Eywa Exists

[auroraglacialis]

Now to the more boring part of hickhacking on offtopic stuff :

Clarke, you seem to be quite hung up on what I would call a religion of technology, that not much can convince you. The point I was trying to make is that you as well as many others who think that way are operating on hope and speculation. You take current technologies and some short time trends and cook up a future that is near perfect. With spacefaring posthumans that are wise and enlightened and have immense capabilities but are showing great stewardship and compassion and all that. That is a nice SciFi fantasy, but it compares to the idea of heaven in religion. You even use the same rhethoric:

Originally Posted by Clarke

Nobody's been able to produce a convincing argument as to why it can't be done

These are exactly the same words I hear from religious fanatics - you cannot disprove that god exists given that god is defined as invisible and that everything happening in the world is gods will anyways.

So i will give you that this is a possible future maybe - but it is lunacy in my opinion to operate under the assumption that this is what will happen. What counts is what is and learning from what was, but to create possible futures in the mind and then assert that this is what is going to happen is hybris. We cannot know the future. And I think it is explicitly dmaging to create such a future by only projecting technology into that timeframe and just apply wishful thinking to the social and behavioural aspects. I am pretty sure that people in 13th century Europe would, if told the technological "advances" that have happened since then would certainly have thought that this must be a wonderful world. A world without poverty, without the need to work, with plenty of leisure time and time for festivals and dances and song. A world of freedom. Yet what happened was that technology changed, but society took a different route. There are more people living in poverty, more inequality, not really less work, more depression and so on. The people in the 1960ies thought if the trend goes on, by the year 2000 robots would do the work and the father of the family who brings in the money will have to work less hours for the same money. Instead now his wife works the same hours as he does and still the money barely pays the bills. The problem I have is that despite all technological changes, society, economics, politics and behaviour in general operates independent from that. Technology is a result of these behavioural systems much more than it is creator of them - and certainly it is not a net positive force - it is a reenforcement instead. It fortifies the behaviour and sociology that created it. A liberating technology comes from a liberal society. Technology is not some outside force, like a god, that makes society or people better, more moral, more just - it is a product of human society and thus it is a reflection, an echo of that society.

To hope (or pray) for it to create a heaven, a paradise - even if that requires a rupture called singularity after which the reign of a highly moral and ethical bigger-than-us power rules, a power we feeble humans are unable to understand but that we are supposed to cherish - is a faith based pseudoreligious behaviour. There is nothing wrong with that - I accept religious faith and people who follow it in most cases, but I am annoyed by the attempts from people who believe in this kind of faith to keep telling me that it is the truth (TM), that this is what is real, what will happen - and that it is of course more real than other faiths. And my annoyance is universal in that I could not stand the same from other religions either.

Science is a tool, a way to view the world. It can observe and interpret the world. In that it is a real thing. Technology that exists now is a set of tools, that we can look at and see what it does or does not and what effects it has. But that is it. Do take the future and claim that all problems will be gone in the future because of improved technology and science is faith and hope and to base present day activities on faith and hope seems awfully un-scientific to me.

What is there to enrich? And wait, what? Catalysts? In a fusion reaction?
You start with seawater and your actual fusion reactor. You electrolyze it, sort out by mass, and that gives you your deutrium.

For electrolysis, you need catalysts, you need pure and actually delsalinated water, "sorting them by mass" is called enrichment (as in "water enriched in ²H"). Please do me the courtesy of at least reading a bit on a topic you want to advocate. So all that is possible, but my argument was that it will not be cheap.

Jevons paradox - I think the implications of that go beyond consumption of meat. Think about energy for example.

If someone implemented bioprinting, demand for meat is irrelevant, since you are no longer using land to grow food for the animals; you're just growing animal out of relatively raw material.

And where does that raw material come from? Most likely plants or algae, right?

Not in the 19th century when most of the "dirty" tech was actually invented/introduced.

The 19th century people were ACUTELY aware that the soot and pollution is harming people and their land. They were very well aware of the social implications. The Luddite movement in England was very outspoken about the potential of people ending up as unskilled conveyor belt workers instead of free craftsmen. Yes, some effects are unforseen - we now do not yet even begin to understand what the effect of present day technologies will be - if genetic engineering or nanotechnology will maybe in 20 years time be recognized as something similar to the ozone hole - or not. Who knows. The knowledge is always incomplete but there is always enough knowledge to conclude that something should be done - and most of the time that is ignored or, as you do, put off into the future and into the hands of future generations, a god int he sky or "new breakthroughs in technology".

Last time I checked, mass extinction events usually last a few thousand years

It was about the speed of extinction, not about the duration.