Nuclear Fusion and The Last Man
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Summary
U.S. government scientists have made a breakthrough in the pursuit of limitless zero-carbon power by achieving a net energy gain in a nuclear fusion reaction for the first time, according to three people with knowledge of preliminary results from a recent experiment.
Transcript
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Well, I'm happy to say that I am bringing you good news.
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The nut of all nuts has seemingly been cracked.
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Energy from fusion is coming online, maybe in our lifetime, maybe in the next 20 years, if not tomorrow.
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We can create bounteous energy for the grid, for electric vehicles, electric trains, space travel, who knows, and more, through nuclear fusion without creating radioactive waste.
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And by avoiding the costly and dirty fossil fuels that have been the backbone of industrial civilization for the last hundred years.
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This story has been picked up, but I don't think it's been given the fanfare that it deserves.
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It was first reported in the Financial Times, and I will just read a little bit of this, just to get you up to speed.
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This reads like science fiction, to be honest, or a young adult fantasy novel.
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U.S. government scientists have made a breakthrough in the pursuit of limitless zero-carbon power by achieving a net energy gain in a fusion reaction for the first time, according to three people with knowledge of preliminary results from a recent experiment.
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Physicists have, since the 1950s, sought to harness the fusion reaction that powers the sun.
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But no group has been able to produce more energy from the reaction than it consumes, a milestone known as net energy gain or target gain, which would help prove the process could provide a reliable, abundant alternative to fossil fuels in conventional nuclear energy.
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As an aside, nuclear energy operates through fission, that is, the splitting of the atom.
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The federal Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California, which uses a process called inertial confinement fusion that involves bombarding a tiny pellet of hydrogen plasma with the world's biggest laser, had achieved net energy gain in a fusion experiment in the past two weeks, the people said.
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The fact that this includes the world's biggest laser is really the cherry on top of the sundae.
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The fact that this is an amazing story, this is an amazing story, and I am very happy.
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In fact, news like this almost kind of reverses many of the trajectories that I see for Western civilization.
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It's worth revisiting this notion called a Kardashev scale.
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And this is something that Carl Sagan spoke about.
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And it's basically, it came from a Soviet scientist in the 1960s.
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So level one in the original scale, it's been modified, but I'll stick with the original.
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All the energy that reaches the planet from the sun is being harnessed or consumed.
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Kardashev is basically measuring a civilization through the energy that it's consumed.
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Now you could say, well, that's not really what civilization is about.
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Civilization is about art and intelligence and culture.
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And of course that's correct, but at least in the industrial age, we can measure a civilization
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Now, what the value of that work is, is not a question that can be answered.
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That is a value question that science in a way can't answer.
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But it definitely does offer a good, you know, rule of thumb type measure for where we are
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You know, whatever debates we might have, certainly if energy consumption began to drop by 10% a
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year and we were, you know, the world was going dark and so on.
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I think everyone could agree that civilization was declining.
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Now, it is interesting, we have not officially reached stage one.
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Stage one would be harnessing all of the energy from the sun that is reaching the planet.
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Now, you know, on some level, all civilization, even hunter-gatherer civilization, if you want to call it
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It is an attempt to harness the energy given off by the sun, whether through gathering berries
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that grow through sunlight and photosynthesis, whether it is hunting antelope that are also,
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you know, on some root level based on the energy input from the sun.
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That would include, you know, developing fossil fuels, which is, of course, from the dinosaurs,
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It might include solar power itself directly, immediately harnessing it and other things like
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Now, a stage two civilization, you know, in this almost ridiculously big picture outlook is
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capturing or harnessing the energy radiating from a planet's home star.
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So this would be like creating a megastructure around the sun, a massive series of solar panels
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where we are more or less taking all of that energy.
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But with that amount of energy, you could certainly imagine interstellar travel and so on.
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And then not to be outdone, Kardashev really takes it to the limit and talks about a level
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This includes harnessing all of the energy of a galaxy.
