I think it’s a similar phenomenon to the transhumanists like Ray Kurzweil who believe that we’re ~20 years away from digitizing human consciousness and achieving immortality, or the religious nuts who are certain that the rapture will occur soon. It’s extremely important to these people’s belief systems that the big event happens within their lifetime rather than some more reasonable/plausible timeline. They start with the certainly/need to believe that [big event] happens when they’re personally still around to experience it then work backwards from there to determine the schedule.
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This has me thinking—is there even one truly “self-sustaining” city, like, anywhere?
Cities on Earth are and always have been centers of commerce, culture, manufacturing, etc. but I don’t recall ever learning of one that produced everything it needed within its own borders.
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No shortage of shit anyway which was a problem for the book/film I think.
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FTFY. Autarky at the city level, the old dream of an arcology with no need of belts of farms, imports of food and power and raw materials and finished goods, lined with docks and all the other things that lets a dense group of people live, has never happened.
During the Trojan War, at least according to the Illiad, the Trojan women left the city every morning to get water from the river, hopefully upstream from the Greek encampments, and farmers sold food to both the city and those who came to rescue a stolen beauty. Rome was abandoned, in what appears to be just a few months, after the aqueducts were destroyed by the Ostrogoths, and was reduced to pastures and ruins for centuries.* In the middle ages and Renaissance, the people would flee the cities during disasters even as late as the 17th century, with Londoners fleeing en-mass to the country for weeks due to a combination of plague and fire. In South Africa, the city of Cape Town almost ran completely out of water just a few years ago, and tens of thousands left due to hardship, job loss, and related issues. Cities are complex machines, easily broken, not easily built or fixed, that require a constant influx of material, and cannot just be plopped down on an alien planet and inhabited by tech-bros living like it was Earth, just more red and lower gravity.
Any ‘colony’ on Mars, even if it manages to become autarkic for water, oxygen, and food, will still need to import almost everything else, and that’s an enormously big “if.” At futurist convention panels and online I’ve seen scientists, engineers, and science fiction authors alike postulate that a technological society needs at least somewhere around 1,000,000 people dedicated to maintain the bare minimum infrastructure for something like a space colony. Not to build, not to do research and science to improve things, just to keep people alive in a not-too-hostile environment at what we consider to be our current technological level. The number drops rapidly if you can outsource the really numbers-intensive stuff like chip manufacture, large-scale construction, and raising families so there will be a next generation.
When Musk bought Twitter, I believed that was his admission to himself that he wasn’t going to move to Mars as overlord or even as junior filter maintenance technician, sort of like a spoiled rich kid blowing his college fund on a Ferrari after failing out of his fourth private school. SpaceX, that made sense, that could have gotten him to Mars, the Boring Company is a logical way to make a human habitat in such a vacuous radioactive wasteland, even Tesla gets you some potentially interesting battery technologies and Mars rovers. But Twitter? That $44 billion could have gotten the project started, without touching most of his operating capital as he demonstratively had it to spare. And like that trust fund baby, he drove that figurative Ferrari right into an oak tree at 100 mph.
Musk is not going to Mars. And he knows it.
*Oversimplifications and hyperbole in order to make a point.
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He’s working on replicators. They’ll be ready in mumbles more years.
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In the federal court on Monday, Bret Walker SC, acting for X, said the original notice that led to the fine was served to what was then Twitter Inc, which merged with X Corp in March of 2023.
“Everyone agrees that Twitter ceased to exist. That’s the critical point,” he said.
Walker said the section of the Online Safety Act regarding the notices being issued did not account for who bears responsibility for the notice, should the organisation it was issued against cease to exist.
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Oh jeez. I thought that Hyperloop was dead and buried by now but apparently they’re still doing tests in Europe. With some EU and Dutch government funding, no less.
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Why would he even try that line of nonsense when the CEO still calls it twitter half the time? 
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Every day, maybe a hundred cows died for Ankh-Morpork.
So did a flock of sheep and a herd of pigs and the gods alone
knew how many ducks, chickens and geese. Flour? He’d heard it
was eighty tons, and about the same amount of potatoes and
maybe twenty tons of herring. He didn’t particularly want to
know this kind of thing, but once you started having to sort out
the everlasting traffic problem these were facts that got handed
to you.Every day, forty thousand eggs were laid for the city. Every
day, hundreds, thousands of carts and boats and barges
converged on the city with fish and honey and oysters and olives
and eels and lobsters. And then think of the horses dragging this
stuff, and the windmills… and the wool coming in, too, every
day, the cloth, the tobacco, the spices, the ore, the timber, the
cheese, the coal, the fat, the tallow, the hay EVERY DAMN
DAY…
Terry Pratchett, Night Watch
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Racist pseudo-science is making a comeback thanks to Elon Musk. Recently, the tech billionaire has been retweeting prominent race scientist adherents on his platform X (formally known as Twitter), spreading misinformation about racial minorities’ intelligence and physiology to his audience of 176.3 million followers—a dynamic my colleague Garrison Hayes analyzes in his latest video for Mother Jones.
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Interesting read.
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Tesla Workers Trained Autopilot To Ignore Road Signs So It Didn’t Drive Like ‘Robot That’s Just Following Rules’
[…]
For example, some workers said they were told to ignore “No Turn on Red” or “No U-Turn” signs, meaning they would not train the system to adhere to those signs.
[…]
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Meh. Not like Skum has had to obey the law for a long, long time.
He will face no consequences for this until we change a great many things.
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