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Comment by jafaku | Hacker News Reader

How can one care about what will happen within the next 10,000 years?

You don't have kids yet, I take it? One of the most universal desires parents have is for our children to live better than we did, hence the sacrifices we make to fund education etc.

How can you not?

We are not talking about throwing away everything to insure ourselves against future catastrophe, we're putting a small portion towards a bit of futureproofing. Seems smart to me.

Ah, that's just your DNA talking. Otherwise we could be immensely pleased with the amazing experience of being alive, and when our time is up allow Mother Universe to move on without us. Perhaps after we are wiped out, another better form of life will take hold and really do amazing things, fueled by our decay.

Besides, it looks like our own behavior is going to do it for us, so might as well "love the bomb".

I guess that speaks to the dichotomy of urge in humans. We are equally as likely to sit on our butts staring mindlessly at something on a screen as we are to strive for extending the reaches and hopes of our species.

I hope it could be us that will do those amazing things you mentioned.

We are alive as far as we want to be alive. We can be that "better form" of life, it's questionable that a better form of life can emerge from scratch. If our own behavior is going to get us extinct, so be it, let's help the nature then!

Besides that, I think that personification of "Mother Universe" is just a xenophobic form of human fear of the "otherness" surrounding us. There is no monolithic Mother Universe, more probably, there is a mesh of living creatures and natural phenomena we are a part of.

We are a part of Mother Universe.

To be clear I love to see funding going towards science. But 10,000 years is too damn much. People are placing chronologically the technological singularity within the next 100-200 years. For all practical purposes, 10,000 years ahead it's simply a different universe for me.

You said "within the next 10,000 years". So where's your cut-off point? 1,000? 100? 10?

There are things we need to prepare for and there are advantages to starting now. Every advance we make is a foundation for something else. I think there are things we take for granted today that only exist because of some urge to explore and learn thousands of years ago.

"The best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago. The second best time is now."

To be selfish, I'm keen to see what we can find out about our world (including beyond Earth obviously) in my lifetime. Something like the comet landing is a step along a far bigger path to getting all our eggs out of a single basket situation.

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