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And when I hear something like this, I'm almost imagining the creatures or entities in Arthur
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Clark's book, 2001, and that are more mysteriously depicted in Stanley Kubrick's movie, 2001.
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Um, this, you know, intergalactic organism that can seed intelligence and unknown planets
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and that can make plans on the timescale of millions of years, just really something else.
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Now, let me talk a little bit about the implications, kind of more immediate implications.
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This news has just hit and we should be cautiously optimistic or skeptically hopeful about what can
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I don't think they would have done that unless this potential is real.
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That being said, you know, you're bombarding a pallet of hydrogen plasma with a giant laser.
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We don't know how this can be made pragmatically useful or needless to say, be commercialized or
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Are we going to be able to harness this power in the next decade, in the next 25 years?
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Is this, is this going to, it's taken us about 50 years of laboratory work trying to get to
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Is it going to take us another 50 years where we can fuel a grid through the fusion process?
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Again, um, this does fill me with optimism, but it's cautious.
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But keep in mind that markets are forward projecting mechanisms.
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That is, you are not buying a stock, for instance, due to its great performance in the past or
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how this has been a great company for the last 50 years and you just want to own a bit of it.
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That's nostalgia markets are always going forward.
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The question is, what is this company going to be in the future?
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And thus, can you sell it to someone at a profit?
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And I don't know if anything has been affected by this news because this is very early, but
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you could certainly imagine markets for fossil fuel companies and the like beginning to tank
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Now, I, again, I don't think it would happen that quickly, but as this is developed and as
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there is a kind of timeline for, um, the, the commercial industrial, just practical application
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There could be a run out of energy stocks, conventional fossil fuel energy stocks in the
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sense of we're not going to, we're not going to care about this stuff anymore.
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We're going to drive electric cars in the future that can be powered on the grid.
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And, you know, with a mere glass of water, you could fund a million electric cars for a
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Uh, this could be an extremely remarkable thing.
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Now, another political implication that I think is going to come from this is that if this
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is something very real, then there are going to be political forces funded by entities in
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the Middle East that are going to try to talk everyone out of this because needless to say,
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this reduces the power of the Middle East to a tremendous extent.
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Some 50% of the world's oil reserves, and I think around a third of natural gas, is in
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the Middle East, a ultimately small area on the globe that is immensely important.
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And there are going to be clear geopolitical implications to fusion if it is practical.
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I don't think getting our hands on oil was the sole reason for, say, the invasion of Iraq
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or our United States' continued interest in the Middle East.
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And we didn't just go in and conquer and take the oil.
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But again, I'll grant you that oil, the presence of oil makes someone like Saddam Hussein much
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more important and potentially dangerous to the U.S.
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empire, uh, than someone out in a, uh, resource depleted place that we don't care that much
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about because he couldn't, so to speak, turn off the oil tap at any point.
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I wonder if they're going to even be religious implications to the ending of the Middle East
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I think with Christian Zionism, American foreign policy and just the endless chaos and the Israeli-Palestinian
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conflict, all of that tension and drama almost added to the religiosity of Christian Zionists.
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You know, the Middle East and Jerusalem and the birthplace of their religion, it's, it's
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And so you can kind of understand why they would have apocalyptic fantasies about the
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If this changes and the Middle East becomes a backwater and we simply don't care about
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Qatar or Saudi Arabia and the like, and we just simply move off it.
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Uh, I, I personally think that would be an amazing thing, but I do think it would, it would
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obviously affect geopolitics, but I think it might also affect Christianity in some profound
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We could also discuss how something like fusion could be the beginning of a new civilization,
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Um, we spend so much of our lives running around, working hard, fretting, pulling our hair out,
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just to basically survive, just to keep going, just to make sure that we can put enough food
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on the table or fill up our, uh, our tank with gas or have enough money to fly, to fly in a
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We put so much into the very basics and the rest of it is, you know, the icing on the cake.
