There are very few people with a disability who wouldn’t want it to have been prevented or cured. “A healthy man has many dreams. A sick man has only one.”

Voluntary acts aren’t eugenics, otherwise you get absurd things like free choice of mates being eugenics because you are choosing, or any medical treatment being eugenics if it touches genetics or reproduction. Eugenics should be defined as meaning only authoritarian (directly or via state backed “social engineering”) forms.

This is the same fallacy, but taken toward rather than away from infinite possibility, that underlies things like the Club of Rome’s world models and their limits to growth thesis.

Zoom way out and the details disappear. Look only at aggregate statistics and extrapolate. Do this and you tend to get graphs that go to infinity (this paper) or to zero (limits to growth).

But the details are where things actually happen.

Also look up computational irreducibility, which is kind of another way of approaching what I’m getting at here. You can only treat details in aggregate for systems whose causality is strictly hierarchical. If one detail can change the whole system, every detail must be considered or a simulation is invalid.

Turns out that living systems are like this.

SETI BTW is kind of a joke. The only way we would hear anything is if someone was very close or was intentionally blasting a signal at us at incredible transmit power (like terawatts or more). Radio signals fade pretty quickly.

It’s hard for humans not to get bogged down in base desires, period, because of the dopamine system.

Eliminate the AI variable entirely and the problem remains, therefore AI is not the problem.

With superconductors you can make magnetic bottles.

There’s also some interesting inertial confinement work happening. There the limiter is both confinement and the efficiency of the driver. Look up MagLIF for a hybrid magnetic inertial approach under study.

And yes, space flight is brutally hard. Look up the history of sailing. Look up the Polynesian indigenous peoples and how long that took, through multiple waves of exploration, or the people who walked across a land bridge to North America during the ice age. Space flight is easier and safer than some of those feats, given the tech they did it with at the time.

If there is a fantasy it’s the idea that we’d have bases on the Moon and Mars by now. What we are doing today is the equivalent of early Polynesians hollowing out some logs and going fishing.

You’ll probably get one of three outcomes: regulatory capture by monopolies, self dealing by bureaucrats to enrich themselves or gain power, or regulatory capture by self absorbed ideologues who halt all progress or force it down some ideologically approved path.

In none of those scenarios is anything aligned with the best interest of the people.

I’m a little obsessed with Orion though. The fact that the math works on that lunacy. The good old devil’s pogo stick.

If you could make pure fusion bombs it would be maybe politically viable, especially if you also use superconducting magnets to make it less just brute force. You’d still induce a little radioactivity from neutrons but it would be short lived and not even close to fissile fallout bad.

To see that thing launch. From somewhere very remote though, probably Antarctica. And from many miles away, and probably with welders glass. But damn. That would be epic.

As far as censorship goes, it’s clear that the deeper problem is that mega social media doesn’t scale. When the aforementioned loud obnoxious minorities invade, it becomes totally untenable.

If you don’t censor you end up with either a Nazi bar or a Tumblr struggle session. If you do censor you end up with either a boring milquetoast platform or a censored echo chamber that just reflects the beliefs of the people running it. None of those things are appealing to most people.

As a medium for real communication it just doesn’t scale. Places like HN are tolerable because they’re small enough to be actually moderated and to self police. This is also why real discourse has moved to Discord, Slack, Telegram, Signal, and private sites.

Maybe brain rot is the platforms attempt to fill the void left by the fact that discourse doesn’t scale. This might alter my view slightly. My take has been that platforms push brain rot to be addictive, and there may be truth in that, but maybe that was more a later move to try to save the platform’s user numbers after the collapse of social media as a productive discourse medium in the late 20-teens.

In the end it’s that social media just failed.

Life may not be that unusual but it might be mostly just goo: little extremophile type bacteria and maybe very tiny creepy crawlies living in deep seas, underground, in liquid mantles in ice moons, etc.

But to get stuff even as sophisticated as frogs and bunnies, let alone something that can try space flight, requires a place that is all of: big, stable, with abundant energy, with high enough metallicity, and in an environment well shielded from flares and impacts.

There may not be a lot of places like this.

So no space program from a super Earth until they figure out not just fusion but compact high density fusion that could fly. You’d need stuff like in The Expanse, or at least in that rough ballpark.

Using fission is something they probably wouldn’t do unless they faced an existential reason forcing them to go to space, like deflecting an asteroid.

Note that all the fatalities have been launch or landing related, not in space itself. Clawing out of this gravity well is tough. Make Earth a bit larger and you’d never get off it without something like NERVA or nuclear pulse Orion.

I wonder sometimes if that’s another thing to toss in the Fermi paradox bucket. Many rocky planets might be much more massive than Earth. On one with 3X our gravity a space program might never get going.

What’s left is brain rot and its addicts.