Re your concerns about US global domination

Come on now, enough with the hyperbole. The US has been a superpower for 60 years, the beginning of which was marked with rebuilding Europe and Japan insead of enjoying the spoils of war, then turned to creating international organizations like NATO and the UN as a response to Soviet expansion, and then worked to clean up hotspots like Yugoslavia, Kuwait, and Bosnia.

I can't say I approve every US action in that span of time (particularly in South America and Southeast Asia), but the basis of comparison is the Europeans. This is a group of people who, when they had the power to, raped and pillaged the rest of the planet for 500 years, before just about destroying themselves in two wars. Now suddenly they're the moral compass for the rest of the planet?

>>21

Hell if I know. Thats why I advocate a period of technological stagnation or regress while we work this shit out.

>>22

Expanding the size of our environment would reduce the probability of destroying it all in one go. But it would also reduce the disincentive to destroy large parts of it. I think that going to space would just encourage us to use our nuclear weapons more freely.

>>23

I _do_ assume that powerful, organized groups usually do more harm than good (I think I said that in >>20, more or less). Indeed I do not have "proof", this is not an anthropological "law", but I think it is a good theory supported by the most readily available evidence. Read any book of human history, and find groups of people doing INARGUABLY more good than harm. Post that list. My list is easy: every war ever fought in human history. I bet you my list is bigger.

Yes it's just a theory. Yes there is no way to prove it. But it is impossible to describe evolution or gravity as a law either... so I don't feel bad that all I've got is a non-provable (and non-disprovable) theory well-supported by the facts.

Notes: When I say good and harm, I mean it in the sense of a Pareto optimality. Simply put, if at least one person is made happier, and no-one is made less happy, than a situation is "good", elsewise it is harmful. For more info pls check wiki. I wrote that article and a lot of the other one's on social economic calculus. :P