Maybe not. Humans might turn their focus inward. Religious movements to deal with the loss. We would definitely descend into petty squabbling. Like the AI in "The Matrix", it may decide that covertly engineered conflict is what humans need to thrive.
Stagnation at best. This is a way some see our current paradigm - Nebulous actors controlling nations and guiding world events, except they are ascribed to Illuminati, global banking families, or global Zionism. The nightmare would be if the AI decided to increase its reference data by constantly experimenting with different types of conflicts. Then again, this is pretty much a large part of the story of human history.
I agree we are not stagnant *yet*. We are at a crossroads between a new Aenean Age, and a new Dark Age that may last for a few centuries or a millennium. The globalist forces are trying to push us into an easily controllable state of stagnation.
"Perhaps this is simply a chance alignment between my imagination and that of a wild-eyed cult leader from the last century"
I remember reading how R.E. Howard was of the opinion that his 'Conan' world came to him as a message from the past. Pretty outlandish stuff, except that his version of pre-history is more accurate than the 1990 version of pre-history (out of africa, no farming or civs before ~6k years ago, etc.) Even with all the genetic evidence and archeological finds (Gobekli Tepe, wild sheep [mouflon] having genetic markers for domestication 100k+ years old, ancient maps showing ice-free antarctica, etc.) that have been uncovered, many "experts" refuse to change their opinion from the 1990s accepted truth.
H.P. Lovecraft (a pen pal of Howards) believed similar. He had a crazy story about an ancient civilization with cyclopean architecture existing by a lake in Antarctica a mile beneath the ice ('At the Mountains of Madness'). Crazy stuff, how can you have a lake beneath a mile of ice? A few decades later sonar discovered a number of such lakes...
My occult studies with the Archdruid have taught me about multiple cycles of civilization, of which we're the fifth. Here they are in order, with astrological correspondences and geographic centers:
4. Atlanteans (the Sun, sunken continent in the Atlantic ofc)
5. Aryans (Mars, Eurasia, that's us!)
and at least two more cycles to come, corresponding to Jupiter and Saturn respectively, and possibly a couple more, corresponding to Uranus and Neptune. Following a certain astrological numerology, this sequence would give you: 9876543(21). Interesting stuff, isn't it.
This often gets tangled up in nonsense, since remote viewing often gives you jumbled visuals. But the point is that there are traditions telling us of a much deeper history than is currently accepted. There are also various bits of evidence, technological artifacts and things that can't be explained rationally without massive amounts of cope (eg it's more likely that monkeys spread from Africa to South America via civilization, rather than ridiculous theories of monkey-rafts and vanishing islands).
Going beyond humans, there's evidence even of intelligent dinosaurids building civilizations in the Mesozoic, which would explain a couple of anomalous windows in the record such as the Cenomanian-Turonian boundary event, which shows a carbon spike, along with phosphates and rare-earths (consistent with farming & tech respectively).
Much of what the rationalists claim is a narrative that suits their purposes, and is far less compelling than other stories, which may be more than just fiction.
Honestly I'm unsure of those projections, and I'd have to go digging through the literature. Occultism is something I've only delved into in recent years, as a result of getting into dissident wrongthink. In fact, my Rationalist conditioning broke apart around the same time as my Liberal conditioning, and I don't think this is a coincidence.
Keep in mind, those areas should be understood as centers of gravity, where the most significant cultures resided, in all cases, there was civilization in other regions too.
And as I mentioned, just because the rationalists have gone astray, doesn't mean you should believe every claim to the opposite. Rather, there are alternate sources of knowledge handed down to us, and this should be taken into consideration, especially when it offers explanations that fill the gaps and make more sense than the official narrative.
"Much of what the rationalists claim is a narrative that suits their purposes, and is far less compelling than other stories, which may be more than just fiction."
I have the same issue with a lot of received wisdom. If you dig down into why modern "experts" believe something, often the evidence is just as or even more shaky than other explanations that are derided as crazy.
I recommend Cremo's "Forbidden Archeology" for a long list of artifacts that can't disprove the modern concept of much of human history, and how modern "experts" simply ignore those items.
Definitely. To cite one example, the Baghdad Battery is a clear case of experimenting in electricity centuries ago, with the rationalists making pathetic excuses with pretzel logic for why that can't be so. For example, they tried to say it carried scrolls, even though sealed scrolls generally don't disintegrate into blank shreds -- obviously they soaked paper in acid as a battery component. And just because you can't see the connections now, in a degraded state, doesn't mean they weren't there.
There's other examples too, like accurate maps of the Antarctic coast from long before European discovery, or a premodern map of the Black Sea which is way too accurate for known methods. Another is the corridors of the Egyptian pyramids, covered in art, yet with no sign of soot on the ceiling -- how did they bring light down there? And an ancient solid aluminum belt buckle, and much more, you get the idea.
The official narrative requires alot of curation and censorship to hold together, and even then there are holes in it.
Bagdad battery was probably an artifact or technological remnant of an older civilization, rather than a new invention of that time. There are matter-of-fact accounts from about that time period of people flying around on ancient devices, then the devices stop working one day and they didn't know how to fix or make more.
I am in no way, shape, or form smart enough to converse about this beyond: wow. You blow my mind quite often. And now, during a hailstorm that sounds like it's going to break through my house, I'm going to think about the moon.
Julian Jaynes has an interesting theory of the bicameral mind, part of which is that humans didn't really become capable of consciousness until the rise of civilization around 2k BC or so. If I understand his theory, it's that the rise of civ required an increase in consciousness/ introspection/ ability to think abstractly (I still struggle with exactly what he was saying.) I'm not sure if he'd say this, but to me it seems this would create a feedback loop: the more conscious a population became, the higher it's civilization could rise. The higher a civilization rose, the more conscious the population would need to become.
Similar to the hydraulic theory of the rise of civilization: once population limits are hit, you need to increase organization in order to increase irrigation. When irrigation increases, population increases, and so more organization is needed in order to build more irrigation...
A few days ago I was talking to someone who mentioned that many backwards populations don't seem to have this Janyesian consciousness, but when an education system is implemented which includes metaphors and other abstractions, some of their children will have this power of introspection and abstraction.
Relate to this:
"Nicholas Dames has taught Literature Humanities, Columbia University’s required great-books course, since 1998. He loves the job, but it has changed. Over the past decade, students have become overwhelmed by the reading... Dames’s students now seem bewildered by the thought of finishing multiple books a semester. His colleagues have noticed the same problem. Many students no longer arrive at college—even at highly selective, elite colleges—prepared to read books.
