alt Hacker NewsMore Everything Forever
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I am surprised this obviously correct take is so controversial! The problem, essentially, is that the "more everything forever" crowd wants to get paid for the idea of the future today and then will never actually deliver what they promise. They are selling snake oil for the new millennium.
Yes, of course I support space travel and settling on mars. I expect that, if we doubled or tripled NASA's budget, we could get a few humans on mars within 100 years (optimistically). It will be hard! There are many problems to solve (as the book seems to note). There's a place there for SpaceX and all other competent private companies - I love public-private partnerships.
I actually think this kind of low-information escapism about the future (we will "fix it" with technology in a way that is impossible) is similar to religious faith in a coming apocalypse. Faith in an impossible event raising you up and casting down your doubters and opponents. Technology can do a lot! It has a lot of potential! But we cannot fix any of our big problems (climate change, eventually making humans multi-planet, equality) with technology alone and the people who tell you we can just want to scam you out of your money.
Without the hope of technological progress, human expansion and economic growth the world becomes zero-sum.
In such a world, humanity will soon arrive at their self-imposed limits, after which no-one can hope to create wealth and prosperity but only to take it from someone else.
The pre-industrial world was like this and it is characterised by millenia of warfare and slavery. Human suffering on a scale that we struggle to comprehend.
Of course, some people are overly optimistic about the near-term possibilities of technology, but I much prefer that to the alternative.
>“We are here now, in a world filled with more than we could ever reasonably ask for,” Becker writes. “We can take joy in that, and find satisfaction and meaning in making this world just a little bit better for everyone and everything on it, regardless of the ultimate fate of the cosmos.”
I don't like this mindset. Be grateful for what you have. Maybe the world is not that great yet for many people and we should aim to improve things substantially, not marginally. This is something that the shuffling around of ressources on a political level can never achieve. Those dreaded tech entrepreneurs have correctly identified technology to be the only way substantial improvements can happen. So then it all blils down if you can make things happen and here the article and some comments here just claim, well, they NEVER deliver!
I will say that our discourse is weighted pretty heavily towards people who don’t deserve it. Most genuine experts are careful to only talk about things they know, not bloviate about everything under the sun.
I am sure Marc Andreesen is a very intelligent person but he built and sold a web browser. He isn’t an expert on every tech topic. Same with Peter Thiel and the rest of the PayPal mafia. PayPal isn’t revolutionary and getting rich off of that doesn’t make you an expert on (for example) AI.
If you like optimistic Sci-Fi, I would recommend the Culture Series. It really changed me when I read it in university.
> The “ideology of technological salvation”
On this point, 20+ years ago I had a chat with my uncle who managed a factory of rubber thingies for the car industry. I asked him what he thought of climate change: "Oh well, if it's ever an issue we'll just invent something to fix it, like carbon-sucking machines or whatever!".
I take issue with this mindset where innovation is the cure-all silver bullet. Not because it says that technological progress can help (it can!), but because it also implies that there's nothing really wrong with everything else we do and that we shouldn't have to think if we had a hand in the endless crises we see.
Don't tell me about a future where Earth is such a dystopian wasteland that going to Mars looks like the right choice. I don't want to build penthouses for the few billionaires that actually enjoy the place. The best place on Mars is still worse than the worst place on Earth.
Tell me about the future where Earth is seen as a wonderful spaceship, where we learned to live in peace and where we have a good thing going on such that going elsewhere to see what's possible is appealing!
It is obviously true that technology allows us to modify nature to an ever greater extent. That is what technology is! I don't think we'll have a colony on mars anytime soon, but AI is obviously coming and will obviously be extremely disrupting (for better or for worse)
Did this get removed from the home page? As I write this it was posted 2 hours ago with 48 points and 73 comments. Should definitely be on the home page. Why are we filtering content like this?
When I read this, I sort of resist the idea.
Which reminds me of the "Dogma of Otherness" by the scifi author David Brin:
"Think about it. 'There's always another way of looking at things' is a basic assumption of a great many Americans."
