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Comment by kyriakos | Hacker News Reader

What's your opinion on this? Do you believe we are ready for such technology? Imagine at our current state of global politics are we ready to start venturing into space and possibly into planets with life? And I'm not even considering possibilities of Intelligent life.

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Have we truly been ready for any of humanity's technological developments? They tend to be very messy, and lead to all sorts of consequences few could predict.

We somehow managed to survive nuclear weapons (so far). But imagine things as simple as a pathogen or invasive species from space the kind of mess it will create when a year later covid is still not under control.

I’m not scared of space bugs. Bear in mind from its perspective, Earth life are the space bugs. There’s no reason to assume the space bug will win.

In fact it’s very unlikely. On Earth we have a planet full of the results of 4bn years of competitive evolution. Put that against one single species resulting from evolution. The chances are at least one species on Earth will eat its lunch. Furthermore Earth life is customs tuned to the Earth environment, but the space bug is most likely optimised for a different environment.

Warp drives, maybe not, but multigenerational space travel at slow speeds might actually require a certain amount of social cohesion and cooperative tendency, as well as a pioneer's ambitious personality--the rigors of the journey combined with those of establishing civilization on a planet without any humans to enslave and manipulate will add up to significant selective pressure on settlers.

My opinion is that if and when we are able to harness the energy of 100 Jupiters our society will be completely unrecognizable compared to what it is today.

It was a hypothetical question, in case tomorrow we woke up and somehow we had a feasible warp drive invented.

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