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Tech barons like Jeff Bezos want to colonize space and the oceans

78 点作者 bezout超过 4 年前

19 条评论

darawk超过 4 年前
You know what else isn&#x27;t public spirited or democratic? The internet. The internet is a bunch of private fiefdoms. I think for the most part the internet works much better than the physical world, in large part <i>because</i> it is a collection of private fiefdoms with zero transaction costs for leaving. Reddit gets to run itself the way reddit wants, HN the way HN wants, etc. If you don&#x27;t like it, you can start your own. There&#x27;s infinite real estate, and exit is mostly costless.<p>I&#x27;m perfectly happy with people doing this in the physical world. I think we could use a lot more experimentation with community design and rules, and most governments simply aren&#x27;t willing to do this. As long as these communities are opt-in, and not forced on anyone, I think it&#x27;s great.
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galacticaactual超过 4 年前
I don&#x27;t understand this article. People with money want to do stuff with that money. Somehow the thesis is that people should intervene? Where does that stop? Should VC investment be subject to democratic vote? Perhaps we should first get good at demanding how our own tax dollars are being spent before making demands on how folks ought to spend their personal fortunes.
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WalterBright超过 4 年前
&gt; that sounds awfully like indentured servitude packaged as frontier life<p>Frontiersmen historically have worked brutally hard and died young. It&#x27;s an inevitable result of going somewhere where there is no infrastructure and no support structure. You have to do it all yourself. And you can&#x27;t afford to bring anyone along who isn&#x27;t going to work.
ggm超过 4 年前
Money is a rationing system. For real world goods it makes some sense, absent central planning. For digital life, and intellectual property money is a bad fit.<p>The disparities between rich and poor were getting smaller for much of the 20th century. Rich now has a new top bracket which is insane. And, its built on disruptive digital finance models.<p>Bezos however, is an old school robber baron. His money directly correlates to the relative poverty of his workers and his opposition to unions has a rational basis which equals his wealth.
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nexthash超过 4 年前
&gt; SpaceX wants to shuttle settlers to Mars for $500,000 a ticket, with loans available that could be worked off.<p>Woah. From the 15th - 18th century, colonization of the &#x27;New World&#x27; was the equivalent of today&#x27;s space ventures. There were innovations in funding (joint-stock ventures), technology (vessels that could cross dangerous ocean environments &amp; navigation technology), and in the European perspective, a sense of mystery about a voyage into the unknown. It was seen as a way to start life over, and if you couldn&#x27;t afford to pay the passage (5 pounds in 1650 is roughly $16030 - $307285 today) you would indenture for a master to work off the debt. Sound familiar?
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WalterBright超过 4 年前
&gt; We must envision more public-spirited, collective futures – ones in which the market alone isn’t allowed to dictate everything from housing to environmental regulation to mining rights.<p>Both Plymouth Colony and Jamestown started out as communes. They starved. Plymouth Colony switched to free markets and prospered, Jamestown failed.<p>As for environmentalism, you cannot afford that when it&#x27;s a bitter struggle just to survive. Besides, what does environmentalism even mean on Mars? There is no biosphere.
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ceilingcorner超过 4 年前
This is the inevitable consequence of making society into consumers and not creators. When the average person can&#x27;t write a short story, can&#x27;t draw, can&#x27;t do anything <i>creative</i> (in the generative sense), but instead relies on consuming pre-packaged experiences for entertainment, it&#x27;s inevitable that those with the most resources will be the ones designing your future. This only accelerates as new media becomes both more popular and more expensive (i.e. $50 million Netflix series) as compared to the cost of writing a book (none, essentially.)<p>It&#x27;s like the old cliche: <i>design your life or it will be designed for you.</i>
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poorslave超过 4 年前
I don&#x27;t get why I should have a say about how someone wants to spend his money. It seems like the author assumes that a &quot;public-spirited&quot; future is better than &quot;private-spirited&quot; one.<p>&gt; SpaceX wants to shuttle settlers to Mars for $500,000 a ticket, with loans available that could be worked off.<p>Why would this be something inherently &quot;bad&quot; ?<p>&gt; We must envision more public-spirited, collective futures<p>I don&#x27;t think I need to be an expert about the history of &quot;collective&quot; and &quot;public-spirited&quot; countries, to understand how dangerously authoritarian this can become.
