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RE: The Threat is Real. Can the DOJ Defend DOGE?

in #life5 days ago (edited)

A great many intricacies emerge from your considerations that are relevant to the matter. Sadly, I think in trying times subtleties are neglected as obdurate challenges resist clever solutions, and instead are solved with brute force or not at all. History is clear that from time to time trying times come, and they don't go away until the trials thereof are overcome. When facing trials it is easy to falter. Faint hearts full of fear fail, but feet carry us on even when our hearts cannot. The cataclysms of the day are never viewed from a perspective that encompasses the geological history of humanity. Geological catastrophes seem fictional. Pompeii's devastation after Vesuvius erupted is a museum exhibit. The supervolcano Toba, some 75k years ago, laying waste to S. Asia from Africa to Indonesia, burying India under ~6m of ash, is almost inconceivable. The Burkle crater in the Indian Ocean is ~5k years old, and left deposits from tsunamis >1 kilometer high in E. Africa and the Middle East, a doom hardly imaginable to see coming.

People survived these things. People will survive this century in Europe too. Besides geological history, people have geopolitical history. In truth geopolitical catastrophes can be even more devastating than natural disasters, because they can target people deliberately, while chance chooses the victims of volcanoes and meteorites. Samarkand and the Amu and Syr Darya basins have still not recovered their populations from prior to the Mongol invasion in the 13th Century (although this information is unvetted, perhaps hyperbolic or dated, as my research into irrigation on the Amu Darya claims irrigation utilization of over half the river flow presently). Because they resisted conquest, the Kwarezmians were genocided, their fertile soil salted, and centuries of development of irrigation works destroyed.

People came back, the salt washed away in scant rains, but the irrigation works were (claimed) never fully restored, and the productivity of the land never again supported as many people as it had when originally irrigated.

On Earth we are so common that human life is squandered. This will be completely turned on it's head in space, with the scarcity of good company the one thing AI cannot deliver, much less in such abundance any would squander it. Humanity adapts to it's conditions, and the close and unavoidable association we experience today devalues our good company, while such scarcity as interstellar distances between us will create will increase the value of good company incalculably. Appropriately valuing the scarcest thing in the universe, good company, will become an evolutionary hurdle that will eliminate them incapable of it rapidly because society is necessary to a social animal and the extremity of it's scarcity will increase the importance of being good company to survival beyond reckoning.

The abundance of resources and automating their development will create circumstances of inconceivable wealth of material goods to us that will be utterly unremarkable to them availed of it. The separation of people by relativistic distances will create practically absolute freedom and security. I fully concede these predictions are centuries in the future, but, in the event these technologies develop, will be the certain consequence. The technological advances necessary are all in process presently, and if we take the survival of the human species as a given, I do not see any reasonable basis for assuming they won't mature to the requisite state.

We are left to assess the several hurdles that must be surmounted to attain to fully automated production, and at will space travel (which I will argue is a product that will be one of those fully automated, in due time). AI obviously exists and the most advanced AI that has been produced to date, Deepseek, has just been released into the wild as open source code. Clearly that tech advance is underway. As to table top, or individually owned and operable means of production, in every field of industry, I also assert have advented, if yet in primitive prototypical form. Since these technological advances are, according to my research, ongoing and are incapable of being prevented from maturing because they are the mandate of the laws of physics, then the state of humanity I predict is only a matter of time and engineering - unless I have grossly misunderstood some factor that puts the kibosh on some critical advance.

I know this discussion is boring to you, so don't expect you to spend effort or time to develop such criticisms, but would not be disappointed if you did. I have written pages of text, and serially condensed to about 10% of it's original extent, so I have diligently done my best to be as brief as possible out of respect for your preferences.

Edit: bah! I neglected to address why humanity would be isolated by space travel and individual ownership of automated means of production, which I edited out some pages of explanation in a brutal quest for brevity. Your description of communal efforts isn't the result of decentralization, but of centralized production.

When humanity is availed automated means of production to individuals, crews will not work together, because that introduces that competition and confrontation wholly avoidable by individually laying claim and developing a resource. Because the means of production are owned by individuals and wholly automated, no laborers, no crew, no corporate structure is necessary, nor would the fractionalization of the wealth produced be very tolerable if accompanied by vicious competition, as we see close quarters produces. Vastly more sites to be developed exist than there ever will be individuals to develop them, so individual, or at most, familial colonies will be developed, rather than communities fraught with potential violence, betrayal, and brutal competition.

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