Thanks for responding! I definitely agree on the major points. I’m having trouble making questions, but here are some statements that you should feel free to challenge:
(Focusing on just the US)
My perception is that there’s more than enough productive capacity to meet everyone’s basic needs (food, water, shelter, healthcare), and the reason folks go without is capitalism’s failure to prioritize meeting everyone’s needs. I agree that the simplest solution is to nationalize firms/industries, put them under democratic control, and collectively direct them to work for the good of the people. I’m down with that being priority #1, since people are fuckin’ dying.
We seem very far from having enough power to do that now, and I like anarchism’s prefiguration as a way of building a mass movement that is able to ultimately gain enough influence to make that happen.
I’m also personally fascinated by the emergent properties of a group of people and like viewing human society through the lens of a superorganism. Under that lens, the values a society holds guides each individual’s behaviors, and the aggregate behavior of individuals shape society. It’s certainly not materialist, but it’s why I focused on individual incentives above.
I’m mostly pulling from here for concerns about the state and here (and here) for individuals mutual influence with society.
Google says solar system formed 4.6 billion years ago, but I’m gonna say 4.7 billion bc that would mean the planet would need to travel one light year every 100 million years.
And it would not need to go fast to do that - about running speed according to wolfram alpha
So there’s definitely a chance! Which I wouldn’t have expected.
Per reddit, our probes take about 16,000 years to go one light year.
It’s unlikely that a random system would orchestrate a gravity assist as well as we can, but even at 1,000x slower than us, that’d put the planet leaving the solar system <1 billion years ago (~750 million years ago).