62 points
*

That has a real chance of existing? Something with clean power.

That I really want? Replicators. Man think about a life not having to cook or clean dishes.

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5 points

So many stupid problems could be resolved with miniaturized fusion cells

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3 points

That I really want? Replicators. Man think about a life not having to cook or clean dishes.

Drug addicted, Mafia made, trash fed makers from Transmetropolitan, specifically.

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2 points

Is transmet trending somewhere? I haven’t seen it quoted or memed in years but now twice in two days.

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3 points
*

Not that I’m aware. Probably Baader-Meinhof.

To wit, coincidences are more noticeable than non-coincidences, and once you’ve noticed one it’ll be much easier to notice others you might have missed.

I myself once spent about a week seeing Curta hand-held mechanical calculators everywhere. Books, magazines, blog posts, youtube… I wasn’t complaining, of course, the Curta is an amazing piece of engineering, but still, it was a bit weird.

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1 point

My appliance is on drugs

I LEARNED IT FROM WATCHING YOU!!!

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2 points

Guessing not the replicators from sg1.

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1 point

Cooking is super fun tho

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38 points

Earth unity. Whatever they did to make humans stop attacking each other was crazy.

We probably need another species to compete against to unite us. I’d put Billions into nasa to find aliens so we can fight them.

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8 points

We probably need another species to compete against to unite us.

Nah, the US would use it as an excuse to demand a world government under their control.

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4 points

If we controlled the world government, then what are all these politicians who run on a platform of exposing the secret government that already controls the world going to do?

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1 point

I’m only downvoting you because that’s basically what OP said, not be cause you’re wrong.

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4 points

Throughout history men have joined with their enemies to kill their neighbors. Cortez had an army of native Americans with him to take down the Aztecs.

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4 points

Another species is very useful for unity, not necessarily for us to band together against, but because a proper intelligent alien kind of invalidates every religion. All the conflicts from culture clashing suddenly become pointless.

Or at least racists will have something else to look down on.

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3 points

That Venutian amoeba will have to take one for the team. OUR team.

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2 points

Dump all the billions into AI controlled nuclear weapons

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2 points

When the aliens show up and demand who’s responsible for why our societies are such shitshows, all we have to do is point towards the fancy neighborhoods

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1 point

Now Mr Ozymandius with this one cool trick you don’t even need to find the aliens.

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32 points
*

I’d like to support solarpunk development. I just want to live a simple life, with high tech in cooperation with the environment. We need it badly. I would fund so many community libraries. Don’t misunderstand me though. I still want space travel, but I no longer trust capitalists with it.

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27 points
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A fully open source tech manufacturing company such as chips, gpu, ram, motherboard, connectors, ssd .etc you get the idea.

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7 points

I’ve been thinking along the same lines lately. A fully open source hardware and software architecture and implementation, to replace the closed “old world”.

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3 points

Hell yeah but it is all a pipe dream anyway cause no corpo or billionaire is gonna do it.

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3 points

I imagine it would probably take someone obscenely rich choosing not to be rich anymore in order to make it happen. Which seems unlikely.

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23 points
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Asteroid mining. This may still be too far off and too expensive. But the first person to get this working successfully will be a trillionare.

This plus fusion are the two things most needed to transition humanity to a space based civilization.

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10 points

Or it’ll be a gold rush situation where that guy will break even, but the people selling him rocket fuel will make a modest fortune. It’s all dependent on how expensive the shipping method invented is.

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2 points

And that is something to inspire to? Look at the world right now, with billions of people having almost no money at all.

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1 point

This seems like it would never be lucrative in any way shape or form.

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0 points

Asteroid mining is incompatible with current capitalism. Say you harvest an asteroid with 100,000 of platinum in it. You in theory now have trollions of dollars in platinum for the $40 billion you spent harvesting the asteroid, only you have now quadrupled the amount of platinum in the economy, crayering the price and totally ruining your company. It’s obviously a net good for humanity as a scarce resource is now abundant, but it is bad for capitalism because the ones who finaced the work are the biggest loser.

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5 points

No you’ve got it backward. The mining is a cover. You look for celestial bodies that require only a small delta-v to redirect to a collision event.

It’s a proper hostage situation, once you’ve got the infrastructure to replicate it more cheaply than people can defend against it.

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2 points

This would be a really cool idea for a novel or mini-series IMO.

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4 points

I did some googling and math. Global platinum market is 8 million oz a year. Current spot price is ~$900. That’s $7T per year. They would have a monopoly and be able to shut down all mines by undercutting the price selling at say $800/oz. If it cost $40 Billion to mine the asteroid, that means it would take 7 years to pay back the cost.

7 year payback is short for businesses. Commercial Solar is installed despite having a 10 year payback.

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3 points

I think if mining economy worked like that, Saudi Arabia would have gone bankrupt by cratering the price of oil.

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1 point

Oil jas constant demand and the Saudis have so much of it that it costs them very little to drill for it and store it. And digging a new well doesn’t immediately flood the market with 4x the annual production of oil.

I’m not arguing against asteroid mining. I am saying that it is fundamentally impossible under our current capitalist system. That’s why there has been zero advances in the concept in iver a decade.

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