[ExI] OP-ED: The billionaire space race reflects a colonial mindset that fails to imagine a different world

[Adrian Tymes]

On Thu, Aug 26, 2021 at 12:15 PM William Flynn Wallace via extropy-chat <
extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote:

> adrian wrote:
>  The current trend would eventually see human population begin to shrink,
> which I fear would have negative consequences for humanity.
>
> Yeah? Just what?
>

At a simple extreme, extinction.

Short of that, a lot of modern technology is only feasible because it has a
large number of users.  Chip fabs to support billions are easier to make
and scale up than chip fabs that only support millions, let alone
thousands.  Without feasibility, the technology ceases to exist.  Imagine
if the effort to make computer chips was ruinously expensive per chip - and
thus, no more computers were made - if human population had decreased to
the point that there weren't enough users to make chips cheap.

Now imagine that for food production, sanitation, medicine, and other
basics of life.  The impacts would not be as soon or as extreme, but they
would be there.

I see a boon for the slowing and reversing of the loss of habitat for those
> animals who share the planet with us.   Do we want animals to exist only in
> zoos?  And the regrowth of forests and the Amazon Basin, etc.
>

Note I said "for humanity".  Humanity could (in theory) skip right off
Earth into orbiting colonies that could provide vastly better quality of
life than exists today, and those benefits to Earth's environment would
still happen.


> Not going to make it easy on supporting retired folks, I reckon.  bill w
>

That is already being seen, with a mere slowdown in growth.
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