It is also interesting to think about two galactic civilizations coming together over a common need to survive in the post collision Milkdromeda galaxy.
If Earth gets wiped out by a meteor, or weaponized Ebola, in either case it might be nice to have a backup.
The US, currently the greatest military power in history, can't currently even justify a Vietnam-scale conflict, much less a WWII-scale one. Improvements in agriculture have radically reduced food as a resource war motivator, and I think that in a few decades, renewables will have wiped out energy as a resource war motivator as well.
Ideology without serious contention doesn't lead to war, it leads to taunting remarks on the internet.
In 1913, "less than a year before the Great War broke out, the Economist reassured its readers with an editorial titled “War Becomes Impossible in Civilized World.”
“The powerful bonds of commercial interest between ourselves and Germany,” the Economist insisted, “have been immensely strengthened in recent years … removing Germany from the list of our possible foes.”"
http://blogs.reuters.com/anatole-kaletsky/2014/06/27/world-w...
> can't currently even justify a Vietnam-scale conflict, much less a WWII-scale one.
https://www.cnbc.com/2019/01/24/doomsday-clock-risk-of-globa...
"Doomsday Clock timekeepers say risk of global annihilation remains at Cold War highs"
The only reason for that is the misguided decision to include some fuzzy-headed interpretation of catastrophic, anthropogenic global warming (CAGW) in the risk of "doomsday".
The risk of actual nuclear war is far lower today than it was during the Cold War. The risk of an individual nuclear weapon going off in a city is much higher, however.
Please explain why do you think that the systems that are automatically triggered by the nuclear weapon going off in a city would not do what they are designed to do: all respond to the perceived attack with their full power.
Also explain how the humans trained to start the retaliation sequence would all not do what they are trained to do, once a city where their families are gets destroyed.
The "doomsday machines" are real.
Service jobs won't be needed, but we as a civilization can't just sit idle. We still need fulfillment so whether there's money or not at that point we need to encourage future fulfillment else we die out from sheer boredom.
I like to hope we move past all our petty differences, embrace the humanity that we are one single species. Then we drop the super stars, celebrity adoration, and desire to be uber wealthy and 'control' other people and we can focus more on arts and sciences. Arts for people to enjoy life, sciences for people to explore what's out there.
Imagine if the only careers were in entertainment and science/research what we could accomplish and imagine if everyone had equal footing to go into their chosen path. If we had 10x the scientists or 100x the scientists working on global problems and even intergalactic ones. We might actually make it to the stars.
But before we get there --there will be unrest and wars, just more middle class vs elites. Also potential wars for water as it becomes more scarce if we don't fix global warming soon.
I dream of a day when wage labor is looked back on as almost as oppressive and horrible as chattel slavery. We're a long way from that, though. The technology is almost here, but the political will is not.
The trick, then, is fulfillment. How do we give our lives meaning, if not through our labor? And how do we fight the brutal addictions of social media and passive consumption in order to achieve individual meaning? I fear a future where we don't have to work, but rather spend all our time sharing memes about how lonely and depressed we are.
You could drop most of Western Europe into central western Canada, and we literally wouldn’t notice.
> Calhoun's work with rats inspired the 1971 children's book, Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH, by Robert C. O'Brien, which was adapted into a 1982 animated film, The Secret of NIMH.
Calhoun did his work on rats/mice at the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH).
So my thought process was: have their scientists realized that the Milky Way is going to collide with them in 4B years? Are they already sharing pictures of what it will look like?
[1] That is, when the hot gas cooled down enough to convert from free electrons and protons (and some helium nucleii) that scatter photons into neutral atoms that don't.
Other factors make the infinitely old part unlikely, though.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Olbers%27_paradox
Most photons emitted from within our solar system are liable to collide with dust or gas eventually, most likely in the interstellar medium of our galaxy. Only a tiny fraction will collide with stars in our galaxy. The rest of our galaxy cluster covers a small solid angle of the skies of any of the bodies in our solar system. Finally, the small minority of photons that escape our galaxy cluster without being absorbed are most likely to stretch to arbitrarily long wavelengths and vanish from practical physical detectability well before the infinite future. It is vanishingly unlikely for an individual photon to couple to a lightlike geodesic that intersects a star at more than a few billion light-years.
For experts, there is some meat in §§1-2 of these lecture notes: http://www.tapir.caltech.edu/~chirata/ph217/lec02.pdf
> it’s extremely unlikely that any individual stars will collide because of the sheer amount of empty space in galaxies.