this post was submitted on 17 Dec 2023
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These two are delusional.
We are looking at tens to hundreds of millions of people fleeing where they live /this decade/ due to climate change.
The tensions caused by immigrants moving to more developed western countries to escape the many wars going on in Africa and the Middle East, and now in Ukraine and Palestine are just a teeny tiny sampling of this.
Also, it is likely we will hit peak oil this decade. Modern agriculture is reliant on petrochemical fertilizers which will become more expensive as oil does.
Half the world lives in poverty, and America is the most economically unequal society in all of known human history, in terms of income disparity.
There is absolutely no way to get to a trillion humans under our current economic and political paradigms, and no one knows or agrees on a framework that would.
We will be lucky to make it to the end of this century with half the current world population.
We are not going to be colonizing space anytime soon. The economics of building systems that can get enough humans and materiel to make a self sustaining colony on Mars are still many orders of magnitude away from being feasible, and life there would be hellish. Humans growing up on Mars would suffer horribly from the low gravity, even if they lived underground their whole lives to avoid radiation. Terraforming is still a pipe dream.
Building a giant space rotating space cylinder for us all to live in is even more economically, scientifically and sociologically dubious. We cannot even figure out how to ecologically maintain the viability if our own homeworld, a self sustaining gigantic orbiting or interplanetary ship carrying even hundreds of humans is barely even realistically conceivable, to say nothing of what it would take to get to trillions.
To say the things they are saying, they must be literally delusional, as in /should be locked away in mental institutions as dangers to society/.
They should know these basic facts. We already know many wealthy elites are just literally building bunkers to escape the collapse of human civilization, which they have basically caused.
Madness.
The only way we can have a trillion humans is if we massively colonize the solar system.
Which I think is also a good idea, but we spend too much on our military to do it.
Let me know when humanity manages to construct a self sustaining interplanetary vessel with artificial gravity that can house 100 people on an ongoing basis.
A ballpark estimate for that most basic of first steps would be costing something like a trillion dollars. We would have to assemble it in orbit, you cannot launch such a large craft with rockets.
Basically, this will never happen unless the US military declassifies the supposed gravity negating field generator that is rumored to be essential to the TR 3B, which is itself rumored to exist.
You have to go all in on conspiracy theory tech like that, or magically world peace happens, we invent affordable greater than parity fusion generators, oh and entirely magically figure out how to stop climate change, and replace petrochemicals at every single stage of production in the world economy.
I would call that delusional magical thinking.
I didn’t say it would be easy or fast, just that we should expand into the solar system and that’s the only way we get to a trillion people.
Jeez, folks are really argumentative tonight.