[Voultapher]

As much as I'm in favor of moving towards renewables, we are still destroying our biosphere, and the resources needed for renewables are not renewable ...

> Energy transition aspirations are similar. The goal is powering modernity, not addressing the sixth mass extinction. Sure, it could mitigate the CO2 threat (to modernity), but why does the fox care when its decline ultimately traces primarily to things like deforestation, habitat fragmentation, agricultural runoff, pollution, pesticides, mining, manufacturing, or in short: modernity. Pursuit of a giant energy infrastructure replacement requires tremendous material extraction—directly driving many of these ills—only to then provide the energetic means to keep doing all these same things that abundant evidence warns is a prescription for termination of the community of life.

https://dothemath.ucsd.edu/2022/09/death-by-hockey-sticks/

Humanity needs to let go of the fantasy of endless growth, which permeates through our cultures, economies and politics. Life on this earth is a co-op, you can't win by being the last species alive, or at least your wining will look very sad and be short lived. If you think endless growth is a viable strategy, go and ask your neighborhood slime mold in a petri dish what it thinks.

[nazgul17]

Before growth became a thing, it was a zero sum game. Nasty setup for harmonious living.

[gsf_emergency_2]

Yes! Nonrenewables+greenhouse gases. Are a zero-sum game with Earth.

Problem is, locally, a zero-sum game can look quite non-zero-sum (as opposed to globally). And perhaps vice versa too (in time scales, eg universally)

I'm all in on renewables+albedo driven globally pos-sum games :)

(Until heat death of solar system)

[bwestergard]

Do you mean that "Before [economic] growth became a thing, [life] was a zero sum game?". I'm genuinely unsure what you mean by that. By any measure, the history of life on earth has seen many ups and downs in biodiversity. So the flourishing of one species often coincided with the flourishing of many other related species. A well-known example would be various pollinating insects and birds and the flowers they pollinated in the early cretaceous.

[fch42]

If you mean "eat or get eaten", then there's a few early red flags that the pursuit of growth and decarbonisation concurrently may well lead us back to that idea. There's a strong correlation in politics worldwide of extreme xenophobia with climate change denial, and growth-focus with "others pollute more than us".

If you think "carbon budget" then it's compelling to grow yours at the expense of others.

[ETH_start]

We are not confined to Earth. Currently something like 99.9999999% of the energy radiated by the sun is emitted into empty space, where it is completely wasted. That can all be harvested.

To put that into perspective, our civilization could use 20 trillion times more energy than it does now if it harvested the sun's entire output.

[lostlogin]

> We are not confined to Earth.

A couple of humans can go to space in that they can go up for short stints. The rest of us are confined to earth for the foreseeable future. Even if we weren’t, I’d like the place kept nice.

[ETH_start]

The energy harvesting infrastructure can extend beyond Earth while we live here.

With advanced launch capabilities we can also build much more livable habitats beyond Earth than the ISS.

And yes, we should keep Earth nice, but we don't need to limit economic development to do that.

[henearkr]

There is a right order in which to do these things:

1) enable space harvesting of energy and minerals,

2) unleash growth.

Doing 2) first as we are is just planetary-scale suicide.

We should even first concentrate on 0) figure out how to preserve the biosphere liveability, and stick to these rules.

[ETH_start]

I respectfully disagree. There are vast opportunities, even on Earth, to expand energy generation without overloading the environment — such as utilizing arid lands for large-scale solar farms and expanding nuclear power, among other solutions.

That said, I believe a robust space economy is imminent, not some distant uncertainty. Starship has already had partially successful test launches, and if it follows the same trajectory as the reusable Falcon 9, we will soon have a fully reusable vehicle capable of delivering 150 tons to low-Earth orbit per launch.

If Musk follows through on his ambition to develop a fleet large enough to transport the materials needed for a self-sustaining Martian civilization, we could see an explosion in lift capacity within the next decade or two, radically transforming the scale of human expansion into space.

[gf000]

Even a post-ww3 nuclear wasteland Earth with climate catastrophe is orderS of more habitable than anything else in the Solar system.

Musk is a scammer and is dumb as a rock on any technological question.

Also, energy is useless if it's not where you actually want to use it, and transporting it is expensive/lossy.

