[birdsbirdsbirds]

Why should there be a limit? If you can command robots to build anything you can ever imagine, who doesn't want his own Versailles - with impressive towers like the Burj Khalifa? Who doesn't want to fly their jet or space rocket just for fun to the moon and back?

And humans will be humans. There will be new games, like drone wars on distant planets, where any production capacity and energy will be used. And since everything is very efficient, there will be no food left for birds or even poor humans.

[mlac]

I don’t. There is the consideration that more money comes with more problems. You can say that more money would fix those problems, but at the end of the day, you still had to spend energy thinking about it.

You can quickly approach a situation where time is the limiting factor. In this case I think that the private jet or extremely fast transportation allows you to get some time back. Beyond that you might have one or two projects that you really enjoy, like a palace, but you don’t really have enough time to handle much more. Elon is a good example: he’s got a few projects that he really cares about and does them at an extreme scale. He effectively has unlimited resources but he would not make any progress on his three major initiatives if he was much more fragmented than he is.

And if you run this to the extreme, the true cost of overconsumption creates the problem of environmental damage and negative externalities on others that can wind you up like Marie-Antoinette.

Plenty of other people are happy with minimalism. And that can be hard for some folks to understand if they aren’t minimalists.

[eggsmediumrare]

I agree. All I want is peace. Time with my family and friends, a garden, time to read, that kind of thing. Why anyone bothers with loud cars or big houses with huge lawns is beyond me.

[jodrellblank]

I don't; one can only drive one car at a time, one can only be in one room at a time, one can only eat one stomach full of food in a given period, one can only read/watch/experience at most 24 hours of media in a day.

Once your Versailles is big enough, you won't be able to walk it in a day. Once it's bigger than that, you won't be able to drive its length in a day. Once it's bigger than that, you won't be able to travel its length in a lifetime at light speed. There's a limit for you. But you likely won't want to spend your entire life travelling at lightspeed to the far wing of your house, then die. So that drops the limit enormously.

What does it mean for it to be "your Versailles" - could you draw or depict Versailles in detail from memory? How will you verify that your clone is exactly like the original? Do you care? Do you really mean that you get to design your own mega-palace? So now you spend your life choosing furnishings and layouts and architectural details - hope you like that kind of passtime, because there's a lot of it. But if you don't like that, why bother having "your Versailles" instead of going to look at someone else's for a few hours? Or look at a picture, for that matter? What are you going to do with your Versailles? Are you a king or queen with courtiers and subjects so that you can have extravagant parties? Are you going to organise the food and cleaning and heating that the robots do?

How old are you, were you around when computers ran at Khz speeds? And now you have effectively "infinite computing power", you spend your time commenting about Bitcoin on HN - why aren't you simulating your own Virtual Versailles and flights to the moon and stuff? Because it's not that interesting now you can do it? Endless hedonism is boring.

> "Who doesn't want to fly their jet or space rocket just for fun to the moon and back?"

OK, that's taken a week of sitting in a tiny box waiting and doing nothing. What about the rest of your entire life?

Listing fancy sounding things is what religions do to entrap people with dreams of heavenly afterlives. All you have to do is look around you at all the things you once wanted, and suddenly don't once you attain them - the drawer of abandoned Raspberry Pies is a common one for HN people to notice, then start to internalise that you can have any film ever made delivered to you from Amazon for a few bucks, and you don't, you can't think of a film you'd rather watch than comment "Make your own exchange." on a Robinhood thread on HN. Got a wardrobe of too many clothes? Got boxes of unused stuff? A garage of tools and spares?

[birdsbirdsbirds]

Endless hedonism is boring until there is competition. DenisM mentions status in his comment. Status will demand Versailles bigger than can be passed at light speed during a life, just to impress. There will be galaxies full of combat drones, just to keep the balance in fighting power.

[jodrellblank]

I already have everything in the Universe outside your lightcone as my personal Versailles most remote wings, and you can't prove otherwise. My robots are on their way back and information about them will arrive with you approximately a second after you die, whenever that is.

See what a pointless status grab it is? If it's outside all possible knowledge, it may as well be lies (it's not though). You can play Elite: Dangerous if you want a galaxy full of combat, and it's happening right now and better than the rest of the Milky Way there are actual players and ships and things and not silent void. The main lesson I took away from Elite Dangerous is that the Galactic PowerPlay between all the major factions can never end. If it ends, if one side can dominate and win, there is no way for another faction to recover from that without a reset and restart, like all games - play, end, restart.

> "Endless hedonism is boring until there is competition"

Competition doesn't need ever increasing resource use and hedonism, it's not the resource use which captivates people (but it can make a spectacle); competition is fine with animals running, with kickball, with Chess - 32 pieces on 64 squares creates world champions, millionaires, tournaments, audiences, lifelong obsessed people, gambling opportunities, it doesn't need galaxy spanning resource use. The thing about competition is that you can't be Usain Bolt or Magnus Carlsen or John Carmack just by throwing more resources at it. At the point where you can say "I have a Versailles on every planet in the Milky Way" and someone else says "so what, everyone has", there's no competition there. If you claim you can win the Tour de France on a bike in a small region of Earth, people will sit up and take notice.

[birdsbirdsbirds]

What if it's not about keeping individual humans comfortable with nice experiences but about growing the amount of awareness? We think of humans as a resource problem but they are also the source of innovation and creativity. Will resources be limited if there is the chance to grow the number of aware beings to new heights with the potential to reach new levels of civilization?