Matching dinosaur footprints found on opposite sides of the Atlantic Ocean

Except evolution does not work that way. It does not optimize for cognitive skills improvement. Not necessarily at least. Different traits may be more important for different species.

Imagine that for the first 50 years of aviation all airplanes had been single use, and then in the 1960s someone figured out how to make them reusable. Thats what’s happening with space flight. The next 75 years are going to be interesting.

I do think 2100 is a stretch, space is hard, but we’ll likely have all the basic elements of that proved out by then.

That’s only 75 years away, same time since the first work on developing orbital rockets.

But by 2500 sure. And likely by 2500 some form of self sustaining asteroid with propulsion will leave the solar system.

I used to think ince that happens for a few thousand trips, humanity will survive enough that our descendants will last billions of years. Not the same biology, certainly not a single culture, but once the technology exists nothing can stop the spread.

Then I read about the “light cage” concept.

https://projectrho.com/public_html/rocket/empiremap.php#ligh...

We won’t ever send physically natural humans to other systems.

Not because we could never do it, but there won’t be any motivation to.

We will send relatively tiny ships, initially as probes, then as resource extraction & reproduction systems.

With laser acceleration & fusion deceleration (potentially fed by hydrogen collected collected from the target system), travel between systems can happen within 1-10% of the speed of light.

So only ten or so years to the closest systems.

That (propulsion) technology is not far off now. The bottlenecks are the need for further miniaturization, and our economy could not yet support the cost of, nor is it ready to benefit from, that scale of investment.

Whatever “format” our technology/lifeform has evolved to, we will be able to be sent it in extremely compact form, given any thing large can be recreated at the destination.

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Ironically though, despite a decade or so sounding very fast to us now, with time deflation (I.e. absolute time translating to higher & higher subjective time as “we” and our ability to process information & act speed up), decades between systems will subjectively Become be aeons of time.

But resource needs will also accelerate, so the necessity will be there.

So space will be deflationary, along with time. A meter & a second today will have much more relative meaning in the future as everything becomes more compact and faster.

Think about how the digital latency around the planet remains a constant, but as computing centers increasingly compactly, and grow in processing power, by orders of magnitudes, distributed computing with any serial or regular merging component will have to become ever more & more local.

Mars is big latency today. In 50 years, cross planet communication will be a relatively big latency.

I don’t think they are solved, but not bottlenecks for beyond Earth, post biological life.

They still matter.

How long intelligent life depends or cares about a “natural” Earth biosphere is impossible to predict. “We” will for a while. But for how long?

Wars and any destructive conflict will always matter. They increase existential risk for individuals and collectives, and waste resources.

We are used to casually equating the future of the Earth, the biosphere, intelligence, civilization, humanity, our systems & communities, and each of us as individuals.

But they are all different things, whose trajectories are increasingly separating.

Military conflict might help a lot. Enslave the population in misery so we can get those off planet resources and weapon platforms to fight better.

I agree, our communal lack of wisdom and recklessness is the only real risk. But maybe not as much as we think.

Ironically many of our biggest worries, like climate collapses, extreme pollution, inequality, huge regional wars (Taiwan), population collapses, pandemics, don’t present much risk for expansion into space.

Only a full civilization collapse or extinction event would do it.

So definitely a long term optimistic outlook for “life”.

But the specific ways things play out could still be catastrophic from individuals perspectives. The rate and nature of changes these next decades will be profoundly disruptive & challenging to every aspect of our existence, all at once.

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If we don’t reflect the universes non-human created resources as a joint inheritance, in a legally and economically explicit way, there is going to be a great culling of some kind - there is no way around that.

We need formal recognition and a societal structure supporting that, for a shared ownership of raw natural resources in some way, to have a soft transition.

I don’t see this as a violation of capitalism, but as a completion of property rights under capitalism.

It accomplishes what communism tries to do by mistakenly socializing production, instead by joint shareholding of nature’s original undeveloped resources as a gifted asset nobody created. And allowing capitalism to do its job of maximizing that value for all of us.

Bidding to extract resources, rental of limited shared resources (land) etc can continue unchanged. But everyone will be compensated for their part of raw resources as they are privatized or used exclusively.

So the combined lifetime of people in a large city.

A thousand years after the fall of the western Roman Empire, the eastern empire fell. Five hundred years after that, a rocket named for the Roman god of renewal helped put men on the moon. I wouldn’t write us off.

>bug populations have halved in a decade

Which will have a direct impact on the price of food as the pollinators disappear. Professional pollinator might be a high growth career in the coming decades.

So humans aren't on their way out, it's not even clear global human civilization will collapse as opposed to adapting and mitigating before then.

For those who missed the point of this concise note;

There are 8 billion people alive today. A few handfuls of whom will be alive 100 years from now.

Everyone dies.

Will the birthrate drop? Likely yes. Will resources become more scarce? Some, definitely yes. Will life be easier or harder 100 years from now? That's harder to predict.

Touché

Again, that's a crazy thing to conclude from even the most pessimistic global warming predictions.

What does an "uninhabitable" Earth mean? Do you mean less habitable than the Sahara or Antartica, or the Himalayas? Because some people do inhabit those places, and more could if they needed to. There's no scientific evidence whatsoever that all of Earth will become uninhabitable for humans. That's just doomerism.

I think it was a poor taste piece of pedantry: in 100 years, almost everyone currently alive, 8 billion people, will be dead. It's just that new people will have been born in the meantime.

> may not be inhabitable in a relatively short period of time

This is pretty much nonsense. Worst climate change predictions do not make the planet "uninhabitable", only some parts of it.

Why must we? There are other intelligent life forms in the Universe, undoubtedly. What makes us so special?

Creation scientists actually do go pretty far, though, in trying to make things as physically plausible as they can. I think they're aiming for a theory where God makes specific events happen, like creation itself, or unleashing water in the ground and air to generate the Flood, but aside from that physics pretty much runs as designed. And to their credit, this would be sort of a local minimum in divine interference required for the theory... if the rest of the physics worked.

Ed: though I suppose that implies less than it ideally would about the attitudes of random believers on the street, who might well be a lot less principled about where they let divine interference into their model...