Of course, from what we can gather here, if an ancient civilization went extinct before reaching the industrial age and/or going global, we would have much less chances of detecting its presence. Also an interesting point raised by the article is that the longevity of a past civilization should be proportional to its ability to be environmentally sustainable, and so by definition less detectable.
]]>Personally, I think strengthening the exploration of space is our best hope for saving Earth: not for population expansion, but because of natural resources.
Let's face it, humanity in general is not likely to accept the kind of reduction in standard of living that saving the planet ecosystem would require, not without a lot of people dying before, and this does not seems to be very ethical. If anything, people now living with a lower quality of live will want to see it increased, and will be willing to fight for it.
So, outsourcing all those polluting human activities to orbital-and-beyond space, even if only by automated plants, could be a way to still get the things that people want, and not choke our planet in the resulting waste (there would be also a point to be made about the red-herring trick pulled by the big industries with our current approach to recycling, how they managed once again to externalize environmental costs while going on with their practices, but that's another thing).
Also, right now there is a strong push by many people toward finding a way to "cure aging". I'm not saying it's going to be as easy as some people hope it will be, but if it will ever come to pass, either it will be completely forbidden for everybody (unlikely to succeed on the long term anyway, likely to be quite unpopular even worse than prohibition or the war on drugs, and I think also unethical), left as an expensive option for a very limited elite group (more likely to succeed, but deeply unethical), or open to everybody. In this last option, even with decreasing natality, suddenly population pressure is going to become relevant again.
If nothing else, it would be likely lead to a movement toward space colonization as the only way to get away from the older generations, that would otherwise keeps their firm and young-looking hands on the levers of power of anything of any importance.
]]>For the political point of view of the movie (and of the book too, if a bit less because you can cram more stuff in a book than you can in a movie), the power armor is an extra: arguably, in the book it was only there to make slightly more plausible the importance of the low trooper in an age of atomic weapons (and with a minor point of being a candy bait for the tech crowd).
This is useful if you want to defend the plausibility of the system as depicted in the book, and an obstacle if you are trying to make a point of the fascist absurdity that was his target.
Even then, you could have paid lip service to it, but then you must face how hard it would have been practically. Especially because he had already dealt with full cyborg suits in Robocop, he likely well understood how incredibly hard would have been having an army of them (check the Robocop trivia section on imdb, there are plenty of examples of the real troubles they had with the suit, including the suffering for the actor).
So, pay a lot of money to have a lot more troubles filming to be a bit more faithful to a book when you are trying to send a different message and this being more faithful making your intended message weaker by making the intended mocked protagonists cooler? I wouldn't have, too! :-p
]]>I mean, yes, the connection to the book is tenuous at best, but Verhoeven by his own words was interested in making an antifascist satire about the military like he had just done with Robocop about the American society in general, and the book license was simply something the studios had there at that moment.
But anybody that knows the work of Verhoeven in general could not think for a second that he was in any way praising fascism, violence or anything like that.
In fact, form an interview that I read, he was mostly inspired instead by a book titled "friendly fascism", by Bertram Gross.
Even the "badness" of the movie was mostly a conscious choice, like the choice of recruiting all soap opera young actors, to give out the feeling of watching a propaganda piece.
Maybe i don't feel the outrage at the "butchery" of the Heinlein book because I never particularly liked him and his works even as a kid that read any SF I could get my hands on and was pretty insensitive to politics. For some reasons, his works always strongly triggered my BS alarms, like more blatantly partisan authors did not
]]>Still, points in its favor: 1. it's cool: some kind of people are more likely to get involved in a supremely hard but interesting and exciting endeavour than a merely uncomfortable and boring one. In this site often the neo-religious roots of the space colonization myths are pointed as a disqualification of the idea itself, but let's not forget that nothing in this universe have any innate meaning apart from the meanings we put in it ourselves. Space exploration (and colonization as a requisite to do any serious exploration) is cool, apart for those mystical roots: as a proof of it, we are constantly talking about it, and the host himself have written a lot about it precisely because its a cool idea. So, choosing to focus one life on a cool thing because it's cool, on condition that do not cause damage to other people, is no worse way of using one own life than focusing on, for example, writing books, painting, doing sport or other similar activities.
