Posted by jasondavies 2 days ago
Any society struggles with conservatives vs adapters. The population transition boundary is along prosperity. Until society reaches a certain degree of prosperity and prosperity alteration shows relative slowdown, adapters win. But afterwards, conservatives will fear movement downward.
It takes substantial adapter power to attempt transformative change. Once the transition boundary is hit, it doesn’t matter how much prosperity gain will be achieved. The key element is adapter power. In a democracy, especially, conservatism dominates past the prosperity boundary. The shape of bureaucracy will impede executive adapters.
America is mostly past the boundary and high-value change only occurs in fields where adapter power exists: opposition to BEVs, space technologies, AVs, chip fabrication, biotechnology, and land modification is strong. Adapter actions occur only through the use of executive power and memetic warfare: using conservatism language to promote subsidies for BEVs and permit AVs, military use for space launches, defence rationale for chips, and hiding biotechnology research until it’s ready.
Terraforming is too high-profile and easily fought. To succeed we need to transform it into using the language of conservatism (“restoring habitat”, e.g.), apply executive power (do so under military research auspices), or make it less valuable for conservatism to fight (many smaller projects rather than one big one).
We’ll get there, though. We’ll make the world better despite conservatism fighting us at every turn. Everything is good. Everything could be better.
There is no rationale contained in the proposal for why this would make anything better, or even if it did, why it would be a more desirable approach than any other proposal that does not involve fantasy engineering.
You go live in a city. Leave nature alone. Send the rest back where they came from.
oh that wish has already been granted. the world fertility rate is 2.3, and it has been falling precipitously for decades. once it gets to 2.1 we start depopulating an ageing population without a growing workforce (assuming no AI takeoff in the next decade) is going to be a lot of fun. you saved in your pension fund? too bad you can't eat numbers on a computer.
I guess space colonization is a third variable here, but the feedback loop on that is likely to not materially affect our trajectory in either direction.
it's possible that a lot of the loss in working age people won't be that bad - "bullshit jobs" (Taleb) do make up a lot of the existing jobs, so perhaps it's only the economic system that needs to change and the underlying population and means of production will be enough to work with.