[stoicShell]

Here's to one more step on the road to a Kardashiev type 1 civilization.

If we harness the power of fusion, we basically remove the biggest roadblock to a space-faring, galaxy-spanning civilization.

And we'd solve so many pressing problems right here within a few decades.

[fnord77]

in the book "Flight to the Stars: An Inquiry into the Feasibility of Interstellar Flight" by James Strong, the author theorizes the max-v of a generational ship would be about 15% the speed of light. It would take 450 years to get to the next closest star.

Spanning the galaxy would take hundreds of thousands of years, if not longer. There'd be next to no contact between earth and settlements more than a few light years away.

Not so sanguine about it solving near-term problems, either. We currently have exponentially more wealth than anytime in history, yet most of it is being hoarded by a small percent of the population. The benefits of cheap power will also be hoarded

[AnthonyMouse]

> Spanning the galaxy would take hundreds of thousands of years, if not longer. There'd be next to no contact between earth and settlements more than a few light years away.

Yeah, but they'd exist, which they don't right now.

> We currently have exponentially more wealth than anytime in history, yet most of it is being hoarded by a small percent of the population.

The "wealth" of today's billionaires exists almost entirely on paper. Even if Michael Dell has a huge house and a private jet and you don't, he doesn't spend most of his billions on himself. He uses it to own shares in his company. And the company uses it to make computers.

We have more wealth in the hands of corporations than at any time before in history, and there are some serious issues with that, but it isn't that they're somehow hoarding resources. Apple having a mountain of cash in an offshore subsidiary isn't why you can't afford housing -- that money is just somebody else's debt, not an actual consumption of resources.

And if you can make fusion work, it's the opposite. It doesn't matter if some people make a lot of money from it because the only way people will buy it is if it's better than the existing alternatives, which would imply that it's better than the existing alternatives. Which means you get cheaper electricity or less climate change or both. All they get is a pile of green paper they're probably never even going to spend all of.

[LessDmesg]

An average person today with e.g. a car, a shower and a smartphone with internet access is already richer than any of the kings of the past. Retirement plans also didn't exist or were not widespread. Dentistry and birthcare were either charlatanic or inaccesible etc. So no, wealth isn't "hoarded by a small percent of the population", we really are, the vast majority of us, richer than ever in history of man.

[dragonwriter]

> An average person today with e.g. a car, a shower and a smartphone with internet access is already richer than any of the kings of the past.

George VI was a “king of the past”; I don't think there is any reasonable general sense in which the average person today is richer than George VI. If you go to the distant enough past, this becomes arguably (and, farther, clearly) true, but also not at all meaningful.

> So no, wealth isn't "hoarded by a small percent of the population

Yes, it is; the narrow distribution of wealth is uncontrovertible.

> we really are, the vast majority of us, richer than ever in history of man.

That doesn't contradict that wealth is narrowly hoarded (that is, both narrowly distributed and that narrow distribution being the active choice of those who are in the narrow group receiving the most), and to the extent that it is true, it doesn't matter because, in fact, wealth is narrowly hoarded and it turns out that, once you get out of the most abject poverty, relative wealth matters more to experienced utility than absolute wealth.

[LessDmesg]

George VI didn't have access to millions of books at the palm of his hand, George VI couldn't get a Chevy or a flight to Tokyo, he couldn't get decent anesthesia or a quality tooth implant, and George VI couldn't play a video game for all his wealth. So no, George VI could only dream of the riches you command in your day.

No, narrow distribution of wealth IS controversible. All of the "super-rich" are mostly rich in terms of investment and assets, not actual money (i.e. wages). Jeff Bezos can't get all the hundreds of billions $$ that are attributed to him, they're not on his bank account: instead, they're paying wages to all the employees of his successful company as well as driving down costs for Amazon's customers.

And that's where you're most wrong: wealth does get shared, especially in the realms of technology. Computers, smartphones, the internet, combustion engines, electric cars, airplanes, hydroelectric and nuclear and solar energy etc. are all now accessible to the widest swathes of humanity. The rich might hold most of the worlds superyachts, but smaller yachts are much more widespread, and the vast majority of humanity can get a ship or a plane ride. What was once not affordable to a single person on Earth is now affordable by over 50% of adult population. There's no reason to believe fusion energy will be any less so.

[morelisp]

> George VI didn't have access to millions of books at the palm of his hand

He had access to any book he wanted within short order (less than day for anything in the UK, probably less than two for anywhere in Europe - and multiple massive libraries who would not refuse him access to any item in their collection). If your goal is "better books" rather than simply "more books" this seems preferable to my case where I can get any book one of a half-dozen retailers want me to have instantly.

> George VI couldn't get a Chevy

Uh, why not?

> or a flight to Tokyo

He famously died after postponing a flight to Australia, I'm pretty sure he could've made it to Tokyo if he wanted.

