[dude01]

I really hate zero-sum thinking. It's true, if we were stuck on this ball of dirt forever, and technology is stagnant, then yes we should conserve a lot. But we're not stuck here (help Musk!), and technology will keep progressing. So I gotta say I completely disagree with this article.

[umanwizard]

> we’re not stuck here

Seems like we are. We’re very far from generalized space travel, and very close to ruining this planet.

> technology will keep progressing

What evidence do you have for such an optimistic assertion?

[tc7]

> What evidence do you have for such an optimistic assertion?

Wouldn't the burden of evidence here be on someone saying the opposite (that technological progress will stop)? Technology has continually progressed across human history, exponentially so in the very recent past. Do you think it will stop?

[pjc50]

> Technology has continually progressed across human history

This is the so-called "Whig view of history", and while it looks superficially true it ignores those cases where technologies have been lost, abandoned, become uneconomic to maintain, or given up for political reasons (e.g. China abandoning its exploration fleets).

How do you account for the European "dark ages", for example?

Collapse is possible: supply chains may be extremely vulnerable to certain risks, such as a war in Korea or an earthquake in Silicon valley. Decline is also possible: life expectancy is starting to fall in the US, as it did in Russia in the post-Communist period.

[trisimix]

People need to stop comparing the fall of pre aircraft civilizations to the fall of a post Internet civilization. You wouldnt compare the fall of the roman empire to the extinction of the dodos. We've made enough strives in technology to where it may be fun to say oh history repeats itself, but at this level of unexplored territory you're going to need facts to prove your point.

[ben_w]

Why? The technology being better does nothing for human nature. The very things that give us so much for so little also make us vulnerable to very small attacks. We have a police force that’s defeating out opponents for the time being, but as the IRA told Thatcher, the defenders need to be lucky every time, the attackers only need to be lucky once.

[magpi3]

>How do you account for the European "dark ages", for example?

The lack of a printing press? From what I have read, the creation of the printing press is what helped lift Europe out of the dark ages and presumably prevented it from ever returning to another one.

[mobilefriendly]

The latest thinking on the European dark ages is that they occurred because of the Huns-- they pushed hordes of other barbarian tribes into and overwhelming Rome, and brought Black Plague which killed half of Europe.

[domevent]

And we all know that mass migrations and plagues can’t happen today! No really, if anything the technology we have makes both of those things much harder to control. Climate change leads to drought and famine, which leads to political and social instability, war, and mass migration (as we’ve already seen recently). Those same forces, along with people loving cheek to jowel, with access to rapid mass transit, is a risk for plagues. The current “solution” is runaway spending on the military, and wars that seem to never end.

[sverige]

Where is climate change the root cause of mass migration?

[Fargren]

Technology has regressed seriously at least two times that I can think of. After the Sea People invaded Mesopotamia, and after the fall of the Roman Empire. Arguably in some ways after the colonization of America too, a lost of technological knowledge was lost. It took several centuries to recover from each of those, and technology right now depends on resources that are not renewable and that we are making more difficult to get. If we regressed again, it could take a very long time to recover, because of the exponential growth you mention.

[masklinn]

> After the Sea People invaded Mesopotamia

The eastern mediterranean basin. AFAIK Assyria wasn't directly affected, the polities directly affected were Mycenaean Greece (collapsed), the Hittite empire of Anatolia (collapsed) and the Kingdom of Egypt (which repelled the Sea People but likely at high cost).

The Assyrian Empire contracted at a later date, possibly as an indirect consequence of the collapse.

> If we regressed again, it could take a very long time to recover, because of the exponential growth you mention.

An other issue is the ability to access resources. As a civilisation progresses it consumes easily accessible non-renewable resources, the more it progresses the more difficult to access the resources it consumes entirely.

A civilisation following the collapse of the current globalist one would have a very, very hard time accessing non-renewable resources to fuel its growth.

[domevent]

This book discusses that time period I’m fine detail, and ultimately presents a very compelling series of perspectives. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/1177_B.C.:_The_Year_Civiliza...

If you’re familiar with the LBA collapse, you’ll enjoy the read.

[mobilefriendly]

North American pre-Columbian societies were all Stone Age and most were pre-literate. One of the most advanced, the Mayans, collapsed hundreds of years before Columbus. The most advanced Aztecs worked with metals but hadn't discovered the wheel (beyond toys) or bronze. No doubt the collapse from European contact resulted in tragic loss of life, loss of culture and loss of local knowledge of medicine and agriculture, but on net it actually ushered a wave of dramatic technological advancement among indigenous tribes-- particularly adoption of the horse and horse-riding, which the Spanish tried to make illegal. The tribes in North America that adopted the horse (and later, firearms) rapidly conquered the tribes that did not, until they were ultimately displaced in turn by European settlers.

