I get the thrust of what you say but this wasn't always the case. The idea of linear progress upwards is not universal. Many cultures placed the pinnacle age in their past, before some corruption or decay took place -the ultimate expression of such would be like the biblical story of the Fall, but it also existed on less cosmic scales. The golden age when people were better, seeing your age as decay against the valorized past is in fact more common.
Also just because others thought similar things doesn't mean it isn't true now. The progress since sometime in the 1800s has been insane. If in 100,000 years a super smart civilization, unimaginably advanced, looks at an estimated world population time series, they will be objectively impressed that those guys figured out / stumbled upon some impressive things to manage that. It's really interesting to think about just how desolate the world was even a few hundred years ago. Almost all our big cities today were little towns, except for like 1 or 2 globally. The change is undeniable. It's not all subjective and "they said X, we say X, nobody can decide if X is true, what is truth anyway, etc"
In many cultures, there is/was also the idea of cyclical history. Things don't go forward or backward, they just repeat themselves in slightly different ways infinitely.
It reminds me of Vernor Vinge's Zones of Thought trilogy, especially the observation the traders make in the second book that all planet-bound civilizations are doomed to collapse at some point. They are usually able to restore technological progress more quickly the more records they have, but without leaving the planet are still doomed to repeat the cycle. IIRC there is even more-or-less standardized "uplift" protocols - series of technological reveals for less-developed civilizations to rapidly advance/restore their capabilities.
I wonder if there is academic study comparing past-focused, future-focused, and cyclical views of human progress in literature.
"Collapse" is maybe hyperbole in this case, if it's building on our own history to extrapolate forward. For us, certain societies have collapsed, and with them have been lost certain practices or technologies, but human civilization as a whole has been largely steady or growing since the agricultural revolution (using population size as a heuristic). There's always the threat of ecological collapse, but that's something that has only happened a few times in the history of life on the planet, and we haven't really faced anything like it before at civilization-wide scale. There's always been another group to move in and take up the abandoned land. Without some major technological breakthroughs, yes, we're likely to face a collapse eventually, but as a biosphere, not merely a civilization. Short of that, people seem to keep on keeping on.
I think the mistake comes from something common to a lot of sci-fi, which is mistaking the scale of a planetary setting. It takes a lot of energy to disrupt life on a global scale (we're managing it, but it's taken hundreds of years). "At some point" is carrying a lot of weight in that observation.
> "Collapse" is maybe hyperbole in this case, if it's building on our own history to extrapolate forward.
In the story, "at some point" generally involved technologies we are currently incapable of; the greater technology actually facilitating the greater collapse. Which at the most obvious included nuclear catastrophe.
> always been another group to move in and take up the abandoned land
Completely agree with your points, but I think it’s worth mentioning that the collapsing populations may not have been aware of this depending on their level of isolation and cultural view on outsiders.
Sounds like Niven and Pournell's Moties civilization cycle from "The Mote in God's Eye"
Excellent books.
Though isn't progress inherent in that knowledge tends to increase over time? What's useful tends to get passed on to future generations, so there is an inherent advantage compared to earlier generations. Of course it's not perfect (as sometimes things get forgotten) and just knowledge/skills don't always translate to increase in living standards or productivity or well being, but by and large, in the long run, this should be true?
“ all this has happened before. All this shall happen again.”
> Many cultures placed the pinnacle age in their past, before some corruption or decay took place
North America, for example.
> how desolate the world was even a few hundred years ago
Well, those were the Dark Ages which objectively represented a decline of society relative to what came before them.
Besides that, agreed to all you wrote.
> The progress
Progress towards what, exactly?
Victory over the terror of the natural world on all of its fronts. That doesn't mean decimation of natural beauty, but answering the question "how will I live comfortably and not die today?" everyday for everyone forever.
Do you/we think this is a truly possible or laudable goal.
Leaving aside the heart death of the universe, I can imagine a future that's a more utopian version of the Altered Carbon universe, where everyone who wants to have daily backups, which they could set to restore either in the cloud or in a biological/robotic body in the case of an unintended death.
I don't know if it's a laudable goal, but I think it'll eventually be possible.
I was asked about the direction of the destination. Saying the direction and having everyone agree on it is worth a lot when the current bus driver is heading towards a cliff. I do think things get better if we all pursued this destination together.
If you asked me several years ago I would have said "yes, the star trek future is at least partially attainable", but that requires a lot of optimism in technological advancement that I don't have. I do think that with the technology and resources available to us today (or the near future) we could support 10 billion people working safe labor in air conditioning, full stomachs, free time, and on a planet that is still hospitable.
If you want to know how to actually get there: I have no idea, but I do know if we don't agree on the direction and make steps towards it continuously for many generations that we'll never get there. For now I'm voting with my feet and contributing my labor to a cause I think pushes us in the right direction.
Also, I'm setting aside the battle with natural death. Preserving brains and their contents indefinitely is not impossible, but transhumanism is as much philosophy as it is technology.
Hmm. I think I get it and its certainly a goal you could get behind. I take it you basically oppose Ivan Illich's premise that modern medicine will never out smart death and fails to help people adapt to the truth of their mortality?
I don't think that death is a certainty. It is today, but we are working on it. We are not supernatural. CGPGrey's thoughts on this mirror a lot of my own.
