maybe not on your lifetime but at the speed of current progress, maybe your son or grandchildren can become space settler to terraform mars in the next generation (that literally coolest thing ever)
It's the coolest thing, but it will be frontier work. It won't be a walk in the park, almost certainly neither fun nor safe, and possibly a one-way ticket for a long time. (Even without the "corp-owned slave town" dystopia scenario that's also a possibility.)
Man is the best computer we can put aboard a spacecraft... and the only one that can be mass produced with unskilled labor.
- Werner von Braun
Thanks to delayed effects of radiation and such, people are the automatons. Extremely commodity and robust. Humanity, (or to be fair, safety) in my work is cooler, actually. Nothing beats my bed!
The worst political nonsense I get caught in means a phone call. Not an extended stay with potential life-lasting or shortening effects. Rad is different for everyone :)
Captain Paperclip would have encouraged the negative path, yes.
oh yes lets send a spaceship that full of leading edge tech with unskilled human labor, sounds about right
maybe you must see real world first, drinkable water and plant is literally of the most rare thing in the universe surpassing mineral and metal, one of the most abundant things in space
I perfectly understand the metaphor but machine already replace human in factory on earth, why do you think human can work in the 10x times worse condition in space???
also if you born poor in earth, many people would take a chance to do space industry at all in the future despite the risk
The machine is great at doing one specific, repetitive task.
Humans are currently much, much better at doing varied, unexpected tasks. We will at some point likely get more universal robotics, but right now I think there's a very good chance we'll get humans to Mars before we get the robots to work.
We simply have different outlooks. I'm not going to argue it. I see exploitation (in a negative sense) where you're more optimistic. I truly hope you're right!
Before we had machines to put in our factories, we had hordes of dead laborers. Regulations are written in blood. Then we had company towns and truly brutal police enforcement.
Why will humans work there? Partly for the reason you gave: poverty. That makes them particularly expendable, offering themselves to the 'chance' as you say.
edit: My bias is obvious, I work in SRE - not development. I don't create things, I deal with the fallout of creation. It's a lot like that.
wdym exploitation, space company would not having a hard time to pay their employee the same reason oil company do
also human is expensive, if fleet of human slave is cheap then we outsource all of our work to china and india. but that don't happen we build a trillion dollar industry (AI and robotic) to make all of that
When I look at the power dynamics between employee [on a spaceship] and an employer, pay isn't the utmost concern. Not even the trendy replacement, scrip. Nay, performance reviews and how it might relate to oxygen availability.
I don't see a collaborative trip through the cosmos, I see a very unhealthy relationship with danger to boot
This may be all the more reason for robots, but again: humans take no engineering. Just a few minutes and a lot of tries (heh, sex joke). They'll literally pay for themselves.
RE: outsourcing, I don't know what you mean/where you are. That's exactly what's been happening, here. Consistently. For decades. Many ventures can happen.
its more easier to setup 1 billions self replicating robot in space than setups 1 billions human living conditions infrastructure because back to square one turns out water and plant is more rare than metal in space
also human is fragile, weak, costly, too long to make it productive.
it takes 15+ year for human to be any useful at all (and not counting experience)
do you think these space corp would just sit 15+ year revenue of upkeep going to waste only the next day human employee die because some dust near light speed particle hit the station???
nooo, slavery human space is not practical because is not cost effective economy wise
But right now, we don't have working practical self replicating robots, but we do have humans. The cost of the 15+ years is externalized, you can just lure a desperate already-grown human with shiny promises, give them some training, and ship them off.
Yes, you have to ship them oxygen and food, which is expensive, but it's a solution that exists and works with todays technology (minus some well-defined engineering), while the robots aren't ready yet.
we talking about space colonization at this point, jensen huang literally have an wall-e robot now
also space is vast and empty, even with spaceship that has near light speed it still take years to even reach the destination not even counting do extract resources or back go to earth
I'm not defending Microsoft but "scam" is probably the wrong label for what they did. Nothing was literally sold to anyone. They made a misleading announcement about progress they supposedly made.
For a significant part of the world China has not tried to conquer their country or done them any harm. Their only experience with toppling governments comes from the US doing it to them.
Except China has been imperialist for longer than the US has existed. Then after the Qing dynasty fell and the CCP rose, they've been trying to imagine what the greatness of their past empire looked like and regain it. Their last empire was weak and out of touch with the world which caused self-inflicted humiliation. Now they're trying to form a stronger empire.
Taking territory, taking sea, influencing international institutions and so on. They've been using unrestricted warfare to wage probably the largest scale influence campaign of any country in history to get China's way in the world.
This, from a country that has very flexible views on the value of human life and sees the US's valuing of human life as a weakness to exploit. The CCP even used terrorist human shield tactics.
We've fought China's enemies more than we've fought China. Germany, Japan, England and Russia all took territory from China. We've fought or pushed back against all of them. I'm sure the Great Wall exists for reasons you can imagine too. All of its neighbors are basically some kind of empire and China isn't exempt from playing the same game.
People misunderstand our posture to our allies. We aren't losing them. We're making them stronger. The US and its allies all need to harden up, because that's the posture of China and Russia.
To topple the US, you would have to topple a bunch of states simultaneously, because the federal government is irrelevant in that regard. That only gives you a chance, not even a guarantee of overturning the constitution. Even then, in the worst case our allies would see the value of our continued existence and possibly intervene. Don't expect to see it any time soon.
That is because China has only become regional and global power in the last 3 decades. They didn’t have the means to threaten the world. They do now. See how they projected their naval power against Australia and New Zealand - [0]
China’s behavior in Africa and countries such as Laos and Cambodia resembles neocolonialism of the past - [1]. In other words, they acted exactly like colonists who controlled China a century ago.
