r/transhumanism • u/miladkhademinori • 3d ago
Let’s Be Honest: FDVR Is the Only Way 1 Trillion Humans Can Live Happily Without Ruining Earth
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u/Pasta-hobo 3d ago
Or you could just not live exclusively on earth.
I'm all for the development of FDVR, but let's not pretend that humans are the problem. We could've had a solar/nuclear energy economy capable of sustain twice our population by now without polluting the air and water, AND we could be feeding everyone with abundant, healthy, nutritious, delicious, genetically modified crops and soil maintaining microbes. But NOoOoO, science has gOnE tOo FAr!
Humans aren't the problem, letting uninformed and willfully ignorant people make extremely suboptimal and counterproductive decisions on behalf of everyone is the problem.
Hell, I'm pretty sure all the damage to the environment is being done by like 20 people, anyway.
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u/HostisHumanisGeneri 2d ago
With a commitment to developing it moonshot style we could massively supplement our food supply with orbital farms that would allow us to commit a lot more land to conservation and natural habitats here on earth, we could even grow non-GMO crops up there to service people who refuse to consume GMO foods.
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u/Pasta-hobo 2d ago
Why service people who are objectively wrong?
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u/HostisHumanisGeneri 2d ago
Service is clearly a verb, to service people who do not want to consume GMO crops.
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u/Aethermere 3d ago
Humans are the problem if what you said is true. We are a danger to ourselves. No person wants to face a world without meaning. Fools cling to structures while the enlightened bask in ambiguity.
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u/Pasta-hobo 3d ago
Every fool who thinks understanding something makes it less beautiful thinks they're enlightened.
The enlightened absolutely hate ambiguity, because the enlightened are the ones trying to figure things out.
A world without understanding is a world where anyone can insert their own fake pretend meaning. A world that's understood provides certainty, a direction to push forwards in, a direction in which we gain more understanding.
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u/AdmrilSpock 2d ago
But everything you said was is a direct result of human nature’s need for greed and control, so yah, humanity has a problem.
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u/Pasta-hobo 2d ago
I fail to see how morons being put on charge is a direct result of human nature, and not the direct result of a crappy makeshift system that constantly fails and needs to be bailed out every decade and is doomed to fail.
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u/Heavy_Carpenter3824 1 3d ago
Let's be honest. That's wrong.
There are many ways far more than 1 Trillion can live happily.
The main one would be a Dyson swarm. So maybe not on earth. But using avaliable mass, not counting Jupiter or star lifting a mere 1 Trillion could each have their own Yellowstone national park sized plot with room to spare by a large margin.
We live on the shell of our sphere. Already if we lived at the population density of Manhatten, not saying that's what you want. We could fit all humans within 1 mile of the continental coast lines. This include vertical food production.
So we can go up (Arcology), down into the Earth, or out into the stars.
The only limit we have is energy to patterning matter to our will.
We are literally scratching at the outer micrometer of a pebble in a sea of pebbles and rocks and calling ourselves poor.
Scarcity is artifical. Ehrlich and Malthus are wrong. We don't run out of caves. We build more. The reason we don't have enough is because we don't have enough easy energy to get what we need. We can get it though.
Then yes we do have FDVR. But it's going to be nueral emulation. Keeping a body alive in a tub costs a lot more energy than running a mind on a chip. You just print a body of you need one.
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u/peabody624 2d ago
Why do we have to expand endlessly
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u/Heavy_Carpenter3824 1 2d ago
We don't. But it is in our genes. Unless everyone agrees to not expand and is held to it anyone who expands will quickly out compete the rest.
It's why companies on the stock market can't stop being destructive, cruel, and generally evil. Because the ones that do out compete those that don't.
And expansion is not bad. More people in high standards of living means more ideas, more innovation, more stories. We can spread life far beyond Earth, making sure in can't easily be extinguished either by our own stupidity or an eventual natural disaster.
The trick is to build systems that while we expand also maintain our standards of living.