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reilly3000超过 4 年前
People don&#x27;t colonize space or the ocean already because we have lacked the technology. Working to help your species thrive in inhospitable environments seems rather prosocial to me, and squarely a technology problem.<p>If given the option to watch innovation happen because of nation-states in an arms race, or billionaires duking egos, I&#x27;d rather the latter. My kids will outlive the ego, and may get to live in a new environ because of it.<p>If we get the scalable collaboration thing down as a species, we wouldn&#x27;t need billionaires or politicians to move big matters forward. I hope that gets borne out this decade, where we learn to think, code, and act in coordination over shared priorities, beyond the bounds of corporations and nation-states. I look to the open source model for spiritual inspiration there, but it doesn&#x27;t offer many examples of large projects that can collaborate effectively over multiple generations without central control of a BDFL. Maybe our brains aren&#x27;t wired that way, that we need a just do need a strongman to get anything done. I sure like to think otherwise. We can get machines to do distributed consensus pretty damn well these days, why can&#x27;t we upgrade ourselves to do the same?
ve55超过 4 年前
It would be nicer if articles with this general tone focused more on alternative creation and positive action rather than on stopping others from creating things.<p>It&#x27;s reasonable to want to have more public sector involvement in many areas and alternative views for our future, but none of these require that you have to &#x27;stop&#x27; people like Musk and Bezos from doing what they&#x27;re doing.<p>Building things is actually really hard. Much harder than complaining about the status quo.
sergefaguet超过 4 年前
If you want to build a different future you should go and build one yourself instead of whine about how other people’s vision is going to shape it.<p>Thankfully, destiny belongs to those who act.
sharemywin超过 4 年前
&gt; SpaceX wants to shuttle settlers to Mars for $500,000 a ticket, with loans available that could be worked off.<p>He forgot to mention it&#x27;s $5M to fly back.
Fishysoup超过 4 年前
Relevant: some interesting insight into the inhumanity of it all <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.theguardian.com&#x2F;technology&#x2F;2021&#x2F;feb&#x2F;03&#x2F;jeff-bezos-and-the-world-amazon-made" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.theguardian.com&#x2F;technology&#x2F;2021&#x2F;feb&#x2F;03&#x2F;jeff-bezo...</a>
fiachamp超过 4 年前
This author doesn&#x27;t realize that &#x27;people&#x27; don&#x27;t care if someone is a billionaire if they became one by taking risk themselves. Yes, people will rightfully shit on the ones who inherited their wealth or achieved most of their success through backroom regulatory dealings but elon musk parlayed his whole lifetime earnings into Tesla and SpaceX while the US government printed money to subsidize investment banks and mortgage lenders. Did &#x27;public&#x27; sector or &#x27;private&#x27; sector generate the more useful innovation? I&#x27;m all for the rule of law and at the local level it makes sense to have democratic government. The most obvious trend in this era is that centralization of power is bad but most of it has occurred through politicians who are out of touch with the people they represent who live 1000s of miles away from them + central bankers manipulating interest rates and preventing an actual free market that would let shitty companies go bankrupt. So when people poo on where much of the world has arrived in wealth disparity, they should blame crony socialism in the public sector rather than free market capitalism (which to date only exists on the internet and in crypto). Instead governments are demolishing the currency employees get paid in to subsidize shitty companies and inflate asset prices. And that process is mostly not run by billionaire but by elected and appointed bureaucrats.... This writer has the nuance of a fart joke.
jl2718超过 4 年前
Seasteading and Bitcoin have an interesting shared memetic history. In 2007, ship prices were down to almost nothing. An almost-new first-rate cruise ship could be had for about 10% of original purchase price. I saw a 400-person seaworthy vessel selling for $500k, which was ~100x my wealth, but still interesting. The Seasteading Institute popped up around then, founded by Peter Thiel, whose libertarian bent was previously SV mainstream and now openly reviled by journalists, led by Milton Friedman’s grandson iirc, and rose to popularity with the Tea Party. But of course there were big gaps in any plans for offshore viability. For completely different reasons, I had spent a year learning about the ocean and how to live on it indefinitely (see “A Sea Vagabond’s World” by Bernard Moitessier), with less success actually doing it. But theoretically, it was freedom, and cryptocurrency was a big part of that. The big issue was connectivity to prevent double-spending. Okay, maybe this is more of my personal history, but I was making cubesats at the time, and in 2008 I met the NASA Ames center director (at a golf course bar I was told to go to), who was looking for nanosatellite concepts to fund, and I pitched a simple bent-pipe re-transmitter to the bitcoin gossip network enabling access to remote or censored users. The design itself was simple, but imagine the confusion about the concepts around that idea that one would have to explain when BTC was just an idea. He didn’t like it, but it was probably not a good idea anyway, because ground-ground HF is probably better than ground-LEO-ground ISM for the use case.
