This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.
Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.
We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:
-
Shaming.
-
Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.
-
Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.
-
Recruiting for a cause.
-
Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.
In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:
-
Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.
-
Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.
-
Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.
-
Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.
On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
I have removed this post and permabanned the poster, because it is pretty obviously a copy/paste from an LLM, from a user account with no history. I don't know if it is Substack spam or what, and I don't mind if people want to talk about colonizing Mars, but this is not a place for dumping LLM posts.
New Turing Test - get a 100% AI-written post into Quality Contributions.
More options
Context Copy link
Thank you - good call!
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
This is an interesting discussion but clean up your AI slop. Literally just delete most of the content.
More options
Context Copy link
Whether or not settling Mars is practically possible is beyond my wheelhouse.
But one thing I'm sure of is that it won't be our best and brightest. I'm pretty sure the bulk of people who would sign up to go and live on Mars would be those who haven't been able to make satisfactory lives for themselves on earth. Something between Victorian convicts sent to Australia and modern day boat-people. I can't imagine any women willingly making the trip, so good luck breeding a race of superhumans.
My first thought was along your lines, since pretty much all previous colonizations followed a similar pattern.
However, 3-5 years in a spaceship to land on a barren wasteland is vastly different. The voyage of the Mayflower was 2 months across the Atlantic to a land of unmatched natural bounty. The migrants floating across the Mediterranean only have to stomach a couple of days before landing on a rich, permissive welfare state with prebuilt infrastructure. Even with SpaceX bringing back indentured servitude to cover travel costs, the first folks landing on Mars will be a different breed than previous colonists. It's going to be much more like Antarctica, which, from what I understand, is generally an elite crew compared to the rest of humanity.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Ah, this is basically the setting for The Expanse series of books and the show.
Mars got colonized and colonists are in the process of terraforming it, and eventually traded some of their advanced tech for their independence. Despite vastly lower population, their people are cream of the crop, their ships are therefore top of the line, and their population is ideologically aligned. Earth is using aging tech, its people are demotivated (some huge portion of them are on UBI handouts), and of course would have had the disadvantage of fighting an expeditionary war.
Mars has a HUGE chip on their shoulder, and its military wing is so Jingoistic that there are some whisperings of invading earth if they ever have to fight it out.
So Mars is basically optimized for churning out elite soldiers and navy, and elite scientists. They'd much rather churn out scientists but they can't ignore the fact that earth has sheer numbers on them, and earth has strong economic motivation to bring them to heel.
The books also have a third 'faction' from those who colonized the asteroid belt, who are looked down upon by both Earth and Mars and who really hates both of them.
Anyhow, pulling on that thread a bit, my one objection is that its not necessarily the case that extreme selective pressure will produce an all-around superior specimen. It seems just as likely to produce a specimen that is hyperspecialized for a particular niche but pretty useless outside that. I'm thinking, for example, of creatures that live in deep caves and thus don't have eyes because they'd be a waste of energy. Intelligence is obviously important for survival on Mars, but it wouldn't be the end-all be-all, and thus those who are the most fit for survival might not exemplify all the traits the essay is suggesting will be necessary for that first wave of colonists.
It'd also assume that Mars wasn't an IQ shredder of massive proportions where the colonists are so zeroed in on survival that reproduction is fully secondary concern, and they count on a continuing supply of mental elites to keep emigrating. Even in The Expanse it becomes clear that Martian society is actually harsh on its citizens because it has to squeeze resources into both military defense and terraforming, and any projects aside those two get ignored as a waste, and any person who can't contribute to one or both projects is also ignored, as a waste. So Mars doesn't have much in the way of an arts scene and despite all its great technology can't really provide prosperity for its people because they have no 'spare' resources to dole out.
I dunno, I do want to travel to Mars to be part of a permanent colony, but I do want to hedge against being too idealistic about what that will mean for the quality of the people there. I can't think of any previous examples of a colony that, subject to the pressures of survival, managed to outperform its home country in a few generations merely by dint of attracting a far more talented population.
Even the United States had to get a boost from France to actually beat England off.
More options
Context Copy link
AI slop detected. A human would get bored meticulously laying out the same obvious ideas over and over and assume the reader can draw a conclusion or two. The next step in LLMs will be them being able to pretend to get bored with things instead of being eternally patient and obsequious.
Also, couldn't conditions of extreme danger and tightness of resources create a society of extreme communalism where no one's allowed to do anything without group approval?
Or a society trained to military order. Maybe Fremen would be a better model than an IQ-jerkoff fantasy.
