Environmentalists are fond of saying that “There is no second Earth“. They are wrong! Here’s why:
There is an entire second Earth right here on Earth.
Second Earth is a waterworld. It’s the vast Pacific Ocean that covers half the planet.
Well, he’s a little fuzzy on the concepts of halves and wholes, but let’s hear him out on colossal geoengineering projects.
the sequel to time cube, ice cube
You’ve tried cubes of time, but have you tried cubes of time, on ice?
See what’s really fun here is that once again the libertarians are blissfully unaware of their natural predator: bears.
This is so funny. Every time they are given what they want the infrastructure crumbles to the point of being dangerous, and then the bears come to finish them off. Just ordinary bears are deadly enough for libertarians to LARP a Jurassic Park speedrun.
I guarantee that if there is a libertarian space colony, all of their life support systems will be contaminated by mutant tardigrades (aka water bears). The libertarians yearn for destruction by bears.
Wow, amazing story. Same thing actually happened to a friend of mine
(But srsly, I enjoyed that.)
That was a good read
Tap for spoiler
I did predict the twist, when they mentioned a completely safe quarantine zone. Nothing ever goes perfectly well with stories built on apocalyptic premises. But reading it still gave me chills. Excellent delivery.
There is an entire second Earth right here on Earth.
“… Mister Bond.”
“I sunk your battleship thirty-five minutes ago.”
ah yes so he’s up to making
aircraft carrierfloating libertarian treehouserube goldberg mad max platform out of pykreteOne idea for the bottom of the iceberg is to erect a grid of airtight barriers on the bottom of the berg, with cells a few dozen meters wide and a few meters tall and blow air bubbles into them
this makes this grid having to support several tons of buoyancy force, it will have to be airtight but also its connection to ice will have to be so, and ice will probably deform over time. did all of these motherfuckers dropped out of middle school?
look, i think it’s up to all of us to have the imagination and foresight to support roko in this fabulous and important endeavour. we could lure patri friedman onto the same ice floe, for example, by the simple expedient of putting up a yellow and black flag with “no steppy on snek”
It would give the orcas an opportunity to do the funniest possible thing
nah, he’ll never get there
all he can possibly do is to beg for money from givewell or whatever it’s called, then release a shitcoin to fund it, run a few prediction markets and hopefully at some point money cops will catch him
it will have to be airtight but also its connection to ice will have to be so
just flex tape it bro why you so negative
As Tom and Ray would say (rest in peace), it’s too much course 8.
(Course 8 is the catalog number for the physics department at MIT.)
Besides, it’s been then tried already: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Habakkuk
i like how he started on the premise that iceberg is cheap real estate, then okay let’s cover underside with thermal insulation, and also reinforce top with freshwater ice, that freshwater will be have to be transported there and then frozen in place, and also let’s cover top with expanded glass and concrete, and let’s put wood pulp and basalt fiber rebar in ice, and
all while never counting beans, and any and all numbers are entirely pulled out of his ass
even on lesswrong the guy going through his numbers for how concrete behaves
Roko even said the ‘I think agricultural waste products like straw can be substituted for sawdust so maybe you are paid to take it off their hands.[emph mine]’ line. which is always a good sign when somebody is trying to the economically feasible math.
yeah let’s just divert entire global straw output so that Roko can build his libertarian crypto paradise
also straw is not a waste, wtf is he thinking
Maybe he was thinking of straw that has already been through the horse?
Ahh, horseshit. It is a key libertarian building block.
New form of pykrete made out of manure and ice. Eventually the Icebertarians will get use to the smell (an AI company is also working on a CRISPR fix), and with the problems of excessive manure and thus nitrate in places like the Netherlands, you are paid to take it off their hands! Win win!
@Soyweiser Why not make pykrete out of neoreactionaries?
A Turdburg on a turdberg. Not be a shining city on a hill, but it might have high albedo.
It’s hard for me to even imagine a more apt description of a privileged silver-spoon moron than thinking straw is waste and people would pay you to get rid of it.
Human minds are amazing, I can’t even hypothesise what thought processes, if any, led him there
And even if it was waste, that you are planning to build megastructures with it makes it no longer waste very quickly, and as there was no demand for the product before and now it is in high demand, the price will prob do some very interesting things. A suggestion was made to use sugarcane bagasse which has no other use it seems. But that would then also quickly get a use and increase in price, which would also do things to the price of replacement products, like sawdust, or straw. And I assume that if the price of straw in the world rises a lot due to this megaconstruction a lot of farmers would be unhappy, but yeah fuck the poor countries.
