Possibly. Other models have generation ships.

I'm not even entirely comfortable with the ethics of having children born on dangerous interstellar voyages. I can accept if people become pregnant along the way, or embarked on a voyage while pregnant. But to store embryos to restock the new world, like they're corn or tins of coffee, seems... off to me, somehow. These babies are being treated as stockpiles of raw materials with which to build a new world.

I'm much more comfortable with the first few voyages being entirely automated. And with robots and whatnot pre-building housing, energy production, and other infrastructure, so people just show up and move in.

> a new data point in an already decreasing trend or an outlier.

Longstanding trend.

• Change in annual CO₂ emissions
• Change in per capita CO₂ emissions
• Production vs. consumption-based CO₂ emissions, Europe
• Change in production vs. consumption-based CO₂ emissions per capita, Europe

It's fusion power, but already here.

I think this spreading out, the independence that would offer, would pose some interesting moral conundrums. Sure, everyone "does their own thing," But... not really. You'll have a cult habitat/asteroid where a guru is lording over his 50 glassy-eyed underage wives. Do you intervene? These young women aren't "doing their own thing," after all. You could have a world where white supremacists have reinstated race-based slavery, and they're kidnapping people from other worlds. Do you intervene?

That's not to say that you could govern a 1000-light-year-wide empire, with the limits imposed by the communication lag (speed of light), etc. Not to mention transportation, obviously. Which I guess is why most science fiction just has the convenient trope of FTL travel and communication and whatnot.

What "science fiction" means differs, since there is a lot of dystopian fiction out there, far larger than the amount of solar-punk type positive portrayals.

> How accepting did they think they could be in a future where they had to eat bugs instead of cow

Stuff like that is a great example. "Eating bugs" can be a Snowpiercer-style dystopian image of you forcing down cockroaches while the rich eat steak. But IRL insect protein is being made into flour or other substrates for processed foods. Insects are mainly being grown for chicken and aquaculture feed. And soon culture meat is going to enter the market and scale. But much of r/futurology seems intent on framing that as dystopian, too.

> The question of how far we could adapt to higher science fiction level advances was truly fascinating to listen in on as my students debated.

I think there are a lot of questions posed by science fiction that our ethics are just not equipped for yet. Take robots or androids. Where do we consider them human? A mining robot isn't going to be seen to have rights or need protection, I'd wager. But what if your neighbor has a bevy of sex-bots that look like underage kids? Should that be illegal? But they're robots, right?

Consider too virtual worlds. Do you allow any fantasy to be acted out in virtual worlds? Nominally, going in, sure, many would agree to that. But humans have an 'icky' factor that kicks in very quickly. Consider hentai now. There are plenty of types of porn that were never anything more than ink on a page or pixels on a screen, but people would still want to be illegal. No humans were harmed, but people insist (with no real foundation) that it "encourages" this or that, ergo if you hand-wave hard enough then it's a public danger and thus should be banned. It's bullshit, but it's also that "icky" factor kicking in, where people have to rationalize banning it on basis of moral revulsion. That's only going to become a more acute problem as technology improves.

Chickens are natty, and live in the wild. Cows are as natty as a pekinese.

Most of the bug posts were about companies growing bugs for aquaculture and chicken feed. And cultured meat is meat. Most vegans will eat it because it addresses the issue of animal suffering, and vastly improves the environmental sustainability of meat production. Still not as sustainable as eating plants directly, but better than conventional meat production, certainly.

But the sub definitely needs an ag-tech flair, so people can hide the posts if they want to. There are only going to be more posts about cultured meat, cellular agriculture, vertical farms, even insect farming, as time goes forward.

First lab-grown burger was in 2013. And keep in mind that cultured meat is just meat. It's the same cells, just grown outside the animal. You can tailor the feedstock however you want.

• Chemical safety benefits of cultured meat
• Food safety benefits of cultured meat

Another interesting read: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cultured_meat#History

If I ask the average shopper in the meat aisle of my supermarket if they knew or cared about the antibiotics, hormones, antifungals, and other drugs/chemicals in the meat they're buying, or in the crops fed to those animals, I doubt a lot would know or care.

> This incentivizes landowners to sell out to developers as quickly as possible--and will further drive suburbanization & car-based cities.

I don't think there are masses of people clamoring to move to rural areas to live on former cattle ranches.

• https://www.census.gov/library/visualizations/2021/dec/percent-change-county-population.html (all of those orange areas lost population from 2010-2020)
• https://ourworldindata.org/urbanization
• Number of people living in urban and rural areas, European Union
• Number of people living in urban and rural areas, United Kingdom
• Number of people living in urban and rural areas, United States
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rural_flight

Cities and suburbs are growing more dense, and rural areas are losing people. If animal agriculture declines, that'll take economic activity out of rural areas even more quickly. I can't see how that would result in more people moving in.

The food from the waste products of animal agriculture will get more expensive, as animal agriculture shrinks in size. The price for all "traditional" slaughter meat will go up, as it loses the economies of scale.

>Will we still grow animals?

We still raise horses, but far fewer of them than in 1900. Look at whatever dish you have in mind, and ask if you would pay enough for that dish to raise the whole animal. These niche products will have to carry ever more of the cost of raising the animal.