> he couldn't get decent anesthesia or a quality tooth implant

Neither of these is readily within the means of much of the US population, so weird example - but osseointegrative implants were available since the early 20th century. Anesthesia also becomes recognizably modern shortly after WW1.

Between this and the Chevy, I question if you have any idea when George VI lived.

> couldn't play a video game

This is absurd.

[dwaltrip]

If I'm richer than a king, why do I have to cook my own meals?

[zeeZ]

You can use your smartphone with internet access to have your meals delivered to you.

[dwaltrip]

I personally could afford to do that (not everyone with a car and smartphone can), but it wouldn't be a good use of my limited budget to do that for every meal.

[fnord77]

51% of the world has never used the internet (according to wikipedia, 2017). I doubt they have a car or a shower or retirement plans, either.

[SubuSS]

I like how you included your own speculations right besides a scientific (sounding - haven't read it) example :)

Wealth accumulation as many have pointed out is a very short term problem. In a way it is necessary as well if you want alternatives to depending on all powerful governments to move technology forward. In the process of the wealthy trying to multiply their wealth, they will use their current wealth as a giant amplifier. They may or may not succeed, but we can't deny that humanity moves forward as a whole with them.

Also to remain wealthy it isn't enough to just rest and vest: it is entirely possible to slip very quickly from the 0.1% to 1% to 10% to regular folk without actual tending. And no, how much ever reddit recommends it, I don't think s&p mutual funds are the answer if you are and want to keep being a part of the 0.1%. This is why I believe greed is a powerful motivator.

[de_watcher]

When you have something cheap it opens the whole new qualitative level of viable products as a result. Just like it was with aluminum. Fusion opens the access to the orbital ring family of the technologies.

[pfdietz]

At 15% of the speed of light, one gets to Alpha Centauri in about 30 years. 450 years would be the time it would take at about 1% of the speed of light.

[jotm]

Galaxy spanning? Did we find the ring? :D

But yeah, I'd be happy with just a solar system spanning civilization.

[stoicShell]

Haha I wish

The gist of it, according to experts, is that fusion is so cheap and powerful that it's like sailing on Earth: didn't take "that long" (few thousand years) before we circled all of it. So give us fusion, and given enough time, and few enough aliens (so far so good we've seen none), and they say we'll be all over the Galaxy, eventually even beyond.

Cool perspective if you ask me! Wish it were my time. BTW, check out "Isaac Arthur" on YouTube if you like this sorta topic, he's as hard as science-fiction gets. Awesome dude.

[usrusr]

But unlike the multi-generational effort of cathedral-building, sailing always came with the promise that a few lucky survivors might live to see the end of the voyage. Makes me wonder if under current laws conspiring to condemn your unborn children to life in the confines of a spaceship might have legal repercussions while still in earth.

(actually I'm not even sure about cathedrals, to the best of my limited knowledge the idea of starting them as multigenerational projects might just as well be a retrospective fiction. Are there sources that show that they were not just started I unrealistic schedule expectations?)

[stoicShell]

You're right about cathedrals, and it applies to several such big architecture projects (temples, etc). It's also how science operates when you think about it — that quest so far has always been far bigger than anyone, you know you'll die trying from the beginning, that you won't see where it all leads eventually.

There's a collection of vids by Isaac Arthur that might interest you: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H2f0Wd3zNj0&list=PLIIOUpOge0... The first one is called "generational ships" and talks exactly about that.

A few interesting points:

- such ships are likely to be orders of magnitude more 'modern', comfortable, heaven compared to anything we know in terms of habitat even on Earth — a very basic promise of space habitats is that you can make them much, much better than any planet can do 'randomly'; and that would happen far before we even think of physically going to another star.

- assuming generations on a ship, it's entirely possible that colonizing a planet feels "ancient", "backwards" to these people now born and raised in space; such "spatians" might just choose to remain so (bummer for the founders of the mission, but a decently good move for evolution too).

- there are several ways to "colonize" a distant world. One is to go there and breed on the way. Another is to send a genetic "boot" (think a few million distinct human DNAs that machines would grow in vitro just prior to arrival, AI to teach them whatever it is they need, etc). This is within known science, but maybe cryogenics are also possible (that's a third option then).

These questions become incredibly complex (and fascinating) the deeper you dig. I think we can rely on 'truths' that were valid for 'enough' generations as being 'plausibly also true' in the near future (symmetrically in time: so if something's been true for human beings for ~5000 years, then it stands to reason that it won't change before, on average, at least as long).

It should thus be observed that culturally, we are currently have an extremely short-term view in the Western world; there's a huge contrast with Asia in that regard — where it's not uncommon for businesses to plan for 2030-2040, and 2050-2060 looking at 2100 in politics. Think about it, that's only 3 generations away at the current rate. It's really not that far. It will be vastly different because tech, but also vastly the same because human beings.

Do watch that video, he talks about these things very astutely! :)

[pfdietz]

Which experts say fusion is going to be "cheap and powerful"? Because that's nonsense. I want to know which "experts" are poseurs we should be ignoring.