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The problem wit hthat was that the Captain was a SJW and complained about:"A single black father in that time" like fuck there is no racism in that show besides the "ur a ferengi so a jew" kind of racism
Imagine back in the 50s when computers were the size of small factories at government-level cost. Can you even imagine how people would respond if you said that in just 60 years anybody would be able to have computers millions of times stronger than those for some tens of dollars, and they'd fit into devices as small as a watch? You'd sound like you'd been reading way too much sci-fi, if not straight up hitting the lysergic a bit too much. Yet that's exactly what happened. And now technology, in nearly all endeavors, is accelerating far more rapidly than it was in computing back then...
Just within our lifetime we'll almost certainly see interplanetary colonization and celestial resource utilization (e.g. asteroid mining). That alone will already alleviate any real notion of mineral or land scarcity. Automation will supplement this in ways I think are difficult to even imagine for now. Suffice to say that production and distribution of said resources will look quite a bit different than it does today. Those are both in the ballpark of 9-20 years away. Any conception we have of what the world's going to be like in 100 years is simply going to be wrong. The amount of imminent revolutionary scale change makes any prediction beyond it like trying to imagine what the color red might look like, for a person who's never seen anything except black and white.
And now technology, in nearly all endeavors, is accelerating far more rapidly than it was in computing back then...
No, it isnt.
Smartphones were disruptive, but even they were an iteration, they existed well before the Iphone, but the data network wasnt up to par and they were mainly for tech focused people, Apple built the market by dumbing them down for other people. Since then we have received iterative changes, slightly faster, slightly larger/denser screens, slightly longer battery life, etc.
Tech companies try to pretend these are massive astonishing changes as a marketing tactic, but it really isnt. What you have seen is the consumerization of tech that has been available in slower forms for decades.
The tech advances of the last 60 years have been computer driven.
As in "That thing we are doing, throw a computer at it"
Computer driven fuel injection and ignition have made cars more reliable and require less maintenance while CAD and research studies have taught us how to make slightly better mechanical components. But a mechanic from 1950 would recognize the mechanical components of a new car, its just the funny carburetor and lack of distributor that would throw him off.
CAD and easy number crunching has led to refrigerators that are more efficient, but they are not dramatically different than their counterparts of 60 years ago (larger freezer sections though)
interplanetary colonization
As much as I hate to admit it, this is incredibly unlikely.
The amount of effort required to build a human habitat on another planet in our solar system is obscene, without some kind of new tech (ftl travel, a huge breakthrough in additive manufacturing or general automation) it is just unlikely to happen, and even if it does such a colony will be precarious until/unless terraforming can be performed.
Most people dont think about the small army of workers actively maintaining our infrastructure to keep water running to our homes, imagine if you had to generate oxygen too.
celestial resource utilization (e.g. asteroid mining).
This I agree with, and it might make me a "liar" on the above in that there might be need to put humans in space to manage the mining. These will not be true colonies so much as mining outposts though.
Any conception we have of what the world's going to be like in 100 years is simply going to be wrong.
I agree to an extent.
The biggest breakthrough that might come is human level AI. AI that is capable of truly taking over for a human being is a game changer, but we have no way of knowing what will happen.
People act like HLAI will be our great savior or the end of our civilization with certainty that they cannot possibly posses.
HLAI will be like an alien landing, totally unpredictable, it could serve all our needs, it could kill us all our of fear, it could commit suicide.
If we are really unlucky it will absorb /b/ and construct velociraptor robots to rape us all to death.
Most of the things I mentioned were definitely not just off the cuff. Let's hit on the interplanetary colonization part for instance, and Mars in particular.
Oxygen is a really interesting topic. There's just so much to say here. The first thing is that Mars is just absolutely loaded with compounds containing oxygen. For instance the atmosphere is mostly CO2 and the ice caps are also completely dry ice - frozen CO2. So one idea here is MOXIE. It's a rover that NASA is sending in Mars 2020 that will experiment with converting atmospheric CO2 directly into CO and oxygen. Now massive amounts of this oxygen will be being produced. The main purpose is not just for life support, but as part of rocket fuel. And I guess that leads to the Sabatier Reaction. The Sabatier Reaction is another neat bit of chemistry. CO2 + hydrogen can produce methane with a byproduct of water!
And we haven't gotten into the nitty gritty of Martian dirt. If you ever saw the movie or read the book The Martian you know one of the things the protagonist struggled with was getting water. He went through the crazy process of reducing hydrazine (really really nasty stuff) to water. What the author didn't know (because it hadn't yet been discovered) is what most people probably still don't know. Martian soil is moist. I don't mean the recent discovery of trace surface water but in the areas that on film look like desert. It's about 2% water by weight. In other words a cubic foot of soil gets you about a liter of water. That again opens up countless possibilities. At the most basic level of course simple electrolysis of water produces hydrogen and oxygen. Inefficient, but there's plenty of surface to deploy solar on Mars.
