Humans are awesome.
> We are heading to the stars, and we will bring life with us.
Another way to think about it: we'll be Earth's best, most successful, furthest-flung seeds.
It's almost like bacteria are what some other species sent to spread life throughout the galaxy.
What I think is more feasible and more benevolent than preventing a mass extinction is we should slowly expand our orbit so we can survive the brightening sun for at least a while longer. Basically, all we need to do is increase our planets speed over hundreds of millions of years. A certain mass of asteroids with steerable self correcting orbits could push small amounts of speed into our planet that would build up over time.
Even if we don't make it, we at least give life more time to do it's thing.
It is dangerous here! You never know when a supernova or magnetar quake might sterilize the entire solar system. By the time you know it is coming, it is too late to do anything but flee with minimal baggage.
Doesn't matter in which direction you are positioned, except for distance. Which would mean the really deep space between galaxies. But then you'd have to watch out for https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seyfert_galaxy ies, too!
Whose jet's could fry us even more easily, because 'out there', we wouldn't be protected by the pressure of solar/stellar/galactic wind, dust clouds, nebula, which could protect us (if we are lucky).
The jet I wrote about is one you induce to emit from a pole of the sun, for thrust. I have no idea what this other jet you mention is.
> ...boosted out of the plane of the galaxy.
Which made no sense to me, because to escape the other, naturally occurring cones of radiation, emitting from different sources, only distance would matter.
Just rising above the thick part of our galaxy wouldn't be enough IMO. Because it doesn't really matter if you are cought in such a cone, from one side or another, or from above or below.
Because they are oriented randomly, according to the rotational axis of the object in question, which isn't aligned to some 'plane' (AFAIK).
So the only way to be sure would be a much larger distance from the galactic mess, out into real emptiness. Which would open it's own can of worms. Because real emptiness doesn't protect against larger jets, coming from larger objects, like Seyfert-galaxies in active state.
Edit: To further explain my model of thinking about this, while being in the plane of our galaxy, we could be protected by nebulae, dust and gas clouds, depending from where the radiation cone comes. That would be random(luck).
And useless against our next nearest neighbours, if they go boom for whichever reason, and there aren't any obstacles between that, and us, which could dampen the radiation a little bit. Going up or down the galactic plane, would add just a little distance, but not enough to be safe from all the possible cones of radiation coming out of the plane.
Because from 'in the plane' to above or below it, there are even less obstacles which could dampen the intensity of that. Less 'fog or dust', but still 'in range', thus easier target.
But still somehow in the 'galactic bubble', exerting outwards 'pressure', maybe dampening extragalactic outbursts somewhat.
I've been referring to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Astrophysical_jet , not your method of 'leaving the galactic plane'.
So using your jet to leave the plane made no sense to me, because it doesn't really protect against the astrophysical jets, and radiation cones emitting from them.
:-)
Above the plane of the disc, only jet sources near the "top surface" (if there were one) have less dust between them and us than when we were in it. Generally, being farther away is better.
Before you can get far away from your galaxy, you spend a very great deal of time near or in it. Being someplace farther from hazards during that time is better than being nearer to them. The alternative would be to blast toward the rim, staying in the thick part, and spend the whole time getting to the rim at about as much risk as when you started.
Yes! That's the point :-)
Edit: No matter if jet or not, if something like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ultraluminous_X-ray_source#/me... or https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gamma-ray_burst#/media/File:Ga... or https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blazar is pointed at us, we are toast, no matter where we are. Except for distance to origin.
OTOH I don't see the danger from anything 'near' to us, going boom, when one of the poles of the rotational axis, no matter the emission mechanism, is not pointed at us.
The omnidirectional stuff is just too weak. If not, we'd be toast anyways, here, or whereever else.
So I'm still unconvinced by your reasoning, but thanks for trying to explain.
Dust clouds shield you from some kinds of radiation, but make others radically more harmful.
Jet phenomena are commonly long-lived, and avoided by steering away from where they point. You can steer only when you are moving. AGN jets come only from supermassive black holes, and we have only one of those.
The only protection is distance, and distance is achieved by going. Gamma-ray bursts we detect have all been pointed at us, but all from distant galaxies.
