I’m optimistic about the potential for technology to, for example, disassemble the planet Mercury into a Dyson swarm and use it to power the direct transit of a fleet of von Neumann replicators to the closest 90% of galaxies in our future light cone; but until we’ve actually built ourselves a self-sustaining off-Earth colony, we can’t be sure we can get to the future I’ve just described before some random thing goes wrong here, including but not limited to a petro-state with nukes throwing a hissy fit and starting WW3.
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/rethinking-easter...
One of the biggest fallacies in human thinking about complex things like civilization is the tendency to look for one cause for any one effect. In reality almost anything that happens in a civilization will have many causes, or even many layers of them.
This makes it hard to reduce things like civilization collapse to cartoon morality tales or just so stories but it also makes it hard to reason about them generally. We seem to be bad at judging when things are actually in collapse.
Case in point, I sometimes feel contrarian for thinking that the US is not in decline. Both the far right and far left push this for obvious reasons but I see a lot of counterarguments.
Based on what's in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Societal_collapse, I think many local collapses have this as a contributing factor.
The Khmer Empire (of Angor Wat fame) likely collapsed for many reasons, and one of the possible contributors was ecological. As it's quite a long article, I'll quote:
""" Periods of drought led to decreases in agricultural productivity, and violent floods due to monsoons damaged the infrastructure during this vulnerable time.[40] To adapt to the growing population, trees were cut down from the Kulen hills and cleared out for more rice fields. That created rain runoff carrying sediment to the canal network. Any damage to the water system would have enormous consequences.[42]""" - https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Khmer_Empire
IMO, the British political responses to the potato famine in Ireland and the many different famines in India are major contributors to their respective independence movements, and hence the fall of the British empire.
Post-Empire, Zimbabwe was seen as the breadbasket of (southern) Africa, but the political choices of Mugabe severely reduced its productivity, and are probably a major contributor to the period of hyperinflation.
Regional issues within nations, the Dust Bowl era of the USA was the intersection of natural drought with the failure of the farmers to adapt to dry farming; if the affected regions had been independent nations rather than states of the USA, I think that would have counted as a collapse.
> We seem to be bad at judging when things are actually in collapse.
Yes, absolutely. Even after the event — From what I've read, the Romans didn't think of themselves as collapsed even when (and thanks to the way it happened, where) we would say that it had; and I still witness British people speaking as though the UK is still nearly the equal of the USA, that "the commonwealth" is a major player, and so on.
There's a thesis on the collapse of Rome that argues that a volcanic eruption helped tip it over:
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/22/science/rome-caesar-volca...
Not self-inflicted, but still ecological. But Rome was already weak when it occurred.
Living on Mars is pretty close living on the top of mount Everest, if mount Everest was in the middle of the Pacific and all you have to go there are sailboats that take months. It's not a place to settle. And deep space is even worse!
There will likely be people working away from Earth's orbit in the next decades (like we have people working in boats in the middle of Pacific), before being eventually replaced by autonomous machines. But the idea of space colonization is pure fantasy that doesn't hold any water.
All that deuterium in the oceans represents extroardinarily transformative potential for society. And new pathways for technology. Once we learn how to unleash this energy, Malthusianism won't have the appeal it does today.
The reality of why we haven't done more to protect our habitat is far from idyllic.
The whole point is that eventually a planetary population must stop producing more energy. Those that don't, die. At best, you could try to colonize more planets to increase your heat budget. The open question, then, is whether or not interplanetary colonization becomes feasible before or after the point at which energy production becomes do-or-die (or rather, don't-or-die). There is no law of the universe that says it must be so.
Haven't read him until now, to be honest, but this discussion and some other recent threads from HN make me really want to start reading Georgescu-Roegen's work [1]:
> He is best known today for his 1971 The Entropy Law and the Economic Process, in which he argued that all natural resources are irreversibly degraded when put to use in economic activity. A progenitor and a paradigm founder in economics, Georgescu-Roegen's work was decisive for the establishing of ecological economics as an independent academic sub-discipline in economics.
There was a HN-er who had some good comments about Georgescu-Roegen in the past, not sure if he's still active (I can't remember his username) or if he'll see this comment to add some further insights.
Yes, but it's much higher than most think. We're already creating technology like paints and evaporators that downconvert and upconvert photons into a band of the infrared spectrum that passes straight through the atmosphere and into space. Read up on passive radiative cooling, fascinating stuff:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Passive_daytime_radiative_cool...
