Re:The Great Filter – Are We Almost Past It? (1998)
by ArkyBeagle on Monday April 06, 2015 @08:02AM
(#9327615)
Fusion isn't something that we can simply order. People are working on it. I'm far from even ... ignorance on the state of the art there, but my guess would be that investing more would probably not produce it any faster.
Cleanliness - basic control of waterborne disease, the level of schmutz from power, control of pernicious trash - is huge. Queen Victoria's husband Albert died of this sort of disease 150ish years ago. This is vanishingly rare now if it exists at all.
I don't buy "90% in medieval subsistence level poverty" because medieval subsistence level poverty doesn't scale. It went obsolete even with the potato as a base food crop in the early 19th Century - I'd accuse the Irish potato famine of ending anything remotely like it. If there's feudalism again, then it's because we can't organize ourselves in anything more efficient than that.
I can't say that some sort of Malthusian equilibrium is impossible, only that it seems unlikely. Historically, we had two notable examples in the 20th Century - the Ukrainian famine post the Bolshevik Revolution, and the Chinese Great Leap Forward. Both were, paradoxically, caused by belief systems grounded in Malthusian predictions. Now that's largely inductive predicting on my part, but we just know better now.
There's a heck of a lot of muddling through between going to the stars and a continuous Malthusian crisis. I'd say "going to the stars" has more than anything else failed to capture at least the popular imagination.
Cleanliness - basic control of waterborne disease, the level of schmutz from power, control of pernicious trash - is huge. Queen Victoria's husband Albert died of this sort of disease 150ish years ago. This is vanishingly rare now if it exists at all.
I don't buy "90% in medieval subsistence level poverty" because medieval subsistence level poverty doesn't scale. It went obsolete even with the potato as a base food crop in the early 19th Century - I'd accuse the Irish potato famine of ending anything remotely like it. If there's feudalism again, then it's because we can't organize ourselves in anything more efficient than that.
I can't say that some sort of Malthusian equilibrium is impossible, only that it seems unlikely. Historically, we had two notable examples in the 20th Century - the Ukrainian famine post the Bolshevik Revolution, and the Chinese Great Leap Forward. Both were, paradoxically, caused by belief systems grounded in Malthusian predictions. Now that's largely inductive predicting on my part, but we just know better now.
There's a heck of a lot of muddling through between going to the stars and a continuous Malthusian crisis. I'd say "going to the stars" has more than anything else failed to capture at least the popular imagination.