[yodsanklai]

> this is precisely the kind of thing that will help humanity outgrow the dark age of war, inequality and climate mismanagement.

Is that irony or plain naiveness? historically and technically, conquest of space is inseparable from warfare. As for climate change, one can argue that technology is one of the primary driver: aviation alone is estimated to 4% of global temperature rise.

[fc417fc802]

Energy use is the driver. Fossil fuels happen to be cheap. It's effectively a coincidence, nothing inherent to technological progress itself except insofar as something like aviation would never have been a commercial success without an exceedingly cheap, dense, and portable method of energy storage. Solar-syngas and solar-battery would have eventually gotten there but we'd all have been taking trains and ships for the past 80 years while riding electrified public transit.

[yodsanklai]

Energy and tech are two sides of the same coin

[fc417fc802]

Not really. Most tech doesn't use much energy at all. It's not uncommon for advances to reduce energy usage.

Granted that as something becomes cheaper and easier we tend to scale it up but that's not really a tech thing it's more like a natural force that applies in equal measure to literally everything. It goes beyond humans; all living organisms will exploit available resources to the extent possible provided that doing so increases fitness.