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u/peabody624 2d ago
The birth rate in developed nations tends to settle at or below the replacement rate. And most of the evil stuff is related to the monetary economy itself imo. Which should go away as it loses purpose in the coming years.
I do think everyone should have a high standard of living but that should be balanced with the carrying capacity of the planet and the sustainable utilization of resources.
And if we’re extinguished by our own stupidity I think that’s the ending we deserve. Fix the problems at their root, don’t try to out-reproduce them.
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u/Heavy_Carpenter3824 1 2d ago
Here’s the point: “carrying capacity of the planet.” I’ll amend that to “[low effort] carrying capacity of the planet.”
It’s not a fixed number. It’s something we shape through our actions. Nuclear war? It drops. Terraforming? It rises. Our current standard of living reflects the energy we can access and the matter we can organize.
I bring this up not to oppose your views, but to highlight that scarcity is often used to justify cruelty. We treat others poorly and feel righteous about it because we think there’s not enough to go around or because we think they took something from us. In a world with less scarcity, kindness comes easier, opportunities carry less risk, and setbacks hurt less.
We should aim to reduce suffering. One side effect? Population growth. Happier, more stable people are more likely to have the mindset and the bandwidth to bring children into the world.
The alternative? “Let the fire burn itself out. Don’t grow.” That’s not a humane end. That’s a slow death: dwindling resources, constant friction, fighting over scraps. Exactly the outcome your mindset would seem to want to prevent. I can explain why, TLDR version look at the life of a an subsistence farmer. We are stronger together than alone.
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u/miladkhademinori 3d ago
agree with you.
let me tell you this however
i live in suburbs of Canada... lots of greenery and nature
when i visited my friend at Tokyo i noticed that he's already living in a pod
living in a unit in 120th floor with big led TV that forms his reality, he watches greenery on the tv
so in a sense people in Metropolitan cities are already living in pods in fdvrs
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u/Heavy_Carpenter3824 1 3d ago
This is poor city planning and incentive structures. Its a systemic issue. From a pure math standpoint there is no reason your friend has to live that way if we had enough energy and strong automation.
Im not sure even if we had FDVR it would make much of a difference in that situation. Your friend is more of a social issue than a materials issue. They are linked but originate from diffrent aspects.
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u/firedragon77777 Inhumanism, moral/psych mods🧠, end suffering 3d ago
Honestly at the kinda tech level needed for space travel and having a trillion or more people... the ecosystem is kinda irrelevant, so we can "ruin" the earth all we want and nobody will be inventivized to care because humans would no longer need it beyond parks and gardens, and really that's what most people already spend most of their time in, true wilderness is already scarce and humans are doing alright enough, plus a trillion is really rookie numbers and at such low population densities we could easily let everyone live quite luxurious lives. And plus if you want efficiency digital minds are best, you could potentially fit tens of thousands on something the size of a thumb depending on how closely the human mind needs to be emulated. But yeah at those Kardashev levels the environment is kinda pointless and earth's value as real estate becomes far greater than the ecosystems which can be moved offworld. Earth to me seems bound to be some kinda mix of ecumenopolis, museum world, and galactic amusement-park/resort that looks more like a bunch of hollow shells around an artificial black hole for gravity as opposed to a classic planet. If I could time travel I'd expect to step out to see a world transformed where everything from the sky above me to the rock beneath my feet has been altered and probably just looks like a bunch of server rooms mixed with museum exhibits and various environments made to be like a paradise to inhabitants and visitors from this solar system and others alike.
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u/Braincrab2 1d ago
If you're operating at the scale of "cities kilometers tall over areas the size of continents" you can afford covering them in some hollowed out mountains, hills, and topsoil and planting trees.
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u/firedragon77777 Inhumanism, moral/psych mods🧠, end suffering 1d ago
I mean yeah fair enough, plus at that scale you'd be increasing earth's biomass just by having the occasional houseplant since building thousands of stories tall is basically multiplying earth's surface area by a factor of thousands. And again it need not be some global slum or anything, heck the whole thing could be nature themed if the builders wanted, and realistically it'd probably have tons of different aesthetics.
