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Comment by hvs | Hacker News Reader

If we wipe ourselves out within 100,000 years, I'm not sure "intelligence" is a particularly advantageous trait, evolutionarily-speaking.

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For long term survival you need to get off your planet, for which you probably need intelligence. Earth has around half a billion years left until it starts feeling serious issues with our sun. If our evolution took something like 10 percent longer things would be tricky

Or become a bacteria that has a really great chance at surviving in space and have your planet get hit by an asteroid. You go up in debris and colonize the galaxy over millions of years

We could easily seed the rest of the solar system and even a few nearby other solar systems with basic archaea and what not capable of surviving on any large object with water, at least guaranteeing some form of life escapes the death of Earth. It takes intelligence to figure out how to do this, but we have enough intelligence and the means to do it right now, but we aren't since we're largely concerned specifically with human survival, and humans are much harder to keep alive and transport through space.

This solar system not. All the habitable space is soon gone. Even with Elon's plans, as seen in the latest Hollywood comedy.

But the next is not far away, just a few light years. Maybe we'll see this in the next comedy . So far it's only in a Stanislaw Lem novel.

Well, it's more like 300,000 years.

Anyway, even if that always happens, that seems a bit too large a hill for evolution to notice it's not a global peak and route around. Unguided genetic evolution is scarily efficient, but not that much.

(Funny thing that memetic evolution may be able to make that decision, but if you are right, it's the problem by itself, so it couldn't fix it.)

That's an interesting thought, when you think about long term survival of a species, how much does all this technology help? If you think about humans surviving the same asteroid impact that killed the dinosaurs, I think we would have a good chance, some people would stay in underground bunkers and eventually repopulate the Earth, but the majority of the population would probably die, and a lot of technological progress would be lost.

There's also the possibility that knowing early enough we might be able to prevent an impact altogether.

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