Off the top of my head (and assuming arbitrary political/resource requisitioning powers) I might aim for Profoundly Self Sufficient Habitats.
This would basically be a kind of space exploration program on earth. The goal would be to develop a suite of technologies and practices to enable small groups of humans (less than 500) to survive and thrive with a technological civilization for centuries in extreme environments and cultural isolation. We should know how to build a habitat capable of supporting a group of humans generation over generation with construction of more habitat using ambient resources in (1) the Sahara, (2) the Antarctic, (3) deep underground, (4) at sea, (5) near Fukushima or Chernobyl, (6) at the top of Everest, (7) at the bottom of Lake Superior, (8) near deep sea vents, (9) in the upper atmosphere, etc.
You would need a bunch of new technology/culture and it would have to be relatively simple and self supporting, like 3D printers that can print their own components, highly efficient recycling systems, expertise in managing closed ecologies, cultural awareness of the dangers of culture loss/drift in small communities, etc, etc. This technology would probably have numerous spin-off applications in the rest of the world. The same project, assuming success, would create “life boats” that could hedge against certain kinds of X-risks. The same project would probably expand the effective carrying capacity of the Earth, because it would be opening up terrestrial niches for humans that we currently can’t fill. The same project would be good practice for longer term goals like the colonization of the inner planets, the asteroids, and the Jovian moons.
I think that the Seasteading institute is looking into this already. More generally, I think the idea is called permaculture. I agree with you. This is a close second to education reform for me.
No idea. I would expect that to be part of the research… especially if you were trying (for instance) to set up three well running habitats initially and come back 100 years later and find seven habitats that were running with additional optimizations that the initial three lacked. You want persistence, growth, and innovation instead of just grim survival.
If you seeded them with “astronaut quality” people then you’ll probably get regression to the mean in subsequent generations, and if the initial group was barely surviving then their descendants would probably run out of luck. It seems likely to me that you’d get a more robust trajectory if you start with mostly average people from scratch, but with a seed culture that was optimized by a vastly smarter community to be something they can teach their basically normal kids to use, maintain, and augment in the course of living.
The personal satisfaction question loops back more brutally when you think intergenerationally, because the kids certainly never gave informed consent to be part of a traumatic science project. But if lives in such habitats are highly rewarding it stops being such an ethical dilemma. One way to look at it would be to have people live in weird places in exchange for having been given ownership of millions or billions of dollars worth of awesome technology… if they aren’t “stuck in a lousy experiment” but instead “inherit stewardship of a treasure” then the ethical question mostly evaporates.
Off the top of my head (and assuming arbitrary political/resource requisitioning powers) I might aim for Profoundly Self Sufficient Habitats.
This would basically be a kind of space exploration program on earth. The goal would be to develop a suite of technologies and practices to enable small groups of humans (less than 500) to survive and thrive with a technological civilization for centuries in extreme environments and cultural isolation. We should know how to build a habitat capable of supporting a group of humans generation over generation with construction of more habitat using ambient resources in (1) the Sahara, (2) the Antarctic, (3) deep underground, (4) at sea, (5) near Fukushima or Chernobyl, (6) at the top of Everest, (7) at the bottom of Lake Superior, (8) near deep sea vents, (9) in the upper atmosphere, etc.
You would need a bunch of new technology/culture and it would have to be relatively simple and self supporting, like 3D printers that can print their own components, highly efficient recycling systems, expertise in managing closed ecologies, cultural awareness of the dangers of culture loss/drift in small communities, etc, etc. This technology would probably have numerous spin-off applications in the rest of the world. The same project, assuming success, would create “life boats” that could hedge against certain kinds of X-risks. The same project would probably expand the effective carrying capacity of the Earth, because it would be opening up terrestrial niches for humans that we currently can’t fill. The same project would be good practice for longer term goals like the colonization of the inner planets, the asteroids, and the Jovian moons.
I think that the Seasteading institute is looking into this already. More generally, I think the idea is called permaculture. I agree with you. This is a close second to education reform for me.
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No idea. I would expect that to be part of the research… especially if you were trying (for instance) to set up three well running habitats initially and come back 100 years later and find seven habitats that were running with additional optimizations that the initial three lacked. You want persistence, growth, and innovation instead of just grim survival.
If you seeded them with “astronaut quality” people then you’ll probably get regression to the mean in subsequent generations, and if the initial group was barely surviving then their descendants would probably run out of luck. It seems likely to me that you’d get a more robust trajectory if you start with mostly average people from scratch, but with a seed culture that was optimized by a vastly smarter community to be something they can teach their basically normal kids to use, maintain, and augment in the course of living.
The personal satisfaction question loops back more brutally when you think intergenerationally, because the kids certainly never gave informed consent to be part of a traumatic science project. But if lives in such habitats are highly rewarding it stops being such an ethical dilemma. One way to look at it would be to have people live in weird places in exchange for having been given ownership of millions or billions of dollars worth of awesome technology… if they aren’t “stuck in a lousy experiment” but instead “inherit stewardship of a treasure” then the ethical question mostly evaporates.
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You just need to find a couple hundred for each habitat—seems easy enough.