Why Do People Move?

Keio SFC’s Environmental Informatics class said something interesting, so I’m taking notes

Let’s think about why people move.

• Survival
  • To eat food or hunt prey?
  • Because we have bodies made for moving
• Curiosity
  • To satisfy curiosity
  • To acquire new skills
  • To get out of the comfort zone and be active

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Scribbles

No deep meaning. Just thinking while riding the train.

What happens if people don’t move? Are humans the only creatures that think about why they live? Are we living without meaning? Do we live because we don’t want to die?

• Feeling fear

I’m living inside a very advanced and complex civilization, but why do the people alive today live? Why do students study?

Adults teach to pass knowledge to the next generation, children learn that and can avoid reinventing the wheel.

There are many people who pursue what they live for, but not everyone is doing that. Most people are so occupied with the things in front of them that they don’t have the luxury to think about it.

People who are struggling with immediate difficulties dream of escaping them and living more easily, without as much hardship. Wanting to become rich and live in a mansion might be that kind of wish. Of course, it depends how the money is used, but money is fundamentally a base for getting things moving nicely, um, how should I put it. I can’t put it into words.

But for now, I feel like I can’t do that. Working hard now so I can live easily later without thinking about anything isn’t necessarily bad, but somehow it doesn’t sit right with me.

I’m about to reach my destination, so I’ll stop writing.

Tinbergen’s four whys

• Mechanism
• Function
• Development
• Evolution

Scribbles 2

I realized that even if the reason humans live is to survive, it’s unclear whether we can survive in the long term.

What if an asteroid hit the Earth? What if the Earth disappeared in 5 billion years?

Well, human-caused causes are probably much more likely.

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So, maybe it’s better to move to another planet or reduce risk by decentralizing functions.

There’s also the idea that you yourself need to survive for that to happen, but if you look at such a long timescale you’ll die anyway, so what should you do?

On an individual level, there probably aren’t many people who live constantly thinking about such things.

One person who cites interplanetary migration as a milestone is Elon Musk. Is his talk about going to Mars motivated by that intention?

For now it’s only to Mars, and I don’t know if there’s a realistic way to go beyond that, but maybe it will become possible in the future.

Well, coming up with and creating such methods requires enormous resources, and to gather that in a capitalist society… ah, that’s Elon, lol.

What is likely to be realized in my lifetime? How much can I contribute to this society?

Should I make the most efficient use of my life and pass it on to the next generation?

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I remembered “Chi.”.

But they spent hundreds of years proving one thing. To reach the truth they faced many social constraints, and the speed of resource and technological progress was different from now, so it took much longer compared to today.

It’s much faster now, but will this speed up even more in the future? What will happen? Will we reach a point beyond which humans can’t catch up or understand?

If something surpasses human capability, humans won’t be able to control it—so what then?

Will humanity become unnecessary? If so, the goal of human survival collapses?

But since that being beyond humanity was created by humans, if we consider it essentially an evolution of humans, it’s just that the pace of evolution sped up; maybe it’s okay if current humans become unnecessary.

That was about a being that could replace all of humanity.

Also, what even is a human in the first place?