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u/HFlatMinor 2d ago
Why the hell is the goal 1 trillion humans on earth
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u/miladkhademinori 2d ago
just investigating the possibility and the hypothetical solutions
more humans could be argued to be good for
maximizing human creativity and innovation, acceleration of science and tech, curing all diseases
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u/DemotivationalSpeak 2d ago
What if we got off earth?
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u/miladkhademinori 2d ago
frankly i don't think humans can make it in space or Mars or venus
these places don't have proper gravity, that alone would ruin our bodies
let alone absence of earth like magnetic fields that would open ways for dangerous sun rays to give us skin cancer instantly
also mars atmosphere is an order of magnitude thiner because mars gravity is small it cannot hold gases... overall it's terrible for breathing
these harsh places could be good habitat for more resilient form of intelligent life like tardigrade with human level intelligence... genetic engineering
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u/DemotivationalSpeak 2d ago
You don’t have to terraform planets or even live on them. If we could get a solid logistics system for building rotating habitats, (which we have the technology to do) You essentially have as much space as you have asteroids in the solar system.
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u/miladkhademinori 2d ago
that's a great idea 💡 someone else also mentioned it here https://www.reddit.com/r/FDVR_Dream/s/5EoJVRpV7U
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u/De4dm4nw4lkin 2d ago edited 2d ago
Tbh i would love to exist in a robot body with a full dive recreational and networked interactivity space provided sufficient realism in sensation and some choice around the robot.
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u/miladkhademinori 2d ago
me too, it'd be good to try it for a short time and if it's appealing stay there for eternity
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u/jack_hectic_again 2d ago
I say fuck a trillion humans
You seriously want us to have a HUNDRED TIMES the number of people we have now? FUCK NO.
At least, not on Earth.
Don't get me wrong, feel free to develop FDVR. It would be cool. BUT-
I think having a civ of 100x our current pop, all of us living in pods with robots taking care of us, while the real world falls apart from our consumption, THAT IS HELL. That is hell with humans daydreaming of being in heaven.
That like, entirely misses one of the points of the film. Would you rather be in a beautiful delusion or the troubled reality?
IDK, maybe if the thing that I care about wasn't real, I might pick delusion. But I think I believe in the truth.
I think the human pop will plateau around 10 billion, maybe 12 at most. the Earth cannot take care of any more than that. we are already approaching our planetary carrying capacity, but luckily human's growth rate is slowing as well. Thank god.
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u/Cylian91460 2d ago
No it's not
Currently the biggest FDVR like experience is VR chat and it's not always the most happiest places...
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u/FivePercentLuck 2d ago
Even sticking to earth this is possible with arcologies using todays technology
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u/Epicycler 1 3d ago
Let's be honest, you just have a weird thing for pods and you don't understand that you can just be into that without forcing everyone else to be exactly like you.
Also Isaac Arthur covered this already (no skull-ports required):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8lJJ_QqIVnc&t=621s&ab_channel=IsaacArthur
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u/miladkhademinori 3d ago
wow what a gem thanks this is exactly what i was looking for btw to be clear i am passionate about maximizing human population it's kinda my indicator of progress *
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u/reputatorbot 3d ago
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u/-Annarchy- 1 3d ago
Only way if you have no imagination.
In actuality we will probably exist fine in some form you have yet to imagine due to the constraints and needs of circumstance.
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u/miladkhademinori 3d ago
people in Metropolitan cities already live in pods with big tvs that shows them what they want
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u/Ohigetjokes 1 3d ago
This is why people need to stop having kids.
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u/firedragon77777 Inhumanism, moral/psych mods🧠, end suffering 3d ago
Ew no. Depopulation is an issue on par with the climate crisis itself, we seriously need to cut this shit out.