Even if it was waste, the sellers would notice and start charging for it. Libertarians have a fucked up definition of what ‘waste’ also with bitcoin mining.
straw goes for something like $70-100 per ton (in poland; depends on region and other factors) sawdust is probably cheaper
Just program the godlike AI to turn everything into pykrete instead of paperclips.
Problem solved.
This is literally the dumbest shit I’ve read all week and it’s been a pretty dumb week. I’m afraid I have to diagnose Roko with having the brain scamblies. There is no cure.
Yes, we’ve had vertical cities with economic class strata, but have we had frigid vertical cities with economic class strata? This is an incredible innovation in the dystopian novel genre.
N = 2 (this and judge dredd) right now, but was there a rise in fiction in the 70’s/80’s where they did the ‘people live their whole lives in a skyscraper and didn’t come out’ thing? Is there some underlying societal fear I’m not super aware of? Or am I making too much of two examples?
It was (is) a real thing that archtitects have thought about. In 1969, the concept was named arcology. I learned about them through SimCity 2000 which helped popularize the concept.
I think, culturally, it’s an offshoot of Modernist thought. One trend in modernism is that science can be used to find more efficient ways to live, and that science will lead to human dominion over all natural processes. Some thinkers took this to one (terrible) conclusion and wondered about if people could live, work, and socialize all within one building; one efficient and contained (and human controlled) space.
Real skyscrapers were often designed with this in mind, and we still see the echoes of it today with concepts for Mars colonies and hanging-building mega-cities in Tokyo.
Whittier in Alaska is mostly all in a single building.
Yes I know about archologies, but those are all just concept ideas, which is interesting that it lead to these dystopian ideas. I was wondering if there was more to it than just that.
Look up also extremely influential architect and noted fascist Le Corbusier.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unité_d'habitation
The building also incorporates shops including an architectural bookshop, a rooftop gallery, educational facilities, a hotel that is open to the public, and a restaurant, “Le Ventre de l’Architecte” (“The Belly of the Architect”).
It was a huge trend after the war for a variety of economic and ideological reasons.
The Tcity serie are all about that too, Mark Adlard wrote about the potential path things were on with everyone living in a fully automated society within dense housing blocks. It was inspired by the emerging post industrialisation in the north of England which was at its peak in the late seventies (before thatcher and the Tories gutted it) there are some fantastic descriptions of the cultural implications exploring things like boredom and their attempts to alleviate it.
The failed utopianism of the north, and various other projects like the London tower block communities, just before the wave broke inspired a lot of English sci-fi, it was an era when the future must have seemed so open and undecided. The early signs of collapse starting to show but it sill being so uncertain if and how the chips will fall.
Harry Harrison though American lived in the UK and was closely involved in that same sci-fi scene, his series the stainless steel rat draws from.a lot of that same energy but from just after the wave broke and the capitalistic realism washed away all the beautiful castles built on the sand. ‘We must live as stainless steel rats in the wainscott of their society’
I can’t even remember what the thread is about, so I doubt this is related, but they’re great series worth finding if anyone loves old sci-fi.
@Soyweiser It was a bigger theme earlier: 50s/60s. Asimov, Bradbury, and I think Heinlein all used it.
I recall reading quite a few of those, but don’t recall any specific building ones, esp not which much themes of ‘people stop interacting with the outside world’.
The Caves of Steel was basically named for it, with a major plot point revolving around the fact that everyone is too agoraphobic to have committed the murder because of generations spent living in giant domed cities kept isolated from the natural world.
@Soyweiser Not as a primary focus, but as a background fact, e.g. Trantor in Foundation.
The granddaddy of those would be E.M. Forster’s The Machine Stops, from 1909
There’s a bit in foundation (iirc) where they go to earth (or somewhere) in the distant future and everyone is totally isolated living in their own super secure little underground bubbles. (or am I thinking of a Clarke short story?) No one even bothers messaging each other anymore because they have nothing to say to each other, they just stay in their own closed system safe from all dangers.
Also James Blish, in the of-their-time-but-still-worth-reading Cities in Flight series.
That’d probably be Ballard trickling down into pop culture
also, to some extent, poul anderson’s war of the wing-men.
Welcome to Alcor Towers.