This development puzzled Dames until one day during the fall 2022 semester, when a first-year student came to his office hours to share how challenging she had found the early assignments...the student told Dames that, at her public high school, she had never been required to read an entire book. She had been assigned excerpts, poetry, and news articles, but not a single book cover to cover.
“My jaw dropped,” Dames told me. The anecdote helped explain the change he was seeing in his students: It’s not that they don’t want to do the reading. It’s that they don’t know how. Middle and high schools have stopped asking them to."
Gaius Baltar had a very interesting essay recently, suggesting that we have started becoming less conscious. I suspect this is widely true. AI could accelerate that...
Abundant evidence for this is piling up all over the place.
You may be aware of the work of John Zerzan on archaeoprimitivism? Very interesting stuff on the effects of domestication on human capacity and wellbeing. Hard to argue against.
It's a verifiable scientific fact that since the onset of civilization, the brains of humans, like the brains of domesticated wolves (dogs), have become smaller on average. Hunting and gathering selects primarily for individual abilities, while civilization selects primarily for cooperation.
Brains have gotten smaller, but this might be related to cooling requirements. Notably, the onset of agriculture and urbanization corresponded to *enhanced* selective pressure on alleles affecting neurological development. It's also notable that the neolithic cultures we've made contact with have reliably been less cognitively capable than us.
Having worn and fought in armor - historically accurate, steel kit with blunted weapons - both in single-combat and in group battles until one team has the last fighter(s) standing, I attest that the most shocking discovery was how much of what you can do in battle is dependent on conscious heat management for your melon. Your head is cased in 15-20lb of reinforced-steel, lined with steel padding, and then a coiffe to cushion the blows. Problem? When you overexert, your head begins to cook. It's unbearable.
Add to it that you're re-breathing some of your own CO2 because your mouth and throat and eyes need protecting and are also covered, and you very quickly start to suffocate while overheating.
All of which is to say - people vastly underestimate the importance of cooling to humanity's evolutionary success. Tim Noakes (South African Dr and distance running legend) and others have pointed out that persistence hunters succeed against vastly stronger and faster prey because we can cool ourselves - we sweat as we exert, while many animals don't. Panting is way less efficient at dissipating heat than sweating. We can run them to heat exhaustion and then simply walk up and stab them while they're panting after a few days of well-planned routes and bands chasing them off of water holes in the area.
I can think of one or two paleolithic cultures that functioned on genomic resources that are undeniably less cognitively capable than modern Europeans and Asia. Which is why the speech codes are enforced with such vigour.
One of the few theories that adequately explains why int is selected for assumes that it had nothing to do with actual int. Big brains evolved to be a better heat radiator (also why we have so many blood vessels in the head). Even today, some hunter/gatherers hunt by trotting after an animal until it collapses from heat exhaustion.
Which can also explain why people can lose big chunks of their brain and not lose intelligence. I knew a kid born with half a brain due to his mom's lupus, and he was pretty smart. About as smart as his mom, smarter than his dad.
I don't buy that for a second but it's an interesting theory.
Brains are highly redundant. You can burn out huge sections of a mouse brain with a soldering iron and it will still remember how to navigate the maze.
I don't believe that high cognitive capabilities are a useful trait in a Neolithic environment. Still, I will admit that high group organizational ability beats high individual ability every time.
While the moon as a whole is relatively low in REEs, the areas of Procellarum and Imbrium are significantly higher in concentration. Like gold being fairly low as a proportion of Earth’s crust, but abundant in California, Alaska/Yukon, and South Africa
Admittedly, I'm behind on the latest semiconductor technology, but the question still seems relevant: Do you need significant quantities of rare earth elements to make a monster AI? Intel advanced quite a few generations past Pentium using silicon with microscopic amounts of dopants. Then they launched a line of chips with some exotic element (Hafnium, if memory serves) involved. Don't know what it's purpose was, but if it was just a dopant, you wouldn't need much.
Rare earths are a really big deal for electric drones and other robotic technologies which depend on powerful magnets for compact/efficient electric motors.
And yes, rare earths are used in the stepper motors in hard disk drives. Old disk drives are a great source of super deluxe refrigerator magnets. But note that semiconductor drives are nearly caught up with hard drives.
They are also needed in great quantity for high (as in liquid nitrogen) temperature superconductors. The prospect of commercial fusion power plants is starting to look real thanks to such superconductors. But if our evil moon is powered by solar cells and/or fission reactors, how much superconductors do we really need?
Though given that maintaining the AI will require the full robotic tech stack, which itself probably requires a certain amount of rare earths. I believe solar panels do as well.
A quick check with Dr. Google says that the first rare earth magnet was discovered in 1966, and neodymium magnets in the early 80s. Surprisingly, the strength difference according to Wikipedia isn't that much higher than ferrite or ceramic magnets. About a factor of two. Seems a bit of a head scratcher to me having compared conventional refrigerator magnets with the magnets from inside hard drives.
Maybe the conventional cheap magnets are diluted old tech. My recollection from reading Speaker Builder back in the day was that cobalt was the bottleneck to making good magnets prior to the rise of neodymium. It is thus worth asking about the availability of cobalt on the moon and asteroids.
As for solar panels, no rare earths needed. Cadmium Telluride cells require cadmium and tellurium, which aren't super common, but aren't rare earths. But I think the layers can be pretty thin. The rare element needed for good solar cells is GOLD. Gold has the magical property of being both electrically conductive and a bit transparent. A very thin coating of gold is applied to the top side of solar cells to provide conductivity between electrodes. However, it is a very thin layer, otherwise it would block light.
OK, rare earth's are generally not incorporated into silicon semiconductor chips. The dopants are typically arsenic and phosphorus, sometimes boron - certainly not rare. The halfnium is in the form of halfnium pentoxide HaO5 used to make a high-k gate dielectric, which allows for smaller device architectures compared to silicon dioxide SiO2 gate technologies.
Their primary use of Rare Earths is in magnets. Some are used in High-T Superconductors, but new types of HTS are constantly being discovered - some use REs, some don't. Even graphene (carbon) has superconducting properties.
> we must eventually run into physical limits, for example Landauer’s law which establishes a lower bound to the energy necessary to erase one bit of information
One of these days, my old blog will go back online, and with it the article on recycling energy. Turns out it's perfectly sensible to expect energy efficiency in excess of 3000%... assuming you live inside the hot reservoir of the heat engine. You know... like you would in a spaceship. I wonder what that does to Landauer and all the others. ;)
> such inter-state squabbling would be beneath its dignity to interfere with
Oh dear. I got a chuckle out of the guy's naivety.
