[caskstrength]

> As a human, I have a human-centric mindset. I don’t want to live in the forest with rain filling up my mud floor. I like nice things.

I think the whole discussion is about which amount of humans on this planet would maximize the probability of having nice things for each individual. Certainly it would be hard for you to have nice things when there is only a million humans on Earth, but probably even more so if there is a trillion of them around.

[alexey-salmin]

Hopefully with a trillion people around we'll figure out a good source of energy that'll deliver both prosperity on earth and interplanetary travel

[caskstrength]

There would be some significant tradeoffs necessary for maintaining a trillion people population on Earth no matter the energy cost. Even if you assume cheap and abundant cold fusion energy source, living in mcmansion and eating avocado toasts with wild salmon is likely out of the question.

[alexey-salmin]

I don't think it's the case. If you have truly free energy then transformation of matter in whatever you want it to be becomes a purely technological question.

And in any case, having spaceships and no avocado is much better than the inverse.

[caskstrength]

> I don't think it's the case. If you have truly free energy then transformation of matter in whatever you want it to be becomes a purely technological question.

Some purely technological problems are hard to solve. There is already a market for (very expensive) meat substitutes and they taste like crap. If you are talking about some sci-fi "replicator" tech that will just "synthesize" you and avocado, then I'm not sure how achievable that is in short or medium-term irrespective to energy prices.

> And in any case, having spaceships and no avocado is much better than the inverse.

Much better for whom? OP said they like "nice things". I would also prefer avocados to spaceships since I'm not that interested in space travel without FTL.

[sokoloff]

> There is already a market for (very expensive) meat substitutes and they taste like crap.

Impossible is pretty decent tasting for ground beef substitute, IMO. The pricing is currently not competitive or inline with its utility value, but I could see that changing much faster than any colonize-space or make earth pleasant for 12 billion people projects.

[alexey-salmin]

A trillion of humans is not short-term either

> Much better for whom? OP said they like "nice things". I would also prefer avocados to spaceships since I'm not that interested in space travel without FTL.

For humans and for avocados. The sun is doomed and so are they, unless we manage to scale our available energy by many orders of magnitude.

[kmstout]

As long as there's coffee.