Zero Contradictions
The square/cube isn’t really relevant to the O’Neill cylinder itself, but it is relevant when considering what kinds of space infrastructure could be created to launch the cylinder or its components into space. I agree with the reasoning that he stated in the book regarding this topic.
I think he’s right about the maximum length of steel cables at Earth surface gravity. Granted, space would have much weaker gravity, so assembling an O’Neil cylinder in space and having it never land on any planets could make this a non-issue.
Also, the bullet points are my attempt to summarize what he wrote. They’re not what he actually wrote. But the first chapter of Van Allen’s book is free to read on Amazon as a sample if you’d like, and it includes everything that I was trying to summarize.
Anyway, thank you for sharing the link.
The Economics & Practicality of Starting Mars Colonization
Sam Harris’s Argument For Objective Morality
I don’t believe that gene-editing is a viable solution to preventing dysgenics for the entire population.
Unregulated reproduction has the potential to harm others, so it’s reasonable to regulate it.
The Race FAQs has lots of high-quality information on genetic group differences: https://zerocontradictions.net/faqs/race
I don’t support the past eugenics or forced sterilizations that you’ve mentioned. However, I still support eugenics. I argue that reproduction licenses would protect human rights: https://zerocontradictions.net/faqs/eugenics#human-rights
This is a great idea. I’ve brainstormed and compiled a list of additional ideas that could also help raise fertility rates. https://zerocontradictions.net/faqs/overpopulation#boosting-western-fertility
The Case Against Moral Realism
This is honestly some of the best feedback that I’ve received on this site, so thank you for your comment. I edited the introduction and I clarified what I meant by “redundant” research.
I once tried to quantify the validity of academic research, but I gave up on trying that. I talk more about this in my reply to Seth Herd.
I didn’t come up with the title for the essay, but I re-titled this LW post, so thank you for your suggestion. In hindsight, I’ll agree that my comment came off as condescending to some extent, so I edited that as well. I just haven’t been in the best mood when I post on this site since I’ve gotten used to people giving me downvotes, disagreeing with my comments, and sometimes sending condescending comments into my inbox, though that doesn’t justify me being condescending to others. Regardless of the essay’s title, the essay’s contents raise serious questions about whether academia is intellectually honest.
I’ve thought about expanding my sequel essay even further to more precisely quantify and evaluate the research in each academic field, but I ended up not doing this since it would probably take me a week or longer to further detail everything. Another problem was that even if I finished it, people could always say that I failed to evaluate this or that, since there are tens of thousands of papers out there. Another issue is that not everybody agrees on what counts as “fake”, as I mentioned in the sequel essay. So even if someone quantified all academic research as best as they can, it’s not possible for them to make an overall assessment that a majority of people would agree with.
For these reasons, I don’t think it’s productive to quantify whether most academic research is true or false or high-quality or low-quality, which would explain why the author didn’t do so. I think it’s more productive to analyze how academia and the academic research process work and what kind of output such a system is likely to produce. From everything that I’ve seen across a multitude of fields, my overall impression is that most academic research tends to be low-quality. Blithering Genius’s analysis and my own analysis both conclude that that’s probably the case for most academic research.
Anyway, I appreciate your comment and reading your thoughts.
The bigger issue is that not everybody agrees on what’s true or false. I did my best to address these considerations in greater depth in my sequel essay: https://zerocontradictions.net/epistemology/academia-critique
Regardless, the point of the essay is that the overall academic enterprise is not designed to seek the truth. Ideological bias, perverse incentives, social circularity, naive/fake empiricism, and misleading statistics (e.g. p-hacking) compromise the production of truthful research. The sequel essay elaborates on all these ongoing issues. I could expand it even further, but it would probably take me a week to do so, when I have more important priorities.
Why Academia is Mostly Not Truth-Seeking
Climate Change And Global Warming
If you think that “humans will be living on Mars and O’Neill cylinders 30 years from now”, then you probably haven’t tried to calculate whether that’s actually economically feasible and whether it’s practical to get to Mars and live there:
The Square/Cube Law makes it very difficult to build megastructures like space elevators, orbital rings, etc.
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 Tsiolkovsky Rocket Equation.
For more information, I recommend reading 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 we 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.
