Pio
+240 others
5 years ago
What is the cost of lives never lived?
"And the last point here is that civilizational collapse has the problem of mass death. I'm gonna give an example a little bit later. Some people have questioned oh, you know, Rome never really fell. What happened was a social transformation. Well, yeah, it's a transformation, but with an intellectual dark age, it's the cost of lives, never lived exceptional lives, incredible lives. The cost of the Roman dark age is that there were never Romans visiting and sailing around the world that there was never a lively discussion between Greek philosophers and Confucian scholars. The cost of our civilization of lives never lived might be that we can't actually take a vacation on the moon. My dad, when he was something like nine years old and living in a very, you know, an optimistic country. People forget this, Communism was optimistic in the 1970s, he wrote a simple essay about how well you know extending current trends in economic growth and technological progress by the time he's a dad, he'll be able to take his kid on a field trip to the moon, right? He didn't take me to the moon. It's very disappointing." source: video 