> How much more reassuring to offload that terrible burden onto an entity that can be trusted to act as the ultimate fair arbiter?
This also gave a chuckle due to the guy's naivety. xD But I understand the might have been saying it only for the sake of the argument.
Libertarian types often are extremely naive. I think they project their own rationality onto others, and assume humans are rational and fair. When all evidence points to the contrary.
lib: "All we have to do is create a system that demands everyone be fair and good!"
me: "OK, how do we make sure the arbiters of this system don't abuse it?"
lib: [increasingly excited] "Weren't you listening to me?! There'd be RULES!!"
Thinking an AI would of necessity be the ultimate fair arbiter when AI itself is created and programmed by humans is typical of that libertarian blind spot.
An AI wouldn't necessarily have the ability to hide it's own motives, though. In principle you should be able to flip open the hood and see what's inside. (It's just complicated by the 'black box' nature of large ML models with billions of parameters, although there is significant effort to develop tools to address this.)
In a transhuman scenario human nature itself is also no longer a constant (and never really was, over long enough timeframes.) I can see ways for that to go horribly wrong, but it wouldn't break the laws of physics per se if some batch of test-tube babies actually were instinctively rational and fair.
I suspect any attempt to engineer "negative" traits out of humans would come with some huge downsides. There seems to be a view that you can easily separate bad things from good things - like how it was once thought that the pain-killing quality of opiates was distinct from the addictive quality, so if you just refine the former it won't be addictive, which is how we got heroin.
Similarly, oxytocin makes people more cooperative with and sympathetic towards the in-group that they bond with, while simultaneously becoming more hostile towards the out-group.
It's all double-edged swords. Try to blunt the bad thing and you make the good thing useless; try to enhance the good thing and you strengthen the bad thing.
Negative pleiotropy is one of the potential "horribly wrong" scenarios, sure, but anyone with a spicy opinion on the personality aspects of HBD or willing to go on about the golden mean of Aristotelian virtue can't really take the position that all possible variants of temperament are equally good.
I mean... sure, personality variation helps a species to adapt to changing environmental circumstances- I'm not going to argue for a species of clones- but maybe the environmental circumstance of "now we have the technology for star-spanning empires" is itself something we need some population-level adaptations for.
There is also, happily, a novel biological faculty which allows an organism to rapidly adapt to changing situations in a way that no suite of simple instincts could adequately cover. ...It's called learning. (The useful debate, as I see it, is over whether we should learn more from history and tradition or from lab experiments and polling data.)
Yes, governance structures must evolve to adjust to more advanced technologies. People are quite capable of learning to do new things, in comparison to other animals.
Your point is unclear. "Therefore we learn to not do war anymore?" Good luck with that I suppose.
I'm not trying to be obscure or condescending, I just see the arguments for not tampering with human personality to be similar to most other anti-eugenic arguments (e.g, they assume a moral relativism that the critic themselves doesn't believe in in any other context. No offence.)
And... yes, I believe at some point our species will either have to cease engaging in unregulated existential conflict with itself or it will cease to exist (or at least, cease to be in charge of it's own destiny.) Because the human form is not the most efficient way to win such conflicts.
Uhhhh, is Yarvin loosing it? Did he suggest new world order + banning guns? I like my right to keep and bear arms, and I do not think military technology is as threatening to humanity's wellbeing as everyday electronics.
As for the practicality of controlling near earth space, I think it would be similar air superiority. I think America should use the space force to gain near space superiority, but it should primarily be used as a means to colonize the moon and mars. I just don't trust the Chinese to colonize space. Tho, any nation that does gain space superiority would have to exert resources to maintain it. I just don't see AI being fully autonomous as I don't fully trust it (and hopefully my friends in any future US government are of the same opinion). AI is one tool among many, to be used by humans. I think America should try colonizing both Mars and the Moon. Like you have said, once planetary colonies are established, they most likely will have a degree of autonomy and sovereignty simply due to the fact that they are physically far away from each other... because they're literally in space.
"When Gurdjieff said that we are food for the Moon, he seems to have meant that at more than one level. In a sense this is a metaphor, with the inner life of man conceived as a sort of cosmos. The conscious mind is the Sun, the lowest level of the body the Moon, and absent continuous application of will we would continually fall away from the former and feed the latter with our thoughts, feelings, and actions. Yet Gurdjieff also seems to have meant this quite literally. In the esoteric view, following the principle of ‘as above, so below’, we see the same patterns repeated at every level of nature."
I just finished Gene Wolfe's ''Book of the New Sun'' series. This paragraph throws a whole new layer of perspective on the character of Severian, as preternatural torturer/executioner/warrior. The progenitor and natural born intellectual and spiritual leader of the OA, combining the infinite spiritual mind of the ''Akashik record'' with Bran Stark's ''record of humanity''. He's out there somewhere, Severian is, and he'll show up when the hour is darkest, I'm sure, like a Deus ex Machina rising out of Hell as the sun fades and the moon grows dim. We are the new sun. Your D&D world reminds me of how I depicted Ravenloft in a recent campaign 2 years back.
The stuff about the OA sounds exactly like John Norman's books of Gor - the 'counter earth', where an omniscient race of 'Priest Kings' enforces a technology ban that keeps humans at the level of the Greeks or Romans. The book series is strongly inspired by Edgar Rice Burroughs' Mars books so if you haven't heard of it already you'll find it interesting.
Pretty cool setting, although a bit grimdark for my taste.
I'm struck by how the thesis here converges on that of the Dune novels. The intellectual capstone of the series, God Emperor, makes it clear that the Imperium and its tripod of power (Landsraad, Spacing Guild, Emperor & Sardaukar) were ultimately stagnating, and the human race needed Maud'dib and his Jihad to stir the genetic pot and sow chaos, and then pursue the Golden Path of survival.
Ultimately it's his descendant Leto II who seals the deal by ruling as a universal despot, warning the human race by bad example of the dangers posed by "world peace" and "unity", intentionally building up a massive wanderlust, while also creating selection pressure for prescience-cloaking genes. It was the Scattering after his death, combined with humans immune to prescience, that ensures the survival of the human race, by bursting out into the cosmos beyond the reach of any one hegemon.
A vision reveals the alternative -- the Ixians would've eventually developed intelligent hunter-seeker machines (surprisingly reminiscent of drones and AI, considering these books are from the 70s/80s!) that would've genocided the human race, and then even the bots would break down, resulting in extinction. Thus, the extreme actions of the Golden Path were necessary for survival.
