[ExI] Zuckerberg just bought 26 days of world peace?

[Adrian Tymes]

On Sun, Dec 6, 2015 at 9:49 AM, Tara Maya <tara at taramayastales.com> wrote:

> The more people there are the more jobs there will be. Not only because
> most of the same jobs we have now will have to scale up (more children
> means more teachers, more teens means more police, more adults means more
> entertainments, etc…) but because, as mentioned, there will be a huge
> number of jobs that will open up for the new industries that can only exist
> when our population is in the trillions rather than the millions.
>
> As a science fiction writer, I have a long list of “future jobs”…not the
> tech jobs, which will also exist, but jobs that no one does today because
> it would be a frivolous waste of resources at our present level of
> civilization, but would be perfectly easy to do if we had a more efficient
> technological and economic base.
>

Well said.  Also, those who doubt this is the case can look at the history
of the Industrial Revolution and its timing relative to world population
levels.

Or look at chip fabrication economics: it costs billions of dollars to
develop a generation of computer chips, but per-unit production costs are
low, so if only millions were needed (a few computers per person), the
chips would cost thousands of dollars each, but since we have demand for
billions of chips, they cost in the tens or singles dollars each.

Or look at small vs. large cities, and notice how many more services are
available in the latter while there's not enough demand in the former.  For
instance: mass transit and cab service, a diverse array of restaurants (or
for really small towns, any restaurants), water and sewage, electricity and
phone lines (which the DoE and FCC respectively have been working on for
decades), and specialist services of all kinds.  At the most extreme
(usually not found within the USA), population can get too disperse for
schools and hospitals, so the people must do without.  This has been a
major driver of immigration from rural to urban areas, ever since
substantial urban areas first existed, and has gotten more intense as areas
grew populous enough to make practical more services.

Consider what would happen to prescription drug prices if there was
approximately a thousand times the demand for each given medicine.  Any
time some company jacks up the prices for a relatively low-demand pill,
there's that much more incentive for someone else to develop and market a
low-cost substitute, and then the jacked-up-price pill either gets sold at
a reasonable price or stops getting much sales.

Though, again, this will likely require tapping extraterrestrial
resources.  If nothing else, it might be more practical to create truly
large cities in space, where there's no natural geography that limits the
physical size: if your city of a million will soon be getting an influx of
a hundred thousand, the default answer is just to build more "land".
Imagine what today's largest cities would do if excavation to support
building down, and architecture to support building up, were to become far
cheaper than they are today.
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