100-Year Starship some way off

On 2/21/11 9:28 AM, brooksn wrote:

> > But that's rather silly. Singularity or no, it's clear that technology
> > will continue to advance. It's already advancing so fast that I think
> > it's very hard to predict what life will be like in 2100, or even 2050.
> > 2300 is way beyond our ability to foresee.
>
> I don't think they left out the fact that technology will continue to
> advance. I think we can make good guesses on 2050 and 2100, 2300 is a
> much fuzzier picture but we should still be looking at what that world
> could look like.

Maybe -- but I think their assumptions about future technology are still
far too modest.

There are a number of hard-to-predict but reasonable breakthroughs that
could happen this century:

- Cheap, reliable fusion power (perhaps based on Bussard's polywell?).
- Strong AI
- Mind uploading
- Cure for aging

Any of these will have radical impacts on global (and beyond) population
growth (not to mention raise thorny issues about how you even count
"people" in some scenarios). That's why I think a prediction of 9
billion (a relatively modest increase over our current 6 billion) is a
bit silly.

> I don't see why we'd go to 25-50 billion, and I have no clue why you
> think your guess is at least as good or better then the U.N.'s. Is this
> your area of expertise?

It's as much mine as the folks at the U.N. who wrote that report. I
have done extensive research and writing on mind uploading, for example,
and have followed the other technologies above as an interested
observer. I suspect the U.N. folks have never heard of them, much less
have any idea how likely they are and what the impacts will be.

But the whole point is that expertise doesn't much matter -- these
things will change life in ways so hard to predict, that (within limits)
one person's guess is about as good as any other's. 25-50 billion may
turn out to be much too low. Or it may be a little high. Who knows?
Let's meet in 2300 and have a laugh over how naive we were in the early
21st century.

> I think not having children in the first world has more to do with
> people selfishly not wishing to be bothered raising children from birth
> to whenever they get a job and move out. Also parents keep the money and
> time it takes to raise children for themselves.

Wow. You must know some selfish people! My experience, among the
people I know, is quite different.

> I think overpopulation
> concerns only plays a minor role. Those who are having kids, don't have
> access to stopping in the third world, live agrarian lifestyles which
> have a strong incentive for kids, have a religious prediliction to kids
> (catholic, mormon, muslim, evangelical, etc.), as well as momentum from
> cultural norms (hispanic).

None of those apply to me (2 kids) or my closest friends (1-4 kids among
married friends over 30). But I do know families that used to be much
larger, and are now (in the current generation) choosing to have smaller
families, even when there is still a full-time stay-at-home parent.
Attitudes I pick up from them suggest that, in at least some cases,
overpopulation concern is a factor.

> > It seems certain to me that it will dwarf Earth's. The only question is
> > when that line will be crossed.
>
> But we must get the first habitat with an industrial capacity going
> first, without it, just like the development of space for the past 40
> years we will crawl along.

No argument there. But this isn't the first time this pattern has
happened. Look at the history of European colonization of the Americas
-- there were long periods of no progress in between major advances.
It's only when looking back centuries later that it even begins to
appear like smooth progress.

Best,
- Joe