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Comment by psalaun | Hacker News Reader

You assume there are enough trees on the desertic island to build the ship that will allow us to reach the brave new world full of resources.

We don't know that. It seems to be a leap of faith, based on the possibility of numerous successive achievements (IA, then fusion, then robots, then interplanetary mining, etc.) where each new step is always reachable. Like in a video game.

Maybe the necessary amount of oil (or whatever) required to reach the next key milestone towards unlimited resources has never existed. Maybe it'd have required 1 billion more years before humankind reached the industrial age.

Maybe the trees on our island are just enough to build a raft, not a brig, and we should have used them to build a shelter and make the inevitable end more comfortable.

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We have no shortage of energy or matter in the solar system to accomplish these goals.

To unlock these resources we need to turn to self replicating machines that can stand up lunar and asteroid mining to build sufficient orbital manufacturing capacity.

You completely ignore the point of my metaphor. Do you have enough trees to build the brig to reach these resources?

If we deplete our oil stocks (even non-conventional) before discovering the multiple replacements we'd need at large scale for logistics, electronics, hardware, healthcare, heavy vehicles and tools, etc. we won't get anywhere close your solar system matter. Maybe we should have rationed it 70 years ago, to give us more time to research the next breakthrough, instead of investing in all the modern life shenanigans like buying dozens of $5 pieces of clothes from Shein or Temu because it make us feel good in the schoolyard or on Instagram. The "trust the science bro, if it's possible we'll make it, let the human genius do its thing" is dangerous.

Yes there are sufficient hydrocarbon reserves on Earth to do this. There's also sufficient energy sources from a combination of solar, wind, and geothermal.

* 1/3 of the food that we produce is completely wasted.

* 43% of the world's population is overweight and 16% is obese.

* Livestock uses 77% of all agricultural land, yet provides only 18% of global calories and 37% of protein.

* 60% of hydrocarbon production is used for transportation with more than half of that going to personal use.

* The world generates ∼50 million tons of electronic waste per year, but only ∼17% is formally recycled.

There's a lot of slack in the system. We can easily improve the efficiency of society with no material loss and tons of quality of life improvements for people.

We won't. but we could. And the reason we won't is because there isn't really and there won't really be any existential pressure to do so.

So the species at large will keep plodding along as we do, driving from fast food drive-thru to fast food drive thru stuffing cheese burgers into our faces while clever people work to make things like elegant self replicating machines that can colonize the solar system.

This is just how it's gonna go man.

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