I've estimated that the Imperium was concentrated in the Orion Arm of the Milky Way Galaxy (minor outposts notwithstanding), and the Scattering led to humans colonizing other galaxies in large numbers. Of course, interstellar stagnation was only possible through the regular use of foldspace, which collapsed parsecs of distance, and prescience further tying us together. Barring that, colonizing other stars would be a perfectly sufficient Scattering in the real world. The analogy is clear: being concentrated on one planet puts us at existential risk, and space will secure our future.
Incredible how many don't understand this, read only the first book and conclude that Paul was the villain and it's a story about how war is bad and charismatic leaders are dangerous.
The parasitic vampire moon immediately reminded me of the space vampire megastructures of John C Wright's Superluminary series, a real piece of balls-out scifi.
> They inhabited rude hovels barely above the level of the stone age, having little in the way of material wealth, but around these they projected fantastical illusions in which they appeared to themselves to live as kings
There is a story in Jack Vance’s The Dying Earth very similar to this.
Your description of CY's OA sounds eerily similar to Clif's breakaway civilization sci-fi.
A theme that's been playing rent free in my head lately is the 3 vices of sex, money and power. Even if we get to interplanetary colonization (I don't think it'll happen), until we (as a human civilization) solve this riddle, we'll just repeat the sandbox that is earth (which is why I don't think we'll be allowed off planet as a colonizing force).
I only partially agree with your assessment that brain rot would be the inevitable result after millennia of OA. Your D&D campaign provides the clues. Among the he weaknesses of our current rendition of modernity is the lack and deprivation of spirituality and enchantment. So it also stands to reason that if we deprive earth bound humans, who are not the OA middle managers, of tech, then perhaps we open the door to a return to harnessing tech of old as recounted in what remains of the erased pre younger dryas eras.
Also, food for sci-fi, a healer recently spoke to me about giant structures sucking up vital energies from humans above continents. Far out stuff. And the moon once again becomes an FOB (and so Gurdjieff Is kinda on target).
My personal intuition is that the Orbital Authority probably could extend control to the entire solar system, but (assuming relativistic limits hold), probably not to the galaxy- the distances between the stars are too vast and the energy budgets for rapid travel too extreme for a central hegemon to unite them all. Assuming that the colonies get uppity in the first place.
A lot of traditionalist right-wing arguments about cyclical history and the inevitability of war rest on assumptions about a bedrock of human nature that simply doesn't apply in the scenario John is sketching, though. It's very hard to predict what would happen.
I think even small extensions beyond cislunar space dramatically increase the probability of political fragmentation. Distances are just too large.
That assumes FTL is impossible of course. If that assumption is wrong, all bets are off ... then again FTL dramatically increases the size of the available frontier...
Fusion-plasma thrusters (which we'll probably invent some time this century, assuming Old Terra doesn't go completely to pot) could feasibly cut down transit times within the solar system to something on the order of weeks. At that point it's something like administering the British Empire.
If the Belters go hide out in the Oort Cloud all bets are off, of course, but the pickings there will be pretty slim, and that's an appreciable fraction of the distance to other stars regardless.
Yes, that's the point - the frontier is unbounded, thus as propulsion technology improves the ability to penetrate the frontier also improves.
Regarding the Oort: we don't really know what's out there, but there's at least one planet, which we might have just detected. Probably more. And fusion implies they'd have all the energy they need, assuming they can access the necessary fuel.
Have you read how the British Empire was administered?
At least before radio, you were literally months from higher authority. Yes, you could be recalled, and yes warships did visit. but basically you were on your own.
Anyway, my point is that administering a multi-planetary empire within the solar system should be logistically feasible with relatively near-future technology.
But the Empire was getting pretty weathered by 1914. It had been administered for centuries before that, when India (for instance) was a six month voyage.
The administration apparatus was quite different from 1914.
You're correct that it could be administered, but the current American model where you could direct operations on the other side of the world in real time could not work.
Whether governments could revert to the earlier model (or a variation that accounts for travel times) without some sort of crisis is uncertain.
If OA gets up and running, everything above it is its dominion. The key assumption is no one else is there already.
I've now read CY's article. I'm convinced a bird whispered in his ear that OA is already here or on the near future menu. And he doesn't know quite what to make of it. His world looks inspired from the original planet of the apes, whereas reality would be closer to the Hollywood flic Elysium.
I'm not sure what John's assumptions about human nature are, but I'd agree there's a lot of useless baggage about violence being innate.
Violence is quite innate to human nature. Males are evolved for it, naturally attracted to it, fascinated by it.
Key part to the argument here is that everything above the OA is not, in fact, its dominion. Even assuming there's no one there already, if the OA extends itself well beyond cislunar space, political fragmentation - and thus conflict - becomes inevitable.
The inevitability of reproducing the same dramas in space as we're seeing play out today, like yesteryear, is inevitable, unless we can figure out a better way to build a society from the ground up. Simplified as you wrote, you're right, it's innate, but then, just because we can, doesn't translate into ought or must. If we add "should", we get ethics and morals, and maybe a better way :P
Playing D&D with you sounds like a great time
Yeah, I mean, the setting sounds neat.
Third'd
I really like the sound of that nightmare moon.
"This prison would slowly destroy us... it may well seem like a kind of paradise for the first few thousand years. "
Sounds like a Rat Utopia, in which case it will only last for a few generations.
Yep. It would get eaten alive by nihilism and despair.
Maybe not. Humans might turn their focus inward. Religious movements to deal with the loss. We would definitely descend into petty squabbling. Like the AI in "The Matrix", it may decide that covertly engineered conflict is what humans need to thrive.
That also sounds like a failure mode.
Stagnation at best. This is a way some see our current paradigm - Nebulous actors controlling nations and guiding world events, except they are ascribed to Illuminati, global banking families, or global Zionism. The nightmare would be if the AI decided to increase its reference data by constantly experimenting with different types of conflicts. Then again, this is pretty much a large part of the story of human history.
I suspect the AI very likely would do precisely that, in order to keep the training data varied.
I'm not sure I'd characterize our current global situation as stagnation. Rather the opposite.
I agree we are not stagnant *yet*. We are at a crossroads between a new Aenean Age, and a new Dark Age that may last for a few centuries or a millennium. The globalist forces are trying to push us into an easily controllable state of stagnation.
Correct.
Despite all my rage, I am still just a rat in a cage.
I imagine that is where the Beautiful Chimp metaphor originated.
‘evil hell-world’
I'd play that MMO.
