What life could be like for civilizations 1 trillion years from now
phys.org
phys.org
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p58yFf7aZsM&list=PLIIOUpOge0...
At first his speech impediment makes it harder to follow, but 5 minutes in you're used to it and you're just riveted by the content and the clear communication style.
This is quality stuff.
For example, supply 9 billion humans with clean, renewable energy by 2050. Accelerate cures for cancers, heart disease, malaria, etc. Large colony on Mars within 20 years, ...
There's the perception that it's part of some deep state panopticon, and that there's more than one, and the other one fucked up the 2018 election, or something like that.
But I'd take a wild guess that in reality the effectiveness is something akin to anti-virus software. It only seems to catch the low hanging fruit.
With that in mind, I think this narrative is basing the underlying theme on things that were happening in the early 2000's when Google started buying up companies like Urchin and DoubleClick.
We're way past those days, and while ad tech does still pose a pervasive privacy hazard, I think newer more powerful technologies can passively track pretty much everyone by sniffing all the signals in the air for every wireless and mobile device in everyone's pockets.
I'd wager that the coverage is so dense that it even exposes the identities of people not carrying devices at all, and the facial recognition analysis of security video is just the icing on the cake to confirm exactly that.
So, really, now you have to wonder what the new awful thing is, that our brightest minds are working on.
Probably killbots.
Flying, driving, walking, talking killbots. That's my guess.
Not to say we shouldn't be pushing to make even more progress on those difficult, pressing issues.
1940 Hardy labels number theory (his own area of mathematics) as useless
1977 RSA
> This proposal concerns the management of general information about accelerators and experiments at CERN. It discusses the problems of loss of information about complex evolving systems and derives a solution based on a distributed hypertext system.
I support The Long Now foundation and others who try to think and plan far ahead in to the future.
If a civilisation puts itself on hold for a trillion years, just waiting around doing nothing, then when it wakes up the universe is much colder and it can do computations 10^30 times more efficiently. If the civilization consists of minds running on computers then they've increased their own lifespans by the same factor.
Some principle like "the only way to annihilate something in aestivating space is to annihilate the entire universe it's aestivating in."
Guess we won't know for a while.
Same thing would make sense on larger scales.
We've already "uploaded" parts of the brain - visual processing, voice, simple communication and some interaction skills like playing game, moving about and handling objects.
Our age is the first where massive storage, worldwide communication and cheap cameras exist. So we will be an interesting case for the future uploaded agents - we'll be revived based on our digital traces in order to study the origins of Life 2.0 - digital archeology.
You can read free here:
www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/fiction/accelerando/accelerando-intro.html
Furthermore, most of the useful energy in stars is not their nuclear binding energy, it is their potential as gravitational fuel, for example when added into a black hole via the Penrose process. It makes sense to accelerate stars toward the central dwelling place of intelligent life, even if the stars have burned out by the time they get there.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Star_lifting
EDIT: more material directly on moving stars:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stellar_engine https://www.dynamical-systems.org/zwicky/stellarengines.pdf
edit: No, seriously, the initial comment shat on the author of the link for not knowing anything about mega-engineering. That's what I was calling silly.
its like asking a caveman what the next update to windows will look like.
We simply have no capacity to think yet.
“Apes became conscious, heated up and destroyed their environment, forced back to wilderness, evolved out. Meh... who cares.”
Then like archaeologists everywhere will conclude it was of religious significance.
At such a vast time distance there's likely nothing whatsoever left of us - except in the geological record as a few rare fossilised artefacts and environmental clues. We have a hard enough time understanding life a couple of thousand years back and religion is all too often trotted out as easy explanation for "we don't know why".
I'm curious if any natural being could ever last so long. To stand that sort of test of time would require an environmental design to withstand everything the cosmos can throw at a species. Humans won't last that long, but if they did it would be because they augmented themselves.
We will be lucky to still be here in 100 years.
Rare, but not unheard of. With only one exception that I am aware of, really nasty human diseases are those which only infect humans by accident and have a different main host. The exception, HIV, is already evolving into a various strains, at least one of which is much less dangerous than the original.
However, if we ever consider a disease to be an existential threat, wiping out the other host species isn’t something we would have much practical difficulty with these days. We’re already considering that with Malaria, and that’s not an existential threat.
Can anyone explain what this means?
Think of ants crawling on the surface and a balloon which is being blown up.
Another way to think of it is velocity of an object is derivative of position in space over time. If space itself is moving your position relative to it isn't changing.
So space is being somehow created?! What if i have a large object, will the length of that object increase? Or will it break up?
If the cosmological constant were much larger than it is, atoms would have never formed at all.
Space is not "created", space-time is warped. Gravity is the deformation of space-time by mass/energy. The distance from point A to point B is measured by the time it takes for a light ray to get from A to B using the shortest path. But if you move objects with mass (or with energy) near A and B, the shortest path will change. Also, it's easy to measure distance in seconds when you know the speed of light.
[Edit: and, er, all that has something to do with dark energy?]
