Timeline of the far future
en.wikipedia.org
en.wikipedia.org
Can you just imagine the amount of legacy code with DAY_SECONDS=86400 out there 50k years from now?
edit: I think it will lead to the same or more problems because everyone would have to change all time-related constants. Easier to add a second to the day constant (because the day constant is a subset of the seconds constant, but the seconds constant affects many more aspects than just the day constant).
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isotopes_of_caesium#Caesium-13...
Base e for life.
This technique will definitely be applied to exoplanets as the angular resolution and spectroscopic sensitivity are improved. In fact, improvements to both if these numbers are being relentlessly pursued by a veritable army of scientists around the world.
Spectral broadening only needs one pixel, and enough spectral sensitivity that the broadening isn’t entirely in the margin of error. We are pushing For ever more accurate spectral sensitivity as we try to use Doppler measurement to hunt for exoplanets.
Meanwhile the ongoing efforts to obtain greater angular resolution, has basically been one of the core pursuits of the astronomical community for centuries. We are building massive telescopes and advanced compensation systems in the form of adaptive optics to get the very best out of these telescopes.
So yeah I think we’re going to have rotation rate measures before we see much more than a pale blue dot.
In fact, I realized I made an nearly identical comment here on Hacker News back in 2011. :)
Redefining units leads to ultimate backwards compatibility problems.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boltzmann_brain
> [...] a Boltzmann brain is a self-aware entity that arises due to extremely rare random fluctuations out of a state of thermodynamic equilibrium. [...]
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Given that the question asks about 'current' universe arising spontaneously from vacuum the probability is 1 because that has already happened.
The more interesting question, what is the probability of a new universe similar to our own arising. To the best of our knowledge (which for this type of extrapolation is admittedly flimsy) this is also 1, this just takes a very long time. The expected time it would take (10^10^10^56) is specified on the last row on the "Future of the Earth, the Solar System and the Universe" table.
Well, we don't know that. Whatever 'came before' (if that even makes sense) probably wasn't a vacuum with the same rules as we see now.
Only if you meant "could have happened, but did not, and now for some reason can no longer happen."
"All events that could have happened, but did not" would reasonably encompass every event with 1 > P > 0, wouldn't it?
Actually, no. That would be the existence of my own consciousness. Just mine. Not yours. That's it.
I believe it's well-established that elementary particles can spontaneously generate through quantum fluctuation. Assuming that this process is uniformly distributed, the probability per unit time of any given structure self-generating is nonzero (if fantastically small). Over a long enough timescale, the probability of any possible event occurring approaches one. If time is infinite, the probability is one.
What am I missing?
"Around this vast timeframe, quantum tunnelling in any isolated patch of the vacuum could generate, via inflation, new Big Bangs giving birth to new universes [...] this is also the time required for a quantum-tunnelled and quantum fluctuation-generated Big Bang to produce a new universe identical to our own, assuming that every new universe contained at least the same number of subatomic particles and obeyed laws of physics within the range predicted by string theory."
And yet you live.
Permutation City is the only recent hard science fiction books that I can fully embrace. It has novel and genuinely new thinking, it is realistic, and it's thoroughly entertaining.
Most modern sci-fi fails at one or more of those tasks. Indeed, most modern sci-fi fail's at not being mere fiction.
Maybe it just bugs me a little extra because it's the apex of a weird pattern also in Permutation City and the short story Crystal Nights (which is a fun read!): the story's cool tech, the thing you came to the story for, is pushed by an unlikable character, and everyone else despises the character and everything they stand for including the tech. There's a lack of likable characters that sympathize with the reader in how cool the technology could be; it's harder to sympathize with the protagonists who seem too unimaginative to see how cool the tech could be. I get that the author is probably trying to make a point that technology can be abused by bad people and that most people aren't going to see the possibilities of new tech ... but I think he's getting worse at making that point, or the point is just getting grating being re-executed in the same way several times over.
And the other thing that drives me crazy about Zendegi is the time it spends with the lazy caricatures[0] of real people. It's a little personal given that Eliezer Yudkowsky is one of my favorite authors, but that's only part of it. The caricatures are lazy. Egan might as well have made each of the characters boast of having a small dick. And the bad caricatures aren't just a few unflattering introductions, but form a whole subplot that mostly doesn't affect the main plot or the protagonists at all; it exists just to take shots. And then the caricatures are mainly ridiculed for dreaming big (in ways the story cheaply makes out to be dumb or selfish), especially about AI. I come to Egan books to dream big. Egan's previous books were likely part of what taught many people to dream big in this!