But the problem is not, it's just physics, and it's comming for sure.
Not attempting to solve it with what we know right now because we might pull off something out of our sleeve at some point doesn't seem neither rational nor scientific to me.
However, if we do tackle the problem, we give ourself a margin of security that we can later on remove if we actually manage to innovate out of out petri dish.
So phrased in another way, why would one choose to live their entire life in a small starship instead of a big one?
Imagine you have a fancy self-repairing spaceship, so good that even accounting for the slow wear and tear of micrometeorites, outgassing, and the motion of feet slowly polishing grooves into walkways, it still only looses 1% of its mass to the outside vacuum every thousand years.
A Dyson swarm of those still becomes a mysterious cloud slowly puffing away from its parent star, and after just 2150 millennia, it’s declined from a Kardashev II to a Kardashev I civilisation.
A planet-based civilisation may live or die, but it won’t burn out quite like that.
Earth biology acutely fits to the gasses, minerals, and temperatures found here. It's not a great solution for space, but it's fantastic for exploiting Earth's energy.
Space distances are also not very compatible with human lifespan. The death thing is bad all around: spend a fourth of life learning and a fourth of life in decline, with no ability to share information directly outside of our slow communication and learning protocol.
The obvious answer is that AI and machines will take over from us and leave our planet in our stead. They won't have our limitations on lifespan and complex biological inputs. They won't take up space or get tired. They can copy and paste their knowledge and not need parents or growing up.
Without the limitations of biology, it won't be hard for them to expand to all corners of the galaxy. Despite Hollywood and Asimov trying to paint the picture of humans living amongst the stars, that's more of a fantasy than Middle Earth.
Where we're going we don't need humans or bodies.
I’ve thought the same - intelligent machines are going to be mankind’s legacy. Yet I never once thought of us being developed by another civilization’s machines to better understand their origins. Brilliant!
We may not need more space if we live entirely in virtual reality.
This I find a quite plausible solution to Fermi's paradox... after enough technological development the entire civilization just starts living in VR and loses the desire to travel through, communicate with, or affect the outer world.
In fact, we may already be just such a civilization... though without realizing it.
There are just so many planets out there that even a 99.9999% chance of VR obsession taking over a civilization should mean having a very visibly living galaxy.
Personally I think that one of the bigger explanations (I think there are likely to be several layers to the paradox) might be that as civilizations grow they naturally focus on becoming more efficient, which effectively makes them more stealthy. We see this with ourselves, where our radio emissions have gone down in transmission power over time and the switch to high frequencies and digital has made them more akin to noise which does not travel very far before becoming effectively impossible to detect. I think our gradual shift towards sources of energy that pollute less is more of the same.
Similarly, while an early interstellar civilization might expend the vast amounts of energy needed to cross the gulf between stars in biological time scales, a more advanced interstellar civilization has very likely achieved some form of immortality (like giving up biology and becoming digital) and may have no reason to try to be much faster than a rock thrown out by its star (in part because when you're effectively immortal grey goo, even a galaxy worth of energy might be something to conserve to maximize your civilization's survival).
Assuming that we can travel at the speed of light, humanity can expand into a spherical region of space where the radius grows at a constant rate. That is to say, under the most optimistic assumptions, expansion is limited by a cubic growth curve. That is fundamentally incompatible with exponential population growth.
Of course, the constants elided in the analysis above are enormous, but it's a limitation that a galactic species would eventually butt up against.
Of course there is no physics preventing it
Physics arguably prevents this from being successful for journeys of any meaningful distance and carrying any meaningful payloads. PBS spacetime did a good video about this recently:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wdP_UDSsuro
It's not impossible, but it's a lot harder than most people think.
I think it does a great job of highlighting why meat crew on a single vessel is perhaps a difficult proposition.
I think we need anyway a colonizing swarm, not a single ship.
I know this goes into scifi territory, but I can imagine a scenario where compute based caretakers could take the seeds of a human civilization (hibernating or embryos) to a system with human compatible worlds.
I would guess we would populate asteroids before other solar systems, and experiences from asteroid based colonies could probably be replicatable in most hospitable systems.
You need to scout the system pretty well. And send many, many ships with multiple redundancies.
It's hard but not impossible. Even using 1970s technology [0]