Bassoe
Well-known member
So to recap:
We live in a closed system with finite resources essential to maintaining a first-world quality of life. Therefore, eventually, we'll run out of said resources. The whole 'Great Reset' ideology is essentially the elite attempting to hoard a greater share of said resources for themselves and acquire increased totalitarian control over everyone else by essentially recreating a horrific combination of the ages of company scrip and feudalism, where everyone but the elite are debt slaves who owns nothing themselves but subscriptions, from which they can be banned if they fail to obey the elites who run said subscription services.
Even this isn't a stable situation in the long run, because even if only the elites aren't minimizing their resource expenditure by living in pods and eating bugs, any expenditure of resources which aren't renewing will eventually use them up, it'll just take longer than if everyone had a first-world quality of life. Since we've already extracted all the resources essential to building technological infrastructure which can be extracted without preexisting technological infrastructure, the collapse will be permanent and humanity will remain stuck at a primitive level until the sun's transformation into a red giant or some other cosmological Outside Context Problem causes our extinction.
However, as Cherico already pointed out, there is a workaround in which everyone wins, if the system wasn't closed and we had more resources. And the technology to make that workaround exists, has existed since the cold war space race and in the long run, would more than pay for itself.
With that in mind, the only question becomes, why don't we already have asteroid mining and powersats? What are possible explanations for their absence?
Now with all that in mind, what could we do?
We live in a closed system with finite resources essential to maintaining a first-world quality of life. Therefore, eventually, we'll run out of said resources. The whole 'Great Reset' ideology is essentially the elite attempting to hoard a greater share of said resources for themselves and acquire increased totalitarian control over everyone else by essentially recreating a horrific combination of the ages of company scrip and feudalism, where everyone but the elite are debt slaves who owns nothing themselves but subscriptions, from which they can be banned if they fail to obey the elites who run said subscription services.
Even this isn't a stable situation in the long run, because even if only the elites aren't minimizing their resource expenditure by living in pods and eating bugs, any expenditure of resources which aren't renewing will eventually use them up, it'll just take longer than if everyone had a first-world quality of life. Since we've already extracted all the resources essential to building technological infrastructure which can be extracted without preexisting technological infrastructure, the collapse will be permanent and humanity will remain stuck at a primitive level until the sun's transformation into a red giant or some other cosmological Outside Context Problem causes our extinction.
However, as Cherico already pointed out, there is a workaround in which everyone wins, if the system wasn't closed and we had more resources. And the technology to make that workaround exists, has existed since the cold war space race and in the long run, would more than pay for itself.
With that in mind, the only question becomes, why don't we already have asteroid mining and powersats? What are possible explanations for their absence?
- The majority of the elite are ancient baby boomers whom, no matter how much they literally parasitize the youth, they'll still die of old age before the consequences of ruining the world hit. Just like they've done with everything else.
- Thanks to corruption and monopolies, the ability to create money for the wealthy and massive corporations has became totally divorced from the ability to create anything of actual value. Rules of the scam being; Step one, create an economic crash, step two, offer to bribe politicians if they'll give you a bailout of money taken straight from the printer or taxpayers, step three, pay off said politician co-conspirators with some of the bailout money they gave you. At no point is actual value generated. In fact, since actually producing and selling products has a higher cost overhead than repeatedly perpetuating said scam, it will be economically selected against.
- A self-sustaining colony would be impossible for the elite to control, specifically, to prevent it from just declaring independence, repurposing its infrastructure for moving asteroids around into a MAD deterrence to make said declaration have teeth and nationalizing all its infrastructure in the name of their new independent government, leaving the company or nation who funded them with no profit. Worse from the perspective of the elites, it'd mean the creation of outside competitors. In a couple centuries, with functionally unlimited resources and territory to expand in and no single monopolistic ideology meaning constant open or cold war ideological conflict between them to motivate technological advancement, the descendants of the space colonies would outnumber and technologically outgun the descendants of the earthbound elite.
Now with all that in mind, what could we do?
The Mote in God's Eye by Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle said:...it was difficult to work with creatures who might suddenly see an unreal universe and make judgments based on it. The pattern was always the same. First they wished for the impossible. Then they worked toward it, still knowing it to be impossible. Finally they acted as if the impossible could be achieved, and let that unreality influence every act.