this post was submitted on 30 Sep 2024
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They're both important. And crucially, people in developed countries use a lot more resources than those in undeveloped countries. Just look at the resource utilization of our richest people. We have billionaires operating private rocket companies! If somehow, say due to really really good automation, orbital rockets could be made cheap enough for the average person to afford, we would have average middle class people regularly launching rockets into space and taking private trips to the Moon. Just staggering levels of resource use. If we could build and maintain homes very cheaply due to advanced robotics, the average person would live in a private skyscraper if they could afford it. Imagine the average suburban lot, except with a tower built on it 100 stories tall. If it was cheap enough to build and maintain that sort of thing, that absolutely would become the norm.
The only billionaire I know of that is launching rockets is Elon Musk.
That's just evidence that capitalism is efficient. Because SpaceX has revolutionised space travel making the only reusable rocket doing something all the government agencies said was impossible. NASAs new unbuilt rocket is using tech from the 1970 that they are going to throe away into the ocean on every launch.
The rest you say is meaningless. How you expect this robotic skyscrapers to be built? Some MIT masters project or some capitalist experiment?
Bezos also has a rocket company. Plus there's Richard Branson. And others.. And then you have private jet travel, massive mega yachts, and countless other extravagances. For a certain class of billionaire, having a private rocket company is a vanity project. These rocket companies are vanity projects by rich sci fi nerds. Yes, they've done some really good technical work, but they're only possible because their founders were willing to sink billions into them even without any proof they'll make a profit.
What you are missing is that as people's wealth increases, their resource use just keeps going up and up and up. To the point where when people are wealthy enough, they're using orders of magnitude more energy and resources than the average citizen of even developed countries. Billionaires have enough wealth that they can fly rockets just because they think they're cool, even if they have no real path to profitability.
And no, the hypothetical of the robot skyscrapers is not "meaningless." You just have a poor imagination. To have that type of world we only need one thing - a robot that can build a copy of itself from raw materials, or a series of robots that can collectively reproduce themselves from raw materials gathered in the environment. Once you have self-replicating robots, it becomes very easy to scale up to that kind of consumption on a broad scale. If you have self-replicating robots, the only real limit to the total number you can have on the planet is the total amount of sunlight available to power all of them.
The real point isn't the specific examples I gave. The point, which you are missing entirely, is that total resource use is a function of wealth and technological capability. Raw population has very little impact on it. If our automation gets a lot better, or something else makes us much wealthier, we would see vast increases in total resource use even if our population was cut in half.
It's not meaningless in itself. Its meaningless to the conversation. It's literally a hypothetical you invented for no reason. You're just rambling.
Are you actually trying to claim that if the population was much smaller than it is today total resource use across the globe would be the same?
Because if not my point stands.
A lot of people think rockets can be very profitable. Its just a long term bet and you lack imagination. I would need to check but I'm pretty certain spacex is profitable.
Those other companies are still in R and D.