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Comment by rbanffy | Hacker News Reader

> From that point on, there won’t be any more liquid water on Earth

Not so fast - we can build a parasol and place it a bit closer to the Sun than the Earth/Sun L1 point so it'd act as a solar sail to keep itself in place. This can buy us a lot of time.

Moving to Saturn's moons is also an option for a while - the'll be warm and cozy for a couple billion years after the Earth is toast.

If we don't learn how to do things like this (and to travel to other stars and settle Earth-like planets) in these billion of years, well, then we deserve that fate.

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Assuming we could stabilize the Earth's climate as it is now, and discarding any questions of resources, I wonder if humanity could remain as-is for a billion years? We'd still be under (non-natural) evolutionary pressure, unless we learned enough to stop that happening too.

If we did become a stable species that decided to stick around the Solar system, maybe we'd be powerful enough to move Earth slowly outwards as Sol expanded? Maybe with the gravitational effects of millions of planetoid flybys.

Makes me wonder if we could do the same with stars, lol! Become a shepherd of our local galactic area, carefully keeping stars away from our precious birthplace over timescales of trillions of years...

I mean, large engineering projects for the greater good of humanity don't really seem like our thing as a species, but the answers to most of your questions are yes in theory. If you can surround a star with a Dyson Sphere/Swarm, you can do all kinds of things to it including concentrating all its energy into a beam to destroy a planet like the Earth in seconds (though you can't blow it apart like in Star Wars that easily).

There's a youtube channel dedicated to this kind of stuff called "Science and Futurism with Isaac Arthur".

> I wonder if humanity could remain as-is for a billion years?

Are you kidding? What was humanity a billion years ago?

Remember evolution is based on the survival of the fittest. Not necessarily of the smartest.

Not only on "survival of the fittest"; evolution also supposes that species change more-or-less randomly.

TBH, I'm not sure what your point is; my point was that whatever evolution is based on, evolution happens, and on these timescales it happens in the blink of an eye.

No, individual mutations are random. Selection of the mutations in the gene pool happens through environmental constraints. Species don't change randomly, they change in an infinite optimization search for fitness. We humans aren't immune to this just because we have culture and medicine of course.

Yes, that's more accurate.

Frankly, there are no evolution pressure on humans right now. The only "Evolutionary" pressure today is the willingness to procreate, which is generally low across much of the developed world.

This "pressure" is completely different from evolutionary pressure for virtually every other single species on Earth.

> there are no evolution pressure on humans right now

I don't think all humans have the same chance of making successful descendants. Whether that has correlation to genetics is an open question.

In fact for humans the evolutionary pressure has reversed. We're able to save many people who are too "unfit" to have survived without modern medicine and industrial technology.

Said another way, the fitness criteria for survival has shifted. A reversal implies there’s a single linear direction for evolution when we know there definitely isn’t. That’s why there’s a mix of heights, body builds, intelligences, soft skills like charisma, skin colors, etc etc. In fact, ops claim that we could somehow stop evolutionary pressure is itself bonkers. At that point the evolutionary pressure might become for the traits that enable you to maintain some definition of stasis. Above all else, human culture is never static so there’s always a bias for internal evolutionary pressure even if we manage to control external factors (which even then we’re not able to beyond some point).

Survival of the hottest?

Anyone who makes a statement like that, basically by definition is not thinking in evolutionary timescales. There are always evolutionary pressures, and they are nearly never visible at the kinds of timescales biological individuals operate at.

That would be fungi.

There was a book published in the early 70's, called "Musrum", by Thacker and Earnshaw. It inspired in me the idea that Fungus spores are maybe the most-likely way for life to travel star-to-star.

That's not what's best about that book, BTW; it's a magical book. I'd love to see a copy.

[Edit] Not Bradshaw - Earnshaw.

For a good sci-fi take on this, read Dark is the Sun by Philip Jose Farmer

Also recommended: Palimpsest by Charlie Stross. It's an interesting take on Asimov's End of Eternity that explores deep time like few others.