The cheapest energy is one which doesn't have to be used up to begin with, and we could optimize the existing workflow much more, over some child-dream Martian scam.

[ben_w]

Starship is only a breakthrough compared to the status quo; compared to the scale needed to unlock even a full K1 power consumption it's about as close as the 25m swimming certificate I got as a kid is to swimming across the Atlantic from Lisbon to Miami… 276,400 times.

K2 is 10 orders of magnitude harder than K1.

Using rockets at all for K2 is a terrible idea, as you are forced to start treating oxygen as a mineral to be extracted from rocks, because there isn't enough in Earth's atmosphere… by 8 orders of magnitude.

[throwawayqqq11]

I think you are very delusional.

1) "Opportunities on earth" will always be more efficient in many aspects. Cost, waste, energy demand, reliability, throughput to provide for the 99% remaining on earth, the ones we actually try to solve problems for. You are ignoring cost-benefit analysis, scaling factors and side effects.

2) You are betting on space industries to compete and replace earth bound processes but only give launch capabilities as an argument. I think there are vast uncertainties and unknowns to overcome. Even if it plays out as you imagine, it will probably neither happen in your lifetime nor in next generations. All the while we continue to damage your foundation because we chase a pie in the sky.

3) Shooting for mars is idiotic. Going for the moon yields similar results and is much "easier". From there the rest of the solar system gets closer to us but please keep in mind, I am still not talking about self sustaining colonies or industries. Given that our earth still provides plenty, shooting for space in general is idiotic imo. If I had to bet on a technical long shot solution, I would go for nuclear fusion instead of bezos/musk, who I suspect to be equally delusional.

Please read closely. Id like to tell you something about population dynamics.

Maybe you have heard about the malthusian point of crisis, where food demand overshoots supply and a population starts to decline/collapse. This picture is incomplete.

Every species faces 3 categories of destabilizing threats: resources/nutriment, waste products and selective factors (a general term for internal/external stressors like predators, war, diseases, catastrophes, etc). All of our man made problems fit into one of these categories! In the long run, every species has to solve these problems!

Pointing at the potential resources and space for landfills beyond earth will not free you from these constraints, it just extend your grace period and enables you to pretend to have solved anything. An actual self sustaining colony means producing _and recycling_ everything, from the vital technology stack down to every day products. If any tech billionaire ever reaches that awareness of the problem and a solution for it, then why build it in space?!

What we need is a circular, sustainable econmy, which is also a big moonshot, unfortunately. But either way, the realization of the problems we face is the first step. CO2 is just one our urgent waste products. Can you name a second one with global implications?

[1propionyl]

> livable habitats beyond Earth

Fetuses do not properly develop in the womb outside of Earth gravity.

Sorry. End of the road for that sci-fi pipe dream.

[ETH_start]

Artificial gravity can easily be created through centrifugal force.

[lodovic]

Don't discount the energy and materials required to build that Dyson sphere

[notfed]

> That can all be harvested.

Can it? How?

[aqueueaqueue]

We don't have tech to do that and I cannot see it happening this century

[ETH_start]

Starship will reduce the cost to send a kilogram of mass into orbit by ten to a hundredfold, meaning the cost will come down to something in the order of $100 or even down to $20 per kilogram, from its current cost of $1,500. This is not science fiction, this is totally feasible in the foreseeable future.

[aqueueaqueue]

We don't need to do this. Just put the panels on this planet. And fix the politicians brain worms / fear of other politicians with brain worms.

If we can't get a solar panel on our roofs I can't see the impetus to get them up past the moon.

[gf000]

And then what, you put up a cable to it able to withstand the whole atmosphere? Also, what about space debris hitting it, rotating the panels? Each one will be able to align properly or do they need a way to self-align? Do you think any of that will be able to compete with... A dumb panel here on Earth that itself continues to be cheaper each year, or more efficient production lines requiring less power to begin with?

[ben_w]

I can see it happening, compounding growth has a way of doing that.

But, given how we keep rushing into predictable disasters, I now expect to live to experience personally, first hand, a K2-level Kessler cascade from the inside.

When people figure out the missing parts of VN replicators, that all happens over a handful of decades.