I grant that not all care given to aged is a kindness, but not fighting aging is not virtuous.
https://youtu.be/C25qzDhGLx8
https://youtu.be/cZYNADOHhVY
Not having half of your kids die, could be one thing:
"For most of human history, around 1 in 2 newborns died before reaching the age of 15. By 1950, that figure had declined to around one-quarter globally. By 2020, it had fallen to 4%."
https://ourworldindata.org/child-mortality
Towards maximizing the sum of individual happiness, power, beauty and knowledge. Maybe a few other attributes in there, but these are the bare minimum that no civilization would deny for itself.
The question of course is 'how'. For the last few centuries, the answer has been technology.
Good question, I guess progress to the betterment of society, people's lives, and human knowledge and power.
But no one really knows what future we are heading towards, or what would happen to us in 100,000 years. No one really cares to think that far ahead I guess.
We don’t think about it that much because every assumption we make is likely to turn out to be wildly inaccurate and the technology of the time will likely solve all of the problems we worry about now long before they ever reach that breaking point we are currently worrying about.
Take the example from another thread today. In the 60s we were worried about food shortages to support the exploding population, but it turned out that we solved that problem way before the population number was at that assumed “breaking point”.
We can theorize now about the problems we will face in 100k years, but what about the problems we can’t ever foresee? Aliens with hyperlight laser beams? Rogue asteroids? We have no answers for those types of problems, but they are probably more likely than anything we can dream up today.
astroids are a problem, but we know enough physics to say aliens can't attack. if they exist they are too far away to know we are here.
> we know enough physics to say aliens can't attack
Don't be too optimistic... This isn't just a question of physics but also about the probability of the emergence of complex technological intelligence. Since we only know about a single case, we can't determine this probability. We can make various guesses but these all involve assumptions about things other than physics
all the alien intelligence needs to obey the laws of physics we know. There might be major things we don't know but it still fits in our current laws.
unless you are appealing to 'God can do anything' - but since God wouldn't do that we can ignore that he could.
Well, one thing we don't know physically is whether traversable wormholes exist
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wormhole#Traversable_wormholes
Even if all travel is limited by lightspeed, without knowing the probability of emergence of intelligent life, we don't know how far away or how long ago such life is likely to have formed.
Even if we did have a better idea about this probability, we still couldn't rule out that intelligent life had by chance formed relatively nearby, relatively long ago, thereby allowing them to reach us by now. Nothing in physics forbids this as far as I know.
Personally I don't think an advanced alien civ would attack us anyway, because we'd be no threat. Since intelligence seems to imply curiosity, they might want to observe or experiment with us instead, but that's speculative
> Even if we did have a better idea about this probability, we still couldn't rule out that intelligent life had by chance formed relatively nearby, relatively long ago, thereby allowing them to reach us by now.
What is "now"? Within the next 100,000 years? In human terms, that's an eternity, and in galaxy term, that's an insignificant amount of time. In other words, almost certain not to happen. Even if it does, do we even notice? Chances are they either immediately kill us all, or they just observe and will stay hidden. A face to face interaction is scifi, not reality.
Tbh, on the list of things that humankind should worry about, an alien visit isn't even in the top 100.
It's understandable that it's a great topic to muse about, especially among tech folks. It's been part of scifi lore for generations and one can spend a lot of time discussing technical aspects. That's by far less messy and depressing than dealing with actual real-world problems (like wars, drift to dictatorships, oppression of minorities, inequality, climate crisis, human-made ecological disasters, heritary or contagious diseases, etc etc). Though when it's about devoting actual societal resources, it would be a waste to spend them on alien visitor questions beyond writing novels and making movies. Even if it's more fun to nerd out on intergalactical travel rather than preventing school shootings.
> What is "now"?
"by now" means at some time before the present.
I'm just pointing out an alien encounter is not ruled out by physics. I'm not advocating for societal resources to be diverted to prepare for it.
You mention some well-known, difficult problems. Does their existence mean no one should ever talk about anything else?
I'm not sure why you get involved with a conversation just to point out that wars and climate change are happening. Everybody already knows that. I'm taking a little time out to comment on various topics here, as you seem to be doing too.
Anyway, if you're trying to encourage people to spend time on finding solutions to those problems, I'm listening. What's your proposal?
Sorry if I got you on the wrong foot. I was merely generally rambling, not critcizing you personally or your point. Of course it's fine to discuss this, just like it's fine that people discuss pokemon or cool jazz (who am I to judge). I could have posted this anywhere in the discussion tree. I'm merely a little fed up when some tech folks make it sound like this should be top priority for humankind.
Of course you're right about the physics.
And I don't have solutions to the hard problems either. They are hard for a reason.
Ah ok, thanks for clarifying. I certainly don't think it should be a top priority either, partly because of the low subjective probability, but mostly because it would be an outside context problem (excession) - it's impossible to prepare for an event whose implications we can't bound
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Excession#Outside_Context_Prob...
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Well it can be fun (sometimes terrifying) to try and imagine that far ahead, but unlike hindsight, it is, at the end of a day, just a guess
I didn't mean it in a moral sense, but in sheer production, population, the physical energy moved around the mass of materials moved around etc. It's a wholly orthogonal question whether this is better in a moral sense, whether people are happier, live more in harmony with their authentic selves or with God or whatever. The point is that even an alien would be able to see that this age is not simply like any other where people thought highly of themselves. There has been massive material-technological improvement in the last two centuries in a way that doesn't apply to every era at all. Seriously look at a chart of a world population. It's a hockey stick. Again I'm not claiming here and now that this is a moral improvement. Maybe you think it's for the worse and take the cautionary view, like the stories of Icarus, or the Tower of Babel and think it's bad that we took too much control of things. But that's an orthogonal question.