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Comment by XJOKOLAT | Hacker News Reader

Not necessarily.

Yes necessarily. You can't build an interstellar spaceship without an industrial base, and creating an industrial base is going to have the same effect on the local ecosystems that humanity is being damned for. At best, our alien hive mind is a giant hypocrite.

Not necessarily.

> You can't build an interstellar spaceship without an industrial base

Starship Troopers.

> You can't build an interstellar spaceship without an industrial base, and creating an industrial base is going to have the same effect on the local ecosystems that humanity is being damned for.

This only happens because a human being's short lifespan, limited mind, and constricted point of view mans that a human's perceived self-interest is very limited in scope. A planetary scale hive mind could have a much longer lifespan and a (literally) inherently more global view.

Externalities arise because of a limited scope of knowledge, and persist because of self-interests of tiny scope. We think markets are so wonderful, because the distributed computational power of many individuals can keep up with global complexity. What if a single hive mind could command the same number of neurons, without the disparate competing self interests getting in the way?

It could presumably accomplish great tasks more efficiently without the waste of individual human beings skimming kickbacks from the interstellar spaceship budget or arguing about what color the ships should be painted, but building them is still going to require a massive industrial effort that will have a significant effect on ecosystems, no getting around that.

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