Red Dwarfs Will Be Humanity’s Last Home Before the Universe Dies
antoniomelonio-cosmos.medium.com
antoniomelonio-cosmos.medium.com
Maybe the optimal future of humanity is a simulation powered by the radiation of a supernova, simulating 10^100 years in 1 hour. Who knows?
(Top advantage: you wouldn't have to worry about hostile ETI's, since your entire civilization's light cone fits in one light-hour. For all practical purposes, your society's causally disconnected from the universe, as if it had hidden itself inside a black hole).
At the very end we may use proton decay to power virtual world running on computers composed of folded spacetime. Subjective time within the simulation can continue no matter how slow the computation looks from the outside.
That sounds like pure science fiction. Is there even any theoretical basis for the construction of "computers composed of folded spacetime"?
Compared to stars, this process is much more efficient and allows converting something like 40% of mass of dropped object into energy.
And so with this mechanism we have much more energy available than all stars in the universe have and will ever have produced. Not only that, we can do it at any rate we want. Rather than radiate 99.999999999999999999999999999999999999999999% of it uselessly, we can make sure that most of it is used to power our civilisation.
The problems:
1) The visible universe shrinks, so much less matter will be available to us in trillions of years.
2) Before you drop matter into black hole you need to store it somewhere. The issue here is that over long periods of time orbits decay as gravitational energy is radiated away and so keeping mass in storage actually requires energy to be added.
3) Not gonna save us from Big Rip.
20% is for uncharged, non-rotating BH. 42% (maximum) is for rotating black hole.
I have to agree with 20%. 42% assumes that you are robbing the black hole of its momentum and that cannot be sustained infinitely, as you are throwing more and more stuff into it your best possible efficiency will drop asymptotically to 20%.
Smoke me a kipper, I'll be back for breakfast...
Hopefully this decade is better - ubiquitous satellite internet, self driving cars, brain implants, maybe even fusion power plants (ARC)? Self driving cars and brain implants would be truly revolutionary for daily life.
Finally, instead of steadily gaining public support for science and technology, we seem to have left even more people behind whom we may not be getting back for generations, if ever. It is fully possible that humanity may split into several completely incompatible factions, and that may be the optimistic perspective! The growing fissures dividing us are very visible even on a technology-centered medium like HN.
Outliers notwithstanding, as a civilization the last two decades feel like we have given up on radical improvements. However, I believe outliers could still fulfill some of the promises of optimistic futurism, even though it may take longer and we may not get to a high enough level in time to master the challenges ahead. It's still worth trying, and it's still worth building momentum towards a better public acceptance.
Lots of other possible energy sources will still be around.
Actually he has a whole series on Civilizations at the End of Time.[0]
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pld8wTa16Jk&list=PLIIOUpOge0...
And turn off the news and social networks.
Surprisingly enough, this social network is quite inhabitable. Even when we disagree, we do so in civilised ways.
Finding the joy of humanity through the suffering of/by humanity is a hard but worthy goal.
I find that Jesus gets two things fundamentally right:
- humanity's brokenness - the moral values that underpin human flourishing
It may seem counterintuitive, but recognizing humanity's brokenness as a whole and on an individual level is actually necessary to have hope. You can't fix a problem you don't see. Seeing the problem is not enough, though. You also need to avail yourself of a solution. Jesus is that solution. He has transformed the lives of people, but it is a deeply personal experience that you have to choose for yourself (if you want it).
I think humanity needs religion (without a religious worldview your cognitive framework is incomplete), and i think Christianity is the most rational, most plausibly effective, and most likely to be true religion we have.
Having said that, i'm not here to argue, though there are myriads of arguments to be had. This is just an invitation in response to a question.
To anyone reading this who has been burnt by Christians who may feel the need to vent their frustration: I am sorry for your negative experiences. There is no perfect system in this world. Even among so called humanitarian aid workers there are rapists who go to foreign lands and leave struggling females pregnant and alone. Yet we all recognize the tremendous good done by charities despite the despicable evil. Let's not throw out the baby with the bathwater.