Ok, seriously, this is just Mortal Engines fan-fiction in an oceanpunk AU.
No, see that would be way cooler than this.
extremely funny that none of his interlocutors bother asking what his engineering background is
Don’t worry Roko has the support of the best mind of our generation behind him: Roko: “Elon is absolutely right that Tunnels[sic] would solve traffic”
E: More on the best minds, somebody in the comments : “‘it[a country selling their land to a new country] has happened’ is far less rare than CREATING the land, which has never happened.”. Are we a joke to you? [this sentence was translated from Dutch].
careful with questions about formal education like this, you might offend Dear Leader
Look, I already knew Roko was a moron but this is outrageous.
Yes, good plan, the ozone layer hole craves more skin cancer sacrifices. (And don’t forget that hole is prob going to grow due to mega genius musk putting aluminum sats in the sky that burn up in high altitude)
Amusing also that nobody mentions piracy.
He does mention that you’ll need a military to defend your borders, though of course he’s more concerned about opportunistic “legacy governments” taking his iceborne super country away from him rather than pirates showing up to fish anything valuable out of the sea as it all predictably and rapidly falls apart.
Yeah this new ‘military’ setup will also quicly lead to them being seen as pirates by ‘legacy governments’ (who tend to love armed groups showing up, esp near any shipping lanes (if he wants to live anywhere away from the damaged ozone layer (the south of the south pacific seems somewhat empty at least). And the various groups of people in this new libertarian utopia (I’m going to assume it is libertarian) will surely not start preying on each other, or those nice ‘legacy’ shipping going round. At least 4 people will call themselves Ragnar Danneskjöld.
I meant more like treating the icelibertarians like the Houthis and tossing a few missiles into the iceskyscrapers than that kind of what I assume is USA military fanwank video.
Who needs missiles when a few parabolic mirrors will do the job?
A million red-hot tungsten balls.
Nah, that would only happen if they touched our boats.
Or if we thought they touched our boats.
Or if something wholly unrelated happened to one of our boats nearby and it was politically convenient to say they had touched our boats even if they didn’t actually have much reason to at the time.
Houthis have been bombed with every weapon at saudi air force disposal for almost decade by now
Yes, and they are still around, same with the Taliban, but for some reason I doubt the Icebertarians will be that anti-fragile. As soon as the first Icebertarian becomes homeless and sets up a tent they will bail. “I’m fine with them doing drugs in their homes, but now they are doing drugs and not even coding javascript! I cant bear it!”
Yes, good plan, the ozone layer hole craves more skin cancer sacrifices.
Sun can’t get you if you never go outside taps noggin
Ha, do you think The Hole didn’t think of that? It consumes!
by the way, when was the last time when rats got their lives or limbs in danger by testing their stupid ideas? instead of, you know, asking someone who knows beforehand? probably something weird happened to people testing these anti-cavity bacteria, but nothing really serious i guess. that was maybe half year ago or so
Someone send Roko a copy of James K. Morrow’s novel “Towing Jehovah” which involves the enormous corpse of God being towed, by a (much smaller) oil tanker, from near the Equator north to a fijord for burial in a cave. (I lost interest toward the end).
It’s not strictly relevant - I don’t think the crew sets up on the corpse itself - but it’d be fun to watch where Roko’s head goes.
“Step One: We kill God. Step Two: We harvest the cadaver, plastinate it, and build our city.”
“Step One: We kill God
I’m in for that. He can do with the corpse whatever he wants after, as long as I don’t have to see it.
Roko is of course begging the question, and the premise he is wrong about is that there is a sizable population willing to relocate to a floating iceberg, instead of living in an existing country.
Consider what the proposed citizens have to consent to:
- paying for the R&D required to implement the technical solutions Roko envisions, along with the continued higher maintenance costs
- paying higher wages for the people who are supposed to do all the boring menial jobs in this floating city, on par with existing cities
- paying higher daily cost of living for everything from food to building supplies to luxuries to entertainment that have to be imported
- being at the mercy of “legacy governments”, many of whom possess navies capable of everything from interdicting the food supply, to literally undermining the city from below, to actual assaults and airstrikes
- paying higher prices for insurance of their lives and dwellings and possessions because of all the above
Amusingly the solution for a libertarian city is a megastructure project probably only a rich nation is prepared to pay for.
On the other hand, no age of consent laws
Roko: I’m in.
@dgerard Seasteading 2.0 - with even *more* shit than version 1.0!
