History of Human Space Exploitation

Chapter 21 Backtracking
In 2012, in a small town on the edge of the jungle in a Southeast Asian country, entrepreneurs came to this factory that already existed in the mid-90s.In addition to the yellowed seals pasted ten years ago on the doors of workshops, warehouses and dormitories, there are sporadic but old spider webs with layers of grids on the door frames and door edges. There are some neurochemicals that only curiosity can have.

In this factory area, which covers an area of ​​more than 60 acres, with an actual total construction area of ​​less than [-] square meters, there are old equipment that have been eliminated by a large factory in a neighboring country more than ten years ago.Among these devices, there are even antique machinery that existed in history in the [-]s and [-]s of the [-]th century.Entrepreneurs came here to use these "iron bumps" that have long been forgotten by mainstream manufacturers, together with local almost illiterate ordinary workers, to produce the first package of local light industrial products in more than ten years.

If it is an ordinary entrepreneurial behavior, ordinary people will choose a big city or country with better basic conditions, because entrepreneurs do not need to worry about not being able to obtain some of the most basic services in modern society-such as electricity known as "industrial blood".Here, the first thing entrepreneurs need to solve is not how to start and how to produce these obsolete equipment, but how to obtain the 380-volt three-phase power that has never existed here before. The diesel generators used by the pioneers have long been unusable.

Fortunately, there is a small hydropower station here that is older than this factory. The power of the hydroturbine in the power station is not much higher than that of the era when the hydroelectric generator was invented.While maintaining the machines in the workshop, the entrepreneurs used hoes and shovels to clean up the silt accumulated over the years in the reservoir and forebay of the small hydropower station, so that the power of the small water turbine could meet at least one piece of equipment. policy operation.However, due to the extremely distinct dry and rainy seasons here, this kind of small hydropower station that relies on the sky to generate electricity without any adjustment capability can only meet the power generation for three to four hours a day when there is no rain in winter.

Under such extremely difficult conditions, the entrepreneurs moved from the local market to the northern market where they are located, and then to the national market of the country; after gaining a certain share in the national market, they began to provide services for many production conditions in the world. The region here produces cheap finished goods.During this process, the entrepreneurs used almost every penny they earned to invest in the improvement of production conditions. By the end of 2025, the production conditions of the factory had undergone earth-shaking changes.

Entrepreneurs were able to spend money to attract a year-round power source from neighboring countries through negotiation, reasoning, and empathy; entrepreneurs persuaded and mobilized the long-term addiction to poppy cultivation Farmers replant crops that are popular in the world to solve the supply of raw materials for factories; the process of entrepreneurs manufacturing semi-finished products ranges from spreading on the ground with shovels, shoulder-mounted watering cans and primitive large iron pots, to semi-automation, to Fully automated production equipment; the packaging process of entrepreneurs, from the poor low production capacity of more than 200 handbag workers in 150 square meters per day to more than [-] bags per person per day, to the primary automation of [-] bags per minute, and then to advanced A packaging machine with a speed of [-] packs per minute...

The development process of the entrepreneurs and this factory can be said to be a typical microcosm of the rapid industrialization of the entire human society.The advancement of technology allows capital investment to double, or even dozens of times, the output and profit. At the same time, it is also a process of continuously withdrawing manual labor from the entire production process.Judging from the situation in 2030, the number of human workers in the entire factory will need more than 90 people in the mid-2015s when the factory was just established, and more than 150 people when it initially resumed work in 2018. By 2025, the primary automation equipment will be replaced, and There are more than 30 people when the production capacity is doubled, and there are less than 40 people when it is fully automated and intelligent by [-]. Over the past [-] years, it has indeed experienced changes similar to the vicissitudes of life.

Prevailing from the 22th to the [-]nd century, the classic interpretation of human society and economic organization is considered to be the "Bible" in the description of the social structure of "capitalism" which integrates politics and economy. "The Wealth of Nations" (The Wealth of Nations) ) has been an important reference in economics and sociology since its author, Adam Smith, made it appear.

In "The Wealth of Nations", it systematically puts forward the role that human beings, as individuals, as creators and exporters of the labor force themselves, should, or need to play, in the era and society that is about to enter the industrial revolution.On the eve of the steam engine joining human productive labor, the industrial revolution was about to start and change the world pattern and the dawn of human life. Human labor was simplified in the form of division of labor because of the demand of the market and the demand of supply and demand.While simplifying, it is constantly required to specialize and specialize in a single form of labor.

The subdivision and specialization of labor make labor itself, or the productivity that can be transformed by human power, more and more easily monetized, or simply expressed in the form of wages.In the words of Adam Smith, the author of "The Wealth of Nations", that is, from lawyers, doctors, blacksmiths, tailors to butchers, executioners, bank clerks, nannies and teachers, the remuneration due to various occupations in society will be explicitly or Implicitly, such factors as vocational learning difficulty, elimination rate, working environment, etc. are concentrated in their monetary income.

This kind of process and result has actually started quietly in various parts of Europe and in many Asian regions with developed handicraft industries since "The Wealth of Nations" was written.Even with subsequent technological innovations, from steam engines to internal combustion engines, from internal combustion engines to electrification, from electrification to informatization, from fossil energy to fusion energy, the connotation of labor has not been fundamentally changed.This overall process has taken human beings nearly six centuries to go through the process of constant change and reshaping of human society.