Even when they were a communism country, they caused conflicts with all of their neighbors — USSR, India, Vietnam. They supported Khmer Rouge and were responsible for the genocide that killed at least a million Khmers. They invaded and occupied Tibets.
America has better values than most countries. And Americans should generally trust America more than foreign countries and certainly more than the chinese government.
here are some civilian deaths within china:
- land reform killed 1-4.7 million
- campaign to suppress counterrevolutionaries killed 712k-2mm
- three-anti and five-anti campaigns killed at least 100k
- sufan movement killed ~53k
- anti-rightist campaign killed 550k-2mm
- '59 tibetan uprising killed 87k
- violence in the great chinese famine killed 2.5mm
that's just a sample. this doesn't show the ongoing genocides, the economic colonization of SE asia and africa, the abuses of chinese-supported states (DPRK, burmese junta, naval intervention in libya, etc.)
objectively the American system seems to work out much better and is based on vastly superior principles.
all that aside, I am an American and place the interests of my people ahead of those of foreigners. as such, I will support a world order led by the government most likely to maximize our welfare and very nearly any means needed to preserve that.
Now count all the millions of civilian deaths from (often failed) US invasions during same period of time.
Its fine you are a patriot and think about your country first and foremost, but so is rest of the world, meaning remaining 96% of humans living right now. Pretty horrible things were done not so long ago with similar mentality to yours. But if you want US to be a global selfish bully so be it, world will realign.
I also hate China's dictatorship but its hard to say we are so much better when President wants to emulate them. Trump doesn't think the US is better then China just richer. And not in a soul searching way, Trump doesn't believe in being better. He's an amoral authoritarian who's literally praise Tianamen square massacre as a strong response. So we might still be better but not for long if we dont fight back. And its not surprising if our allies dont trust us when we are backstabbing Ukraine and threatening to annex Canada.
The problem is that there's no realistic options in Ukraine.
If the only acceptable answer is 1991 borders, that's going to be an incredibly expensive proposition. The "economic isolation/sanctions will work any day now" strategy doesn't seem to be delivering, and any amount of defensive armament we could supply will be just chewed up for several years to come. Maybe if you give it another five years, Putin will finally lose interest or exhaust his resources, but in the interim tens of thousands more will die.
This war is expensive for Russia too, but for them it's a matter of national face-- this was a pretty blatant response to their sphere of influence being swallowed by NATO/EU expansion. So trying to get them to fold, especially when they have the stronger military position right now, is a hard sell. I'm not sure even resumption of trade/readmission to institutions is that big of a prize to offer, considering that their brand is pretty much sunk-- who's queuing up to buy Russian goods now?
We could lean into the idea this is about national face-- figure out the smallest concession Ukraine has to offer so Putin can declare a "victory" and de-escalate. But we're so adamant about 'we cannot reward the bully', or convinced that he'll keep trying for expansionism that we don't treat this option seriously.
There's a lot of belief that if Putin is allowed to keep a square millimetre of Ukraine, he will treat it as a license to keep pushing the border west. I'm not sure. We've proven that territorial conquest will be expensive and time-consuming, and I'm sure this has forced them to re-price all their assumptions. He has to finish what he started in Ukraine, but there's far less shame if he simply drops a hypothetical mission in Moldova or Georgia from unformalized future plans..
They are a resource extraction economy and there will always be a buyer for those.
> The "economic isolation/sanctions will work any day now" strategy doesn't seem to be delivering
> We've proven that territorial conquest will be expensive and time-consuming
Well, which one is it? If the former, why would they deescalate at all?
The point is that they don't need (just) any part of Ukraine, or to save face or any of that. That's not why they started the war. Their goal is to take down the world order in which the coalition of western democracies decides what goes - after all you can't buy whole nations, but you can always influence corrupt authoritarian leaders. Until that goal is achieved, Russia will keep waging wars, while also destabilizing said democracies by financing ultra-right/populist politicians and pushing Goebbels-like propaganda and conspiracies to their people.
The west simply doesn't have a choice if it wants to remain free and in control; it needs to keep up the pressure until the Russian regime runs out of money for the war and/or gets changed from within.
Russia is not getting any fresher either. Maybe he could increase aid. He was largely responsible for delaying aid previously which hurt Ukraine and also hurt Europe and america.
As opposed to cutting off aid giving Russia false hope of outlasting and conquering Ukraine and other parts of Europe which encourages Putin to continue the war
the front line barely moving for the past year, even if NATO send more (they already sent equipment they can sent) it would not affect the outcome only prolonged the conflict
we all know that russia is not winning but they are not losing either, any Ukrainian/Russian offensive is not happen soon and only battle of attrition at this point (which russian have an edge because more people available in russia)
war is won by outproducing your enemy. EU and USA could easily outproduce ruzzia if there was political will for it. backing down from putin is a bad move
The United States is credibly threatening to invade Canada, Greenland, and Panama.
It is throwing absurd tariffs at anyone with a pulse except for Russia.
It stabbed an ally, Ukraine, in the back. For a treaty with their invaders. Dividing Ukraine's national resources between the US and Russia, negotiated without Ukrainian representation, in Saudi Arabia.
The space between the perception of America and China internationally has much less space between them a lot of Americans would prefer to acknowledge. I don't have much recent data, but I would suspect international sentiment on the whole right now is more favorable of China than the US in absolute terms.
Some comparisons: Singapore is a de-facto single party state with widespread government censorship, heavily limited civil rights, government/ruling party controlled media and heavy ethnic discrimination. Switzerland OTOH is almost a model country for such metrics.
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