===
"Perhaps this is simply a chance alignment between my imagination and that of a wild-eyed cult leader from the last century"
I remember reading how R.E. Howard was of the opinion that his 'Conan' world came to him as a message from the past. Pretty outlandish stuff, except that his version of pre-history is more accurate than the 1990 version of pre-history (out of africa, no farming or civs before ~6k years ago, etc.) Even with all the genetic evidence and archeological finds (Gobekli Tepe, wild sheep [mouflon] having genetic markers for domestication 100k+ years old, ancient maps showing ice-free antarctica, etc.) that have been uncovered, many "experts" refuse to change their opinion from the 1990s accepted truth.
H.P. Lovecraft (a pen pal of Howards) believed similar. He had a crazy story about an ancient civilization with cyclopean architecture existing by a lake in Antarctica a mile beneath the ice ('At the Mountains of Madness'). Crazy stuff, how can you have a lake beneath a mile of ice? A few decades later sonar discovered a number of such lakes...
also:
https://www.indy100.com/media-library/the-second-location-at.png?id=34663579&width=599&quality=85
I've been convinced for a long time that the early pulp writers were just channeling.
PS Barsoom was real.
Have you ever considered that John Carter's trip to Barsoom was journey through time as well as space?
Regularly.
Carter later manages to send messages back to Earth in the 20th Century. See "The Moon Maid."
My occult studies with the Archdruid have taught me about multiple cycles of civilization, of which we're the fifth. Here they are in order, with astrological correspondences and geographic centers:
1. Polarians (the Moon, ice-free Antarctica)
2. Hyperboreans (Mercury, ice-free Greenland & Arctic)
3. Lemurians (Venus, Sundaland/submerged Indonesia)
4. Atlanteans (the Sun, sunken continent in the Atlantic ofc)
5. Aryans (Mars, Eurasia, that's us!)
and at least two more cycles to come, corresponding to Jupiter and Saturn respectively, and possibly a couple more, corresponding to Uranus and Neptune. Following a certain astrological numerology, this sequence would give you: 9876543(21). Interesting stuff, isn't it.
This often gets tangled up in nonsense, since remote viewing often gives you jumbled visuals. But the point is that there are traditions telling us of a much deeper history than is currently accepted. There are also various bits of evidence, technological artifacts and things that can't be explained rationally without massive amounts of cope (eg it's more likely that monkeys spread from Africa to South America via civilization, rather than ridiculous theories of monkey-rafts and vanishing islands).
Going beyond humans, there's evidence even of intelligent dinosaurids building civilizations in the Mesozoic, which would explain a couple of anomalous windows in the record such as the Cenomanian-Turonian boundary event, which shows a carbon spike, along with phosphates and rare-earths (consistent with farming & tech respectively).
Much of what the rationalists claim is a narrative that suits their purposes, and is far less compelling than other stories, which may be more than just fiction.
I'll bite. What are the corresponding geographical centers for the ages of Jupiter, Saturn, etc?
Honestly I'm unsure of those projections, and I'd have to go digging through the literature. Occultism is something I've only delved into in recent years, as a result of getting into dissident wrongthink. In fact, my Rationalist conditioning broke apart around the same time as my Liberal conditioning, and I don't think this is a coincidence.
Keep in mind, those areas should be understood as centers of gravity, where the most significant cultures resided, in all cases, there was civilization in other regions too.
And as I mentioned, just because the rationalists have gone astray, doesn't mean you should believe every claim to the opposite. Rather, there are alternate sources of knowledge handed down to us, and this should be taken into consideration, especially when it offers explanations that fill the gaps and make more sense than the official narrative.
"Much of what the rationalists claim is a narrative that suits their purposes, and is far less compelling than other stories, which may be more than just fiction."
I have the same issue with a lot of received wisdom. If you dig down into why modern "experts" believe something, often the evidence is just as or even more shaky than other explanations that are derided as crazy.
I recommend Cremo's "Forbidden Archeology" for a long list of artifacts that can't disprove the modern concept of much of human history, and how modern "experts" simply ignore those items.
Definitely. To cite one example, the Baghdad Battery is a clear case of experimenting in electricity centuries ago, with the rationalists making pathetic excuses with pretzel logic for why that can't be so. For example, they tried to say it carried scrolls, even though sealed scrolls generally don't disintegrate into blank shreds -- obviously they soaked paper in acid as a battery component. And just because you can't see the connections now, in a degraded state, doesn't mean they weren't there.
There's other examples too, like accurate maps of the Antarctic coast from long before European discovery, or a premodern map of the Black Sea which is way too accurate for known methods. Another is the corridors of the Egyptian pyramids, covered in art, yet with no sign of soot on the ceiling -- how did they bring light down there? And an ancient solid aluminum belt buckle, and much more, you get the idea.
The official narrative requires alot of curation and censorship to hold together, and even then there are holes in it.
Our deep history is absolutely nothing like we've been taught.
Bagdad battery was probably an artifact or technological remnant of an older civilization, rather than a new invention of that time. There are matter-of-fact accounts from about that time period of people flying around on ancient devices, then the devices stop working one day and they didn't know how to fix or make more.
I am in no way, shape, or form smart enough to converse about this beyond: wow. You blow my mind quite often. And now, during a hailstorm that sounds like it's going to break through my house, I'm going to think about the moon.
"...the higher faculties of the brain would gradually erode due to lack of use, until we were nothing more than beautiful chimps."
Hum, read the news today & oh boy, I wonder if you shoud'a written that past tense.
Not you nor me of course (cough, cough) but the rest of them.... ;-)
Julian Jaynes has an interesting theory of the bicameral mind, part of which is that humans didn't really become capable of consciousness until the rise of civilization around 2k BC or so. If I understand his theory, it's that the rise of civ required an increase in consciousness/ introspection/ ability to think abstractly (I still struggle with exactly what he was saying.) I'm not sure if he'd say this, but to me it seems this would create a feedback loop: the more conscious a population became, the higher it's civilization could rise. The higher a civilization rose, the more conscious the population would need to become.
Similar to the hydraulic theory of the rise of civilization: once population limits are hit, you need to increase organization in order to increase irrigation. When irrigation increases, population increases, and so more organization is needed in order to build more irrigation...
A few days ago I was talking to someone who mentioned that many backwards populations don't seem to have this Janyesian consciousness, but when an education system is implemented which includes metaphors and other abstractions, some of their children will have this power of introspection and abstraction.
Relate to this:
"Nicholas Dames has taught Literature Humanities, Columbia University’s required great-books course, since 1998. He loves the job, but it has changed. Over the past decade, students have become overwhelmed by the reading... Dames’s students now seem bewildered by the thought of finishing multiple books a semester. His colleagues have noticed the same problem. Many students no longer arrive at college—even at highly selective, elite colleges—prepared to read books.
