The more I complain about not wanting to do anything, the more shit I end up doing. Imagine Frankenstein Happy.
But that's not what I want to talk about. I'm reading A City On Mars and the topic that is screaming to me is infrastructure. Plenty of energy out there, same as here. Ah, but infrastructure, like we have on Earth? That costs a lot of money.
Not just money, lives, little bees what live in tomorrow's trees and make the honey money; us busy little creatures. How are you going to get a million people on Mars, like Elon Musk wants? (BTW, a viable Martian colony starts at 100 million people, assuming one person can wear two hats).
Material, wanted material, needs to be gathered and distilled same as down here. We have the same infrastructure problem as here, but you are doing it out there; in a Solar System with no free air, water, gravity, radiation shield, a microbial ecosystem of unknown benefactors?
The thing on Earth is the distilling and transport of materials - since the Modern Age - been energy cheap, but still material scarce. Or rather, the right kind of material. Before modern times, we were energy scarce but materially wealthy. Slaves extracted and distilled the material from vast sources. Not so much now. And, what good is a ten million trillion dollar platinum asteroid? Except maybe as a threat to drop it on someone?
The infrastructure problem of space for space is just too big, because space is too big and spread out. You need big, huge infrastructure to do the job. The argument is but we will have so much energy. Yes, you'll need it. Even though E=mc2, you need infrastructure to do that. Big time, long term, and the only way that happens is to involve government. That should worry you. As I've argued before, governments are the AI we've been worrying about, and corporations more limited version of these monstrous.. monsters.
The objective function of your government may not coincide with your comfort zone. Most educated US citizens are well aware of the horrific beastly shenanigans of our adolescent corporate self, a 360 million cell slime mold living on a globe of slime molds, each snarling and snapping at pseudopod limbs.
What to do about this big kaiju? Become a virus, I guess.
Of course becoming a virus is silly. You'd be identified as a cancer cell and deposited into the largest prison system on planet Earth
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