Meanwhile, in the real world: The antirant.

[ford_prefect42]

In the current general atmosphere of negativity, pessimism, xenophobia, and envy, I think we should periodically step back and look at what is really going on. By every metric, the world is getting better. Not just a little, but *amazingly* better. We're in a time of unprecedented peace, international poverty is falling. Technology, just over my

Comments

[prester_scott]

I take issue with some of your unbounded optimism:

1. Colonizing space. Just because we can send a couple of guys to the moon for a short time, and launch unmanned probes all over the place, does not make us "poised to colonize space."  The challenges of keeping humans physically and mentally healthy on an interplanetary trip, let alone in a permanent multi-generational base off world, are tremendous. And since there is no evidence that FTL travel is possible, sci-fi space empires are, as far as we know, not possible either. A colony on a habitable planet hundreds or thousands of light years away once established will have its own separate destiny.

2. Machines with souls. This sort of talk conceals an equivocation on the word "soul." It's never tightly defined to begin with; we can replace it with "consciousness" but that isn't well defined either.  Materialists insist that there's no such thing as a soul because it can't be detected, measured, or quantified (and that's true even if it's an "epiphenomenon" arising out of a

[ford_prefect42]

For most of your post, I am going to just claim "artistic license". I understand and agree that the "soul" isn't something that has a very specific definition. I was being poetical with that, not rigorous.

To the human condition parts, yes, there are a lot of threats, and bad things still happen. But they're happening less. A lot less at the moment.

Basically, what I am saying is, "this is what a golden age looks like, revel in it!" Not that I think we can keep it.

[prester_scott]

Is it really a golden age if we have to sell ourselves into slavery, or overextend ourselves to the edge of the cliff, to acquire the gold?

This is not to say that I don't and we shouldn't appreciate the good stuff that we do now have, or that we could have tomorrow if we play today's cards right.  Just let's not overstate it.

[dantheserene]

I don't know about you, but my forty hour a week office job is a very long way from actual slavery. I'm not overextending myself or even my finances to live very well.

[kharmii]

I'm also excited about the idea that scientists are on the verge of creating a vaccine for alzheimers, editing out bad genes from the genome and will someday be able to transplant a human head onto a healthy body.

I'm pessimistic about how stable all this is. I see too much lawlessness pushing us into an oligarchy and ruining our culture that I wonder if we are to the point where it can't be reversed.

[level_head]

Happy birthday, sir. I share a fair amount of your optimism, though I note the artistic license aspects.

Prester_Scott is concerned about affordability, but it's not the free market that is expensive (quote the opposite!), it's the attempts by governments to control or co-opt power and constrain the free market that are expensive. In lives as well as treasure.

Parts of the discussion make me rather wistful, because of the effect of those governments - most notably our own: "If we can put a man on the Moon" we used to say. But we no longer can. For a while, it appeared that China was going to pull this off before their own collision of government and market took them out of the running. It now seems that they won't make it.

We are regulating ourselves into extinction. China's problems are different, and they suffer from a different sort of lack of liberty. Oddly, the Chinese people are now much more favorable to the free market than are Americans. By a large margin.

===|==============/ Keith DeHavelle

[ford_prefect42]

I am disinclined to count China out as yet. I definitely agree that they're hitting a major major "speed bump" (their first "bust" after the great "boom"), and that their governmental system is ultimately going to have to be reformed in a major way, however, they also have some VAST advantages at this point. One of those advantages is a governmental system that seems open to reforms.

What I see happening instead of China folding in on itself is a Sino-Russian alliance going to war against the current establishment US/Euro decaying dominant system. A war which the US/europe are incapable of fighting, let alone winning. After that war, The US will have been reduced to a fairly impoverished regional power with, very probably, internal conflicts.

Now, that said, I DO expect the march of progress to continue. The supply chain of important materials isn't located in the US or Europe anymore, it's mostly in Asia and Africa.

I never said I was an optimist, I said things are miraculously awesome :)