"Das Kapital" (Das Kapital) and "Communist Manifesto" (Communist Manifesto) were published about 100 years later than "The Wealth of Nations". In the nearly 300 years after their publication, the political science, sociology and economics contained in them The communist movement guided by philosophy is considered to be a form of socio-economic and political organization opposed to capitalism.The author Karl Marx (Karl Marx) anticipated the subsequent confrontation, and also anticipated the final reconciliation and melting of the two in human society.Because, from today's point of view, although there are huge differences in conception and essence between the two, they can be regarded as two different periods of human society in the development of the industrial revolution, that is, the idyllic peace at dawn, and the middle and early stages. In the period of the first appearance, human beings need to make some adjustments for their own development.

Also from the perspective of labor force, the core of the communist movement lies in turning the labor behavior advocated by capitalism and classical economics, which is priced and monetized by capital and the market, into the organizer and planner of social productivity By.In the process of realizing this goal, it is inevitable to construct a set of operation and management methods that are completely different from the capitalist society from the bottom up.

However, after more than [-] years of human beings embarking on the journey to open up the universe, they have basically got rid of land as an absolutely important means of production and human labor as an absolutely indispensable factor of production. It can be seen that the future will be exhausted, but the above two most important social and economic organization forms in human history can be analyzed to reveal more hidden elements.

In the 23 years from the 500th century to the [-]rd century, under the mutual influence of capitalism and communism, the technological innovation known as the Industrial Revolution ushered in one peak after another.With the advancement of technology, although the connotation of labor has not changed substantially, under the legal and political means embodied in different social forms and management methods, the application of labor and the organization of human beings who produce labor are always moving towards a more The direction that is conducive to the overall production capacity and efficiency of the society is developing.Perhaps, in different documents and records, the two opposing social forms have different ways of expressing this, but looking back at the social development of hundreds of years from today's perspective, this question is suddenly clear.

When we look at the organization of labor, if we call the agricultural society before the industrial revolution the first stage of human social formation, due to the limitations of demand, production technology, and production methods, most of this stage relies on the endowments endowed by nature. Farming cannot change the biological attributes of human beings much.In the second stage of the later social form, that is, the human society after the industrial revolution began, although the total amount of agriculture and farming is rising in the context of technological progress, the proportion of labor and the value created in the whole society , but keeps decreasing.

This means that, from primitive humans freeing their hands to collect fruits, to the subsequent domestication of various crops that constitute staple food, to settled farming forms or nomadic forms based on horses, cattle, sheep and grasslands, in industrial society, relying on nature The form of existence is almost completely broken.Under such circumstances, the biological nature of millions of years has existed in human genes, and passive adjustments must be made under this mode of production.From this, we can see that from the 22th century to the [-]nd century, the natural growth rate of all mankind has been slowly declining. Moreover, such a trend often comes earlier in countries and regions that entered the industrial revolution or industrial age first, and in countries and regions that entered the industrial age later. Countries at this stage are often developing to a certain stage, and the decline in natural fertility rate will inevitably come.

When reading several literatures in the past, I can always see articles criticizing the fertility policies of various countries. The lines in the articles always refer to such a larger-scale decline in fertility rates, only one-sidedly related to certain events in the past few years and decades. National policy.Now we know that these policies can only affect short-term population changes within a small range, and can only influence the trend of accelerating or slowing down the natural fertility rate or population growth rate in the short term.

Here, I suddenly think of an important economic theory from the 21th to the [-]st century, the discussion of the marginal school, that is, under the condition of perfect market competition, a large-scale factory or organization will have a marginal cost equal to the average variable cost. When costing, choose to stop production.If this concept is applied to the model of human labor and labor’s contribution to the overall social development, it may be developed as follows: under the condition that the total amount of social labor force, or the total labor area tends to be stable, or the expected growth rate also tends to be stable , the individual who supplies the labor force—that is, human beings themselves, will continuously increase the unit output of labor force in exchange for greater monetary reward or income, until the marginal income that labor can obtain eventually tends to reach the total labor required for social development. Money expenditure per unit of labor expended.

In this model, the total labor time of a human individual is basically constant, and the time required for a human individual to increase marginal output and marginal income, that is, the total time a human individual spends as an industry or social personality, is the same as that of the individual The total time needed for personal life and human activities as a natural or biological individual forms a zero-sum competitive relationship that ebbs and flows.This can also explain why in the 400 years since human society entered the industrial revolution, the overall natural fertility rate of human beings has always been on a downward trend. The appearance is that some countries that completed the industrial revolution first even experienced negative population growth.From the 22nd to the 25th century, the overall fertility rate of mankind showed a retaliatory increase, returning to the level of the farming era before the [-]th century. At that time, the whole earth basically completed all the technological breakthroughs that can be made on this planet. It has basically reached the level of a Type [-] civilization in the Kardashev hierarchy.

If Dr. Gu Lanlan hadn't accidentally discovered an iron asteroid that would smash into Mars, and the fragments of Mars would hit the earth and cause mass extinction on the earth. Human beings took this as an opportunity to discover the star tunnel phenomenon and start the journey of space exploration. In this cocoon of the solar system, we will live until the end of time.If we compare the solar system to a cage built at the speed of light, we don’t know whether human beings, who call themselves intelligent, will usher in the future after completing the technological innovation and industrial revolution from the 23th century to the [-]rd century. A new technological breakthrough point, but once again caught in some contradictions between development, technology and human biological attributes itself?
As a creature that has just partly escaped from the original natural living conditions for less than one million years, human beings are trying to change some habits endowed by genes and biology for hundreds of millions of years. How easy is it?However, expectations, laziness, fear, and curiosity about life can drive human beings to change themselves spontaneously, so as to meet the living conditions of continuous development and continuous departure from the original natural conditions.

The above-mentioned full text is excerpted from the third volume of "The History of Human Universe Development", and the independent manuscript of the relevant entries in "Society, Economics, and Political Science Essays".

(End of this chapter)