politics: all Earth surface is already allocated to somebody, generally reluctant to let it go. In the case of Antarctica there are plenty of treaties that makes sure that nobody start exploiting it, and governments that would like to be able to stake a claim (Argentina, for example, but also China, Australia and others), and that's ture also for the Artic now-under-ice islands (see Canada, USA, Nordic countries and Russia), for the open sea you can see China artificial islands, and the Sahara is not exactly in a stable geopolitical zone.
distance: for billionaire that see (time will say it they are paranoid or will informed, but its well known that many of them thinks this way) the possible collapse of civilization approaching and foresee a near future of resource wars, hordes of disenfranchised migrants moving from the poorest to the richest nations looking to plunder all their preciously hoarded gains, the perspective of having a good stretch of vacuum keeping those hordes at bay may seem more reassuring than simply moving to a subterranean bunker or to a Patagonian ranch. Also, in some ways, a place that have to be as much a closed self-sufficient system as a requisite design to be able to exist at all, it's paradoxically more guaranteed to be able to go on existing than a system where you stored a lot of resources, but was built by a contractor and nobody ever really lived there for any period of time like one of the aforementioned bunkers.
Personally, apart a small scientific outpost on Mars for scientific purposes, for space expansion I would see space habitats as a more desiderable and realistic solution. If we had the ways to do it, I think a planet Earth left as a natural preserve with only the most important historical human settlements preserved as a kind of archaeological park while most of the human activities have been moved to enclosed perfectly controlled agricutlural, industrial and habitative stations would be something to look forward to.
P.s. I would also like to point to the Isaac Arthur channel on youtube: the guy talks a lot about mega-engineering projects, futurism topics and so on, and while maybe a bit too much "space-optimist", it's still full of interesting informations.
]]>First of all, like yourself noted, learning is already mostly distance. Most essential jobs will also likely already be done by telepresence, and for the essential jobs that can't be, people will be trained already to do it with breathers/pressure suits because that's the kind of environment where people live.
If you're building underground, large open spaces where many people can assemble are already at a premium, so it's likely that the only kind of those spaces are destined to socializing, not strictly necessary for a barebone survival functioning of the city.
Surveillance and monitoring will be already massive, because not only it can be, but in that kind of environment it's almost mandatory having it, things like Singapore on steroids.
Also, population will likely have been already heavily "trained" in following emergency guidelines.
So, if the mayor impose a strict social distancing and quarantine regime, move immediately to an "isolate, certify the status then move on" policy for essential workers, and start immediately a program to vaccine them, this should keep the lid on the stiuation for a while.
Also, side notes: due to the nature of such a colony, it's likely that there will be already an abundance of respirator masks, likely at least one private one per person plus many common one in emergency boxes at every corner and pressure door, regularly checked, and with everybody trained in using them with regular drills. If you start mandating the use of those in public spaces for the duration of the emergency, they should work much better than even the currently used hospital stuff, and as noted before the kind of people that would live on Mars would be quite less likely to start "anti-mask" revolts: you could even add some "smell" to the air in public zones, and start a campaign "if you're smelling the smell, fix your mask or go in quarantine!"
Honestly, unless the engineers that designed this colony did some huge cock-ups in designing the environment and security measures, or some other unforeseen circumstances (i.e. it's not a newcovid virus, it's some kind of toxic spores released by a new fungus that like to eat cable sheaths and AC filters, it's resistant to known antimycotics, and likes the high-radiation environment! or there is some kind of social disruption going on like a new MAGOM cult (make america great on mars) started by the grand-nephew of Trump), I think a extra-Earth colony it's the harder environment for such a virus to spread, because the environment and the population have to be already super-controlled and super-monitored. Unless, that is, the colony is already so close to its safety margins that even a limited push it's sufficient to drive it over to
]]>In industrial automation there is a lot of space for smaller simpler chips, 8-bit microcontrollers, the equivalent of a 8086 or even a z80, that could be produced in place.
Really, considering the notorious failure modes of more complex automation systems, I would design at least the groundwork of an engineering system on such a colony to be reliant on the simplest components... you can always have a higher layer of automation coordinating stuff, but I would not want to install Windows, especially a networked one, on each airlock interface.
Moreover, the same technology you use to print lower-grade chips, can also be used to print solar cells: I don't know much about the current status, but I know that at least for a while most of the solar cells production was covered using old dismissed microchip printing plants.
And of course, there are also concepts like the Minimal Fab sold by a consortium of Japan silicon operators: less useful for printing square kilometers of solar panels, but likely sufficient to keep the server farm of an off-world Mars colony working decently well.
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