This is, loosely speaking, the bundle of ideologies that Timnit Gebru and Émile P. Torres dubbed TESCREAL (transhumanism, Extropianism, singularitarianism, (modern) cosmism, Rationalism, Effective Altruism, and longtermism).
While these are largely associated with modern Silicon Valley esoteric techbros (and the odd Oxfordian like Nick Bostrom), they have very deep roots, which Becker excavates – like Nikolai Fyodorov's 18th century "cosmism," a project to "scientifically" resurrect everyone who ever lived inside of a simulation.
I think that I first heard of Fyodorov via SF author Charles Stross's writings. It was part of the world building in his early Singularity-oriented novels (Singularity Sky, Iron Sunrise, Accelerando, maybe Glasshouse). He also blogged about Fyodorov, as in "Federov's Rapture":
https://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2011/07/federov...
Fyodorov/Federov also shows up in Hannu Rajaniemi's "Quantum Thief" trilogy.
It's a bundle of ideas that has produced some very good science fiction, but I wouldn't reorganize my life around it.
can we invent our way to eliminating billionaires? because that's the common denominator in every problem they claim to be the savior of
> They would require regular shipments of food and water from Earth
That's one of the core challenges techno-optimists like Musk constantly handwave and ignore when grandstanding about humanity becoming a "multi-planetary species". Yes, we can settle Mars. We could probably even do so with the technology we have today, certainly if we invest resources into further research and development with that specific goal in mind. But we can't do so in the political and economical landscape we have today.
We have a massive resource allocation problem here on Earth. We're overproducing goods because it's less economically damaging to destroy surplus products than to sell at cost or only produce to meet actual demand. We build for planned obsolesence and encourage wasteful competition between ten different companies owning a hundred different brands of the same product just to perpetuate an artificial demand via "FOMO". We're siphoning global wealth into the hands of a few people who waste our resources on superyachts like Bezos or actively prevent public infrastructure projects like Musk's attacks[0] on public mass transit. We're subsidizing legacy fossil fuel production and consumption instead of developing more efficient energy use and storage technologies. Meanwhile Russia suicide-bombed the European economy by invading Ukraine and now the US rapidly disassembles its decades old network of allies and trading partners. None of this is stabilizing let alone sustainable - and we need a sustainable human presence on Earth before we can build out a persistent presence elsewhere.
If Musk truly believed in making humanity a multi-planetary species to ensure the survival of our species, his main focus would be terraforming Earth, not Mars. Instead he sells visions of a future that only considers the extremely wealthy, with point-to-point rocket shuttles and hermetically sealed self-driving underground robotaxis. Just like Bezos uses his dildo rocket[1] for a girlboss publicity stunt after getting visibly upset when William Shatner had a genuine moment of realizing the fragile beauty of Earth and humanity[2] because Bezos' vision is to send all the unsightly refuse, industry and laborers into space so the rich and beautiful can have Earth to themselves[3].
But people like Musk aren't actually interested in making a multi-planetary species a reality. It's just a sexy mission statement that justifies their business ventures. He may actually believe in it but if he thinks that's what he's doing, he's not nearly as smart as people claim he is.
[0]: The Hyperloop concept was infamously pushed by Musk to sabotage the public infrastructure proposal of a highspeed rail network but this isn't the only example. A lot of his mass transit concepts boil down to "busses but smaller" or "trains/trams/metros but on wheels". When he first pitched the idea of FSD allowing Tesla owners to let their cars "work for them" as robotaxis, he also floated the idea that this could be used to pay for the cost of the car, which would allow Tesla to run a form of car sharing that offloads the actual risks and maintenance costs to the "owners" of the cars. Tesla's early vision also explicitly included the goal of making EVs affordable to the general public, which Musk no longer seems to be interested in.
[1]: Blue Origin's rockets have rightfully been criticized for being excessively phallic. While rockets necessarily have a phallic tendency, Bezos' rockets stand out for looking specifically dildo-like even by rocket standards. Given that there is no technical necessity for making it look this much like a dick and that the design hasn't been modified to make it any less dildo-like, the appearance can be considered deliberate even if we grant the benefit of the doubt and assume it wasn't originally intended to be so blatantly phallic - at some point everyone in charge agreed that the rocket should continue to look the way it does now.