But with that the life span of a class M-K sun can easily extend the age of the current universe several times.
Earth Will Be Humanity’s Last Home Before Humanity Dies
Here, I fixed that for you.
We’ll be a lot more difficult to eradicate after that.
I think our chief existential risk is nuclear war, which is a political issie that doesn't seem to be going away soon. But perhaps by the end of the century we'll have moved beyond it.
The odds are against intelligent life, it seems.
Why would any intelligent life contact us?
Call me a pessimist, but I would be extremely surprised if humans are still around then.
Why is that? Despite what pessimists - and even the occasional realist - have been saying for decades now, so far humanity has avoided extinction or civilization collapse. Even the arguably most urgent as well as most important problem for decades to come (climate change) isn't an extinction-level event, even in a worst-case scenario.
So far, mankind's continued existence depended on a rather fragile foundation. Once mankind develops into a multi-planetary species, which we are on the verge of becoming, simply all bets are off and things might work out either way.
Becoming a multi-planetary species might be the Great Filter we seem to be observing. Paradoxically, that we have yet to meet any species that has already passed that filter, makes it more likely for humans to simply be the first ones to do so.
Just alone the fact that people cannot even speak freely without censorship and of certain topics in order to discuss objectively whether they are legitimate or possibly a greater risk than climate change, specifically because the conversation and topics themselves are forced and enforced, is also a very good indicator that things will not go as well as people want to tell themselves.
You say we are on the cusp of interplanetary existence? Just alone the realities of that state are likely to cause more problems that could lead to extinction than not. For example, it is far more likely that humans will rather rapidly diverge in evolution between planets for several reasons, which can lead to all kinds of issues not directly related to whether one of the species of human will survive.
We are in a global toxic relationship with each other and are not even clear about fundamental questions of agreeing on basic facts or being able to even just examine whether all the basic assumptions are correct. How one could expect that to allow us to face of extinction is beyond me. However, it strikes me that lying to oneself of faking it til you make it will simply not impress a cold and calculated mistress as reality.
Fair enough, though. It perhaps is true that climate change is assigned undue importance in public discourse when compared with other problems that might be just as important - or even more so.
You'd be hard pressed, however, to find an issue that has as many immediate (or near-future) and potentially severe repercussions for as many people.
Evolutionary divergence certainly seems like a potentially relevant future problem, the key word here being "potentially", though. Climate change, on the other hand, is a certain reality. Assigning the same resources to both problems, even though one of them might never even materialize (or do so in a manner we can't even anticipate yet), therefore would be irrational.
That doesn't mean, however, that we can't work on solving both at the same time. At the very least, 8 billion or so people allow for massive parallelism.
Arguable indeed.
There is un circumstance: that a group of humans today (or in the near future) just time "travels in the future" (e.g. by moving at relativistic speeds, etc, while in cryogenic sleep or whatever) and just happen to witness the late universe without the time actually ticking for them. In that (unlikely) case the same effect that would prevent the species from diverging is the same that would prevent them from getting extinct (not enough time)
There’s an interesting way to get to relativistic speeds - to get close enough to a supermassive black hole, steal enough momentum so you get very close to c, then, a subjective week later, you do the same around another black hole in a different galactic core to shed your momentum and get back to a manageable speed. An intergalactic civilisation would use supermassive black holes as train stations.
Once you have that you inevitably have groups heading off into space in different directions, never to return to Earth, but some will survive trips to other stars, and some will multiply and branch out from then
At that point humanity or its descendants will inevitably fill the entire galaxy, although it won’t be a single civilisation.
Today if you took the scrapable internet + wikipedia + all academic journals, you still probably lack enough detail and method to reproduce techniques in manufacturing, mining, tooling, medicine, and so on.
If the hypothesis is that humans will survive so long as we are off-planet, then the humans leaving the planet need to be able to do everything fully disconnected from the home world to really survive if something happens to the populace on the home world.