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Comment by lend000 | Hacker News Reader

This is blatantly wrong. The Earth's climate will naturally enter a significantly higher temperature climate attractor within 50 million years and will be completely inhospitable to known life in less than a billion years. The oceans will have completely boiled away, even from the poles, within 1.1 billion years, as the sun continues to increase in luminosity [1].

And this is the most optimistic scenario, assuming no gamma ray bursts, bolides, or super-volcanoes strike first.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Future_of_Earth

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This is still orders of magnitude longer than our distance to the Roman Empire. We've gone from no flight to space travel in 150 years and you're worried about 50 million years.

I'm not worried at all, because the jealous, anti-progressive, pessimistic commenters littering this thread are not the dominant force in society (even if they did have a numbers advantage, which I don't believe they do, they would lose by the inherent virtue of the weakness in their personalities), and people like Musk, Bezos, and the thousands of engineers executing their visions will ensure humanity has self-sustaining off world colonies in just a few centuries.

You drank the kook-aid bud, that's all I can say to that.

Right all these comments are just baffling me. This is premature optimization on steroids. For a random analogy, I really hope these people aren't in meetings arguing about how to design a DB schema to last for 50000000 years, when the meeting topic was how to fix slow queries on an unindexed field.

The US life expectancy dropped one of the largest drops ever (1.5 years) and instead of facing the actual real-life disasters happening, "science enthusiasts" are quoting TV shows about science fiction disasters that might happen in 50000000 years... while the scene outside the window literally looks like this: https://abc7news.com/why-is-the-sky-orange-sf-yellow-califor...

I think I have been in that meeting.

I believe they do this because the plan for such people is exactly to let earth be destroyed. Don't do anything to revert global warming, because, after all, "we" have money and technology to colonize the space and let the poor die from its catastrophic results.

Technological progress is not a given. Spaceships don't magically get built given enough time. Humans must spend effort on it.

Do we really have 50 million years? Very unlikely. Do we even have 150 years? I'd take odds against, we've just come way too close to all-out nuclear war recently and international relations are not trending in a promising direction.

If humanity is at risk of extinction due to nuclear war, then going to space isn’t actually going to accomplish anything; the ISS, nor a Mars colony, nor a city of 10 million orbiting Io are going to be able to stop nuclear war either.

Exactly, humans having developed the technology to destroy earth, will easily destroy any kind of spacial colony. Going to other planets is not a solution at all.

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