This development puzzled Dames until one day during the fall 2022 semester, when a first-year student came to his office hours to share how challenging she had found the early assignments...the student told Dames that, at her public high school, she had never been required to read an entire book. She had been assigned excerpts, poetry, and news articles, but not a single book cover to cover.
“My jaw dropped,” Dames told me. The anecdote helped explain the change he was seeing in his students: It’s not that they don’t want to do the reading. It’s that they don’t know how. Middle and high schools have stopped asking them to."
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2024/11/the-elite-college-students-who-cant-read-books/679945/
Gaius Baltar had a very interesting essay recently, suggesting that we have started becoming less conscious. I suspect this is widely true. AI could accelerate that...
Abundant evidence for this is piling up all over the place.
You may be aware of the work of John Zerzan on archaeoprimitivism? Very interesting stuff on the effects of domestication on human capacity and wellbeing. Hard to argue against.
The problem of genetic decay due to excess comfort is not a new one. Nor, sadly, has it been solved.
I've heard of Zerzan. Don't know much about him. What's his solution?
Jaynes is interesting but his argument is basically the medieval homonculus.
It's a verifiable scientific fact that since the onset of civilization, the brains of humans, like the brains of domesticated wolves (dogs), have become smaller on average. Hunting and gathering selects primarily for individual abilities, while civilization selects primarily for cooperation.
Brains have gotten smaller, but this might be related to cooling requirements. Notably, the onset of agriculture and urbanization corresponded to *enhanced* selective pressure on alleles affecting neurological development. It's also notable that the neolithic cultures we've made contact with have reliably been less cognitively capable than us.
Having worn and fought in armor - historically accurate, steel kit with blunted weapons - both in single-combat and in group battles until one team has the last fighter(s) standing, I attest that the most shocking discovery was how much of what you can do in battle is dependent on conscious heat management for your melon. Your head is cased in 15-20lb of reinforced-steel, lined with steel padding, and then a coiffe to cushion the blows. Problem? When you overexert, your head begins to cook. It's unbearable.
Add to it that you're re-breathing some of your own CO2 because your mouth and throat and eyes need protecting and are also covered, and you very quickly start to suffocate while overheating.
All of which is to say - people vastly underestimate the importance of cooling to humanity's evolutionary success. Tim Noakes (South African Dr and distance running legend) and others have pointed out that persistence hunters succeed against vastly stronger and faster prey because we can cool ourselves - we sweat as we exert, while many animals don't. Panting is way less efficient at dissipating heat than sweating. We can run them to heat exhaustion and then simply walk up and stab them while they're panting after a few days of well-planned routes and bands chasing them off of water holes in the area.
I can think of one or two paleolithic cultures that functioned on genomic resources that are undeniably less cognitively capable than modern Europeans and Asia. Which is why the speech codes are enforced with such vigour.
One of the few theories that adequately explains why int is selected for assumes that it had nothing to do with actual int. Big brains evolved to be a better heat radiator (also why we have so many blood vessels in the head). Even today, some hunter/gatherers hunt by trotting after an animal until it collapses from heat exhaustion.
Which can also explain why people can lose big chunks of their brain and not lose intelligence. I knew a kid born with half a brain due to his mom's lupus, and he was pretty smart. About as smart as his mom, smarter than his dad.
I don't buy that for a second but it's an interesting theory.
Brains are highly redundant. You can burn out huge sections of a mouse brain with a soldering iron and it will still remember how to navigate the maze.
I don't believe that high cognitive capabilities are a useful trait in a Neolithic environment. Still, I will admit that high group organizational ability beats high individual ability every time.
While the moon as a whole is relatively low in REEs, the areas of Procellarum and Imbrium are significantly higher in concentration. Like gold being fairly low as a proportion of Earth’s crust, but abundant in California, Alaska/Yukon, and South Africa
Interesting. I didn't realize this! Always a danger in looking at averages...
Also, there's mirrors of John Crowley's *The Deep* and a hint of John Norman as well.
Admittedly, I'm behind on the latest semiconductor technology, but the question still seems relevant: Do you need significant quantities of rare earth elements to make a monster AI? Intel advanced quite a few generations past Pentium using silicon with microscopic amounts of dopants. Then they launched a line of chips with some exotic element (Hafnium, if memory serves) involved. Don't know what it's purpose was, but if it was just a dopant, you wouldn't need much.
Rare earths are a really big deal for electric drones and other robotic technologies which depend on powerful magnets for compact/efficient electric motors.
And yes, rare earths are used in the stepper motors in hard disk drives. Old disk drives are a great source of super deluxe refrigerator magnets. But note that semiconductor drives are nearly caught up with hard drives.
They are also needed in great quantity for high (as in liquid nitrogen) temperature superconductors. The prospect of commercial fusion power plants is starting to look real thanks to such superconductors. But if our evil moon is powered by solar cells and/or fission reactors, how much superconductors do we really need?
What am I missing?
I think I might have flubbed that one lol.
Though given that maintaining the AI will require the full robotic tech stack, which itself probably requires a certain amount of rare earths. I believe solar panels do as well.
A quick check with Dr. Google says that the first rare earth magnet was discovered in 1966, and neodymium magnets in the early 80s. Surprisingly, the strength difference according to Wikipedia isn't that much higher than ferrite or ceramic magnets. About a factor of two. Seems a bit of a head scratcher to me having compared conventional refrigerator magnets with the magnets from inside hard drives.
Maybe the conventional cheap magnets are diluted old tech. My recollection from reading Speaker Builder back in the day was that cobalt was the bottleneck to making good magnets prior to the rise of neodymium. It is thus worth asking about the availability of cobalt on the moon and asteroids.
As for solar panels, no rare earths needed. Cadmium Telluride cells require cadmium and tellurium, which aren't super common, but aren't rare earths. But I think the layers can be pretty thin. The rare element needed for good solar cells is GOLD. Gold has the magical property of being both electrically conductive and a bit transparent. A very thin coating of gold is applied to the top side of solar cells to provide conductivity between electrodes. However, it is a very thin layer, otherwise it would block light.
Hmm. Could have sworn that modern solar panels were doped with REEs.
So maybe you need a teaspoon of rare earths.
OK, rare earth's are generally not incorporated into silicon semiconductor chips. The dopants are typically arsenic and phosphorus, sometimes boron - certainly not rare. The halfnium is in the form of halfnium pentoxide HaO5 used to make a high-k gate dielectric, which allows for smaller device architectures compared to silicon dioxide SiO2 gate technologies.