OK, but in that case, and if we still exist as a technological civilisation at that time (very doubtful) we might be able to use the effect for our own benefit. By building warp drives and er, not-quite-travelling faster than light, by expanding space around a ship, etc.
Both cars start driving off at 10 MPH in opposite directions. From an ant's perspective on top of one car, the other car looks to be going 20 MPH away from it. Then someone starts pulling the blanket underneath the cars from opposite ends at 5 MPH. Now it looks like the other car is going 30 MPH. Now imagine for each ripple on that blanket, another hand appears and starts to pull, and the outer edges are pulled at 5MPH from the reference point of the nearest ripple.
From the perspective of an ant on one end, it can eventually get to the point that the other car is warping off at 100MPH or more. And as this blanket spreads out more and more, things speed up more and more as well. The cars never technically exceed their speed limits of 10 MPH, but the space that they occupy is being pulled apart in a way that they seem to be exceeding 10 MPH from each other's perspectives.
Anyone who thinks otherwise just fails to grasp the distances involved. They are so large as to be beyond understanding.
Anyone who thinks otherwise just fails to grasp exponential growth. They are so large as to be beyond understanding.
Do you mean to say humanity certainly could travel to the nearest star?
I'm skeptical that anything resembling humanity could because everlasting exponential growth requires infinite resources. And humanity evolved on an abundant--but far from infinite--gravity well.
To answer your question though, the main problem with space travel isn't physics (assuming you are ok with long travel times), it's economics. We have sent astronauts to the moon and probes all across the solar system. The main reason we don't do more though is because of how expensive it is. However, a thousand years of 2% growth (not a given but again, grandiose) means we would have 400 million times more money to possibly spend on space travel. A NASA budget 400 million times larger could certainly build and send a spaceship 4 light years to alpha centauri.
Now how long will we sustain exponential growth? Well that's anyones guess but I don't see us becoming resource constrained for a long long time. The sun produces 10^13 more energy than the world used in 2013 according to [0] and we have plenty of resources in the solar system to build with (and we can recycle more).
[0]: https://www.quora.com/How-much-energy-does-the-sun-produce-p...
I'd argue it's biology, not physics. Sending a rock to another star is easy. Sending a rock that can send back data is probably possible with our technology, but it's unlikely it would retain data transmission capabilities long enough to actually report back from another star. Sending a bunch of humans and keeping them alive the entire journey? It's not clear we can do that for a round trip to Mars, let alone an interstellar journey.
I honestly think we'll achieve this long before we're able to properly or effectively simulate a brain with computers of any kind.
Humanity is on the cusp of three major technological breakthroughs that will quite literally change everything.
1) AI. Even if we don't reach ASI in the near term, we'll have ANI to help us research new technologies in months/years rather than decades.
2) Asteroid Mining. Whether it's Musk/Bezos/A. N. Other, the very first time someone brings down an asteroid. It will herald the dawn of abundance for precious metals. What will happen to prices is another topic. But this will allow researchers to develop even more exotic materials.
With better materials resistant to heat, more conductive elements, etc, etc. Humanity be able to build what can only be dreamt of.
3) 7 Billion (now). 13 Billion with Mars, 50+ Billion with Europa, Titan, Ganymede, etc, etc, etc. There will be a time where Humans will stretch beyond this solar system. Imagine how many breakthroughs will be possible with 100m researchers and AI trying to crack something?
What will make this possible? With 1 and 2, we'll be able to finally crack fusion reactors. This will enable faster space travel than with current engines. Habitats will evolve from those initial Mars missions and will sprawl into mega cities. Who knows, there may even be Luxury apartments hovering in the upper atmosphere of Venus.
All this progress is exponential and if you stop to look around. The seeds are being sewn right now. By 2050, some things we consider Sci-fi will be reality.
Oh and I'll just throw this one in.
4) Nasa has been doing some work on the Alcubierre drive. Who is to say, that the issues that cannot be surmounted now, will be in the future? For those that want to know more. I'll leave a channel that goes into such things [0].
[0]: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC2kkCGRqZWaSIK3BmLC8vaw/vid...
Say what? The idea that asteroid mining will enable material science revolutions is fanciful. We're not exactly short on metals (even precious metals). And interplanetary space is less extreme than environments we can create in terrestrial situations, so we're not going to find weird new stuff by poking around asteroids.
I don't know how likely this is. I imagine plenty of research has already been done on exotic alloys, however I wonder how much that research has been affected by economic constraints.
Last I checked, the price of most metals was greater than zero. They're commodity markets, so that means they're scarce. If you mean "available at any price," then we were not short on iron during the Bronze age or short on Aluminum during the early 1800s.
Instead, new space is being created between all objects. This can cause the distance between two objects to increase "faster" than the speed of light, without either of the objects actually moving.
Sorry, couldn't resist :-)
Once you have a wormhole, if you use gravity to accelerate one of the ends away then bring it back near the other end, they will have a time difference, due to general relativity. If you bring them close enough, that time difference will be greater than it takes to travel between them in normal space, allowing you to travel to your own past.
