We may need to start a 'debate' thread where we take conversations like these that erupt. But for this last response:
Not necessarily. If some people actually get hostile to technological progression, this could be very detrimental (and this has happened, at least in some countries).
If some people get hostile to technological progress:
1) usually it is specific TYPE of progress, or means to make that progress, that comes under attack - and we
should take care to be responsible with progress and how we make it.
2) as a movement, it may often be a faith-based argument, which is usually led by religious leaders that are afraid of us 'refuting' something within the realms of the claims they make, causing massive amounts of followers to realize a critical fallacy of their belief system. This, in fact, is a very GOOD reason to continue scientific progress so we can find more to agree on and less to war over. Once this dissatisfaction is processed out of the human thought pool at least. I'm thinking mostly of fundamentalists like ISIS as a current force operating with such motives right now. The Catholic church spent a long time behaving in this manner but has decided lately to clean up its act and roll with the punches of progress instead, finding scientific proofs to at times require an adjustment to the way they interpret things - they've decided to bend and adapt, rather than break, in the face of evidence driven discoveries. Good signs of growth from those folks, imo.
3) it would be extremely unlikely to have a huge rise of people clamoring to stop all scientific progress simply because they fear what it could bring when science has brought us all so many solutions to our most fundamental problems.
4) is based on good cause to fear the progress because of negative consequences OF that progress.
I have a very hard time believing that a shift to renewable energy sources would for a moment cause any social damage that would cause backlash of any form. What are people going to complain about? The added jobs? The cleaner air to breath? Having our energy bills alleviated due to the relief from dependency on an outdated, finite resources, replaced by a wide array of effectively infinite resources? The reduction of war and tension over those finite resources? The avoidance of massive catastrophic earthquakes that are growing more frequent as we hollow out pockets of those limited resources from the Earth, destabilizing the crust? Would people complain they no longer have to contend with huge clouds of smog infesting their cities, causing massive pulmonary health problems? Would anyone complain that this added biospheric health allows us to push the globe to further food production which can help us continue to avert mass starvation for at least a bit longer? In fact, WHO would complain at all? Even the wealthy who fear the loss of their precious fuel driven profits will be forced to play ball and shift their investments and will likely still be just fine and benefitting as much as the rest of us... at least they'll have a world where they can still profit, whereas the alternative is LIKELY massive catastrophic loss of life and economic collapse that would put many of them on their butts right along with the rest of us.
In the end, we might solve a problem that doesn't exist (by your premise), but lose the ability to solve any problem in the future.
If people are so stupid as to take all the positives of the shift to renewable, sustainable energy and convert that somehow to fear, then by all means, we've earned the right to suffer for our stupidity.
In Germany, some people have become hostile to nuclear fusion (because anything nuclear is evil, right?)
Anything nuclear is inherently very dangerous and probably something we're playing with that could cause a lot of damage. We have to admit our capacity for fallacy and if a mistake means mass destruction, we probably should look elsewhere for our solutions. This doesn't mean we shelve it forever. We should very well continue to develop out mathematical theories on the subject and once we can place such energy generators far outside the reach of their capacity to destroy our planet, then we should go ahead and see just how stable we can make such generation methods.
and to space travel (because "we should solve the problems on earth first", because there is no interdependency of technologies, right?).
Yeah, I've heard a lot of American idiots making comments like these. I guess I understand the thinking, but as you say, we gain more by striving for space exploration and the effort to inhabit offworld locations than we do trying to make sure we fix everything first here. The big thing those that think this way overlook is that space travel and expansion may well BE the solution for Earth! We are building up a great deal of pressure from overpopulation and if we cannot provide more land for people to diffuse into, we're going to have some pretty horrific future mass death events I think we'd all like to avoid. If we cannot release the pressure somehow, it's not going to be pretty.
They also say, why would we want to take our problems to other planets? But it's not like there's ever going to be a moment where we can relax and say, ah... there we go... we have no problems any more! There's always something and we all grow together, and the sustaining of more human life can only help us to find more solutions, as it has so far which has allowed us to overpopulate so dramatically already.
We (now explicitly not restricted to Germany) refused to destroy malaria in the 60s because of some birds, leading to about a 100 million dead people (more than both world wars, put together).
I guess that bought us some time...
Always look at the bright side
And certain people openly hope for a reduction of mankind to a few 100 million (without mentioning who needs to go), so that earth can provide for them.
Surely most of us feel this way, secretly hoping we, and those we care about, may survive and the Earth is somehow made MORE healthy in the process rather than taking down wildlife along with it. But I think we can all realistically also admit, there's no way this can happen 'cleanly' and respectfully to the feelings of the people who are currently alive. There is likely no way this can happen with any sense of justice either. The wealthy are more responsible for driving us towards destruction than any of us, so should THEY be given the greater right to survive? As it stands, we generally all agree that wealth is the measure of a person's worthiness to survive if things become scarce, as well as the right to make decisions for how we go about reacting to crises, aka react or don't react.
Again, another reason we need to revolt against the economic system we are trapped in. So that when honest scarcity becomes a real problem, there is some justice to who suffers and perishes first.
