If your view is “it will take at least 30 years to transition to Georgism because otherwise we screw over most people who have >50% of their net worth invested in their homes”, then why bother? Most likely we’ll have humans living on Mars or in O’Neill cylinders 30 years from now, in which case the fundamental Georgist argument of “you can’t make more land” isn’t true.
It seems like you can get 90% of the benefit of Georgism just by going full YIMBY and you don’t have to wait 30 years to do it.
If you think that “humans will be living on Mars and O’Neill cylinders 30 years from now”, then you clearly haven’t done the math for realizing just how expensive and economically impractical that is, nor have you thought about how practical it is to get to Mars and live there:
12km is the maximum length that a steel cable can support its own mass at Earth surface gravity. If it is any longer, it will snap under its own weight.
O’Neill Cylinders will never be economically feasible to build. If we built an O’Neill Cylinder that’s 10km long and 6.4 km in diameter, with a 1m thick hull, then it would weigh 3 trillion kg (2 trillion kg of steel, with 1 trillion kg of material).
Putting 1 kg into LEO varies between $50,000 and $1,500. The lowest cost being the Falcon Heavy from SpaceX, but with only 3 completed launches, this is a somewhat optimistic estimate.
So, if we assume a cost of $1000/kg, then putting a 3 trillion kg cylinder into LEO would cost $3 quadrillion ($3,000,000,000,000,000), and that’s only for one cylinder.
For comparison, the world’s nominal GDP is less than 100 trillion dollars.
And that’s only the cost to put an O’Neil Cylinder in Low-Earth Orbit. If we had to send an O’Neil Cylinder to Mars (or something that’s comparable for sustaining human life), then the costs for space travel get exponentially worse than that due to the Rocket Equation.
For more information, you should read Futurist Fantasies by T. K. Van Allen. The book packs an impressive amount of information into just 100 pages.
in which case the fundamental Georgist argument of “you can’t make more land” isn’t true.
It is true. You can’t make more land. Humans still must obey the laws of physics, whether you like it or not. Both the Moon and Mars are absolutely horrible places for any human to live, so humanity has nothing to gain from trying to live outside the Earth.
I already covered how it’s way too expensive to try that, and I didn’t even go over all the physical challenges that would make it virtually impossible. Unfortunately, it will probably take many people and most LessWrongers a long time to realize all this.
In the 1960s, people thought that Humanity would’ve achieved the technological advancements in 2001: A Space Odyssey two decades ago, and that still hasn’t happen by now. People need to recognize that technological process has clearly slowed down, and we’ve nearly reached its limits.
Another misconception that’s worth clarifying is that the value of land matters more than the supply of land. There’s obvious reasons why lots in Manhattan are worth more than acres in the Sahara Desert.
It seems like you can get 90% of the benefit of Georgism just by going full YIMBY and you don’t have to wait 30 years to do it.
Nope, that’s a huge oversimplification, and it’s much more complicated than that. Any society would have to wait at least a few decades to transition to Georgism, but then the benefits will become progressive and compounding. I recommend reading Georgism Crash Course for a concise introduction.
If it will take at least 30 years to transition to Georgism because otherwise we screw over most people who have >50% of their net worth invested in their homes, then why bother?
Because we live in reality, not a sci-fi fantasy world where humans are invincible.
Even if humans could live on Mars, why would anyone want to live on Mars when you can live on Earth instead? Even Antarctica is a thousand times better than Mars. I will never understand why people fantasize about colonizing Mars when humans haven’t even colonized Antarctica.
If your view is “it will take at least 30 years to transition to Georgism because otherwise we screw over most people who have >50% of their net worth invested in their homes”, then why bother? Most likely we’ll have humans living on Mars or in O’Neill cylinders 30 years from now, in which case the fundamental Georgist argument of “you can’t make more land” isn’t true.
It seems like you can get 90% of the benefit of Georgism just by going full YIMBY and you don’t have to wait 30 years to do it.
If you think that “humans will be living on Mars and O’Neill cylinders 30 years from now”, then you clearly haven’t done the math for realizing just how expensive and economically impractical that is, nor have you thought about how practical it is to get to Mars and live there:
The Square/Cube Law makes it physically impossible to build megastructures like space elevators, mass drivers, orbital rings, etc: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Square%E2%80%93cube_law
12km is the maximum length that a steel cable can support its own mass at Earth surface gravity. If it is any longer, it will snap under its own weight.
O’Neill Cylinders will never be economically feasible to build. If we built an O’Neill Cylinder that’s 10km long and 6.4 km in diameter, with a 1m thick hull, then it would weigh 3 trillion kg (2 trillion kg of steel, with 1 trillion kg of material).
Putting 1 kg into LEO varies between $50,000 and $1,500. The lowest cost being the Falcon Heavy from SpaceX, but with only 3 completed launches, this is a somewhat optimistic estimate.
So, if we assume a cost of $1000/kg, then putting a 3 trillion kg cylinder into LEO would cost $3 quadrillion ($3,000,000,000,000,000), and that’s only for one cylinder.
For comparison, the world’s nominal GDP is less than 100 trillion dollars.
And that’s only the cost to put an O’Neil Cylinder in Low-Earth Orbit. If we had to send an O’Neil Cylinder to Mars (or something that’s comparable for sustaining human life), then the costs for space travel get exponentially worse than that due to the Rocket Equation.
For more information, you should read Futurist Fantasies by T. K. Van Allen. The book packs an impressive amount of information into just 100 pages.
It is true. You can’t make more land. Humans still must obey the laws of physics, whether you like it or not. Both the Moon and Mars are absolutely horrible places for any human to live, so humanity has nothing to gain from trying to live outside the Earth.
I already covered how it’s way too expensive to try that, and I didn’t even go over all the physical challenges that would make it virtually impossible. Unfortunately, it will probably take many people and most LessWrongers a long time to realize all this.
In the 1960s, people thought that Humanity would’ve achieved the technological advancements in 2001: A Space Odyssey two decades ago, and that still hasn’t happen by now. People need to recognize that technological process has clearly slowed down, and we’ve nearly reached its limits.
Another misconception that’s worth clarifying is that the value of land matters more than the supply of land. There’s obvious reasons why lots in Manhattan are worth more than acres in the Sahara Desert.
Nope, that’s a huge oversimplification, and it’s much more complicated than that. Any society would have to wait at least a few decades to transition to Georgism, but then the benefits will become progressive and compounding. I recommend reading Georgism Crash Course for a concise introduction.
Because we live in reality, not a sci-fi fantasy world where humans are invincible.
Even if humans could live on Mars, why would anyone want to live on Mars when you can live on Earth instead? Even Antarctica is a thousand times better than Mars. I will never understand why people fantasize about colonizing Mars when humans haven’t even colonized Antarctica.