I'm sure some of the things I call problems could be done well and aren't automatic disqualifiers, but the sum of all of them in one book with the execution they had just left a surprisingly terrible taste in my mouth.
[0] https://www.overcomingbias.com/2012/03/egans-zendegi.html
Try Anathem by Neal Stephenson.
If you consider the likelihood of a one-brain-state person spontaneously arising in thermal noise versus the likelihood of many similar brain states spontaneously arising in thermal noise, the probability that a given person is going to continue living beyond the current moment seems very low, assuming a finite age for the universe.
Hopefully there's some better, lower-entropy mechanism out there for generating brain states. Maybe it's even an objective physical reality and human evolution producing physical brains. :)
(I loved Permutation City, by the way. I don't think any other novel has made me think so much.)
Agreed mostly, though personally I think Permutation City was dancing around trying to imply something one step further than that: maybe you don't even need that single brain state to exist in some objective reality for it to have a coherent stream of consciousness. In other words, the Mathematical universe hypothesis[0].
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mathematical_universe_hypothes...
(+10^10^59 years) "Ah, good, awake again, shame the universe has gone dark, I wond-"
(+10^10^122 years) "er what the other copies are thinking. After all, there isn't really-"
(+10^10^185 years) "anyway to tell how much time is passing, I wish I still had stars and eyes to see them."
The math is the same as calculating the probability that the glass you just broke will spontaneously jump back onto the table and reassemble itself. Which is a standard introductory example in thermodynamics... but you add self-awareness and suddenly this rather mundane thing is spooky and amazing.
You should be far more interested in what's happening when you boil a pot of water and convection rolls spontaneously form.
Serious question: why?
By 10^(10^50) years that'll be long over.
You mean like... life?
The most interesting part is the related Boltzmann brain paradox: we are far more likely to be isolated brains randomly popping out of chaos and imagining a universe, than actually living in a real universe.
"We are like butterflies who flutter for a day and think it is forever"
A setting that takes place a billion (!) years in Earth's future, after several civilizations have peaked and gone, each building upon the remains of the ones before it and then reshaping the planet yet again to it will, to the point that even the layers of accumulated detritus from the past seem unfathomably magical to future inhabitants (e.g. soil that can reshape itself, or windstorms made up of nanomachines that reshape anything they engulf.)
Consider how mines from wars that took place a hundred years ago are still killing people. [1] Imagine some nomads from a hundred years in the future accidentally coming upon these. After a point, technology simply becomes a feature of the terrain, and indistinguishable from nature (another example would be our selective-breeding and cultivations of animals and plants over centuries to develop new hybrids that are now commonplace.)
All of this really piques my interest in what this world will be like in a few thousand years.
In my opinion, this is the greatest threat to humanity of continuing to pump CO2 into the atmosphere.
Not only that, but the ocean is rising due to land-based glaciers/ice melting, the continental rebound involved from the reduced ice load, and yet more: the warming ocean is less dense and expands. The rising seas along with other factors mentioned also puts pressure on coral reefs, as they often cannot grow fast enough to catch up with that sweet-spot near the ocean surface!
Literally two comments above.
We have scientific observation of corals, and of coral reefs, that goes back just a few decades. We also have their fossil record of the last 500 million years, including huge climate changes and the documented extinction/rise of various coral subspecies. And then we have people who claim to know with dogmatic certainty that corals are massively dying right now, that they cannot adapt to any climate change -- regardless of the full scientific context.
If we know so much as to make such gloomy, specific predictions -- please show me detailed scientific documentation of the diurnal cycle of corals and their symbionts, with exact minute-by-minute measurement of the day-and-night changes in the photosynthesis, the amount of CO2 in the water, and the productivity of each coral and symbiont. Then provide the same for each day across seasonal changes in water temperature, abundance of sunlight, and CO2 fluctuations. After that, can you indicate this: what are the specific concentration of atmospheric CO2, global sea levels, and ocean temperatures that you will accept as the standard to declare there is no risk of extinction? can these numbers ever change over time and corals would continue to thrive?
The actual science directly contradicts the alarmist speculation spread by unscientific media reports and professional purveyors of modern eschatology.