Their primary use of Rare Earths is in magnets. Some are used in High-T Superconductors, but new types of HTS are constantly being discovered - some use REs, some don't. Even graphene (carbon) has superconducting properties.
> we must eventually run into physical limits, for example Landauer’s law which establishes a lower bound to the energy necessary to erase one bit of information
One of these days, my old blog will go back online, and with it the article on recycling energy. Turns out it's perfectly sensible to expect energy efficiency in excess of 3000%... assuming you live inside the hot reservoir of the heat engine. You know... like you would in a spaceship. I wonder what that does to Landauer and all the others. ;)
> such inter-state squabbling would be beneath its dignity to interfere with
Oh dear. I got a chuckle out of the guy's naivety.
> How much more reassuring to offload that terrible burden onto an entity that can be trusted to act as the ultimate fair arbiter?
This also gave a chuckle due to the guy's naivety. xD But I understand the might have been saying it only for the sake of the argument.
To be clear, Yarvin doesn't suggest putting an AI in charge. That was my own connection.
Libertarian types often are extremely naive. I think they project their own rationality onto others, and assume humans are rational and fair. When all evidence points to the contrary.
lib: "All we have to do is create a system that demands everyone be fair and good!"
me: "OK, how do we make sure the arbiters of this system don't abuse it?"
lib: [increasingly excited] "Weren't you listening to me?! There'd be RULES!!"
Thinking an AI would of necessity be the ultimate fair arbiter when AI itself is created and programmed by humans is typical of that libertarian blind spot.
An AI wouldn't necessarily have the ability to hide it's own motives, though. In principle you should be able to flip open the hood and see what's inside. (It's just complicated by the 'black box' nature of large ML models with billions of parameters, although there is significant effort to develop tools to address this.)
In a transhuman scenario human nature itself is also no longer a constant (and never really was, over long enough timeframes.) I can see ways for that to go horribly wrong, but it wouldn't break the laws of physics per se if some batch of test-tube babies actually were instinctively rational and fair.
I suspect any attempt to engineer "negative" traits out of humans would come with some huge downsides. There seems to be a view that you can easily separate bad things from good things - like how it was once thought that the pain-killing quality of opiates was distinct from the addictive quality, so if you just refine the former it won't be addictive, which is how we got heroin.
Similarly, oxytocin makes people more cooperative with and sympathetic towards the in-group that they bond with, while simultaneously becoming more hostile towards the out-group.
It's all double-edged swords. Try to blunt the bad thing and you make the good thing useless; try to enhance the good thing and you strengthen the bad thing.
Original Star Trek episode "The Enemy Within".
Negative pleiotropy is one of the potential "horribly wrong" scenarios, sure, but anyone with a spicy opinion on the personality aspects of HBD or willing to go on about the golden mean of Aristotelian virtue can't really take the position that all possible variants of temperament are equally good.
I mean... sure, personality variation helps a species to adapt to changing environmental circumstances- I'm not going to argue for a species of clones- but maybe the environmental circumstance of "now we have the technology for star-spanning empires" is itself something we need some population-level adaptations for.
There is also, happily, a novel biological faculty which allows an organism to rapidly adapt to changing situations in a way that no suite of simple instincts could adequately cover. ...It's called learning. (The useful debate, as I see it, is over whether we should learn more from history and tradition or from lab experiments and polling data.)
Yes, governance structures must evolve to adjust to more advanced technologies. People are quite capable of learning to do new things, in comparison to other animals.
Your point is unclear. "Therefore we learn to not do war anymore?" Good luck with that I suppose.
I'm not trying to be obscure or condescending, I just see the arguments for not tampering with human personality to be similar to most other anti-eugenic arguments (e.g, they assume a moral relativism that the critic themselves doesn't believe in in any other context. No offence.)
And... yes, I believe at some point our species will either have to cease engaging in unregulated existential conflict with itself or it will cease to exist (or at least, cease to be in charge of it's own destiny.) Because the human form is not the most efficient way to win such conflicts.
Unlikely? Perhaps. I'd love to be wrong.
Who opens the hood?
Do you trust him?
Exactly.
"I'm sorry, Dave, I can't do that "
Uhhhh, is Yarvin loosing it? Did he suggest new world order + banning guns? I like my right to keep and bear arms, and I do not think military technology is as threatening to humanity's wellbeing as everyday electronics.
As for the practicality of controlling near earth space, I think it would be similar air superiority. I think America should use the space force to gain near space superiority, but it should primarily be used as a means to colonize the moon and mars. I just don't trust the Chinese to colonize space. Tho, any nation that does gain space superiority would have to exert resources to maintain it. I just don't see AI being fully autonomous as I don't fully trust it (and hopefully my friends in any future US government are of the same opinion). AI is one tool among many, to be used by humans. I think America should try colonizing both Mars and the Moon. Like you have said, once planetary colonies are established, they most likely will have a degree of autonomy and sovereignty simply due to the fact that they are physically far away from each other... because they're literally in space.
"When Gurdjieff said that we are food for the Moon, he seems to have meant that at more than one level. In a sense this is a metaphor, with the inner life of man conceived as a sort of cosmos. The conscious mind is the Sun, the lowest level of the body the Moon, and absent continuous application of will we would continually fall away from the former and feed the latter with our thoughts, feelings, and actions. Yet Gurdjieff also seems to have meant this quite literally. In the esoteric view, following the principle of ‘as above, so below’, we see the same patterns repeated at every level of nature."
I just finished Gene Wolfe's ''Book of the New Sun'' series. This paragraph throws a whole new layer of perspective on the character of Severian, as preternatural torturer/executioner/warrior. The progenitor and natural born intellectual and spiritual leader of the OA, combining the infinite spiritual mind of the ''Akashik record'' with Bran Stark's ''record of humanity''. He's out there somewhere, Severian is, and he'll show up when the hour is darkest, I'm sure, like a Deus ex Machina rising out of Hell as the sun fades and the moon grows dim. We are the new sun. Your D&D world reminds me of how I depicted Ravenloft in a recent campaign 2 years back.
Sounds Awesome. Cheers.
BotNS was great.
The stuff about the OA sounds exactly like John Norman's books of Gor - the 'counter earth', where an omniscient race of 'Priest Kings' enforces a technology ban that keeps humans at the level of the Greeks or Romans. The book series is strongly inspired by Edgar Rice Burroughs' Mars books so if you haven't heard of it already you'll find it interesting.
I've certainly heard of them. They're infamous. Haven't read them though.