TimTheTinker超过 4 年前
From the title of the article, &quot;Billionaire capitalists are designing humanity&#x27;s future. Don&#x27;t let them&quot;, I was expecting a piece covering the World Economic Forum, which could be characterized as the left-leaning counterpart to the likes of Bezos, Musk, and would-be ocean colonizers.<p>... the difference being that the WEF wants to force <i>everyone</i> into a particular mould, not unlike 20th century socialist visions for a &quot;better society&quot;. We all know how that worked out...<p>But from an economic standpoint, I don&#x27;t mind crazy, unrealistic visions for colonizing oceans and planets. At least such dreams give billionaires something to spend money on, which translates into more jobs and more families fed, not to mention the scientific and engineering advances that are funded along the way.
trhway超过 4 年前
is there a practically possible better way than what Musk is designing as humanity&#x27;s future ? Unfortunately for one Musk we get a bunch of Zucks and Thiels...
sto_hristo超过 4 年前
&gt; forward-thinking proposals of the past – produced by a “public” of academics, artists and government agencies<p>yeah, the joy of Fascism, Communism, and all those other future gems produced by the infallible agencies, institutions, and academics.<p>&quot;Billionaires&quot; don&#x27;t design humanity&#x27;s future. People with ideas do and only if these ideas are freely embraced by other members of the public. Freely is keyword here. And if that person&#x27;s ideas prove widely embraced and successful, they possibly become a billionaire. It&#x27;s an organic and natural process, fair and square; in direct opposition to this are the govt. agencies and academics who in most cases has to force their thinking on the public and as history has proven - to catastrophic results.<p>Naturally some of these successful people become arrogant or simply delusional and start spawning other ideas and grand plans, but that is normal human flaws and nothing out of the ordinary. In such cases, the ultimate error correction mechanism - people&#x27;s acceptance - kicks in and at best Mr. Future ends up with losses, useless inventory, and some media frowns.<p>Author of the article has a sick and fundamentally broken perception of reality. By saying that successful people shouldn&#x27;t be allowed to make things for others to possibly use (or not), he&#x27;s taking away the very fundamental freedom that is responsible for making the better part of the civilized world today.
lifeisstillgood超过 4 年前
I love the Guardian - a beacon of journalistic integrity even if I don&#x27;t agree with everything it says.<p>I love Neal Stephenson - The Diamond Age is one of my youths defining books (as I suspect it is for the new owners of the ocean liner)<p>But one is a fictional book twenty years old, and one is a newspaper at its best reporting on real problems right now, not imagined problems in the future<p>Seasteading is a joke, and despite all the cool cyberpunks, we are not going to become &#x27;phyles and tribes. Geography and demographics are still our destiny for the next few centuries.<p>(Amazon passed some kind of event horizon - 1.3M employees makes it bigger than almost anything out there - armies etc. The thought of being head of HR for amazon flat out terrifies me. And this means we can find any amount of abuse in Amazon if we look hard enough.)<p>Are there better ways for Bezos to spend all the money he got - in my view yes.<p>If enough people like me agree we can do this democracy thing and tax it away from him and into better places.<p>But the problem is not billionaires or seasteading.<p>The problem is sensible democratic action. The problem is regulation (the 2020s call to arms)<p>Write your congressman.<p>Edit:<p>Uncalled-for Advice to the Head of HR at Amazon:<p>Unionise and Democratise<p>Firstly 1.3 <i>million</i> - that&#x27;s an insane number of employees - Walmart and Mcdonald&#x27;s might just outstrip you, but I would not look to them for guidance - look at Indian Railways or the US military. At this sort of size Amazon will be a &quot;safe place to work&quot;. Mothers will start to advise their sons to take work there because it&#x27;s too big to fail. You know that&#x27;s not true but you need to avoid large scale resentment - and that starts with employee welfare - and welfare starts with feeling they have support against the the man - unions.<p>Yes they will make life harder - but you have fine from startup to being your own government - people will expect to spend their working lives in Amazon like they do in Walmart or the DoD or railways. As such they can either be part of the decision making process and protected from abuse - or they can be abused and powerless and work less effectively for you and eventually cause so much bad press that your name is mud.<p>I guess you know all this - but democratising is not just unionising - I think it is coming - i think that companies are going to find it harder and harder to exist by fiat - that every decision will need to be published and publiscise like regulators do now - and this will lead to people wanting a say or a vote on such decisions - internal company referendums as it were.<p>Anyway ranting too much.