed them.)
@47. Lochaber :
Got a better analogy?
Yes, there’s vast differences. Eg ancient mariners couldn’t radio home. We can now. Also arguably vast similarities in what’s required.
Depends on the specifics of the planned missions and rockets & other craft involved and also what use we make of resources on Mars e.g. Zubrin’s plans.* There are many possibilities with varying numbers and specifics.
@48. PZ Myers : I didn’t say “trivial” nor do I claim that its breathable but the Martian atmosphere isn’t vacuum or insignificant either.
There’s ideas like using lava tubes on Mars to cope with radiation, yes, its an issue. Yes, we can find ways of dealing it. A la The Martian novel and subsequent movie to quote but one example.
NatureScience finds a way & will do the maths to get there..* See among other places wiki-summary :
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Case_for_Mars
@ 51. Recursive Rabbit : Who’s “we” here?
The USA has stuffed itself up very badly. Probly terminally. Russia, ditto, I reckon given Putin’s war on Ukraine & its consequences.
The rest of the planet, well, not as bad. Not yet. China? Europe? Japan? India? Etc.. ? Aided by refugee USoA scientists. Especially if they work together and collaborate which is arguably the main strength of our species.
Long-term technology might be easy to underestimate but it’s very hard to predict. The only thing that makes Mars stand out is it’s relatively close and very slightly less awful than the Moon. We have not really started on the massive challenges of letting Homo sapiens live comfortably there but my guess is that if we ever can do it, it will be well after we’ve reached a point where we wouldn’t really achieve anything special by doing it.
@ ^ monad : “The only thing that makes Mars stand out is it’s relatively close and very slightly less awful than the Moon.”
Hey, Olympus Mons & the three Tharsis bulge volcanoes wanta word! Plus theValles marineris too.
( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tharsis )
Seriously tho’ Mars is the bets planet outside of earth for humans in the solar system. The most similar and most potentially inhabitable and terraformable world in our system – with possible exception only of Titan albeit that is a lot further away and a LOT colder again.
StevoR @55: If life was discovered under Mars’ surface, would you still favour terraforming?