Warning, massive spoilers:
There are like 5 or 6 mass extinction events followed by a new civilization each time built by a different specie. At some points a raven civilization goes on the moon (they always had an innate tendency to go higher) and find an old rover, then it jumps to another civ. and the earth is totally smooth and people are living in holes in the ground (this might be another story from Baxter). Then it's some earth inner core creatures fungi-like. It ends with the sun expansion making life on earth impossible and a mars creature pondering all that.
Rings any bells ?
Edit: Apparently Last and First Men was heavily influenced by a short story, "The Last Judgment" by J.B.S. Haldane. Source: https://www.sas.upenn.edu/sasalum/newsltr/fall99/end.html. Maybe that's the one you remember?
I am pretty sure the author wasn't a published author. It was a blog post.
It's a good book to check off the list but it is stylistically tedious.
https://www.resilience.org/stories/2013-09-05/the-next-ten-b...
I was sure I first read that story when it was first submitted on HN. Sure enough here it is https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6860839, I even put out a comment in a discussion.
The funny thing now is that someone mentioned the very wikipedia article `Timeline of the far future` in that short story submission.
Ah, patterns.
I always thought that the universe will just reach zero Kelvin and the party is over. That it will just continue to do improbable stuff was beyond my imagination. I don't really understand how it should be possible that effects like the emergence of virtual particles still work if all the energy is now in a form which can't be used for energy transformations anymore (entropy) - I know that annihilation of anti-particles of virtual particles (which causes them to exist - that was the amazing finding of Hawking with the Hawking radiation where the anti-particles of virtual particles get annihilated at the event horizon and his counterpart is happily living on because he got lucky that he wasn't too close) is a way to form new particles "out of nothing" (using quantum effects), but I still can't believe that this still works when nothing's moving because we're at absolute zero.
Could someone explain why those quantum effects still continue to work (and sometimes even spawn particles and even brains if we get lucky) even if the universe is at absolute zero?
The quantum fields can't ever be zero, from my understanding. And thus stuff can still happen:
> According to Fowler & Guggenheim (1939/1965), the third law of thermodynamics may be precisely enunciated as follows: It is impossible by any procedure, no matter how idealized, to reduce any assembly to the absolute zero in a finite number of operations.
But order is probabilistic. It's not physically impossible for order to increase, it's just ridiculously unlikely. If you wait long enough (really long) it'll probably happen some time.
I don't think quantum effects are especially related, except to the extent they relate to everything.
But first I have to deeply realize that I'm just one out of all possible ones and that I exist infinitely times and also infinitely times where I finally have a beard.
> It's not physically impossible for order to increase, it's just ridiculously unlikely.
Would love to see resources that explain this (I think it comes down to quantum uncertainty again).
> the basic idea is that the probability for anything to happen is different than 0
Yeah, quantum uncertainty.
Still can't wrap my head around it, but in conversations with physicists, they also weren't sure why the heck it works that way. Gonna read my quantum mechanics book, but the math is not easy-going and especially quantum logic with its 3 states (true, false and flying spaghetti monster superposition) is extremely difficult to grasp using intuition. It contains a lot of thinking from statistics which essentially is just extremely unintuitive as well.
- - -
Edit: I really wonder if something like a "gravitational quantum electrodynamics" (don't know if we achieve it with this specific theory) or string theory (I don't really like it due to its unscientific nature) - in essence a Theory of Everything - will really explain everything like it really is or just happens to be a fitting model without being any meaningful representation of reality (in the sense that it explains how the underlying reality really looks like).
We won't be able to verify if our models are actually representing reality anyways (any theory that explains all observed events and which has some plausible and strong predictions can be treated as a possible reality), but would be nice to know. Guess it can't physically happen, unfortunately.
Now imagine you keep shaking the box for a few years or so. Just by sheer coincidence, they might end up neatly sorted for a few seconds every now and then. That's like a Boltzmann brain.
I think that's all there is to it in principle, but I'm not very informed.
That was the part I was unsure about: Does the universe keep on shaking? The answer seems to be: Due to quantum uncertainty - yes. Why? No one really knows because we don't have a god-damn clue about why the universe works the way it works (although we have a good understanding how the universe works in many points, but not a coherent theory or framework that gives a conflict-free explanation).
Again - the universe doesn't cool down to absolute zero. It's called "heat death" for a different reason.
You don't need anything quantum for this. Simple Newtonian mechanics seem enough.
But yeah, maybe energy conservation principles alone can explain that it keeps shaking. But it still feels so unintuitive that it doesn't slow down or cool down.