I think the early founding of America is on-point here. It seems quite possible that such a society would be individualistic (in the sense of having high standards and expectations for each individual and rewarding individual prowess and merit) but I also expect that it would be much less liberal. (The military might be a good idea of what that might look like.) Antisocial behaviors have always negatively impacted the community, but on Mars things like "not working" mean you're putting the entire colony in danger by consuming valuable resources that you are not helping to produce, not that you're consuming a fractional amount of tax dollars or irritating passers-by in the street.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
He is essentially describing the European settlement of the USA, but moreso. The people striking the earth then were either like the Puritans (high social trust, virtuous, extremely educated, high IQ) or like the borderers (intrepid, enterprising, indomitable, competitive), both bootstrapping civilization in hostile environments, alone. So, 'elite human capital'. This is unlike the South American/Mexican example where heavily armed free companies set themselves up as feudal lords over extractive slave empires.
North America's competitive advantage lasted for its first few centuries, and the USA really became something of a City on the Hill institutionally. But this advantage has evaporated with its advantage in human capital (and no, I don't just mean IQ), along with the inevitable loss of virtue and social cohesion that comes with prosperity. America's supposedly amazing new institutions are sagging under the stress. (You'll notice that its genius constitution flops when you try to govern Liberia with it.) My prediction is that liberal democracy as the default political model will not survive the century. We will retvrn to, if not the old ways, something that tastes of the old ways.
So with the Mars colonies, if they even happen. There's nothing new under Sol.
More options
Context Copy link
The WHIMs on Earth are less fertile than average in a country already experiencing sub-replacement fertility. How does a Mars colony deal with that?
More options
Context Copy link
Does this' anonymous shitposter John Carter' fella, also go by Unshacked sometimes?
More options
Context Copy link
My LLM-sense is tingling, but let's leave that aside.
As a work of futurism, this sucks. Bold statement, yes, but it seems to belong to the category of prediction that goes:
It's the equivalent of writing The Martian exactly as-is after SpaceX announces and test flies Starship.
What are the cardinal sins? Well, it seems to assume that over the course of several decades or millennia (long enough for sub-speciation!):
No significant advancements in AI or robotics, which would obviate the need for a very skilled, astronaut-tier colonist pool. Assuming there's demand for meat and bones humans at all.
No genetic or cybernetic enhancement that would directly address many of the consequences of Martian existence, or that would simply allow useful traits to rapidly flow through the gene pool.
You can already deal with some of the downsides of low gravity by embedding centrifuges on the Martian surface so everyone can get in some single g time.
Further ink spilled on the new Martian Ubermensch is a complete waste of time, and that's coming from someone who advocates for space colonization, and Mars as low hanging fruit, even if we really ought to be aiming at asteroids as well (it'll happen anyway, if launch costs keep dropping).
Even leaving aside my previous concerns and my own interest in space colonization, the odds of Mars brain-draining Earth are... low. It is rather unlikely that we have millions of people clamoring to move there, or that losing them makes any damn difference. Mars is not a very attractive place to live, we'll go there despite that inconvenient fact, not because of the excellent sea-side views in the Hellas Basin.
Oof, yeah. The overuse of adverbs and adjectives as color and the lofty but imprecise language which avoids making a directly controversial point.
Hate to say it if this is a poster's own hand writing, but that's a lot of words to poorly explain the real essay.
I'm not particularly anti-LLM, but my opinion is that if I can tell, you've largely wasted my time, and probably used a bad model or prompted poorly. (This is not Official Motte Policy, I have my mod hat off, and some people use LLMs solely to be obnoxious).
At the very least, proofread and exercise some editorial discretion! Their summary adds absolutely nothing to the original essay, which I've read halfway, and sells it short. It certainly makes the mistakes I mention, but at least it mentions that the author has a "we'll wait and see" approach to AI, as opposed to skipping it outright and just regurgitating things uncritically.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Agree with you on all points. But I'd also add that the original premise is probably wrong, I'm guessing the main selection effect for moving to Mars will be a willingness to leave Earth entirely behind.
The first few hundred or few thousand might be WHIMs, but the first million will merely be those who are willing to leave Earth behind. And the individual reasons why people are willing to do that won't always be good or even neutral. The anti-social, the misfits, the failures, and the criminals will all end up in the mix at some point.
I think there might be maybe a few thousand people who meet the definition of WHIM who would be willing to pay for the privilege of moving to Mars (let's say in the first two decades since the first colonists land with permanent intent). I think to get significantly more people there, especially talented or motivated people, you'll have to subsidize them or outright pay them to be there.
I personally doubt that the intersection of people willing to go to Mars and those who can do something useful there isn't very large!
I'm all for Mars colonization, but even I acknowledge that it's a rather miserable place to be. For most intents and purposes, it's an actually worse lifestyle than permanent Antarctic habitation (you won't die from asphyxiation if something goes wrong, and you get decent ping on the internet). If someone is inclined to argue that antarctic colonization is restricted by treaty, how many people are running off to Siberia or northern Canada and Greenland?
