Comment by retrac | Hacker News Reader

Comment by retrac | Hacker News Reader

I've long thought any supposed economic/technological stagnation was illusory, or at least greatly overstated. The third industrial revolution began several decades ago and we're now in the middle of it. I like to stay grounded so I look at basic metrics. Pick almost any raw resource or simple good, and its extraction or production is through the roof, while the energy intensity to obtain it is decreasing.

In fact most trends become quite preposterous, sooner rather than later. (Whole planet turned into ICs by the 22nd century, at this rate.) So all manner of wildness is sure to soon happen. This is certainly not stagnation, whatever it will ultimately mean:

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/f/f9/Copper_-...

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/4/43/Zinc_wor...

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/5/58/Nickel_w...

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/9/96/Aluminiu...

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/4/48/Vanadium...

> while the energy intensity to obtain it is decreasing.

Correct. Infinite Growth being the north star here, but it's not sustainable indefinitely.

Expansion into space would help mitigate a lot of things, and the more population pressure, with the accompanying increase in labour, the more likely that expansion is to take place.

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-12318767/NAS...

> Expansion into space would help mitigate a lot of things, and the more population pressure, with the accompanying increase in labour, the more likely that expansion is to take place.

How can expansion into space mitigate pressure on Earth in any meaningful way?

Who wants to go live on Mars, really? Spoiler: you can't survive outdoor, there are no animals there, no trees, no flowers, it's basically a big desert.

Wanna go further? Proxima Centauri (the next star) is really, really far. Actually even a lot further than that. We definitely won't go there, unless we discover completely new physics (but it does not seem rational to count on that). So it's either Mars, or something that looks like Mars (I don't know, Venus maybe?), or living in a spaceship. Which is a bit like living on Mars, but worse.

Let's try to survive on Earth first, shall we? Because right now we (as a species) are failing. And not because of external factors: just because of us.

Expanding into space consumes exponentially more energy than doing the same things on Earth.

It's basically just wishful thinking and hand-waving away physics until we actually crack fusion and more or less free near-infinite energy.

Until then, it's just a pipe dream by techno-optimists.

I agree that stagnation was illusory and to me it feels like not only the midst of the third Industrial Revolution, but also the start of the third technological revolution. The first ending in 2000 and the second ending in 2021-2022.

Accelerate.

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