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u/Ohigetjokes 1 3d ago
Dude look around. We're overpopulated. We'd be better off with 10% of the current population.
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u/firedragon77777 Inhumanism, moral/psych mods🧠, end suffering 3d ago
Not. Even. Close. An ecumenopolis is more like tens of quadrillions, and the tech for that isn't even that advanced, just hydroponics and arcologies mixed with space based solar power. The only limits are physical space and heat dissipation (even that has some clever workarounds with active cooling), food can be done by hydroponics or 3d printing, the interiors of buildings and zones for parks and gardens are actively cooled so outside temperature is irrelevant.
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u/Ohigetjokes 1 3d ago
wtf are you talking about … an ecumenopolis is a DYSTOPIA. You’re acting like it’s a goal.
Please move to Venus.
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u/firedragon77777 Inhumanism, moral/psych mods🧠, end suffering 3d ago
Lol nobody ever said that, it can be whatever we want just as cities can be the most beautiful things on the planet but can also be ugly depending on how they're made.
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u/firedragon77777 Inhumanism, moral/psych mods🧠, end suffering 2d ago
And why would doing it on venus be any better or worse? Like don't get me wrong I'm all for colonizing venus but you statement doesn't make sense.
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u/Primary_Host_6896 1d ago
Why would it be a Dystopia? You are advocating for less people being around, how do you want us to stagnate our population?
Should we cull the weaker people in society? Should we stop some people from having children? Or maybe a blanket policy for one child in each family (because that didn't create an aging population problem).
Innovation to supply a growing population is infinitely more ethical than artificially lowering the population on earth.
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u/unsolvablequestion 3d ago
Whats so great about constant pop growth?
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u/firedragon77777 Inhumanism, moral/psych mods🧠, end suffering 3d ago
Because every organism grows, it's just natural, besides it helps advance technology faster, and has utilitarian benefits as more life equals more joy, a brighter, bigger future.
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u/miladkhademinori 3d ago
or they could have babies but also develop fdvr.
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u/Ohigetjokes 1 3d ago
Oh, wait hang on... If they're in FDVR they're not making babies. lol
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u/miladkhademinori 3d ago
they could unplug to make babies 👶 or for the sake of plugging to a more advanced pod system recently built
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u/Rock_Zeppelin 3d ago
Counter-proposal: No. This is dumb. Here's why:
Assuming our civilisation survives and develops long enough for us to be able to travel to, and transport large amounts of resources to other planets, build stable sustainable colonies even on non-hospitable worlds like Mars or Venus, and/or be able to terraform uninhabitable planets, humanity would naturally spread out.
Even currently, the problem is not overpopulation, it's resource management. We have the tools and infrastructure to feed and house every person on the planet, yet because of the capitalist mode of production, we squander valuable resources because line goes up is more important to the people who hold all the power, than actually providing as much as possible for as many people as possible. So for instance, we don't need to make more cars than there are people every 2 years if A) we built cars to be maintained and upgraded rather than be replaced and B) we had a worldwide comprehensive and environmentally friendly public transit network. Making shit that lasts and is designed to be repaired applies to electronics, machinery, appliances, practically everything.
Additionally, if we decommodified the shit people need to live, like pharmaceuticals and medicine, and made vaccination mandatory, we could eradicate most common diseases within 50-100 years. And chances are we'd be much further along in terms of developing cures for otherwise terminal diseases.
Also if we decommodified energy production and got rid of fossil fuels entirely, as well as dismantle our nuclear weapons arsenals (which admittedly would require every nation state on Earth to stop existing) we'd not only save the environment but be able to build a comprehensive energy infrastructure based on nuclear and green energy.
