this post was submitted on 17 Dec 2023
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[–] [email protected] 93 points 11 months ago (3 children)

If every extant human didn't need to worry about survival, we'd have 10,000 Mozarts. We could get there if we had zero billionaires.

[–] [email protected] 32 points 11 months ago

Even if these two just swallowed their pride and funded free music education for all ages we'd at least have thousands of Mozarts...

...do these guys even listen to contemporary composers anyway? Could they even identify a modern Mozart? My bet is no. They just have so much ego they believe they'd know about it instantly despite their lack of any intimate knowledge of the subject.

[–] [email protected] 31 points 11 months ago

Those delusional fucks think they're the current Mozarts.

[–] [email protected] 13 points 11 months ago

A thousand times this.

If you look at the history of scientific discovery, you'll find that a great many of those making discoveries were born into wealth, or at least some degree of stability.

[–] [email protected] 65 points 11 months ago (2 children)

I wonder how many Mozarts are living paycheck to paycheck working multiple jobs and don't have time to compose or play because these chucklefucks denied them a living wage by going to war on unions.

[–] [email protected] 27 points 11 months ago

Or simply in a third-world country kept in extreme poverty by global capitalism.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 11 months ago

It’ll be quite a few Mozarts sacrificed because we’re busy funding the thousands of wanna-be Hitlers that were also created.

[–] [email protected] 52 points 11 months ago

Slave drivers wish for more slaves to drive: news at 11

[–] [email protected] 33 points 11 months ago (2 children)

Do you know what would happen in a world where there are 1000 Mozart's? Nobody would give a shit about Mozart anymore. That's it. Most of them would probably starve to death anyway if the world now has to support one trillion people

[–] [email protected] 19 points 11 months ago

But now bezos can exploit Mozart, because "there's a thousand Mozart's ready to take your place".

Truly how can you not see the benefits.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 11 months ago (1 children)

Would we even know if that were the current situation? How many extremely talented composers are making music right now?

[–] [email protected] 3 points 11 months ago
[–] [email protected] 22 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) (1 children)

why do we need a thousand mozarts ?

why would we look to those that can never get enough to understand what it means to be satisfied ?

[–] [email protected] 4 points 11 months ago (1 children)

The more highly intelligent people you have, the faster the rate of breakthroughs, provided they have access to tools and education.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) (2 children)

prove it

or rather prove to me that you are not laying the tracks to supporting eugenics

prove that it won't make a thousand Hitlers

[–] [email protected] 3 points 11 months ago (1 children)

You arent wrong, but neither is the other guy.

Their premise isnt wrong, with a Trillion people the statistical likelihood of more geniuses to solve our problems is almost certain. So yes there's one in the "pro" column.

The "cons" column however is thousands of lines long and would pretty much guarantee humanities extinction.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) (1 children)

I would like to point out that the Renaissance started and saw a huge generational explosion of "mozarts" within a single city of Venice with roughly the population of most small podunk towns. Saying that more people are needed is disengenuous, you need the right environment raising people to the level of geniuses.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 11 months ago

Its not needed, but its also almost a mathematical certainty. If we had 692 Billion more people, we would almost definitely at least have a few more people of natural genetic inclination towards being geniuses.

We wouldnt be able to feed everyone or breathe but thats my point, they arent wrong but they are idiots.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 11 months ago

You just have to track global progress as a function of global population.

[–] [email protected] 20 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 11 months ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 11 months ago

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.

[–] [email protected] 18 points 11 months ago

And then they could put those Mozarts to work in their slave shacks while complaining about the lack of Mozarts!

[–] [email protected] 18 points 11 months ago

I think we're good on Mozarts.

[–] [email protected] 13 points 11 months ago

He just wants more people to exploit

[–] [email protected] 13 points 11 months ago

Fuck that, they only say that because more people = more profit

[–] [email protected] 13 points 11 months ago

Elon and Bezoz think civilization=steadily rising profits and they see that they won’t have enough workers or consumers to enable that if birthrates aren’t also above replacement. Or, as Marx en co. would say, they are running into a classic crisis of capitalism. Profits must grow.

What we should really be considering are plans for economies that aren’t reliant on continuous growth for stability.

[–] [email protected] 12 points 11 months ago

Ahh, yes, the "We need more monkeys on more typewriters so we can get more Shakespeare." argument.

[–] [email protected] 12 points 11 months ago (1 children)

They are so dumb, how did they get so rich?

[–] [email protected] 3 points 11 months ago

Exploitation

[–] [email protected] 10 points 11 months ago

And approximately a trillion people to whom even a chocolate bar would be pretty much an once-in-a-lifetime luxury

[–] [email protected] 8 points 11 months ago

I can say stupid shit too. Can I get on yahoo finance?

[–] [email protected] 6 points 11 months ago

It isn't very interesting to speculate about a trillion-human future when we're so close to a post-human future. Plus, Mozart was the product of his genes and his environment; both can be manipulated to create some process with a higher yield of Mozarts than ordinary human reproduction provides.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 11 months ago (1 children)

Maybe, but they’d all be working shit jobs for shit money so someone like Bezos or Musk could make a little more money.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 11 months ago

No, no, only like half would. You need the other half to buy their products.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 11 months ago

I've seen these arguments gaining prominence on the last few years. I don't think they care about Mozarts or Einsteins though. If they did, they would use their money and push for policies that would improve the conditions people live in, so all the would-be Mozarts would have a chance to actually becoming one. I think they're worried global capitalism will collapse if population growth slows too much; which is probably true.

I also wonder if these people are funding all the anti-abortion and anti-contraceptive campaigns around the world... After a quick Google search, I see it's definitely been on Musk's mind: https://www.businessinsider.com/elon-musk-tucker-carlson-sex-procreation-collapse-civilisation-abortion-pill-2023-4

[–] [email protected] 4 points 11 months ago

We already have thousands of Mozarts rotting in poverty. The fact that these two cunts don’t get it is an evidence for them being entitled, racist, pieces of shit.

I am, somehow, less interested in the weight and convolutions of Einstein’s brain than in the near certainty that people of equal talent have lived and died in cotton fields and sweatshops.

- Stephen Jay Gould

[–] [email protected] 4 points 11 months ago

A trillion is a lot. Even if we all went vegan and the food supply was centrally managed, I'm not sure you could do that on Earth.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 11 months ago

I'm preeetty sure that's not how that works but then again Elmo does not behave like someone I would consider being knowledgeable in anything, so no surprise there.