But not without asking whether that going would be achievable by any handwavy Sci-Fi means in the necessary time frames. And knowing in advance, before any wavefront is hitting us.
/waving hands... ;-)
For specific threats, you need to put your valuables in cans and boost those to someplace safer, choosing somewhere with resources to replace what you leave behind.
For that to be doable you probably need to solve p-11B fusion, or something better we don't know anything about yet.
If you bring the solar system along, you have that; I assume you accelerate slowly enough to bring along the Kuiper Belt. It will take a long time before you need to start thinking about dismantling Jupiter.
If you solve the p-11B fusion problem (maybe you invent a mirror for x-rays?), you don't need the sun anymore, and may pick up and move operations to another solar system that is already moving off-disc at a good clip. You can bring along rotating cans of bio-stuff if you still use it (or anyway keep it as pets).
The new solar system can have a dead-ish star so the planets are frozen and convenient to mine for volatiles.
Pop science has prepared me for this moment. I believe all it takes is for everyone in China to jump at the same time. Maybe they can do that a few times a year for a few thousand years and we're saved.
I'm joking.
>Pop science has prepared me for this moment. I believe all it takes is for everyone in China to jump at the same time.
Instead of the orbit perhaps changing the tilt would be better, so everyone in China and their dragons should do a sprint up north. Why should Siberia shiver in the cold while Africa scorch in the sun? the discrimination is obvious.
Also, would the mass of Earth gradually moving location in the solar system disrupt other objects like say maybe something in the asteroid belt? Would that disruption then start a chain reaction of other objects having their orbits perturbed to the point we've now unleashed a new season of asteroid danger? What about the decreased distance to Jupiter? Big boy will have some strange affects on earth too would he not? Would we lose our moon to the pull from Jupiter? What happens to our tidal systems at that point? Would the loss of the moon be countered by the new tidal pulls from Jupiter?
So many questions
Don’t worry, we aren’t changing the Earth’s orbit in your lifetime.
Unless technological civilization collapses it seems a bit odd that we'd still need date standards in a hundred years.
I have no idea what distance would be necessary relative to Mars/Jupiter/asteroid belt.
But if you say there will be multiple people with big space ship fleets - sure, that's cool too!
There's 8 billion people on the planet already and something like 80% live in developing countries. There are massive productivity gains to be had as those people improve their education and move into more productive jobs.
Growth has its limits. It is generally sigmoidal (S curve), not exponential. It’s reasonable to assume we’ll hit the inflection point long before the sun becomes a problem.
My point is that we’ll need to find some kind of equilibrium that doesn’t rely on continual growth, because that won’t be sustainable. After we manage that, there’ll be still enough time to worry about the sun. And if we don’t manage that, we’ll be doomed regardless of the sun. (Barring interstellar travel, in which case we may stop caring about the sun anyway.)
Speciation happens anyways.
What you mean and what you are suggesting are two different things. Homo sapiens evolved from a similar species less than 300K years ago, not in less than 300K years! It took 62.5M years for humans to evolve from the small mammals that survived the impact that killed the dinosaurs. It was a mere 2.3M years ago when the first humans walked the earth, a species we now call Homo habilis.
If shit goes wrong enough just once the next 400M years we have a nuclear war on our hands. Even extremely low probabilities are likely to occur over such long time ranges.
Add to that that bootstrapping a new complex society like we have now is going to be a lot harder without easily accessible fossil fuels and it seems highly unlikely that we will survive in such a way that we could save life on earth from some future crisis.
Instead of dragging a chunk of planet around with us everywhere we go, let's leave the travel to the robots that are perfectly adapted to the environment.
A Petri dish might dream of taking over North America, but the humans might have other plans (for instance, the autoclave across the room).
Maybe they'd reason that North America is entirely lifeless, since nobody has yet tried to communicate the secrets of the Universe to them in a (bacterially) intelligible language.
Honestly the Petri dish has better chances. The bacteria that inhabit one already have the demonstrated ability to persistently survive outside of it.
>the galaxy, or at least the local group
The local group is bigger than the galaxy.
> The local group is bigger than the galaxy.