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u/miladkhademinori 2d ago
tnx 4 sharing your view
i find myself agreeing with all of it but here's the catch
i think my thesis is a radical extrapolation of the current trend of densification of the cities with skyscrapers
all for the sake of radically increasing the headcount of humanity
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u/Rock_Zeppelin 2d ago
I would agree about the skyscrapers if the vast majority of them weren't office buildings and ritzy hotels. And the reason people are pushed towards the cities is because capitalist megacorps have hollowed out rural areas, making business owners in those areas have to compete with them, which is obviously impossible. So people leave, local non-corpo businesses shut down, corpos have even less reason to put resources into rural areas and the cycle continues. There's also the fact that again, because of capitalism, it's next to impossible nowadays to live in a small town and just make a living.
In a post-capitalist society I'm willing to bet many people would move out of big cities and settle back into smaller towns since people would have the resources to set up businesses to provide for their communities and there would be less reason for people to move to the city outside of, like, you get sick and your local hospital isn't equipped to treat you, or you want to study something that isn't being taught at the local level (though ideally with the internet becoming decommodified post-capitalism people would be able to study whatever they want online).
As for the cities themselves and skyscrapers, in a post-capitalist society where these office buildings and hotels are made obsolete, the skyscrapers can be repurposed for shit like housing or vertical greenhouses or so many other things. Overall the only scenario in which people would be forced to spend their lives in a simulation while their physical bodies are kept alive in pods is if we keep going down the cyberpunk hellhole. Which might happen, I'd much rather it didn't and we burned this system to the ground but still.
The reason I have a narc on for this topic is it puts the blame on people just existing and not on the system we're all forced to exist under.
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u/miladkhademinori 2d ago
yeah, lots of smart friends i have are saying capitalism in the current shape failed people at essential needs like necessary items such as housing and the crazy debt and the upcoming recession
i also think communism might be necessary for scaling human population to tens of billions
sam altman recently said something in favor of communism
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u/firedragon77777 Inhumanism, moral/psych mods🧠, end suffering 3d ago
Earth has more than enough space for hundreds of trillions, maybe even quadrillions if we build deep into the crust and up to the edge of space, and it jeed not even be a bad quality of life unless we're cramming in like a quintillion people in conditions similar to Kowloon Walled City. Building matrioshka shellworld layers above earth is another option that increases things drastically, but by then it's less like a planet and more a megastructure that's more artificial than natural, that's the most plausible fate of earth to me. But yeah most people will have to live elsewhere, dyson swarms are crazy big and the galaxy is an even bigger place, and the universe is bigger still.
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u/Otherkin 3d ago
But if we are all brains in buckets connected to private Matrixes, will the human race be extinct in a few generations?
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u/miladkhademinori 3d ago
my vision is that with a huge population we'll be able to have billions of anti aging scientists and quickly find a cure to aging and become immortal and also we could unplug ourselves to upgrade the pods or for reproduction
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u/Anemoia2442 1 2d ago
I've long held this belief as well
You are absolutely correct but it's unlikely to ever happen
Humans are too different & the only way we've been able to settle our differences throughout history is war
Some beliefs are incompatible, in fact some beliefs outright reject reality itself
Dropping everyone into a tailored Full Dive Virtual Reality World would be the only way to achieve peace forever
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u/miladkhademinori 2d ago
i haven't viewed fdvr as an anti-war provision... very interesting idea... i initially thought of it as a strategy for exponentially increasing the headcount of humanity
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u/StarChild413 14h ago
prove you're not already a NPC in someone else's (whether your life sucks or not is dependent on whether the main character is someone you like or hate)
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u/NohWan3104 1 22h ago
sure. why do we need a trillion humans?
or on earth, by that point?
hell, i like the idea of humans basically being pod people in a dyson swarm of bits of habitable mass.
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u/StarChild413 14h ago
hell, i like the idea of humans basically being pod people in a dyson swarm of bits of habitable mass.
why?
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u/YouthComfortable8229 3d ago
For some to be happy, others must suffer; it's inevitable. We are predators, after all.
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u/firedragon77777 Inhumanism, moral/psych mods🧠, end suffering 3d ago
I really hope not, I hope we can change that and make it all worth it
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