I still have those other models in mind that the universe expands and then collapses or it keeps on expanding (which seems to be the case) or simply stop to expand but also doesn't collapse (and proceed to have maximum entropy level). Those were the three models I got taught. It seems that the universe is flat and will expand endlessly, so the model I thought is right (the universe just stops to expand) isn't true and my related assumptions (that maximum entropy levels get reached and absolute zero) are also not true (for some different reasons like quantum certainty and - it seems - even simple Newtonian mechanics).
related SMBC: https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/2014-06-02
Thus, the cycle of new big bangs continue on forever.
Granted, the timeline for that is 10^{10^{10^{56}}} which is beyond comprehension soooo.
That prediction makes the rather questionable assumption that humans will still be primarily, if not entirely, on Earth in 10,000 years! Interplanetary colonization will likely dwarf the regional evolutionary isolation we've experienced on this planet. In the longrun it will likely even trend towards speciation (as a more reasonable prediction further on does hit on.) Consider that a European, an African, and a Japanese all share an incredibly recent ancestor.
The exciting thing about interplanetary colonization is once the technology starts to become robust, our potential growth and expansion is effectively unlimited. It would be like if the western frontier in the US was uninhabited and somehow went on to infinity. The implications of this are difficult to even imagine.
You're making a common mistake on the speed of light. Understandable as relativity is really really weird. We can get into the hows/whys if you like, but the long and short is that if we can, somehow, develop technology to be able to consistently accelerate at just 1g then we can colonize places that are billions of light years away, all in a single human lifetime. Of course indeed billions of years will have passed for everybody else. It's going to make notions of time, progress, and even extinction get really really weird.
> You're making a common mistake on the speed of light.
Correcting for my mishap, all I said was that finite c makes interstellar travel much less probable, which isn't wrong. It would take infinite energy for your spaceship to arrive at c as the Lorentz factor blows up.
> if we can, somehow, develop technology to be able to consistently accelerate at just 1g
This is exactly the kind of long-shot assumption you are forced to make because c is finite. I would say that reduces the probability. Plus, once we start talking about billions of years of time-dilation, we aren't really in the 10,000 year scope we set up earlier, so it's not even wrong.
All that would happen is that you'd start to experience things getting quite weird. The two biggest things would be that time for everybody would seem to be speeding up and distances would physically contract. This would prevent you from ever perceiving yourself as moving faster than 10 units. The distance from A to B might be 1000 units at rest, but through length contraction it might be perceived to instead only be 15, traversing that distance in thus 1.5 units of time would not be perceived as exceeding the speed of light. However, an outside observer would see you passing through those 1000 units at some speed asymptotically approaching 10 units of speed, but never getting there. They see you taking approximately 100 units of time, you see yourself doing it in 1.5 units of time. Both are right.
A really cool (and handy) area where these two worlds of observer and observed intersect is in particle decay. For instance in particle accelerators we can observe particles that decay after 1 units of time, yet the odd thing is we get observe these particles existing for 4 or 5 units of time! Actually the same effect also applies to things in nature. Muons are created as a product of atmospheric particle collisions, and these muons do make their way down to Earth's surface, yet their lifetime (before decay) is less than the time it would take to get from our atmosphere to the surface of earth at the speed of light! Our universe is seriously weird.
----
These are all very practical problems, or solutions, depending on how you look at things. You can travel billions of years in a human lifetime. Here [1] is a handy converter. It'd take about 45 years at 1g accelerator for a person to travel 15 billion light years - to the ends of the currently observable universe. So the only question is how long it will take us to develop or discover such technology. This is one of the many reasons the possibility of an EM drive, though improbable, was so tantalizing! Forget infinite energy, we're going exploring!
These are also the reason I said that things like extinction become quite difficult to define. For instance, imagine in 200 years that we send out 1000 exploration+colonization ships each with some 5,000 people on them (or whatever the magic number to create a genesis population without inbreeding is). And then 1000 years later humanity on Earth kills itself off. Are humans extinct? Well, we still have those 5 million humans traveling not only in different places in space but in different times in space. So you'd probably say no, but once again... it's weird.
[1] - http://convertalot.com/relativistic_star_ship_calculator.htm...
It's still finite. I recommend this famous Asimov story [1]. I don't think that it makes humanity "more meaningful" or something similar if we start interplanetary colonization.