Now, I already showed my calculations for why I believe it’s far too expensive to try that. I didn’t even go over all the physical challenges that would make it virtually impossible. My judgment is that space colonization won’t be possible for several decades, possibly longer, and probably never. It will probably take many people and many LessWrongers a while to reach similar conclusions.
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.
No, 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 goal was to post stupid comments with the intent of angering me, then you did not succeed. The only thing you have accomplished is wasting your own time. I will not respond to you any further.
One can only imagine how empty and miserable your life is, given that you have nothing better to do besides trolling strangers on the Internet. Out of everything else that you could do with your time, that’s really what you like to do for fun?
If you’re just going to mock my ideas without rationally engaging with them, then take a hike. You clearly don’t have anything to offer to this thread, besides making comments that suggest that your intelligence is quite lacking.
You still don’t have any rational arguments to defend your views, so there’s no reason to consider anything that you say. Again, your behavior is pathetic, disrespectful, irrational, and unacceptable.
My point is that when LessWrongers see not enough water for a given population, we try to fix the water not the people.
That’s also what I proposed. On my Georgism page, I explained that I support taxing water so that water will be used more efficiently. In the Overpopulation FAQs, I explained why that’s only a temporary solution, not a long-term solution to overpopulation, but you didn’t know that because you never bothered to read it and engage with the arguments that I made.
I read your argument that preventing people from dying of starvation and/or disease is bad:
And you’re still misrepresenting it. I didn’t say that it’s “bad”, I explained that it’s putting the cart before the horse. Abundant food and increased disease resistance would increase the population and the risk of overpopulation. If we have a viable long-term solution to overpopulation, then we won’t have to worry about that if we proceed to reduce starvation and disease.
I would rather we do the hard work of supporting a higher population.
I explained in rigorous, comprehensive depth that raising the carrying capacity is not long-term solution to overpopulation, not without population control.
I also explained that population control would protect human rights, rather than harm them.
solar panels
Solar panels have a low EROI, so they are an inefficient use of resources.
Desalination
Desalination could work in some areas, but it also has environmental consequences, and it would be better to focus on using water more efficiently in many countries.
I want to read actual interesting posts and not posts about “Why doesn’t LessWrong like my content? Aren’t you a cult if you don’t agree with me?”.
That was not the point of the post. The post has many interesting linked essays for you to read, if you bothered to click on the hyperlinks and read them.
how we’re going to run out of water
The Overpopulation FAQs is about overpopulation, not necessarily water scarcity. Water scarcity can contribute to overpopulation, but it is only one of multiple potential causes.
if we don’t forcibly sterilize people
That is a strawman accusation. I never proposed forcibly sterilizing anybody, except for murderers, rapists, thieves, and other criminals. A hundred years ago, that policy would’ve had strong public support.
EA is bad because altruism is bad
I wrote that EA is mostly misguided because it makes faulty assumptions. And to the contrary, I did praise a few things about EA.
Sorry, I just can’t escape my cult programming here.
Yeah, I can tell. You can’t make any rational arguments. Your behavior is the antithesis of rationality.
It would be more rational for you to engage with the bullet points and the essays that are hyperlinked on the page. There is nothing wrong with giving a comparison of disagreements between two different movements. If anything, it’s necessary to do that in order to explore different (and potentially better) ideas. Your paragraph of mockery and gibberish is pathetic, and it doesn’t accomplish anything.
Was there anything in particular that you specifically disagree with Van Allen on, either in my summary or the first (free) chapter of his book? I shared the link that you sent me with him on Discord, and he told me that he’s seen it before. He also said that the link that you sent still doesn’t specify the structure in enough detail, as far as he can see, and that it doesn’t really matter.
Like, I noticed that O’Neill proposed: 1. retrieving the cylinder materials from the Moon and 2. setting up either a Rotary Pellet Launcher or a Transport Linear Accelerator for retrieving materials from the Moon to make the construction cheaper. I agree that he didn’t address this possibility in the book, but I don’t fully understand your criticism regarding the steel structure math.
You might be more knowledgeable on this topic than I am, so I’m also wondering if you know of any sources where O’Neill gave a more specific description of what he was thinking about? For example, I’m trying to figure out what O’Neill proposed for the thickness of the original cylinder hull. I can’t find it on Wikipedia or in the link that you sent me, and I think this is a huge deal because the exact dimension of the hull thickness can greatly change the amount of materials that are required for building the cylinder.