Look, I already knew Roko was a moron but this is outrageous.
See what’s really fun here is that once again the libertarians are blissfully unaware of their natural predator: bears.
This is so funny. Every time they are given what they want the infrastructure crumbles to the point of being dangerous, and then the bears come to finish them off. Just ordinary bears are deadly enough for libertarians to LARP a Jurassic Park speedrun.
I guarantee that if there is a libertarian space colony, all of their life support systems will be contaminated by mutant tardigrades (aka water bears). The libertarians yearn for destruction by bears.
Roko is of course begging the question, and the premise he is wrong about is that there is a sizable population willing to relocate to a floating iceberg, instead of living in an existing country.
Consider what the proposed citizens have to consent to:
- paying for the R&D required to implement the technical solutions Roko envisions, along with the continued higher maintenance costs
- paying higher wages for the people who are supposed to do all the boring menial jobs in this floating city, on par with existing cities
- paying higher daily cost of living for everything from food to building supplies to luxuries to entertainment that have to be imported
- being at the mercy of “legacy governments”, many of whom possess navies capable of everything from interdicting the food supply, to literally undermining the city from below, to actual assaults and airstrikes
- paying higher prices for insurance of their lives and dwellings and possessions because of all the above
Amusingly the solution for a libertarian city is a megastructure project probably only a rich nation is prepared to pay for.
ah yes so he’s up to making aircraft carrier floating libertarian treehouse rube goldberg mad max platform out of pykrete
One idea for the bottom of the iceberg is to erect a grid of airtight barriers on the bottom of the berg, with cells a few dozen meters wide and a few meters tall and blow air bubbles into them
this makes this grid having to support several tons of buoyancy force, it will have to be airtight but also its connection to ice will have to be so, and ice will probably deform over time. did all of these motherfuckers dropped out of middle school?
Besides, it’s been then tried already: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Habakkuk
look, i think it’s up to all of us to have the imagination and foresight to support roko in this fabulous and important endeavour. we could lure patri friedman onto the same ice floe, for example, by the simple expedient of putting up a yellow and black flag with “no steppy on snek”
