Would they always need earth to be habitable?
Because if they somehow managed to terraform and colonise another planet like mars, wouldnt they just make earth so uninhabitable that the rest of us would be forced to go where they are? (Prolly as slaves)
Where would the billions come from?
Money is nothing if there are no people who honor it.
Additionally, the people in that class are outright incapable of maintaining their aspirations without hiring others with their money to be spent in society as an incentive. Even if mass automation occured, a single event of system failure or being presented with a new situation that they cannot figure out with their skillset could result in death or being stranded.
I believe this concept was already brought to light when that science fiction author was asked by UHNW investors how to set up a system where their bodyguards wouldn’t just kill/overthrow them and take over their doomsday compounds in the event of societal or ecological collapse (I guess both), and the author essentially said “be nice to them”.
Two points worth making :
- If the entire biosphere collapsed the resulting lifeless rock would still be the single best place for humans to live in the solar system.
- Billionaires dont have enough money to fund a Mars colony.
Billionaires dont have enough money to fund a Mars colony.
but they do have enough money and influence to make money useless and enslave humanity, thus making this point moot.
- Billionaires dont have enough money to fund a Mars colony.
More like they don’t have the technology to make it as efficient as in the scifi movies.
We need to stop thinking about whether we’ll terraform mars or the moon. We don’t simply have the tools or resources to simply make it happen. All we know right now, is that billionaires have fucked this planet up.
Especially given that it’s easier to fix this planet than to terraform the Moon or Mars.
We need to stop thinking …
Nope
Mars is going to be less habitable than Earth no matter what. Even if we did terraform it, it would need to be continuously maintained since it already lost its atmosphere the first time.
since it already lost its atmosphere the first time.
What?! When was that?
The kind of atmosphere a planet can have in the long term depends on having enough gravity to keep gas particles from floating off into space. Mars’ gravity is smaller than Earth’s, which means that even if it had oxygen, that oxygen would be lost over time. Mars likely once had a dense atmosphere heavy in carbon dioxide, it wasn’t lost in one specific event, but gradually losing it over a long period of time.
A while ago.
Fr? Tf
It is vital, they are all entirely delusional, from consistently only breathing in their own farts.
Several people have answered this with essentially: “No, because terraforming is unfeasible and expensive”. I’ll try and answer this question under the assumption that terraforming and leaving is feasible to do.
The core argument against billionaires is that they hoard wealth that they didn’t produce.
Instead, it’s the billions of humans that turn work into value, whether that’s by turning a log into planks, planks into chairs, or by managing the sales operations that allow the sale of those chairs to others.
The 3.5k-ish billionaires in the world didn’t create a billion euros worth of value themselves, they captured most of it from other people’s work, under the justification that they provided the startup capital that allowed the plank maker to buy the log, the chair maker to buy the plank, and the sales managers to buy the chairs to sell. Depending on your ideology this is either justified or not (labour theory of value)
Because of this, getting rid of all the people that generate this wealth inevitably destroys the wealth itself, meaning that: no, they couldn’t just abandon earth because we are the ones that actually create the wealth that allows them their lifestyle. No one to cook, no one to clean, no one to build giant yachts means no billionaire lifestyle.
Now, the newest question at hand in a lot of economies is: will AI and robotics essentially allow billionaires to actually produce this wealth without other people?
Even though research suggests that lots of jobs could be lost, “lots” doesn’t mean all. However, I assume in part your question is motivated by the thought that billionaires will destroy the planet in an attempt to answer that question.
If they CAN, then this means someone still needs to build those robots. That’s probably not going to be the billionaires themselves, so it’ll be us the people doing that. In that case, the only thing stopping us from just making more, until none of us need to work anymore, is the billionaires telling us so.
If they CAN’T, they also can’t leave us behind without also leaving behind pretty much all of their wealth and us just continuing on our way without them, presumably with less being skimmed off the top.
The last caveat to this is, of course, the ruined planet. This is a tricky one, but comes down to a numbers game. We outnumber billionaires by a lot and can drive the change we want by voting and pushing for regulation that benefits the many, not the few.
So, tl;dr: If they want to leave, they need to bring us along, and then they may as well not move, so we pretty much need earth.
if robots can cook and clean then they will be able to assemble robots and likely do all the jobs from mining to manufacture.
I’ll try and answer this question under the assumption that terraforming and leaving is feasible to do.
THANK YOU!
It could but not in our lifetime. Most of the earth is still habitable and there is plenty of resources available. The teraformed planet would take 1000s of years to become like earth.
I think we would need to consider more than terraforming. Somehow, we would need to add mass to the planet to get out to hold water. That probably means deorbiting the Martian moons as well as heavy planetoids from the asteroid belt.
This would need to be done in a way that does not alter the Martian orbit, but doing this may also permanently destroy the current planetary balance.
My theory is that the planet would need to be reliquified. If glassing it by deorbiting mass onto it doesn’t cut it, we would probably need to use solar reflectors to increase the planet’s temperature. This also has the possibility of destabilizing the orbit.
Finally, as the planet finally begins cooling, we could lob ice chunks at it until there is sufficient water. At that point, if humans still exist, we could consider forming the planet into a proper habitat.
My thought is that we would have already figured out artificial gravity and left the planet due to falling rocks.
We’re already their slaves. And terraforming takes a colossal amount of energy and a ton of time. Despite all the problems we keep creating for our selves, the Earth is too perfect and “easy” to ditch in favor of a non earthlike colony that requires terraforming, IMHO
The human race is not capable of terraforming another planet, we can’t even fix the climate of our very nearly perfect planet.
A child can leave Earth without looking back, but not an old man. Jules Pierre Mao might be a titan of the system, but his memories are tied to that rock. That is Earth’s real gravity. - Chrisjen Avasarala.
Some may be delusional enough to believe that they can survive without the rest of humanity, but the irony is the billionare/epstein class benefit the most from society’s status quo being maintained (or the facade of stability being maintained). A nation’s currency has no value if faith in its institutions collapses after all.
It’s actually the basis of the science fiction series I’m currently reading.
“Children of Time” by Adrian Tchaikovsky.
I should hope they become useless to us much sooner.
