Ideas Worth Dying For
A list of hard ideas that will need to be solved for humanity to pass through all the great filters - ranked by difficulty. Adding to these as I go. Written a month ago.
- Pursuit of an objective truth
- As humans we should pursue a maximally objective truth such as the laws of the universe to anchor our technological and societal progress. Not doing so creates a risk of societal regression as was seen in the dark ages.
- This is harder then it looks, since most information platforms use different flavours of recommendation algorithms targeted at amplifying confirmation bias.
- Abundance-age philosophy
- We are currently in the information age, but if humanoids and modular fusion do become a reality in the next 3 decades we could be entering an era of energy and labour abundance.
- Labour and energy abundance means most humans will have to chose to work if we develop a robust-enough UBI system. Most of the work of Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Kant, Nietzsche, Confucius, Rousseau and even Marx needs to be re-visited as we find a new purpose outside of producing labour.
- Humanoids
- Specifically a general purpose bipedal robot with prehensile end-effectors that can interface with human world seamlessly - designed to be the new workforce for humanity
- Robots must build new robots. New robots must build the infrastructure we cannot due to labor shortages. If a robot can built an entirely new robot in just 1 day in 30 days we’ll have > 1b robots!
- The most important use case for humanoids will be in large-scale metropolis construction. The only way to break through 10 billion people is to begin rapidly developing new cities in terraformed land e.g. desert cities, snow cities. Forests should be protected for obvious reasons. Forest cities sound cool though!
- Morphogenetic software
- An operating system which can generate an application on the fly and network with other applications or servers. If it can understand user intent it can extend applications with new features in real-time
- When encountered with process inefficiencies, humans result to automation to speed things up - this is the underlying premise of the multi-billion dollar SaaS industry. However the reality of most problems is that they’re very case by case and because of cost-benefit companies and startups can only afford to build general purpose tools they can sell to a broad range of customers. This is a huge contradiction. When companies decline because their software products aren’t keeping up with their dynamic user base, it might just be because they can’t serve such a large audience that broadly.
- Terraformation
- The process of infusing infertile land with a abundant fuels and nutrients will be key to housing 100 billion people on Earth. Only 10% of Australia’s 7.7 million square km landmass is habitable without large scale terraformation of the drier regions. The same concept applies for other uninhabitable planets like Mars.
- This process should transform surrounding waste into useful products.
- AGI
- Most likely will come after humanoids - more on this here
- Ideally cures all diseases
- Extends human knowledge beyond a major extinction event
- Runs on 20W of power or less to be on-par with the human brain
- Nano fabrication
- Nano fabrication is the process of creating structures at the 1-100nm scale. Methods include lithography, self-assembly and directed assembly.
- Just like anyone can buy a 3D printer today, nano fabricators should eventually become consumer-grade. Anyone will be able to fabricate nano sensors, nano-lubricants, scaffolds for tissue engineering, high-density energy storage etc.
- Rapid regenerative cells
- A universal repair kit of programmable cells senses signs of infection, inflammation, or injury and mobilizes instantly to the affected tissue. These cells carry an on-board library of differentiation cues, allowing them to become whichever cell type is needed: immune, neural, muscular, or epithelial; right where they’re needed.
- Markers that retrain and fine-tune the immune system to tolerate healthy tissues while remaining hyper-vigilant against all known and emerging pathogens.
- Embedded gene circuits enable real-time telomere restoration and clearance of senescent cells, pushing the average human lifespan well beyond 100 years without accelerating cancer risk.
- Likely to be designed by the AGI in No. 6 and manufactured by the nano fabs in No. 7.
- Modular fusion
- Large-scale D-T fusion will struggle to be economically competitive to solar and nuclear as the price of lithium continues to plummet and countries embrace Small Modular and Thorium reactors. Even if not commercially successful at the giga-scale, fusion reactors with a radius of 1.35m could theoretically output of power (from fusion laws scaling paper) which is the equivalent to roughly 90 onshore wind turbines. At this scale fusion reactors could enable new high-tech cities to emerge in remote regions (assuming the Henry Adams curve being the main limiting factor for how high-tech a city can be).
- Modular fusion engines could enable post-chemical propellant engines for deep space voyages to distant exoplanets where modular fusion cells could power robots in that spacecraft to carry out recognisance or first-contact missions. The closest exoplanet to us, Proxima Centauri 4.24 ly away would take 42 years to reach at . Even at the record-breaking pace 200km/s of the Parker Solar Probe it would still take something like 6300 years; a mission only suitable for robots or humans in cryogenic pods (a later technology).
- D-T fusion at 100 mK unleashes 80% neutrons. In contrast, D-D fusion emits only 35% at ~400 mK. Until we unlock technology that can efficiently harness energy from neutrons, D-D fusion would be our clearest path to a type II Kardashev’s civilisation. Removing the hard to synthetise and scarce radioactive tritium is an additional benefit.
- Fusion reactors could be used to fuse heavier elements that are scarce on Earth; an element factory.