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[–] Mathurin1911 0 points 1 point (+1|-0) ago 

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.

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[–] rwbj 0 points 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!

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[–] Mathurin1911 0 points 1 point (+1|-0) ago 

I have never declared installing humans on mars impossible, I am certain it could be. Merely extremely difficult to the point of not being done.

Think of it like this, who lives in Antartica? A staff of scientists and their support staff, and virtually nobody else. And that is a place with Oxygen. It is only there for research, funded at a loss by governments, once governments decide they are done supporting it, it is gone. People are there just to be there, they dont live there, they visit. That is not a colony, it is at best an outpost.

For an alternate option, arctic mining. http://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/stunning-photos-of-a-siberian-gold-mine-only-accessible-by-air-or-ice-road They pull gold from the ground in an incredibly inhospitable place, but because there is gold, there is funding to have people, that is how I envision space colonies, with stations set up on small moons or in lagrange points, built solely to service mining machines and the humans who service them. Even that isnt truly a colony, its a fly in fly out job, with perks installed by the company to draw people in.

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.

As a former restauranteur and current food manufacturing employee, this is only half true.

Burger flipping robots can be done, and we are seeing larger chains working towards that end, but, they arent done because restaurants remain a high risk enterprise, with an astonishing number of them failing very fast. Thus you have lots of humans, because while they are inefficient over time, in the short term they are cheaper than all the money spent on automation, for now. Robots are really expensive, getting cheaper. I think the next big moneymaker will be leasing automated restaurant equipment out on a monthly basis. The "burgermaster 5000" that slots into the kitchen and can produce burgers. Another is we havent truly found out how to automate cleaning, and cleaning is SUUUPER important for food safety, also super destructive to equipment.

Regardless, people worry about automation destroying jobs, I dont, in the last 100 years we have automated like crazy AND live longer working lives AND we brought women into the workforce, and somehow we are not plagued by a shortage of jobs. If history follows this trend, we will have more stuff per hour of labor put in, that is usually a good thing.

In the long run, I suspect advancing automation will effectively destroy scarcity of basic goods, making all our current economic models obsolete, but its basically impossible to accurately predict what will come of that.