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Comment by specialist | Hacker News Reader

We'll reach the stars thru life sciences. Future humans will become space and time adapted. Hardened against radiation. Metabolism so slow that years will feel like minutes.

The future will be pretty wild.

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I'm not so sure that is the case, simply for economic and social reasons. Climate change is a much more tractable and immediate problem, yet technological developments and their implementations still seem to be moving too slowly to matter at the moment.

Solar has dropped 50-75% in cost in the last decade, and accounts for 10x more wattage. Battery capacity has doubled in that time. Wind energy capacity has doubled. Geothermal capacity is 1.5x. Electric cars are 4x more common than they were 5 years ago. Carbon sequestration has advanced at a technological level, although production hasn't seen serious advances (probably because renewable energy produces a profitable resource, while sequestering just exchanges money for fighting climate change).

If that's not enough to make a difference, it's because we started too late and the problem is too large, not because technological development is too slow. Admittedly, nuclear could have done the job already, and the issue there is social.

If human lifespan technology moved at half the climate change technology speed, we'd have 25 extra years per decade and be effectively immortal today.

It seems to older me that punctuated equilibrium is some kind of natural law.

Incremental progress may be ideal. Alas, whatever forces that may be, trying to preserve the current equilibrium, fight off change. Until the compulsion to change overwhelms the system.

Lather, rinse, repeat.

So when humanity finally goes carbon negative, it'll be despite the opposition, because they couldn't defend the status quo any longer. Then all that bottled up change will be like a dam bursting.

Hopefully it'll happen sooner than later.

Instantly made me think of Cordwainer Smith. In particular "Scanners live in vain", but many of his stories deal with adaptations to space.

What if this is just not possible?

We can send persons without sending humans. With a good enough brain-computer interface we should be able to duplicate our brain contents to a digital medium, which we know can travel to interstellar space and beyond

Complex computers break down too. It might well be true that any computer capable of approximated human intelligence is even more fragile than normal human.

I don't think we are capable building computer system (and that includes power system for running it) right now that would last few hundred years without any maintenance, even here on planet.

Or it would at least be very non trivial to build it

we currently have at least 2 functioning computers in interstellar space that are 44 years old. I think we are already at a point that we can make centuries-lasting computers

We are far away from such an interface and space travel takes still far too long. When the first probe reaches another galaxy mankind is probably already gone or we are back in post war dark ages.

> space travel takes still far too long.

Who cares about humans, as a traveling satellite i will have all the time in the universe, literally

And then? What the purpose of a conscience at a faraway planet? Something like We Are Legion (We Are Bob)?

whats the purpose of conscience in this planet? purpose is not necessary, though one could say discovery is a purpose, boldly go where no man has gone before

I wonder if people will view it as sufficient that a digital copy of 'them' (or at least something identical to them at the point of copying) exists, despite their original biological minds eventually perishing.

It excites me to think about discovering the origin of our consciousness and being able to transfer that.

I definitely want to believe. Then we can explore other galaxies.

But I still can't even imagine what consciousness is.

Maybe we'll create new intelligences, punt on the consciousness question, and delegate the task to them.

Ya, that'd suck. But consider. Tardigrades are pretty tough. And elephants have x10 more cancer fighting genes than us apes.

Pretty soon, parents will be picking their kid's eye color and temperament. For better or worse. Surely future humans will become a great deal hardier than ourselves.

Genetics is complex and we don't even can handle complexity in computer programs.

Maybe we can choose eye color, but temperament? Far too complex, far too many possible side effects.

Just look what happened of the dream that AI could help with Corona

https://www.technologyreview.com/2021/07/30/1030329/machine-...

> Surely future humans will become a great deal hardier than ourselves.

It is currently trending in the other direction.

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