Another way of looking at the question: What’s the balance between pursuing useful improvements and chasing infinite perfection?
You can move along the curve and improve things. Sometimes small steps, sometimes big steps. but if you are moving along a logarithmic curve you’ll reach infinity before you reach perfection. Assuming that there’s a cost to this effort, you will have to exert infinite resources for ever smaller gains.
Two other popular ultimate ambitious chases come to mind, no less pursued by some of the same mindsets.
Colonizing Mars and cracking ultimate longevity.
Traveling to the moon came at a relatively moderate cost and significant insights. The first time on a solid surface beyond the Earth, a view of Earth from afar. Totally worth it. Traveling to Mars (beyond an unmanned probe) is a bigger effort (9 months one way vs. a few days) at diminishing returns. Colonizing Mars is whole big step function in logistics and problem solving. Only maximalist thinking would ever consider this at scale, and even then it would only benefit the privileged few at the expense of a lot of problems that could be solved here. It becomes a solution for the 0.1%ers, or current class of billionaires.
Figuring out how to live forever (which has fascinated many movie story lines) is less costly as an effort. However, it’s more costly to the social environment. If it’s reserved to the same 0.1%ers it’s an exercise in elitism. And I can’t say that the current billionaire class has aged well. Musk, Bezos, Zuckerberg all did some amazing good in their younger years, and largely have become isolated and toxic in their older years. Imagine how they would be at 250 or 500? Doesn’t seem like an aspiration for the rest of us. As of now we have the assurance that even the worst people have a defined expiration date.
If you open the idea to everyone, to let everyone live for however long they would like - that would be more democratic, but would stop evolution in its tracks, or replace it with a type of evolution that may not be favorable. Again that thing that we’re superior to nature. It would upset so many aspects of our life structure that exist for reasons.
In short - those goals or aspirations are interesting thought experiments. But better remain just thought experiments that help us better understand why the world is the way it is, and how to improve it, rather than to escape it or pollute it with some over-processed ego.
Always Be Curious, Always Be Humble - and if you will, trust science.