As for putting all of this together, our society is incredibly inefficient in work. In my opinion this was because of technological barriers at the time and is now because of economic come ethical barriers. So for instance let's look at our proverbial burger flipper. These sort of jobs and most of the product line would be pretty trivial to automate. But doing so would wipe out millions of jobs. That'd result in a response from both government, who might see civil order and the economy decline, and society which would perceive it as billion dollar corporations wiping out even those poor paying jobs to increase their profit margins a hair more. So as a result we have lots of people doing jobs that are really completely irrelevant so they can "earn" their living. That will change in the future no doubt, but the point is that comparing our inefficiencies here to what's actually necessary is not really a fair comparison. There's definitely plenty of hurdles to overcome yet, but I haven't seen anything to that seems in any way insurmountable on a near future timeline - let alone 100 years.
Anyhow, yeah. The reason I wanted to pick just one topic is because this is probably already approaching tl/dr and it's mostly just about oxygen!
The only reason LA and San Diego and San Fran haven't become Demolition Man is because we don't have the technology yet. Remember, that whole system was built on their prison system, and the rehabilitation of prisoners through that matrix style learning system.
Continuing minor advances in automation and energy generation enable food production on scales we cannot imagine, with the slow reduction in work requirements and an increasingly easy life resulting in lower birth rates (as can already be seen in western nations) that might be a problem if increased automation didnt make caring for the elderly much less labor intensive.
Professional ones? Lots. But they don't get read as often, as they are not so spectacular. They are mostly about measures to defeat disease, hunger, very large family sizes, and so on.
Sci-fi? Also lots. But not too interesting for people who prefer dystopian sci-fi.
Me personally: I'm sure Earth could easily handle 100 billion people with current technology. And then we should expand into space. If we get immortal and able to improve without limits (transhumanism), we should limit population growth somewhat. But also allow people to spend years or decades travelling to other star systems and do as they please there.
I really, truly do not understand the people who are convinced we are in imminent danger of overpopulating the planet and all dying of starvation and disease. Have they never studied the history of such forecasts?
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[–] [deleted] 1 point 3 points 4 points (+4|-1) ago
[–] 8711785? 0 points 5 points 5 points (+5|-0) ago
Deep Space Nine did not paint a particularly rosy picture, tbh.
[–] [deleted] 2 points 3 points 5 points (+5|-2) ago
[–] Kael_thas_Sunstrider ago
The problem wit hthat was that the Captain was a SJW and complained about:"A single black father in that time" like fuck there is no racism in that show besides the "ur a ferengi so a jew" kind of racism
[–] rwbj 0 points 2 points 2 points (+2|-0) ago
Imagine back in the 50s when computers were the size of small factories at government-level cost. Can you even imagine how people would respond if you said that in just 60 years anybody would be able to have computers millions of times stronger than those for some tens of dollars, and they'd fit into devices as small as a watch? You'd sound like you'd been reading way too much sci-fi, if not straight up hitting the lysergic a bit too much. Yet that's exactly what happened. And now technology, in nearly all endeavors, is accelerating far more rapidly than it was in computing back then...
Just within our lifetime we'll almost certainly see interplanetary colonization and celestial resource utilization (e.g. asteroid mining). That alone will already alleviate any real notion of mineral or land scarcity. Automation will supplement this in ways I think are difficult to even imagine for now. Suffice to say that production and distribution of said resources will look quite a bit different than it does today. Those are both in the ballpark of 9-20 years away. Any conception we have of what the world's going to be like in 100 years is simply going to be wrong. The amount of imminent revolutionary scale change makes any prediction beyond it like trying to imagine what the color red might look like, for a person who's never seen anything except black and white.
[–] Mathurin1911 0 points 1 point 1 point (+1|-0) ago
No, it isnt. Smartphones were disruptive, but even they were an iteration, they existed well before the Iphone, but the data network wasnt up to par and they were mainly for tech focused people, Apple built the market by dumbing them down for other people. Since then we have received iterative changes, slightly faster, slightly larger/denser screens, slightly longer battery life, etc. Tech companies try to pretend these are massive astonishing changes as a marketing tactic, but it really isnt. What you have seen is the consumerization of tech that has been available in slower forms for decades.
The tech advances of the last 60 years have been computer driven. As in "That thing we are doing, throw a computer at it" Computer driven fuel injection and ignition have made cars more reliable and require less maintenance while CAD and research studies have taught us how to make slightly better mechanical components. But a mechanic from 1950 would recognize the mechanical components of a new car, its just the funny carburetor and lack of distributor that would throw him off. CAD and easy number crunching has led to refrigerators that are more efficient, but they are not dramatically different than their counterparts of 60 years ago (larger freezer sections though)
As much as I hate to admit it, this is incredibly unlikely. The amount of effort required to build a human habitat on another planet in our solar system is obscene, without some kind of new tech (ftl travel, a huge breakthrough in additive manufacturing or general automation) it is just unlikely to happen, and even if it does such a colony will be precarious until/unless terraforming can be performed.
Most people dont think about the small army of workers actively maintaining our infrastructure to keep water running to our homes, imagine if you had to generate oxygen too.
