The laws of physics probably don't allow for FTL travel. It's probably not a good idea to pin all our hopes on narrative conveniences invented by the writers of space operas.
However, if we can extend our lifetimes substantially and harness enough energy to travel at substantial sub-light speeds we can do alright as an interstellar species.
There's undoubtedly a great many companies out there where everybody earns at least $70K. I have no idea how this guy managed to get himself in the news.
But proofs always come back to axioms, and on what basis do we accept axioms? That they sound intuitively right. So we've just kicked the problem upstairs a bit, we can't avoid using our intuition.
Personally I'm more likely to believe 2 + 2 = 4, something I can easily check to my own satisfaction using four objects, than I am to believe the Axiom of Choice.
But are people more likely to accept the axioms of Principia Mathematica (and the soundness of every logical step from page 1 to 300) than they are to accept the notion that 2 + 2 = 4 based on intuitive notions of what twoness, fourness and plusness are?
If LA is worried about housing affordability, the best thing to do would be to work to get President Trump elected, so the city can get rid of all the people who have no legal right to be there in the first place.
What would housing costs look like in an LA without illegals?
> Today, we can kill everyone off with an exchange of the already existing nuclear weapon inventory
I'm not convinced we can. For starters, the nuclear weapon inventory is a lot smaller than it was back in the 80s when those sorts of statements were popular. And secondly, as I understand it, it was always a bit of a lie, an estimate based on some silly assumptions (e.g. that everybody in the world lives in cities), which in repetition eventually lost those assumptions.
And yes, I agree with the other poster that it's pretty much impossible to kill everyone on earth with climate change.
Species-ending diseases I do worry about, but maybe that just means I don't know as much about immunology as I do about nuclear weapons.
It's not about portrayal, it's about actual physiology.
The percentage of alcohol users (ie almost everybody) who become alcoholic is quite low. The percentage of heroin or meth users who become heroin or meth addicts is very high indeed.
Alcohol still of course does plenty of damage, unsurprisingly since it's the only such substance which the majority of the population consumes. Maybe the world would be a slightly better place if we hadn't started drinking booze all those thousands of years ago. But I don't buy the idea that because we accept one particular form of stupid behaviour that we should tolerate all the others... any more than I buy the idea that just because I tolerate my unemployed brother living in my apartment that I should open the doors to let everyone else live there too.