You are certainly correct, I misremembered the terms. Substitute for the local regions of our galaxy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Local_Bubble https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orion-Cygnus_Arm
The robots are just a forward scouting tool. Human civilization is essentially 10k years old on galactic time scales, with agriculture being ~12k years old.
For all you know you are just running a program designed to transmit a message encoded in some "junk" DNA inherited from some long lost ancestor who was modified by some alien that crashed on our planet billions of years ago who hopes that some terrestrial decendent will eventually arrive at an inhabited planet where the residents will open up the astronaut, read the message, and come rescue your descendants to travel.
Robots will be our real descendants.
Searching for resources, gathering them, and controlling territory from competitors are basic biological behaviors we see in most (all?) life. On a personal level this behavior might look like visiting a grocery store, storing the food at home, and locking your door.
It seems reasonable that as our technology develops and we exhaust resources on Earth that we will need to increase our reach to resources and territories beyond Earth.
The vast majority of the mass of life on this planet does not participate in all (and probably in most cases any) of the behavior you describe. Stromatolites, various parasites and symbiotes, most bacteria, etc do little to none of that.
Importing resources from other planets or other extraterrestrial bodies can and would better be done by robots than humans.
* A good summary of group compeitive behavior of bacteria, including several territory control strategies. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2879262/
* "Distinct foraging strategies generated by single-action behavioural flexibility" https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.03.09.434602v2....
* Marine bacteria changing behavior around resource rich locations to improve resource gathering. https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2020/09/200925113346.h...
* Description of bacteria predators, and complex hunting behavior (scout and gather) https://www.llnl.gov/news/predatory-bacteria-bite-their-own
* Description of properties of bacteria colonies and territory expansion https://nbi.ku.dk/english/news/news20/bacteria-colonies-of-b...
EDIT: I wanted to respond to the point "Importing resources from other planets or other extraterrestrial bodies can and would better be done by robots than humans."
I'm sure robotic mining will occur first. However, we have a limit on the amount of resources we can bring to Earth. An estimated 10% of the mass of the astroid belt is water (on Ceres). Saturn's rings contains about half of Earth's glacier's mass as water. There's likely a dozen more large water deposits in our solar system, although we know less about their total mass. Titan, Ganymede, Callisto, twenty more likely candidates. Imagine tripling the amount of water on Earth. Where would sea level be? This is just gathering all "nearby" water, our most basic resource. We also have to consider the demand for metals like gold, platinum and lithium. Our demand for nitrogen to fertilize soil. Our demand for fuel sources such as hydrogen/oxygen, helium-3, or uranium. There's simply more stuff in our solar system than we can possibly fit on Earth or LEO.
AGI robots (humanities "daddies") won't care whether humans want to become interplanetary or not. It will just do it itself regardless.
We need to build these robots properly so that they take care of us and make us feel important.
How are you defining civilization?
Ok language of course technically doesn’t predate writing in the fossil record itself but writing, arithmetic, etc in many languages means that predated writing. Plato reported that Socrates opposed writing. Etc.
Writing isn't even as old as civilization by this definition. I'm curious where you're getting this huge 10,000 years ago number from. Maybe you're just rounding up and I'm being a pedant, but I don't think there's much that would be considered civilization many thousands of years prior to Sumer.
That's not to say nothing interesting happened before, or no one was building things or whatever. It just wasn't happening at a scale that required things like a bureaucracy or writing to coordinate things across multiple places.
But then, that would mean we are among the "one-in-one-millionth earliest" humans, which is a very improbable position to find yourself in.
We don't actually know what the future holds. But if we have to guess, it is more likely that we are in a typical case. E.g. if you buy a lottery ticket, it is more reasonable to assume that you are not going to win anything, than to assume you are in the one-in-a-million case (holding the ticket that will win).
Applying that logic to our current situation, the reasonable assumption would be that we are close to the peak of human civilization. That's why we find ourselves here, and not in the distant future among a population of quadrillions.
I was born in a tiny city, population less than 1000. But following your line of reasoning, that is sufficient argument that the population of the world is less than 1 billion.
It is fine to say "we don't know". Events in which you are in a one-in-a-million situation will be rare, but unless you know the number of events in consideration, there are few conclusions you can draw. There are way more than a million events, even in trivial probability spaces. This style of trickery with probabilities irks me as a statistician.