I would be astounded if "humanity" exists a million years from now. I wouldn't be surprised if it doesn't exist a thousand years from now. The thing is we are a technological species, we don't need to rely on random chance for evolution. We can already create DNA on demand and insert it into microorganisms. AFIAK we currently only do this with already-known proteins, but that is a limit of knowing what will be useful, not a limit of the technique.

As time goes on it seems inconceivable that we will not reach the point we can apply this to human DNA at conception. I expect the first manifestations will be editing out known-bad genes and replacing them with the properly-working equivalents. Next will come replacing ordinary genes with known-superior genes. Then they'll be inventing new superior genes.

I expect in almost all cases they'll make the edits backwards-compatible but we've all seen it with software--backwards compatibility only works over a range of generations. Don't expect v20 to play nice with v2. Once the mods reach the point that reproduction with a stock human is no longer possible we have a speciation event--the results can no longer be considered human even if they would not raise an eyebrow if dropped into today's society.

As for long-term protection of our solar system--I can't imagine why. It would be a lot easier to protect the Earth by moving it rather than moving anything that might threaten it.

> Then they'll be inventing new superior genes.

The thing is, they only need to do it once in all those billions of years, and they become a totally different species. And that's assuming they'll still be fond of organic bodies and not decide to live in simulated environments that are much easier to move than planets.

Inventing a superior gene doesn't itself make them a new species. They only become a new species when the result can't breed with a base human.

However, even that gets fuzzy--there's a "species" of bird whose name escapes me that lives in high latitudes. They can all breed with the neighbors, but birds from the two ends of the span can't breed with each other. I expect to see the same thing happen with humanity--eventually highly modded individuals won't be able to breed with unmodded individuals. (Although, unless immortality is developed there won't be any unmodded individuals to breed with. Why would the genetic engineers care about compatibility with the old version that's no longer around?)

I saw a paper just a few years ago about how to shift the Earth to a higher orbit to mitigate solar brightening/expansion. It involved a large asteroid in a careful orbit that could gradually pull the whole Earth to a higher orbit.

Probably couldn't do it tomorrow, but sounded like something we might be able to do in a few hundred years instead of tens of thousands.

I was just wondering about this problem, that's an incredible solution..

In Charles Stross' Palimpsest, humans use a fleet of solar sails that constantly transfer momentum to the Earth over very long periods.

Our species has evolved from apes over about a million years. A billion years ago, we were bacteria.

Who is this "we" that you think might be around in 50 billion years, to colonise the moons of Saturn?

We have removed most of natural selection from our evolution. It's entirely possible we could evolve to be H. G. Well's Eloi, served by mechanized Morlocks, or just that we extinguish ourselves after a couple centuries of Idiocracy.

> We have removed most of natural selection from our evolution.

Ho-ho! So nobody died from COVID-19, because we have defeated disease?

There's a new outbreak of Ebola in West Africa. QE2 just died of "old age". New variants of COVID-19 Omicron are circulating in EU, and killing people vaccinated against the old variants. I've been reading of new polio outbreaks. But it's great that we've defeated natural selection; clearly the Brave New World has arrived.

I said most, not all.

We'll eventually grow resistance to COVID or Ebola provided enough exposure, the same way we developed resistance against the flu (that, for instance, South American indigenous populations didn't when the Spanish first arrived), as we'll weed out those with propensity not to vaccinate their kids, because their kids may not be able to reproduce.

But you won't die because you are not strong enough to hunt a mammoth.

The number of people of childbearing age who died of COVID is a rounding error, which is true of everything else you mentioned as well.

Did you think the Queen was due to have a couple more heirs before her untimely passing?

I think the more urgent question is 50 years from now when we might have general AIs that are smarter and faster than us. Maybe they'll figure something out for us. From there to the end of the solar system and eventually the universe will be quite a bit of a journey that may or may not feature some of the more wacky stuff that Ian Banks and other authors have already imagined. Given how we struggle to foresee even the very near future, I'd say all bets are off that far out.

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