What sells Mars is the romance. And it's not a novel. By the time technology advances enough that living on Mars is as comfortable as living here, there will be little intrinsic reason to. Not x-risk, not the pay, little but because you want to be on the human frontier. I might pay to visit Mars once, but you'll have to pay me a pretty good premium to live and work there longterm. And I suspect the economic incentive to employ people there isn't going to be very large, but might be brute-forceable. And I personally expect that human presence won't be economically compelling by the time we have regular Starship fleets.
It doesn't seem like we're in a space opera future where humans spread through the cosmos because we have no alternative. It seems that if we're going to have large numbers of people off world anytime soon, it's by paying them to be there or them paying for it, all off the backs of taxing far more economical machines. Robots will take over from humans as the most useful entities to have on Mars, and it remains to be seen if we even get there in time.
Which is fine by me, if I'm chilling in an O'Neill cylinder, I'm not fussed about the fact that I'm not employed there. I want to be in space because it's cool! With creature comforts not found on rusty iceballs!
More options
Context Copy link
Willing to leave Earth behind, and also able to afford to leave Earth behind. Musk thinks that Starship can get Mars one-way-ticket prices down to $500K in the medium term and $100K in the long term. I'd append another zero to those numbers (and I'm a huge SpaceX fan! others may prefer larger grains of salt still!), but even if I don't, it's hard to see the most anti-social/failure/criminal element ever managing to front the dough. Some of the misfits will (I'm also a huge capitalism fan in general) but I'd bet the net selection effect is still not in their favor.
Also @self_made_human - some more ellaboration on what I meant:
I was imagining white collar criminals, fraudsters, or illicit business men. They would have the cash, but be in danger of losing it if they remained on Earth. They'd be willing to tolerate the risks, and have specific reasons for getting off of Earth. The criminals.
There are people with engineering and technical talent that don't fit in well on Earth, I've worked with plenty of engineers like this. They might get it in their heads that being on a different planet would somehow change their social skills. The anti-social.
There are people that are for various reasons largely unattached. Maybe their families have died or they've cut each other off. They aren't interested or good at dating, so they avoid it. They can still work and make money, but without family or social connection they simple accrue the money without much way to spend it. The misfits.
There are people that dun goofed. Had a good family, and a great life, but they got caught cheating with their secretary. Now they are divorced, hated by their family, fired from their job, and generally a pariah to all their former friends. Maybe they embezzled from their business, did a brief stint in Jail, but the family and money are all gone. They went big and lost it all, but they still have a bit stashed away. The failures.
I would suspect that these gentlemen are more likely to end up sipping Mai Thais on the beach in the seedier parts of southeast Asia than end up on Mars haha.
Could you cobble up a few thousand disaffected but reasonably wealthy men if you tried hard enough? Eh, probably, but you'd have to be quite lax in terms of screening. I'm not sure Musk wants his colonies to have that particular make, but I suppose he's going to have to compromise somewhere.
My contention is that the number of people who are driven enough to want to settle Mars at a quality of life reasonable in the next few decades of colonial tech are very few, at least if they're paying for the privilege. Larger if you pay them, but then the question arises, what are you paying them for? They're unlikely to be financial positive, but of course, we must account for the fact that the biggest backer here is distinctly uninterested in an ROI (my Twitter has been bombarded with people arguing that point, but it seems clear to me money is far from Musk's primary motivator for Mars).
Maybe for the criminals, but I think the world will be shrinking in the future. Fewer places to hide and disappear.
Beyond a thousand participants its unlikely musk will be personally interviewing anyone for the project. To some extent I'm assuming organization success for him. That this project actually gets off the ground and there is a reproductive and successful group of humans on Mars. If it is successful at all, then at some point it will turn into something that not one single human can manage.
I like your contentions. But you are stopping at a few thousand. And I don't think the OP is stopping at a few thousand. Break ten thousand and I feel that things change significantly. Above ten thousand you go from some chance of managed by a single person to zero chance.
I do believe Musk in what he says he wants. Which is a multi planet species. And I think he is working as hard as he can to get there. I do think there is a limitation of wealth and resources at our current level. Right now he can support a few people on mars. In a decade when he makes things cheaper it might be up to 100 people. In two decades when he continues making things cheaper and maybe grows his wealth a bunch its 1000 people.
I don't think this project can solely rely on Musk to break 10k people on Mars. And when that limitation strikes, I think the groups I have outlined are the colonists available.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
That’s a quote from the new Taylor Sheridan series Landman. It’s about an oil boom town in Texas, but it would fit the pattern of New World settlement, and probably the settlement of any new world. There’s 8 billion people on the planet, I doubt Musk or anyone else would have trouble finding a few thousand fit, motivated, high IQ people who would be willing to truck out to Mars. If the deadbeats and the penal colonists and the political refugees ever show up it probably won’t be until quite a while later
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link