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Do you want to have, you know, buy a fancy dress or whatever?
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It's something offered in addition to our basic living standards.
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And if you just imagine what it would mean if those living standards become radically less
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expensive, because that's at least the promise of nuclear fusion.
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It's not just that we're going to pay 20 cents less a gallon for gas.
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It's that you could run your car for a hundred years on a eyedropper worth of hydrogen.
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I mean, it is an amazing prospect and energy would be so abundant.
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First, I think it would probably be shared with the rest of the world.
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There might even be a kind of lack of scarcity.
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You could, with that much energy, you could operate a robotic mining organization almost
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Now, I know that things have value because they have value in our heads.
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I believe, I don't believe in a labor theory of value where the cost of labor is what sets
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I think our subjective viewpoint sets the price.
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Nevertheless, the idea of having a robot that could endlessly dig for gold all day, all
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night, nonstop, and we have enough energy to do it for a hundred years.
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It's just a remarkable thing to think about as it could radically end scarcity of things
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like gold, as I used it in this example, something you have to dig out of the earth, but also food
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What is our consciousness going to be without the scarcity?
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But I also think that two things need to be taken in on this.
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Civilization really can't be estimated on the basis of energy consumption because it's avoiding the value
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question of what are you ultimately trying to do or achieve.
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And there has to be a new vision that accompanies this miracle.
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It was done through decades of hard work, but you understand this miracle gift.
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Economies and scientific organizations don't just operate on their own momentum or according
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There has to be people operating these organizations or super organisms, you could say, operating towards
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And there has to be people setting those goals.
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There has to be a concept of, we are going to use this miracle to explore the universe.
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We are going to use this miracle to get to a point where we can more fully harness the power
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of the sun in order to, again, terraform Mars, go to other galaxies, unlock the secrets of the
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You have to have that will and that vision to actually make this into something worth having.
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Otherwise, it's just going to simply be a nightmare.
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We could be in a scarcity-free or experience radically reduced scarcity at the very least and
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decide that utopia is really here at last and we don't have to work very much at all.
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You can experience Karl Marx's idea of paradise, you know, be a fisherman in the morning and
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a poet in the afternoon and a piano teacher at night or whatever he suggested in that way.
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We can end the division of labor, have robots do most of the work, and we can, I don't know,
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sit around and improve ourselves or something like that.
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This does remind me a little bit of the UBI concept and one of the most compelling criticisms
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The criticism is not that it's not feasible, it's that it would ruin something important
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about humanity in the sense that you get your thousand bucks a month and you just simply
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You're not going to go start a new business or go back to school or something.
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You're going to play video games or much like in the movie Inception, go to some opium den
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and go to another world through the power of recreational drugs.
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So there has to be a vision for what we're going to do with this new power.
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And simply offering humanity radically less scarcity, I think, could actually turn into
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There have been some books that have, and films that have examined this.
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I'm, you know, we could talk about Brave New World, but I was actually thinking about
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the really good Pixar movie, WALL-E, where people were in this techno paradise and they
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ultimately abandoned Earth, which had been polluted beyond repair.
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And we're just these obese blobs flying through space on a pleasure cruise.
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That's not really what we mean by exploring the universe.
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It's the last man imagined by Nietzsche Fukuyama on steroids or made obese.
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We should remember that we are evolved for scarcity.
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We didn't become who we are through civilization and free market economics and luxury goods at
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No, we evolved into who we are through fighting and scratching in many ways, through a willingness
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to cooperate in order for the tribe to be successful.
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And keep in mind that the success of the tribe often meant conquering other tribes.
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That is a kind of scarcity of mating and breeding and men and women.
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And thus we evolved to value certain traits in the sexual game so that you could win out and have more children.
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We don't know who we are, really, as a species living in a world without scarcity.
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But I think we might soon, maybe within my lifetime, have to figure it out.