>Will we have other sources to get flavor for broths?

Cultured fat is a thing, too.

>How will I be able to get teriyaki chicken hearts at the Japanese Yakitori restaurant down the road?

Heart muscle is still muscle, so if there's a viable market, cultured meat can probably make that muscle, too. I've read in an interview with an exec for some cultured meat company that said they could make bone, too. Didn't say they would, but that it wasn't impossible.

> Will chicken broth just not be a thing anymore?

Cultured fat is going to be be made too, long before cultured meat scales production. Primarily it will be used for hybrid products, to improve the satiety and mouthfeel of plant-based options. But stock/broth is another market.

> The luxury meat would be high end because it would be authentic and expensive,

I think the complication here being that slaughtered meat will still have the risk of fecal contamination. Which will be missing from cultured meat. Even grass-fed beef often still gets antibiotics, and most of it still gets some supplemental crops towards the end of their life, with chemicals sprayed on those crops. Grass-finished beef, beef that ate only grass throughout its entire life, is a tiny sliver of the market, and many don't even like the taste.

• Chemical safety benefits of cultured meat
• Food safety benefits of cultured meat

So instead of "luxury" meat, I think "traditionalist" will be the better moniker. Some people just don't like change, and they think there's some 'realness', some spiritual authenticity, conveyed by us having had killed the animal they're eating. So they won't care about the risk of fecal contamination, since that's part of nature, and you just wash your food as we've always done.

I think it depends on the speed those small EVs are driven. In a place with poor roads, maybe everyone has to drive more slowly. But in the US, motorcycles have a quite significantly higher fatality rate per mile of travel. And I'd wager that countries in which people travel more by scooter have a higher death rate on the road.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_traffic-related_death_rate

I definitely prefer EV scooters over ICE scooters.

• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biomining
• https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S1360138598012837

Plants, fungi, and microbes have all been used.

Strong automation and cheap/abundant fusion would be some kind of world. The dystopian elements in the movie were somewhat artificial, since with fusion and automation at that level you can easily filter/desalinate/recycle. Plus grow all your food in stacked greenhouses, or with cellular agriculture. Both with vastly less use of land and water.

I trust data over gut feeling. "Don't trust the data, trust my intuition" isn't a great argument. China is still building housing, electric cars, and all kinds of things.

>Where do you think your plastic hose comes from? From the plastic mine?

Are you pretending that anyone said that China doesn't export anything? China does export things. But they also have a huge domestic market. Cement and steel are not the entirety of their emissions. They also have a middle class, and more people with money to buy stuff.

Most of China's emissions are for domestic consumption.

• Production vs. consumption-based CO₂ emissions, China
• Production vs. consumption-based CO₂ emissions, United States
• Production vs. consumption-based CO₂ emissions, Europe
• Change in production vs. consumption-based CO₂ emissions per capita, Europe
• Change in production vs. consumption-based CO₂ emissions per capita, Germany
• Change in production vs. consumption-based CO₂ emissions per capita, United States
• Change in production vs. consumption-based CO₂ emissions per capita, China

You have to include nuclear as well, to look at all low-carbon sources.

• Share of electricity from low-carbon sources

China is climbing, but hasn't matched the US yet, much less Europe.

Also interesting:

• Carbon intensity of electricity, 2000 to 2021

We need more density. Without density mass transit isn't economical. The lower the density, the more expensive it gets to build and maintain infrastructure. Yet faster-to-build or energy-efficient single-family detached homes will not be an appreciable part of any solution. Low density doesn't scale. And it takes up more land, by definition, precluding that land from being reforested, renewed as grassland, rewilded, etc. "Not everyone wants to live in density" is true, but also doesn't address the above points.

According to Where the Footprints End, by Cutchin and Renner, Bigfoot sightings and UFO sightings often occur together, or at least in proximity. The idea that Bigfoot is a big hairy ape is just one hypothesis, if the most popular and famous one. But there are a lot of sightings that bleed over into the paranormal.

(I'm not a believer, rather I just find the blurriness of the lines between folkloric 'things' to be interesting.)

Plus it's only "lab-grown" when it's being grown in a lab, during the R&D phases. Production facilities have large stainless steel tanks. Why don't we call beer "lab-grown"? Because even though production is done in large stainless-steel tanks, it's not in a lab.

Naan of these jokes are any good, guys.

Agree on Brave Robot. Good stuff. But Ben & Jerry's is a known, famous brand. More brands equals more shelf space, more mindshare, so people will grow more comfortable. Plus greater production scale with lower production price, and then even more companies will be able to source their ingredients from cellular agriculture processes. It's going to have to win on economics, not merely on environmental sentiment, compassion for animals, or novelty. I want cellular agriculture to be normal and unremarkable, used in even the cheapest store brands. One step at a time, I guess.

The words "space economy" covers a huge diversity of possibilities. Even asteroid mining is a space economy. Space-based solar power, to some extent. So, a "space economy" can cover everything from asteroid mining to something like Iain M. Banks' Culture series.

How it pans out will depend on any number of things. Whether we have FTL travel. How good automation gets. And frankly we barely understand the economy here on earth. Even economists were (and are) all over the map on predictions, for COVID-19 ramifications, looming decline of fossil fuel demand, declining fertility rates, etc.