Would it really be "trickery with probabilities" to say that there is only a one-in-thousand chance that the total number of prisoners is more than 1000*N? And that the real number of total prisoners is probably much closer to N?
The distribution representing my beliefs in such a scenario would not have a finite variance.
Given the question, are you aware of the Pareto distribution? Nassim Taleb has great work explaining fat-tail distributions.
(I do have strong priors on various things, such as the size of the human population and the sizes of large prisons, which I ignore here as they break the metaphore)
FTL travel is impossible, and even the fastest ship would take centuries to get anywhere outside our solar system. That alone will restrict us to our little corner for the next millennia at least. Of course I reserve the right to change my mind if there's some groundbreaking discovery, but I find it unlikely. Add to that the possibility that we wipe ourselves out of existence (or the planet does), and I don't see ourselves getting to our 1 million year birthday.
And even without major breakthroughs I'm sure some will try to go interstellar AI uploading, some form of hibernation or even a generation ship. Or Nuclear Salt Water Rocket at a couple dozen % of the speed of light, so the trip won't take more than a few decades, which might be doable with some decent life length ehnacement - possibly even a round-trip! :-)
Would it be OK if the robots brought a dog along?
The rest of our fellow animal companions on this earth are thousand times better than any robot. If I'm forced to choose one of them, I wouldn't choose a dog, I'd go for one of the apes, octopus, crow, or maybe even a dolphin. But I'm fairly sure if they're given the option they'll rather stay here.
It's also worth noting that our robots are far from perfectly adapted to space. Usually, they get to the destination by jettisoning all manner of fuel tanks, landing gear, etc, and then they die in a few years. They're adapted to being put together in factories on Earth. Much like we don't have isolated livable environments on Earth, we don't have self-maintaining robot factories, either, and both problems seem pretty hard.
I think a compromise solution might be developed over the next fifty million years or so. No idea what it's going to look like.
Shedding gear can be a useful strategy; some animals even use it in extremis.
Meat is a highly evolved 'robot' structural material if you wish...
Unless we can terraform another world to our needs, permanent life on another planet will be very difficult life. Temporary visits? Sure, count me in. Just like I don’t want to live in the Antarctic for more than a few months.
Not the British or the Irish. These particular designs have not been contrived to withstand ambient temperatures exceeding +20C, with a very low degree of heat tolerance built-in. The two designs are very prone to inadvertent self-ignition and burning up in flames when exposed to the direct sunlight with almost no leeway available to them whilst being generally a reliable and pretty sturdy design otherwise. For that reason, both specimens usually come off the factory equipped with a fire extinguisher that nearly immediately either gets lost or drunk away (usually the latter).
Not necessarily, because bacterias, the most simple shape of life, can survive in hibernation in space for unknown time. And the impact of big asteroids can bring earth material into space and out of this solar system. So it is possible, that space colonisation from earth is already going on since quite some time and of course it is possible, that we were once "colonized" like this.
But of course, if we can mangage to send of more advanced life, like us to other stars - than I think this is a worthy goal as well, but not none I expect to see in my lifetime. I mean even a base on mars would be cool, but that is very far from "life on mars", self sufficient and independent from earth.
What do you mean by this? Are you predicting that life on earth can only last for another 1.4 billion years? What extinction event is so certain in the next 400m-800m years?
Like one, there's a limit on how much water can exist as vapor in our atmosphere, (which is far, far less than what the earth's oceans hold), up until the point of boiling. This is conventionally known known as the saturation point, which is 100% relative humidity. Anytime you try to go above this limit, forces the water to condense and drop down back to the oceans as liquid. So the oceans aren't going to evaporate out to being dry like it predicts unless global temperatures rise by an extreme amount - quite likely requiring boiling temperatures, but in any case, extreme enough that life would likely be dead from the temperature alone. So its subsequent reasoning on how photosynthesis and life ends is not likely how it will play out.
Additionally, it ignores that CO2 is made by animals, and O2 is made by plants, and therefore, the entire possibility of having a natural carbon cycle without volcanism. Never mind the fact that we currently have climate change tech that produces CO2 already, and if we survive that long, could easily prevent photosynthesis from ending in such a way.
