Comments by "Fredinno" (@innosam123) on "A Study of Decadence(When Societies Commit Suicide)." video.

Space Expansion is unlikely compared to ocean/polar expansion. The Earth’s gravity well is a bitch. The ISS costs billions just to maintain 7 people, and each Dragon seat is only accessible to the ultra-wealthy ($55mil/seat). Costs have only gone down modestly. Once we develop algal aquaculture, we can see a massive expansion in aquaculture and the marine economy as a viable basis for a wider Marine colonization effort can be made.
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Well, TBF, most of the military were in the rural areas. Later on, Rome became dominated almost entirely by the military, meaning it became dominated by the rural frontier regions.
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What do you want them to do that they aren’t doing? It’s likely that they’ll stop importing Russian energy within the next few months (despite being horrendously reliant on it), a fuck ton of equipment has been sent to Ukraine, pretty much every financial connection and channel to Russia minus energy has been cut, and Finland and Sweden are only stalled from NATO accession due to Turkey. The only way you could go further is to actually send boots on the ground or planes in the sky, which aren’t options due to the risk of Nuclear War. If we’d listened to Reagan with SDI instead of mocking him, we wouldn’t be in this situation.
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@SuperCrow02 To colonize space, you need an economy in space. Each Dragon seat to the ISS costs $55 mil. That’s not an economic basis. We’re still no where near to being able to do that.
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Lol
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@henricussilvanus4332 Because there’s not even a self-sustaining city anywhere on Earth? MIT concluded the tech needed to make Mars One sustainable didn’t exist, and it’d actually be cheaper to just bring all the food you need from Earth. Also, if there’s anything the last 2 years have taught, it’s how important trade is to the modern world.
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@glennnile7918 Well, TBF, even for a pro-Musk person, you can’t ignore the broken promises and WTF is going on in Autopilot and SolarCity.
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Been saying this. Maybe something relevant could work, like what if the Roman successor states (Arthurian/Celtic Britain, Neponic Dalmatia, and Soissons) survived and replaced the Roman Empire instead of the Germanic kingdoms.
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@buddermonger2000 True, but how much? Even if you take Elon’s estimates for Starship costs seriously (you shouldn’t, they’re ~130x lower than Falcon 9), you’re looking at over a trillion dollars to send a million people to Mars. Assuming prices are more akin to what they are now, you’re looking at $90 Trillion. That is minus logistics to keep it alive once the people are there. American Colonization worked because it was cheap for someone to go to the Americas (relatively speaking). The King of Spain didn’t have to spend the entire budget of the country for generations to make it work out. Also, there were natives in the Americas, which actually helped colonization efforts (unless your name was U.S.A.)
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@glennnile7918 Sure, I agree. We just disagree on the conclusion. I think trying to colonize Mars is dumb to start, so he’s just wasting money and effort. Should have just stuck to the mouse landing idea. Is he trying to do good? Sure. But most people are. Most companies at least try to appear as if they are. Read most corporate Social Responsibility Statement, and you get the point. Is he more right than wrong? Sure. But half (or maybe a third) of what Elon Musk tries is just dumb or infeasible, and he only stops after failing miserably after everyone with half a brain tells him it’s a stupid idea- for practical and physical reasons (hyperloop was the worst example of this- and now it’s been replicated with the Boring shitshow- who knows if their new boring machine will actually deliver- but the simple idea of 3D burrowed car tunnels instead of trains or more flexible larger tunnels just falls flat, especially if something goes wrong.) Sure, you could say that about Tesla or SpaceX, but that was more a financial problem- since so few Auto or Space startups at the time got anywhere. This is shit someone with an internet connection, a calculator, and a few pieces of paper could figure out was stupid. I guess you could say I’m more frustrated with him if anything.
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@thecatinthefedora1201 Exactly, that’s my point. We don’t have the tech to make self-replicating machines, which would be necessary to make a colony like this viable.
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@JellyAntz I do. Issac Arthur isn’t wrong, but if you actually do the calculations, most of the things he says are way beyond current Earth’s capability. We aren’t even close to Kardechev 1 anyways.
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@SkyllusBr Except there are way better places to run to if you want to ‘colonize’. It’s not like you can just set up a colony on the Moon and have it go well. The best studies on trying to create a self-sufficient colony (no constant Earthly support) on say, Mars, show a colony utterly dependent on spare parts from Earth. If you fail, you can’t just escape into the wilderness like Settlers used to do and live among the natives. You’re dead. Comparing the Americas to space is like comparing Greenland to Korea. Night and Day.
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@buddermonger2000 Well, that’s only partially true. The Fur Trade and Lumber Trade were profitable. The issue is that even once you get all the people up there, each person isn’t even self-sustaining. Creating a fully-self sustaining colony (from things like the Mars One MIT study and Biosphere 2) is basically impossible (at least so far.) Unlike in the Americas, where you could rely on the environment for your basic needs, you rely on life support tech in space, trying to extract whatever you can from the regolith. So not only is it unprofitable, it’s a economic drain.
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@music79075 Growing Algae and Plankton in tanks and turning it into fish feed. Basically taking the bottom level of the oceanic food chain so that fish farming no longer relies on feeding fish other fish from the ocean- ie. what we did with normal animal husbandry millennia ago on the land. We’re making some good process on this.
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@Lusa_Iceheart No one thought you’d reach the end of the world by sailing off it. The worry is that you’d die before you reached the other side of Asia because you’d run out of supplies. And by that point, the Portuguese had already sailed around Africa. And I guess your logic is the same that led the Pope to call for the Crusades?
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@porterwayman8643 The Roman Empire reached peak decadence during the Crisis of the Third Century. It was on the road the recovery when the West fell, as proven with what happened with the East after the Great Migration (ignoring the Rise of Islam).
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@SuperCrow02 Asteroid Mining? How is that easier than going to Antarctica or the Mid-Atlantic Ridge and digging around? Remember that you’re competing against cheaper sources closer by. Also, just because you can make a dollar, it doesn’t mean you can make a profit. Both Deep Space Industries and Planetary Resources (the most serious asteroid Ming in efforts) went bust. The only efforts remaining are suckling on government grants for support. Improvements are not inevitable. In fact, we are pretty close to the max theoretical efficiency for chemical propulsion in terms of ISP- and going further requires things like microwave propulsion or space tethers- which we just don’t have.
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@roadbone1941 The World Wars didn’t.
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@MyDomesticChiffchaff What would you do then?
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@JellyAntz True, but that’s my point. We’re nowhere near using up the Earth’s resources to the point where using the resources of space becomes viable. We easily have centuries (possibly millennia, depending on growth rates) until we actually need to expand into space. As of yet, space is simply much more costly, making it unviable for anything but sending a couple multi-billionaires to orbit. It’s like fusion- seemingly perpetually 20 years away.
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@JellyAntz No we won't. There's no physical shortage of those things (in terms of the elements themselves). The sorts of we have ___years of stuff assumes usually only current reserves being extracted. Eg. there are hundreds of years of Rare Earths in the Japan Sea. Morocco always had a near-monopoly on Phosphorus Rock. They're also one of the oldest US allies. California is a prefect example why your argument just doesn't hold water. California has known about the issues with water it would likely face now for decades, but has basically refused to do anything that would actually fix the problem, like adding new storage reservoirs, the Peripheral Canal, or indeed, desalination.
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