Really, it doesn't matter even if we inhabit the whole observable universe. We will die and it doesn't matter if I die on an exoplanet as a 1500y/o guy in a young body or if I die on earth as a 80y/o. Maybe I will experience more and whatever, but I don't really give a sh*t because life will always be finite (even if you can be billions of years old). And the implications of becoming so old can be seen in the Netflix series "Altered Carbon": You will develop weird sexual fetishes because you're bored af. And if we "overcome humans" and become some other weird sentient being it's still limited and if it's not limited it still doesn't matter from some other angle.
I don't understand why everybody is excited about interplanetary colonization and immortality. There's this quote: "To philosophize is to learn to die" - I think this is more important than trying to increase your life span or do some other stuff to delay death or even become immortal. I think most of those Silicon Valley tycoons who want this, e.g. Peter Thiel, just like the thought of accumulating power over hundreds of years. Sounds hedonistic to me + all that "will to power" ego talk.
We each have to find our own personal meaning to life. For myself it's simply knowledge. And starting to colonize other planets, and more generally become a genuinely space faring civilization, is going to revolutionize our knowledge and understanding of this universe. To what end? Well, I'll tell you when we run out of things that we don't know. I expect, even if immortality should come to pass, this is a question I will not have to answer.
Like the episode of Deep Space 9 where Bashier works with the other genetically modified humans. They talk about how eventually the galaxy will come to an end due to entropy, but their predictions for the Dominion War had too many variables to accurately predict close up.
Psycho-history and Foundation is sorta like this, but I think Issac Asimov doesn't do as good a job with this story/theory/believably.
So while these time spans are minuscule on an astronomical scale, they are enormous on a human scale.
Was that in the original Carl Sagan version of Cosmos as well? I seem to recall it, but I've never seen the Neil DeGrasse Tyson version.
It really puts into perspective how insignificant we really are on this tiny blue dot. On the grand scale, nothing we do will matter, in either time or space. We're too small and shortlived. Probably means we should make the most of it :)
Well, it depends how you define civilization. Humans reached Australia 60,000 years ago. Many substantially complex settled civilizations existed 3,000 years ago. Ancient Egypt's dynastic period began 5,000 years ago.
So you could say it's 1/6th of Australia's habitation time, or merely two Egyptian stories.
I've been posting too many Kurzgesagt videos recently, but it's amazing how much of their content is relevant! :D
However, it seems to me at some point a critical juncture would be passed and the black hole would cease being bound gravitationally and the matter would be released similarly to a supernova or just spontaneously form a neutron star.
What is the fallacy in that thinking?
The black hole losses energy over this radiation, energy it produces from it's own mass.
Since hawking radiation output increases relative to the size of the black hole as it gets smaller, eventually you end up with an explosion. I do believe that Kurzgesagt made a video that details what would happen with a blackhole with the mass of a coin in your pocket (short version: you die)
The cutoff is at around 4.5×10^22 kg (about the mass of the moon). The event horizon at this mass is only 0.13 mm.
Black holes aren't as scary as people think. If being next to a black hole of mass M is bad, then being next to a rock of mass M is probably just as bad.
According to that guy, there will be a new ice age in 50k years regardless of the current global warming being stopped or not.
They are even connected. Making the world incrementally better now will impact the lives that your loved ones and their loved ones are able to lead.
But ... there are many lifetimes between now and then, and the quality of those lifetimes (at least the earliest ones) is something we can have an influence on, so what we do matters a lot.
So, really, it boils down to what scale you choose to measure the consequences of your actions by.
I think it's uplifting to know how much more there is than what goes on around these parts.
When you are put into the Vortex you are given just one momentary glimpse of the entire unimaginable infinity of creation, and somewhere in it there's a tiny little speck, a microscopic dot on a microscopic dot, which says, "You are here."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technology_in_The_Hitchhiker%2...
I think once you start to grasp how truly unimaginable large this number is, you get a comparable feeling to how the cosmic scale compares to us in an emotional way.
Java is still at the top of the TIOBE index. Moreover, the familiar Java update progress dialog will display "100 Trillion Devices Run Java Across Thousands of Galaxies".
They don't talk much about AI and other synthetic replacements for humanity. Maybe it's just too difficult to extrapolate.
One can guess, though, that long before another 10,000 years have passed, we will have developed artificial beings that are billions of times smarter than we are.
By then, we probably will have augmented our minds and bodies to the point where we are vastly more intelligent and powerful as well, so perhaps we will survive in some form or other.
The future can be more brilliant than we could imagine, or darker than our worst fears can conjure. Likely, it will be somewhere in the middle.
