I thought I clearly stated that people tend to choose out of convenience, just like you're pointing out:

> I don’t know much about the past but I’m pretty sure trying to travel unmapped backcountry terrain was super dangerous and hard and slow

I never said it would be faster or easier.

> saying that all it takes to get horses is “simply breed some” is like saying all you need to get a car is “simply build one”.

Yes! And you cannot build a modern car. You could, say, in 1940 (probably over quite a wide range of decades), but try building one now and getting it road-legal. You are arguing my point.

> Disregarding the fact that modern population densities in most of the western world would make subsistence farming impossible

I don't want to disregard that since you are yet again furthering my point. :) Our blind quest at throwing technological solutions at problems have lead us past this irreversible point (among many others). Money and greed made farming into huge corporations and technology (fertilizers made using fossil fuels) was one of the main tools to achieve that. To grow beyond the point of self-reliance.

This is why the realization of this tends to lead to the necessity of some kind of destruction - downscaling has simply gotten (seemingly) too difficult.

> why is self-sufficiency an unquestioned virtue, so much so it gets to be up there with heavyweights like Autonomy and Freedom?

I had a paragraph that I edited out in the end about many people not caring about self-sufficiency - many naturally gravitate towards relying on others. I thought I loosely covered this in the end paragraph by mentioning that I take pride in self-sufficiency, as did Kaczynski.

But also it becomes a basic incredient when you expand the scope of systems to small communities of people, rather than just one or a family. Or larger. But! The important idea is that the smaller the community of self-sufficiency is, the more resilience it has.

> To illustrate my concerns more explicitly: If I invented a machine that could make any material or object appear instantly, would you destroy it, under the logic that it’s better to remember how to struggle?

To assess the values and virtues of technology I think it should be judged in terms of characteristics like:

- can I create it myself (tools, raw materials, licensing)
- can I repair it myself?
- what's the life-cycle and if not practically infinite (Ship of Theseus) how much of it can be recycled/reused/repurposed?
- etc.

So if your material synthesizer relies on a proprietary miniature fusion-reactor with the proprietary tech owned by a multinational conglomerate where, once humanity has grown to rely on the device will effectively be enslaved by it, I don't think it's that great of an idea (although the tech by itself sounds awesome). I wouldn't destroy it, but I think it'd be a terrible idea to adopt it worldwide.

If however it was powered by open-source tech, where any reasonably equipped small factory can produce spare parts for it, that sould like it could be quite a revolutionary thing!

> Or more near term, are you strongly against the prospect of interstellar travel?

Not sure how this is more near-term but no, I have nothing against interstellar travel, that seems like the obvious thing for any life form to do - to try to propagate outwards/further as much as possible.

However! All life forms also tend to respect the boundaries in the environment and find an equilibrium. Animals tend to stay where there are resources available to sustain them. The problem with humans is that we, using our large brains and us-vs-them views, use technology to expand at the expense of everything else. If we were to solve this conundrum and find a happy balance, we might not even want to venture out to the stars (for much more than redundancy purposes as a species).

Our planet is quite an incredible place, as is our minds. If we'd started looking more inwards we might find that we don't need to perpetually evolve external things in order to be happy.