Pretty cool setting, although a bit grimdark for my taste.
I'm struck by how the thesis here converges on that of the Dune novels. The intellectual capstone of the series, God Emperor, makes it clear that the Imperium and its tripod of power (Landsraad, Spacing Guild, Emperor & Sardaukar) were ultimately stagnating, and the human race needed Maud'dib and his Jihad to stir the genetic pot and sow chaos, and then pursue the Golden Path of survival.
Ultimately it's his descendant Leto II who seals the deal by ruling as a universal despot, warning the human race by bad example of the dangers posed by "world peace" and "unity", intentionally building up a massive wanderlust, while also creating selection pressure for prescience-cloaking genes. It was the Scattering after his death, combined with humans immune to prescience, that ensures the survival of the human race, by bursting out into the cosmos beyond the reach of any one hegemon.
A vision reveals the alternative -- the Ixians would've eventually developed intelligent hunter-seeker machines (surprisingly reminiscent of drones and AI, considering these books are from the 70s/80s!) that would've genocided the human race, and then even the bots would break down, resulting in extinction. Thus, the extreme actions of the Golden Path were necessary for survival.
I've estimated that the Imperium was concentrated in the Orion Arm of the Milky Way Galaxy (minor outposts notwithstanding), and the Scattering led to humans colonizing other galaxies in large numbers. Of course, interstellar stagnation was only possible through the regular use of foldspace, which collapsed parsecs of distance, and prescience further tying us together. Barring that, colonizing other stars would be a perfectly sufficient Scattering in the real world. The analogy is clear: being concentrated on one planet puts us at existential risk, and space will secure our future.
Incredible how many don't understand this, read only the first book and conclude that Paul was the villain and it's a story about how war is bad and charismatic leaders are dangerous.
What a cool world concept to build off of.
The parasitic vampire moon immediately reminded me of the space vampire megastructures of John C Wright's Superluminary series, a real piece of balls-out scifi.
Those books were great. Love Wright.
> They inhabited rude hovels barely above the level of the stone age, having little in the way of material wealth, but around these they projected fantastical illusions in which they appeared to themselves to live as kings
There is a story in Jack Vance’s The Dying Earth very similar to this.
Yes that's probably what inspired it, I read a lot of Vance as a teenager.
Your description of CY's OA sounds eerily similar to Clif's breakaway civilization sci-fi.
A theme that's been playing rent free in my head lately is the 3 vices of sex, money and power. Even if we get to interplanetary colonization (I don't think it'll happen), until we (as a human civilization) solve this riddle, we'll just repeat the sandbox that is earth (which is why I don't think we'll be allowed off planet as a colonizing force).
I only partially agree with your assessment that brain rot would be the inevitable result after millennia of OA. Your D&D campaign provides the clues. Among the he weaknesses of our current rendition of modernity is the lack and deprivation of spirituality and enchantment. So it also stands to reason that if we deprive earth bound humans, who are not the OA middle managers, of tech, then perhaps we open the door to a return to harnessing tech of old as recounted in what remains of the erased pre younger dryas eras.
Also, food for sci-fi, a healer recently spoke to me about giant structures sucking up vital energies from humans above continents. Far out stuff. And the moon once again becomes an FOB (and so Gurdjieff Is kinda on target).
My personal intuition is that the Orbital Authority probably could extend control to the entire solar system, but (assuming relativistic limits hold), probably not to the galaxy- the distances between the stars are too vast and the energy budgets for rapid travel too extreme for a central hegemon to unite them all. Assuming that the colonies get uppity in the first place.
A lot of traditionalist right-wing arguments about cyclical history and the inevitability of war rest on assumptions about a bedrock of human nature that simply doesn't apply in the scenario John is sketching, though. It's very hard to predict what would happen.
I think even small extensions beyond cislunar space dramatically increase the probability of political fragmentation. Distances are just too large.
That assumes FTL is impossible of course. If that assumption is wrong, all bets are off ... then again FTL dramatically increases the size of the available frontier...
Fusion-plasma thrusters (which we'll probably invent some time this century, assuming Old Terra doesn't go completely to pot) could feasibly cut down transit times within the solar system to something on the order of weeks. At that point it's something like administering the British Empire.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AojKy1iDloQ
If the Belters go hide out in the Oort Cloud all bets are off, of course, but the pickings there will be pretty slim, and that's an appreciable fraction of the distance to other stars regardless.
Yes, that's the point - the frontier is unbounded, thus as propulsion technology improves the ability to penetrate the frontier also improves.
Regarding the Oort: we don't really know what's out there, but there's at least one planet, which we might have just detected. Probably more. And fusion implies they'd have all the energy they need, assuming they can access the necessary fuel.
Have you read how the British Empire was administered?
At least before radio, you were literally months from higher authority. Yes, you could be recalled, and yes warships did visit. but basically you were on your own.
By 1914 global travel times were on the order of weeks:
https://www.reddit.com/r/MapPorn/comments/14ibtpx/what_travel_looked_like_100_years_ago_map_shows/#lightbox
Anyway, my point is that administering a multi-planetary empire within the solar system should be logistically feasible with relatively near-future technology.
But the Empire was getting pretty weathered by 1914. It had been administered for centuries before that, when India (for instance) was a six month voyage.
The administration apparatus was quite different from 1914.
You're correct that it could be administered, but the current American model where you could direct operations on the other side of the world in real time could not work.
Whether governments could revert to the earlier model (or a variation that accounts for travel times) without some sort of crisis is uncertain.
If OA gets up and running, everything above it is its dominion. The key assumption is no one else is there already.
I've now read CY's article. I'm convinced a bird whispered in his ear that OA is already here or on the near future menu. And he doesn't know quite what to make of it. His world looks inspired from the original planet of the apes, whereas reality would be closer to the Hollywood flic Elysium.
I'm not sure what John's assumptions about human nature are, but I'd agree there's a lot of useless baggage about violence being innate.
Violence is quite innate to human nature. Males are evolved for it, naturally attracted to it, fascinated by it.
Key part to the argument here is that everything above the OA is not, in fact, its dominion. Even assuming there's no one there already, if the OA extends itself well beyond cislunar space, political fragmentation - and thus conflict - becomes inevitable.
The inevitability of reproducing the same dramas in space as we're seeing play out today, like yesteryear, is inevitable, unless we can figure out a better way to build a society from the ground up. Simplified as you wrote, you're right, it's innate, but then, just because we can, doesn't translate into ought or must. If we add "should", we get ethics and morals, and maybe a better way :P
Nah. War is eternal. It's just predation (and the response to predation), which is as old as life.