It’s not easy to make predictions, short or long term, given this. The coral prediction, which does have the word “if” in it, also assumes we
Wow, I'd love to be able to see that. Makes one sad about all the things they'll never get to experience.
> [...]
> 3.3 billion - 1% chance that Jupiter's gravity may make Mercury's orbit so eccentric as to collide with Venus, sending the inner Solar System into chaos. Possible scenarios include Mercury colliding with the Sun, being ejected from the Solar System, or colliding with Earth.
Are these statements contradictory or am I missing something?
Orbits have a large number of degrees of freedom and the chaos noise amplification effect is different for each, so given 15M of noise in starting conditions the point along the orbit of the earth is completely unconstrained in about 100M years, but the diameter of the orbit is very tightly constrained in comparison. In 100M years it'll be pretty easy to draw an ellipse and completely impossible to predict where along that ellipse the earth will be, but it'll be somewhere along that ellipse.
There's no analogy in physics, but there is an analogy in numerical simulation, that its like predicting electron orbits. I can do organic chemistry and build lasers all day without knowing where any specific electron is located, does that mean prediction of electron orbits is impossible or that its irrelevant to most practical issues? The specific mechanism for electron orbits is a quantum mechanical limitation whereas the orbit problem is statistical undersampling of noisy data.
Given the services of a measurement calibration lab and sufficient budget I can predict very accurately what comes out of a screw making factory tomorrow given today's sample data without continuously supervising the factory overnight, but I can't calibrate the screw making factory today, let it run 100M years, and usefully statistically predict what the factory will try to ship on one given day 100M years from now.
These are cool predictions but they need not be true
> 800 million Carbon dioxide levels fall to the point at which C4 photosynthesis is no longer possible.[57] Without plant life to recycle oxygen in the atmosphere, free oxygen and the ozone layer will disappear from the atmosphere. All multicellular life will die out.[58]
The general idea, I believe, is that the carbonate-silicate cycle will shift more toward carbonates over time. The Earth will warm substantially as the sun's luminosity increases over millions of years. Warmer conditions will accelerate the reaction of water and carbon dioxide with silicate minerals like magnesium and calcium silicates, shifting the equilibrium to favor more carbon-as-insoluble-carbonate and less carbon-as-available-CO2. Plant life will eventually go extinct from insufficient atmospheric CO2. I haven't spotted a discussion of oxygen loss in either citation 57 or 58. But "just" losing plant life would be enough to drive the extinction of most other multicellular life on Earth.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbonate%E2%80%93silicate_cyc...
Photosynthesis converts CO2 into carbohydrates. Lowering the concentration of atmospheric CO2 slows this reaction. Plants also metabolize carbohydrates, producing CO2. So photosynthesis requires the right balance of CO2 concentration and light.
The estimate for when CO2 levels would fall too low appears to come from the following linked article:
The latter authors feared that photosynthetic production would cease ~ 0.1 Gyr from now when just 150 ppm CO2 remained in the atmosphere. The latter figure corresponded to the CO2 compensation point, at which photosynthetic carbon fixation would exactly balance losses through respiration. We stress that _ this must not be confused with the CO2 value at which healthy metabolism ceases; with zero net C fixation available, a plant could not repair itself, produce seeds, or even grow.
https://arxiv.org/pdf/0912.2482.pdf
There's more on the compensation point here:
I'm fairly certain we're looking at the end of human civilization one way or the other within the next 100 years max. The Global Pollution Epidemic, robot uprising, and nuclear war are the more likely bad scenarios for the end of civilization.
We might instead be able to develop technology which solves all present problems (like pollution and energy production) and then use it wisely to bring wealth and enlightenment to everyone.
I wouldn't care to estimate what outcome is more likely.
https://www.thebalancesmb.com/how-long-does-it-take-garbage-...
I think this should have been mentioned somewhere in 'Human constructs' section
Fellow man! Your whole life, like a sandglass, will always be reversed and will ever run out again, - a long minute of time will elapse until all those conditions out of which you were evolved return in the wheel of the cosmic process. And then you will find every pain and every pleasure, every friend and every enemy, every hope and every error, every blade of grass and every ray of sunshine once more, and the whole fabric of things which make up your life. This ring in which you are but a grain will glitter afresh forever. And in every one of these cycles of human life there will be one hour where, for the first time one man, and then many, will perceive the mighty thought of the eternal recurrence of all things:- and for mankind this is always the hour of Noon.
http://hopefullyintersting.blogspot.com/2018/03/the-drake-eq...