This I agree with, and it might make me a "liar" on the above in that there might be need to put humans in space to manage the mining. These will not be true colonies so much as mining outposts though.
I agree to an extent. The biggest breakthrough that might come is human level AI. AI that is capable of truly taking over for a human being is a game changer, but we have no way of knowing what will happen. People act like HLAI will be our great savior or the end of our civilization with certainty that they cannot possibly posses. HLAI will be like an alien landing, totally unpredictable, it could serve all our needs, it could kill us all our of fear, it could commit suicide. If we are really unlucky it will absorb /b/ and construct velociraptor robots to rape us all to death.
[–] rwbj 0 points 1 point 1 point (+1|-0) ago
Most of the things I mentioned were definitely not just off the cuff. Let's hit on the interplanetary colonization part for instance, and Mars in particular.
Oxygen is a really interesting topic. There's just so much to say here. The first thing is that Mars is just absolutely loaded with compounds containing oxygen. For instance the atmosphere is mostly CO2 and the ice caps are also completely dry ice - frozen CO2. So one idea here is MOXIE. It's a rover that NASA is sending in Mars 2020 that will experiment with converting atmospheric CO2 directly into CO and oxygen. Now massive amounts of this oxygen will be being produced. The main purpose is not just for life support, but as part of rocket fuel. And I guess that leads to the Sabatier Reaction. The Sabatier Reaction is another neat bit of chemistry. CO2 + hydrogen can produce methane with a byproduct of water!
And we haven't gotten into the nitty gritty of Martian dirt. If you ever saw the movie or read the book The Martian you know one of the things the protagonist struggled with was getting water. He went through the crazy process of reducing hydrazine (really really nasty stuff) to water. What the author didn't know (because it hadn't yet been discovered) is what most people probably still don't know. Martian soil is moist. I don't mean the recent discovery of trace surface water but in the areas that on film look like desert. It's about 2% water by weight. In other words a cubic foot of soil gets you about a liter of water. That again opens up countless possibilities. At the most basic level of course simple electrolysis of water produces hydrogen and oxygen. Inefficient, but there's plenty of surface to deploy solar on Mars.
As for putting all of this together, our society is incredibly inefficient in work. In my opinion this was because of technological barriers at the time and is now because of economic come ethical barriers. So for instance let's look at our proverbial burger flipper. These sort of jobs and most of the product line would be pretty trivial to automate. But doing so would wipe out millions of jobs. That'd result in a response from both government, who might see civil order and the economy decline, and society which would perceive it as billion dollar corporations wiping out even those poor paying jobs to increase their profit margins a hair more. So as a result we have lots of people doing jobs that are really completely irrelevant so they can "earn" their living. That will change in the future no doubt, but the point is that comparing our inefficiencies here to what's actually necessary is not really a fair comparison. There's definitely plenty of hurdles to overcome yet, but I haven't seen anything to that seems in any way insurmountable on a near future timeline - let alone 100 years.
Anyhow, yeah. The reason I wanted to pick just one topic is because this is probably already approaching tl/dr and it's mostly just about oxygen!
[–] jbnunez 0 points 2 points 2 points (+2|-0) ago
Yes aging population creates conservative voter base, sensible policies. Aging population can depend on Robots self driving cars etc,.
[–] [deleted] 0 points 2 points 2 points (+2|-0) ago
[–] 8711813? 0 points 2 points 2 points (+2|-0) ago
The only reason LA and San Diego and San Fran haven't become Demolition Man is because we don't have the technology yet. Remember, that whole system was built on their prison system, and the rehabilitation of prisoners through that matrix style learning system.
[–] [deleted] ago
[–] Mathurin1911 0 points 1 point 1 point (+1|-0) ago
Yes.
Continuing minor advances in automation and energy generation enable food production on scales we cannot imagine, with the slow reduction in work requirements and an increasingly easy life resulting in lower birth rates (as can already be seen in western nations) that might be a problem if increased automation didnt make caring for the elderly much less labor intensive.
[–] carlinco 0 points 1 point 1 point (+1|-0) ago
Professional ones? Lots. But they don't get read as often, as they are not so spectacular. They are mostly about measures to defeat disease, hunger, very large family sizes, and so on.
Sci-fi? Also lots. But not too interesting for people who prefer dystopian sci-fi.
Me personally: I'm sure Earth could easily handle 100 billion people with current technology. And then we should expand into space. If we get immortal and able to improve without limits (transhumanism), we should limit population growth somewhat. But also allow people to spend years or decades travelling to other star systems and do as they please there.
[–] Thisismyvoatusername 0 points 1 point 1 point (+1|-0) ago
I really, truly do not understand the people who are convinced we are in imminent danger of overpopulating the planet and all dying of starvation and disease. Have they never studied the history of such forecasts?
[–] 8711675? 0 points 1 point 1 point (+1|-0) ago
Yes, but it involves a lot of Muslims and the killing isn't for population control.
[–] ShittyAdvice 0 points 1 point 1 point (+1|-0) ago
Read Heinlein.