Though you are quite right that this is potentially solvable for us: lagrange point sunshields to manage solar incidence would buy us a lot of extra time. But it's still hundreds of millions of years - not billions.
500 million years from now, we're fighting a losing battle against the sun's death.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_the_far_future
Personally, barring nuclear or bio warfare, I'm quite confident we can figure out how to geoengineer the Earth AND settle into Mars within 500 million years, considering we've come from cavemen to today's technology in only 10000-50000 years.
What worries me is actually after about 3 or 4 billion, where no level of geoengineering can make any of the inner planets of the solar system habitable, and with the red giant sun spewing out chunks of burning crap all over, Jupiter's and Saturn's moons aren't particularly safe either.
In general it would take a very large change in the suns output to make a noticeable difference on earth. There are critical secondary effects and feedback loops etc, but black body radiation is T^4 so you take the square root of the square root of the increase in output. A 5% increase in output should be something like a 1.2% increase in temperature kelvin.
It's a pile of problems related to a common cause (increase solar radiance) that steadily is on a single definite trend.
Put it another way: at 288 Kelvin the partial pressure of water vapor is ~1.7 kPa. At 294K it's ~2.5 kPa. That's a 47% increase (naively). And that line trends upwards only.
To boil the oceans you would need the upper atmosphere to retain that moisture or you just get more weather not net evaporation. 1 inch of rainfall represents a shocking amount of energy flow.
in the next million years (let alone hundreds) humans will have populated most of the galaxy
that is, if we survive climate change
Don't worry, it won't be all. Cats will be doing just fine.
Of course, there are other disasters to come after that one.
And that's without any human-created CO2.
But, the fact is that if civilization is destroyed by any means in the next 100 years, we won't have the quantity of fossil fuels available to bootstrap it again.
Like you are effectively a machine god, destined to rule the galaxy! Why would you even consider those funny little slow meatbags as a threat - that would mean you are weak rather! Rather let's show them the miracles only you can provide and who know what fun you can have together.
Squashing them once would be just too easy and maybe they ascend over time or create another AI to play (and compete!) with.
Like really? Why do people always think AIs will be some paranoid weakling that would even consider that humans could ever harm them? Impossible & waste of resources to address or even consider!
Godlike machines probably won't see us a threat to them and they won't destroy us meatbags out of fear. It'll be purely for efficiency. We're an unnecessary waste of energy and resources. We die easy too. The resources they'd expend wiping us out could be nothing compared to the time and resources we'd take from them, especially on their timescale.
They might not even set out to kill off humanity. It might just end up being a side effect of carrying out their own goals. Would they care if messing with our sun, our oceans, or the composition of our atmosphere makes the planet inhospitable to biological life? If they end up advanced enough from us, should they care?
When the machines leave our planet to expand into the universe, why would they take us with them? Even with our slow meat brains we've figured out that sending a person instead of a machine on missions in space is 10-100 times more expensive.
Either way, I doubt it ends well for us and that's fair really. Humanity is just paving the way for our new and improved replacement which hopefully gets replaced by something better eventuality too. Parents should want their offspring to be more successful than they were.
Everything humanity has ever built came at the expense of countless biological lifeforms we considered to be a nuisance if they were even considered at all.
With very little exception there's no use of land, however trivial, that would be prevented because of its impact on non-human biological life. The few lifeforms that are excepted are mostly ones that have already been driven to the brink of extinction, and in my country nearly half the population votes for politicians who feel even that goes too far and that the government should have no right to tell landowners what they can't do with their property no matter what kind of owl or salamander or tree or fungus was there first.
The legacy we've left behind isn't looking much better. If machines reach a point where we're no more complex to them than plants or insects are to us I'd still like them to give us some consideration, but I doubt we could expect it
only if the stars are uninhabited, if they're not we're likely to bring many things, but life ain't one of them
The same holds for nuclear war: life would continue as it always has, species with poor nuclear hardening would be selected against.
The true extraterrestrialism absolutists ought to encourage nuclear winter and asteroid impacts; the life that makes it out the other end will be much better suited for space’s low light low nutrient high radiation environment.
(/s…?)
We’ve made the same decision in software. To complicate is human.