[gonvaled]

During the 200 thousand years of human history, technological progress was pretty flat. Low hanging fruit like electricity and nuclear power took a long time to develop. Most of our dreams remain just that.

Recently, apart from CS and genetics, we are stagnant.

On top, progress is trickling down pretty badly. We are wasting lots of resources on conflicts, essentially to ensure that the one percenters keep their possessions, including means of production (so that capital can further concentrate).

We will probably lay the planet to waste, by wars and resource exploitation, much sooner than technology will advance enough to save us.

The ingeniuty of the human race is not its predominant feature.

[WJW]

> Recently, apart from CS and genetics, we are stagnant.

That seems a pretty weird argument to make. "Apart from all the people with black hair, nobody has black hair" These two fields alone are wide ranging enough that they can touch almost everything on earth. Furthermore, fields like material science have progressed an incredible amount due to widespread availability of computing power. So have agriculture, logistics, manufacturing, mining, medicine and education. We may yet destroy ourselves before we attain utopia, but it won't be because our technology is too stagnant.

[mobilefriendly]

There's no evidence that tech is stagnating but quite a lot that the pace is accelerating, perhaps geometrically. There are two reasons-- one is the integration of many more people into the western/global structure of scientific and material progress (particularly in Asia and South Asia) and the second is the complementary impact of advances across multiple fields. Consider for example, the enormous impact of internet communications tech on medical research.

The Wright brothers, working in a bicycle shop, invented fixed wing flight in 1903 and it took less than 100 years for western civilization to develop jumbo jets and space planes.

[arkano]

> Recently, apart from CS and genetics, we are stagnant.

Are we? And also, the developments in CS (and computational science, in general) seem to speed-up discovery in other fields more and more.

[perfmode]

Every exponential is actually a slice of a sigmoid.

[nafey]

How does one objectively decide on whom the burden of proof lies? Genuinely curious not trolling

[checkyoursudo]

It is generally considered impossible to prove a negative. Even if you can prove that something is not now the case, it is usually not possible to prove that it will never happen.

Therefore, the burden of proof is usually assigned, fairly objectively, to the argument that makes a positive claim, e.g., that something will happen or something is true, etc.

In this case, the claims are: 1) I believe space faring technology will advance enough to the point that humans will be able to leave our planet permanently, and 2) I am skeptical of 1.

Two is like the null hypothesis. This cannot be proven; it is the default until #1 is proven. Therefore, #1 should objectively have the burden of proof.

Kind of like how financial disclaimers will include something like "past performance is not proof of future results".

It's not that the claim that "technology will continue to progress forward" is wrong. I think it's a reasonable belief. But that is not itself proof that it will continue on. Reasonableness of a claim is not proof of its truth. Intuition is not very good evidence.

Even if we assume that technological progress will be effectively infinite, that doesn't mean that any specific technology will come to exist.

[mLuby]

Don't think it can be decided "objectively", but we usually assume the ordinary scenario is correct and require more evidence the more extraordinary the deviation from the norm (AKA Occam's razor).

Sometimes we explicitly agree on a position, as with the US's "innocent until proven guilty."

[dsign]

FWIW I share your point of view. The article is as political as the game itself, they just take opposite stances.

That said, there is a kernel of a judicious argument about Progress in Real Life (PRL) and 4X games, and that's that real-life progress is deliciously complex, full of accidents and unpredictable. Real life progress is a roller coaster that for the most part goes up (don't take my word, just lookup the data), but people step on it coked to the bone on that opiate called "the news", and boy they are going to throw up to the smallest lurch ... but I digress...

4X games on the other hand lack all the complex system amplifiers, which is to expect because well they need to run in far more modest hardware than PRL, and for most people the 4X game itself is a relatively mild psychotropic that they use to counteract the effects of daily boredom and of the nick drugs : the apocalyptic phantasmagoria of click-bait media.

[ebbv]

This is equivalent to thinking "Well I'll keep making more money forever and I could win the lottery so I don't need to save for retirement."

[wyager]

If humanity “retires” we’re guaranteed to go extinct anyway. At the very least there are periodic extinction-level asteroid impacts that will wipe us out if we stay earthbound.

[rebuilder]

If we consume too much, we'll never make it off the planet.

[krona]

If we consume too little, there will never be the required return on investment required to attract the capital required to make it off the planet.

[wyager]

The main limiting resource is energy, and we have enough coming from the sun to increase our consumption by several orders of magnitude.

The second limiting resource is low societal time preference, which I’m afraid we might run out of.

[trisimix]

Yeah this guy mentions stellaris then dismisses it when actually it solves most of these problems. More than what he mentioned can happen to your society to set it back.