I have no problems with environmental protection, but I don't like "sustainability". There is nothing more sustainable than an absolutely static lifestyle where nothing changes for centuries (think ancient times) without any ability to cope with unforeseen problems.
According to
https://www.researchgate.net/public...nd_its_underlying_sustainability_correlations - quoted by
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sustainability - "the term 'sustainability' should be viewed as humanity's target goal of human-ecosystem equilibrium (homeostasis) ..." - How can you be in an equilibrium (and it's obviously a static equilibrium) and still make progress?
Sustainability does not mean 'no change'. Your life has been sustained from birth to now - does that mean you never grew? Sustainability simply means we can continue to operate on the system we've devised without a predictable point approaching when that system will become insufficient for our needs. Establishing sustainability does not mean that we stop growing and developing... it actually frees us to put our efforts into other priorities, enabling greater achievement and overcoming more problems. Getting stuck on political BS when we HAVE beneficial solutions but are just having a hard time convincing humanity to stop being its own worst enemy is far more frustrating than not having the means to solve our issues at all.
It's "refuted".
Or perhaps "is refutable but not refuted". I know this is more confusing, unless you try to explain how Newton's theories could ever have been supplanted if they were "proven".
We're arguing over semantics? As in, when to use the word refuted or not? Is that not just a little miscellaneous?
We should rather have an event called "Coral loss by Coral Bleaching" that randomly removes coral features in plots with high air pollution.
Agreed. An event would probably be far more suitable anyhow. That's a bit of a project for someone of course.
Eternal economical growth is not "sustainable" because it's an impossibility. Economical growth is of coarse a good thing, but we should not adapt our morals towards always pushing that growth to the limit. Often times we as a species call something that produce more bads than goods for economical growth, the bads can for example be ecological damages or health issues which in the long run is more costly than what we gained by making them. In other words we should start broadening our economical equations, at least try to include ecological factors.
As long as we cannot take dramatic steps towards getting our population to spread out to other planets very quickly, you are absolutely correct. It is horrifically damaging that our economic system must promote population growth to avoid collapse. If we don't change our ways, this will very soon cause very very bad things to be necessary.
Science can make what is not sustainable today sustainable tomorrow, but we should not run far over that limit thinking technology will catch up soon enough, that is simply arrogance.
I agree that it is arrogance to think we can rely on answers forthcoming that we do not currently have. There's always the distinct possibility we've cashed too many checks we cannot cover and there's simply no way out. At some point, no amount of problem solving can get around hitting walls like this. Even a surfer has to hit the beach someday.
I also agree with you that this is particularly the case if we ignore the answer we
already have, which is that we MUST begin to accept, globally, that we have to start actively depopulating.
The best way to do that is to start making having less to no children be a popular concept. We CAN make this happen voluntarily. The argument is actually pretty solid... what's the point of life if every generation simply lives for the next? Be the generation that spends your time accomplishing the pinnacle of your family line's achievement rather than enabling another generation to potentially be the one to take that action. AKA, stop breeding if you can possibly emotionally handle the concept! Besides, having children is a huge sacrifice in your life... are you SURE you want to lose all that time and effort from other things you could experience?
We need to make it fashionable to deny breeding. We also need to strongly support birth control and educational efforts to back its use. For those who would argue this is against the value of 'life' I would argue that it is instead absolutely FOR the value of life. If we don't lean some global society-wide personal responsibility to diminish the population rather than expand it, we're just inviting more to the mass death party we're setting ourselves up for. I think we'd all like to avoid that hell wouldn't we?
It would be pretty bad from a human rights perspective to have to pull a China on that though. But it IS a pretty dramatic problem and growing worse fast.
The problem is that most of the future's problems are unforeseeable. How many of our current problems could have been foreseen in 1917? Or in 1817? Can we even begin to estimate what might worry the people of 2117? (Yes, I am assuming here that humanity will not die out in the next 100 years.)
Ok, point taken. So can we at least agree to cut the red tape crap and SOLVE the problems we know how to solve and stop being stuck on stupid so we can free our systems up to approach problems we haven't solved? Knowing we're going to be presented with even more to come someday that we cannot predict? What we CAN predict is already pretty daunting.
But no... our economic system needs continues to keep us stuck in self-defeating decisions in exactly the same way as an addict's emotional process keeps him stuck in a cycle of addiction. Those with power MUST let go of a lot of that power (permanently) or we're in very deep trouble.
A truism if you mean a truly infinite time, but very debatable if you mean "eternal" in the colloquial sense. There are more planets in the universe than grains of sand on earth.
But our ability to reach them as fast as we populate to support our economic growth needs is extremely questionable at the moment. Probably something we can eventually overcome, if we survive long enough to. When populations implode (easily observed phenomenon in nature in most animal populations), it's often enough to take down every individual in that population and can lead to extinction of the species, at least locally.
On Easter Island, this pretty much happened to humanity and is a good prediction model for Earth as a whole. Sure we found some natives there when we discovered the islands, but they may not have had much more time to survive there at all with how much they had stripped the land of its capacity to support any human life at all.