[2]: There's a widely circulated video clip of Shatner having a moment and being interrupted by Bezos fetching and spraying a champagne bottle. Shatner stated that he went on the trip expecting to be overwhelmed by the endless possibilities of space because he had always been fascinated by it but that the experience had fundamentally changed his outlook by showing him the contrast of the vast emptiness of space and the vulnerability of Earth containing all that ever has and and ever will matter to him - an experience he apparently shares with many others who got to see Earth from space. Of course this isn't why Bezos took him on the ride and isn't a message Bezos cares for - the vapid girlboss soundbites by the more recent ride carrying female influencers is a much better match for his intented PR, especially the insistence on referring to the space tourists as "astronauts".
[3]: Although Bezos hasn't been in the news much over his visions (probably because when Musk did so he had a more receptive audience because there was a general pop culture of space optimism which largely seems to be gone now) he has floated the ideas of launching Earth's waste into space (presumably especially radioactive waste, which might be a bad idea if there's a chance of rocket malfunction) and of moving dirty industry into space to reduce pollution on Earth - the latter included the idea of creating habitats for the laborers, which had certain undertones.
Colonizing Mars is such a dumb idea. I wish it was a strawman, not the stated goal of the world’s richest man.
Anyway, some of the utopian/distopian thinking, I get. We aren’t going to create an AI god, good or evil. That belief is probably a side effect of the facts that Millennials are (finally) grabbing the reins, and we grew up in an era where computers actually got, tangibly, twice as good every 18 months or so, so some sort of divine techno-ascension seemed plausible in 2005 or so.
But we live in the failure path of our plans. So, I’m quite worried that a group will try to create an omnipresent AI, run out of runway, and end up having to monetize a tool that’s only real use is scanning everybody’s social media posts for wrong-think (the type of wrong think that makes you unemployable will invert every four years in the US, so good luck).
If I see another mention of the paper clip example I'm gonna lose it.
Perhaps better is to kindly refer everyone to a physics 101 text book.
I would like to mention Bill Gates as a tech bro who has been doing "good works". Like fighting malaria, funding vaccine development (yes), Na reactors, and so forth. He was the nasty tech bro in the 90's and early 00's but evolved into a good tech bro.
I agree with the author about the other big tech bros. They're evil.
"Blessed are the meek: for they shall inherit the earth."
The rest of us can meet up every couple millennia around Alpha Centauri for an old-home week.
Also reviewed by Cory Doctorow: https://pluralistic.net/2025/04/22/vinges-bastards/#cyberpun...
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This book seems insufferable, at least based on the review. Half of the review is trying to poke holes in why people won't live on mars and the other half is about how people trying to pursue goals such as this are self-serving and corrupt.
I'm sure a market exists for this kind of book, but to me it's just exhausting. What's the harm in trying to go to mars if it results in decreasing the cost of space flight by 99%? Who cares if someone is trying to naively live forever if it results in a lot of money into longevity research? Would you rather this person be spending his money on yachts?
I wish we had more ambitious things. It's fine that the author doesn't believe in this stuff, but to mock and try to get rich off it seems like more of a grift than anybody trying to do ambitious things. I don't get it, this guy is literally an astrophysicist, surely he's looked up at the skies at one point and imagined what could be done. I guess the only difference is he never took his shot.
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> He encourages us not to get hung up on galaxies far, far away but to pay more attention to our own fragile planet and the frail humans around us.
While I don't necessarily agree with the motives of the Silicon Valley billionaires you must have a really basic imagination to hate on the future, and the answers to Man's oldest questions which may be on Mars and beyond. Of course, like a broken record, out comes the trope of "Why don't you solve poverty on Earth (with all that money)".
For once, can the malthusians come up with a single unique idea or viewpoint rather than recycling the same content? People criticize AI for producing slop but look at what makes the NYT.
> [Mars colonists] would require regular shipments of food and water from Earth, presumably via Musk’s company SpaceX
Any vessel taking water away from Earth should be shot down with extreme prejudice.
Gift link: https://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/23/books/review/more-everyth...