This video gives a quick explanation of the problem:
The bounds on which wormholes are possible are likely bounds which make the transmission of information (including matter) impossible, because we live in a universe in which relativity and causality exist, and cannot (as far as we know) be violated.
Gravity: that’s treating gravity like it doesn’t go through the wormhole. I expect it would. If it does, both sides are time dilated equally.
Acceleration: what, exactly, are you accelerating? If it’s made of stuff, you time dilate the stuff. If it’s not made of stuff… can you even move it in any meaningful sense, or is that like trying to move a patch of curved space from here to the moon to create artificial gravity?
Trillion is nice sci fi. 10,000 years in the future with any recognizable civilization is even more of a stretch.
There have been massive wars/killings, massive famines, massive epidemics.
We're in what may well be a local maxima, or perhaps an overall maxima. There are a lot of challenges to face that we need to unify to fight, like water poverty, food security, avoiding escalation of conflict - and not much sign of greater unification (quite the opposite AFAICT).
IMO we can turn it around, but we're going to have to have a sudden outbreak of altruism.
Two out of three of those problems are getting easier with technology (renewable energy for desalination and smart agriculture). If we leave this maxima, it will be because we permitted nuclear proliferation. Even that isn’t inescapable, however.
No water = no food. Where millions perhaps billions of people are on the move, societies will break down. Look what is happening on the European and US borders and the hysteria it generates when the migration is but a trickle of what is to come.
Yes humanity and technology is moving forward at record speeds, but at what cost to the world majority? To the environment.
I think by 2400 is a rather optimistic figure, it is likely to be much sooner
You can't reach into people's brains and change their temperament (yet! say the optimists) but I don't think we should want to. And not allpessimism/skepticism is based on temperament, though certainly some is.
10,000 years in the future is the premise of Frank Herbert‘s Dune.
The novel (or rather the series) depicts a mankind that on one hand in some ways has evolved way beyond humanity’s current capabilities.
On the other hand, society has devolved into a feudal state.
Some technologies are shunned and outlawed for their destructive potential, most notably nuclear weapons and “thinking machines” (there’s some room for interpretation if this just means AI or computers in general), which have been replaced by “mentats” (basically human computers).
You guys need to clarify what "a collapse" is. Not eating as much meat? Do you really think that we would not be able to power our computers or not be able to produce rice/wheat on any industrial scale?
The amount of FUD spread without any foundation for it is maddening.
I imagine that's what people said before the Dark Ages too. It's not as if empires and civilizations haven't ever fallen before.
It is a reasonable low-probability high-risk concern, given (unordered):
* Depleting fossil fuel reserves: most obvious risk; dominant fuel source for transportation and agriculture, dominant energy source for industries, dominant material in many consumer goods.
* Climate change: threatens some regions' agricultural and ocean productivity, pressuring human migration, spreading diseases.
* Exhausted oceans: oceanic deadzones are spreading, loss of fishing as a food source is a serious risk for parts of Asia, which will put additional pressures on agriculture and motivate economic migration.
* Over-use of antibiotics and vaccines: risk of super-bacteria/virus plagues, mostly in agriculture and 3rd world nations.
* Depletion of aquifers: imminent risk amplified by climate change. America's food production is heavily reliant on effectively non-renewable aquifers, depletion or poisoning through fracking are serious risks.
* Globalized economy/supply chains: coupling economies improves efficiency but introduces the risk of cascade failures.
No one of these problems are an existential risk by themselves... but they are all interrelated and poorly understood, which impacts our ability to effectively preempt wide-spread impact.
Humanity will recover should the worst happen, but I think it's better to avoid the set back in the first place.
But, of course, if it is bumming you out, then definitely go do something else :)
Alternate Westworld themed hypothesis: It's already a trillion years in the future, we're all living in the valley beyond and don't realize it.
But now I am going to point out that someone will probably weaponize fusion and that will be the end of that.
We're not making it off this planet as a civilization, and honestly that may be for the best.
(but I still think The Expanse may be the best show since Babylon 5)
Most of CO2 is absorbed by oceans, and humans may never be able to find a way to tame CO2 there, this will result in much faster melting of ice in Arctic and Antarctica than anticipated.
No, humans aren't going to find an alternative habitable planet anytime soon where they can travel.
In the '80s, movies like War Games and The Day After depicted how people thought Earth may turn out: nuclear war triggered through Mutually Assured Destruction. (Source: I lived through the '80s.)
you get the idea.
My knee reaction with such articles is "I am glad that the guy is not payed with my taxes" but then I wonder how many of such useless papers where actually trampolines for useful ones (by bootstrapping ideas, suggesting "some uses of vibranium which, in that specific case could be replaced with titanium", etc.).
This extends to topics like astrophysics of galaxies far away (which we will not reach within 7000 years), particle physics (which work at energies which cannot be replicated outside of the lab), ... I am well aware that things which happen around these topics (say, the need to better understand magnetism in accelerators which can lead to better tomography or something) but are these money pits really needed as catalyzers?