Quote of the day—Sebastian

I’m becoming more convinced that free people need a frontier, because without one, eventually, the meddlers, swindlers, and sycophants of the world catch-up to us.

Sebastian
April 25, 2016
Science Nerd Post: Reactionless Drive
[I’m in general agreement but things will have to get a lot worse here before living on a distant rock under a dome with a huge portion of your economic output consumed just to stay alive. And without an industrial base to produce medicine, electronics, vehicles, buildings, I can’t see it being able to be independent and have anything approaching the quality of life we have here.

If there were a terraformed planet with a population of a million or more with incredibly accessible natural resources I could see it being plausible. But it becomes a chicken and egg problem. Terraforming and industry building robots might be the answer. I remain a skeptic for now and believe the better, at least short-term, option is to fix things on our existing rock.—Joe]

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4 thoughts on “Quote of the day—Sebastian

  1. A frontier can be defined as the edge and beyond of a region controlled by defined social, legal and moral behavior. But a frontier can be better defined as a region in which there are resources at low cost or even free to the use of those willing and able to exploit them, such as land for crops or ranching, minerals to exploit, lumber to harvest, and so on. This economic definition, describing the frontier as the least expensive opportunities to grow a civilization, might be of more interest to those contemplating a Long March, a la Heinlein, even more than the other one, which only defines who is in charge.

  2. Yeah; we ain’t goin’ no place in our lifetimes, and such will likely be the case for many generations to come. It’s best to think about dealing with things as they are here and now.

    Besides; the only way a viable space-faring civilization will ever come about is if there’s a free and just society to get and stay the fuck out of the way and allow the necessary discovery, innovation and production happen. The giant, coercively funded public works space programs that were programmed into our brains as a model will amount to jack squat. Governments only get in the way, or get out front of what’s already happening so as to take credit for it, control it and keep it in check.

    I’ve long though of the model of the Klingons, for example, a technically advanced, space-faring yet highly authoritarian and brutal warrior species, modeled essentially after the Soviet Union, as ridiculous. All such systems are parasitic and self-destructive.

  3. “Yeah; we ain’t goin’ no place in our lifetimes…”

    Not with that attitude, you won’t. Elon Musk appears to have a different idea. One of you is in the rocket business.

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