The problem is always when you have to say
who needs to go. Please keep in mind just how close this topic is to something horrendous. And according to
https://ourworldindata.org/food-per-person/ - chart "Daily food supplies for countries around the world" - food production per person has constantly
increased at least since 1960 (2200 -> 2700 kcal/day).
I guess I've already addressed this thought above. It IS a big issue, yes. And a huge reason to change the way we do things.
And the "arrogance" you mentioned is a funny thing. Science and technology really have transformed and enriched our lives (to the point where a middle-class person today has a vastly greater wealth than medieval royalty), whereas "sustainability" still has a lot more to prove. What is more arrogant - asserting that you can continue a story of incredible success that has already lasted for a few centuries, or claiming that switching over to a completely untested lifestyle is preferable?
When you know that the incredible success you've achieved with the system you have has also presented a growing price to pay for its use that will eventually lead to mass devastation of all that success, you must start looking at other, better ways to proceed. With mathematical modeling, nothing is ever truly 'untested'. Plus there are also many small scale examples of many attempts to find better ways, and problems have been identified so as to be potentially then solved (a problem cannot be solved until its determined what the problem is and what it stems from, which is exactly what a human mind can currently do that an AI struggles to do.)
We're back to our old debate here of socialism vs capitalism of course. The problem, then, specifically, with capitalism, in these frames of discussion, is that it is based on the ponzy scheme of relying on a larger population in the next generation to pay the debts of the previous generation by nature of economic expansion. It constantly borrows from the future for current benefit and the boulder over our heads grows larger and larger every year. Meanwhile we can all feel like everything is sunshine and roses now so our system must be great right? So long as we blind ourselves to the innevitable implosion that any ponzy scheme runs up against eventually if it cannot find more victims to wrap into its illusion of wealth.
Someone always ends up paying the price at some point. And at that point we all realize we can't allow anyone to do all that to people again and regulatory laws emerge. It'd be nice if we took corrective action towards our whole economic system now and in a measured manner, rather than letting it all collapse uncontrollably leading to massive starvation and death someday in the future.
OK, back on the mod development directly (and please keep in mind that the above conversation does relate to how we politically craft the future experiences under various systems someday):
<iTrainReluctance>10</iTrainReluctance>
What does this do? Only 3 Property systems have this, Education, Air and Water Pollution. Why was another Tag deemed necessary for these particular systems?
This is a peg in the latest AI advancements. It has given me an effective and necessary tool to help them determine if and when to 'give up' on over-extended efforts to control a property that may not require absolute control or would be too expensive to try too hard to address to perfection. It limits the AI willingness to expend limited resources (gold basically) towards property control. You'll probably have to let me tweak that as I find it necessary by deep code evaluation to do so. It may even become necessary to deepen the AI structure yet further eventually.
Only Education, Air and Water Pollution should generally be shown restraint in direct responses with unit production, thus why only these three have any value there. Crime and Disease are pretty much an 'always keep training more units if you need them' type of affair, up to a second limiting check in the code that I've discussed elsewhere that is a lot more tolerant. That limiter is based on the defined 'operational range' tag.
So for example, if you didn't have this tag in use, you could - actually no... you WOULD - end up with runaway training of entertainers, park rangers, or ecologists, that could sink a nation's economy. The Park Rangers are the most dangerous, to be honest, because they make such a small dent in the pollution problem that you can invest an entire economy into them and still barely address the pollution issue.
Did some reading on Reef bleaching. It's as much related to Water pollution as it is Air. I moved Reef Bleaching into Water pollution to give each category 12 "items". Each Pollution has 4 groupings with 3 "items/buildings" per group.
I won't argue against it as it's subjective to some extent how to model it. However, I don't necessarily think that trying to make Air Pollution have the same amount of autobuilds as Water Pollution really does us any benefit, though I do understand the design elegance motive. I've made some sacrifices for design to that end as well.
Have you considered what it might be like if we turned this into an event instead though? Maybe just taking it out of the autobuilds and putting it there may be the best way to go.
Will also be extending Range from 0-1000 to 0-2000 as posted before.
Will still keep 1st entrant for each Pollution at the 400-450 range. But will not allow next step to level up to be only 50 points high than previous for any category or group.
Big fan of your approach here. I'm hoping it has a significant effect but I suspect we may want to extend it even further eventually.
Also slowing the rates of accumulation by ~20%.
How are you achieving this? One thing I've always thought about pollution imbalance is that early early buildings are giving far too much impact and could use dramatic reduction. You shouldn't be able to build up to a noticeable problem with something like a cooking fire. Sure it should be there to play a role in slow buildup that later becomes larger buildup but I think we should look at the values of pollution assigned and ramp them up more gradually and smoothly until a huge boost in the industrial era when it starts being something we really are causing a problem with.
and reduces Water Pollution by 200 (which at it time in the game is Good), But.... for some reason the maker decided that it should also give a +100 to Air pollution (this is very bad). It is buildings such as this one that I want to change immediately. The +100 Air actually needs to be a -100 Air pollution.
