O'Neill Space Stations on 99% Invisible podcast

[DBowman]

On 7/6/2016 at 4:09 AM, Nibb31 said:

There is also no rush to start now. Statistically, the difference between an Earth-destroying "unexpected disaster" that hasn't occured in a billion years happening in the next 50 years, vs in 2000 years is practically nil.

The trouble is (to paraphrase Walter White from Breaking Bad ) "we are the disaster". We have been messing up ecosystems since we developed agriculture, since the renaissance we have really 'stepped it up a notch' - already the natural world is ... well I guess almost gone altogether, and even the unnatural parts of the ecosphere are under direct immanent and serious threat from us. Life on Earth is a one time, unique, actually awesome thing - it's the end point of billions of years of 'game play' with no save points, no backup, and perma death. We should try not to trash it.

I'm a 'tech will save us' kind of guy but it's pretty worrying really. World pop in 2100 could be anywhere from 16 to 6 billion. At the moment only about 1 billion live high on the hog energy & material intensive lifestyles, and it seems clear we have already outstripped the earth's ability to accommodate us gracefully.

It's not clear to me that even the best case demographic revolution of female education etc will save the natural world. Imagine we 'get over the hump' and come out the other side with high tech (because only tech will get us there), lower impact (there is no zero), and lower population (or we'll make a wasteland). When longevity improvements kick in the population will grow again. Probably most people will decide 'lets have kids, it's neat, make two so they have sibs'. Some won't maybe till they partner with someone who wants, maybe 'late in life', some will early - but it's reasonable to think on average everyone would think 'yes, just one mini me'. When longevity starts lets say 25% of the population will have not had kids yet (currently 26% are under 15, so probably it's higher) - if life span goes from 80 to 200 years then the population will increase 2.5 times, if lifespan pushes out to 400 years population will be 5x pre longevity - 30 billion best case.

Moving the centre of gravity of human activity off the Earth gives us the possibility of saving the natural world. Obviously it's not a no brainer, or easy, or near term - but it seems worth thinking about.

[kerbiloid]

36 minutes ago, DBowman said:

When longevity improvements kick in the population will grow again. Probably most people will decide 'lets have kids, it's neat, make two so they have sibs'

Or they will decide: "Look, the baby of us already has 100 sibs in the kindergarden."

Probably, once being stabilized, the population will never grow again. Also because most efforts will be put on the adults' life duration.
And when you are 200 years old, you can hardly distinguish generations of your descendants, and for the 3rd-4th generation you're just "one of our numerous great-grandfathers", as they are for you.
Also if several generations of people have the same social/emotional/intellectual/etc age (30, 40, 100, 200, ... — all of them look like 70 lol ), the parent-child relations will be blurred.

So, unlikely a birth race would take place.
Looks more likely if "a hundred years ago we had a common child with that person, probably some of that people are my great-grandchildren, need to google up their DNA signature" or so.

Edited July 11, 2016 by kerbiloid

[DBowman]

1 minute ago, kerbiloid said:

Probably, once being stabilized, the population will never grow again.

Without other information the best predictor of future behaviour is past behaviour and human population has historically grown inexorably and pretty much monotonically. I agree that the current exponential increases are probably (hopefully) temporary and will stabilise - given people keep dying off on schedule.

I'm not suggesting a 'race' - all it takes is everyone at one time in their life having one child plus longevity to blow out the population by 2, 5, ... times the baseline. There is no reason to think the current 'urge' (probably / possibly deeply hardwired into us) will abate. Even in the current first world it's only dropped a tiny bit below replacement, and it's probably not because there are 'enough people already' - it's because with modern med and education two is the new 'enough'. The only reason some first world countries populations are stable / declining is there is not yet longevity. With longevity they will stabilise again, but the longer the longevity the higher the multiple of baseline.

[kerbiloid]

2 hours ago, DBowman said:

With longevity they will stabilise again, but the longer the longevity the higher the multiple of baseline.

When occasional mortality will equalize intentional fertility, they will produce a oscillating long-term equilibrium.
Say, 900 years ago some person had eaten something wrong, due to this 800 years you have got a honorable duty to born a child instead, and performed this 90 years later.

Edited July 11, 2016 by kerbiloid

[Diche Bach]

On 7/3/2016 at 0:23 PM, RenegadeRad said:

Guys don't hate on me but what Nibb31 says is the hard truth. There is no point colonizing planets right now, first we need to fix our own world. Once perfect enough and we have loads of extra resources, we can explore and colonize for science. Especially if it benefits us with resources like Karbonite in KSP...

A very BS example I have (in a retrospective) is the lore of Independence day. They made ESD because they needed to survive from outside threats...

A bit optimistic what I said, but better than being that edgy teen who says nothing will happen.

Well . . . "eventually" Sol will balloon into a red giant and make life on Earth untenable . . . but 2 or 3 billion years is a pretty reasonable "foreseeable future" during which we can get out act together before we go on the road!