If the habitable zone isn't too close to the star that any planetary body wouldn't be tidally locked and if they don't send out regular radioactive flares that would pose a challenge to life, they might indeed prove to be a longer lasting home than larger stars like our sun.
But with that the life span of a class M-K sun can easily extend the age of the current universe several times.
Either they too just don't have means for communication on an astronomical scale or maybe nobody wants to have anything to do with these strange ape-like bipedal primitives and humanity is on an intergalactic ban list which prohibits any contact. With exception of those that get abducted from time to time to undergo alien experiments of course.
> The day will come when the last star dies and the universe plunges into eternal darkness. [...] The last star in the cosmos will very likely be a red dwarf. Alien life forms may live around such a star, and it could be humanity’s final home before the universe becomes inhospitable.
Call me a pessimist, but I would be extremely surprised if humans are still around then.
The time scale is so vast that whatever happens, with whatever definition of "optimism", it's hard to imagine our descendents to recognize themselves into us.
There is un circumstance: that a group of humans today (or in the near future) just time "travels in the future" (e.g. by moving at relativistic speeds, etc, while in cryogenic sleep or whatever) and just happen to witness the late universe without the time actually ticking for them. In that (unlikely) case the same effect that would prevent the species from diverging is the same that would prevent them from getting extinct (not enough time)
> moving at relativistic speeds, etc, while in cryogenic sleep or whatever
There’s an interesting way to get to relativistic speeds - to get close enough to a supermassive black hole, steal enough momentum so you get very close to c, then, a subjective week later, you do the same around another black hole in a different galactic core to shed your momentum and get back to a manageable speed. An intergalactic civilisation would use supermassive black holes as train stations.
You're a pessimist. If we can survive long enough to have sustainable settlements away from this planet and moving out to the stars, there will be no stamping out humanity.
The time scales are so vast that’s hard to answer that. We also need to be able to expand do other systems as well. At that stage, I wonder what the appeal of being a planet-hugger is - if we can live in city ships in deep space, why would we want to go into a gravity well just to see a planetary surface from up close?
The appeal of an inner solar system would be the Dyson swarm surrounding the star, powering a Jupiter-sized matryoshka brain. But most of humanity would live in the vastness between the stars: taking a sun with us in the form of portable fusion power, and making a home among the trillions of Kuiper belt and Oort cloud objects between the stars. Hopping from rock to rock, sprouting villages, towns, and cities with each step an blossoming humanity into uncountable many descendant civilizations.
> Call me a pessimist, but I would be extremely surprised if humans are still around then.
Why is that? Despite what pessimists - and even the occasional realist - have been saying for decades now, so far humanity has avoided extinction or civilization collapse. Even the arguably most urgent as well as most important problem for decades to come (climate change) isn't an extinction-level event, even in a worst-case scenario.
So far, mankind's continued existence depended on a rather fragile foundation. Once mankind develops into a multi-planetary species, which we are on the verge of becoming, simply all bets are off and things might work out either way.
Becoming a multi-planetary species might be the Great Filter we seem to be observing. Paradoxically, that we have yet to meet any species that has already passed that filter, makes it more likely for humans to simply be the first ones to do so.
Just alone the fact that people like us who are arguably part of humanity’s most advanced people must believe that climate change is the biggest problem is a very good indicator that humanity will not survive, particularly because you and we are unable to identify other far more immediate pressing challenges that make climate change a relatively meaningless concern even if you accept all of its premises and motivations for concerns about it at face value … a totally other large issue.
Just alone the fact that people cannot even speak freely without censorship and of certain topics in order to discuss objectively whether they are legitimate or possibly a greater risk than climate change, specifically because the conversation and topics themselves are forced and enforced, is also a very good indicator that things will not go as well as people want to tell themselves.
You say we are on the cusp of interplanetary existence? Just alone the realities of that state are likely to cause more problems that could lead to extinction than not. For example, it is far more likely that humans will rather rapidly diverge in evolution between planets for several reasons, which can lead to all kinds of issues not directly related to whether one of the species of human will survive.
We are in a global toxic relationship with each other and are not even clear about fundamental questions of agreeing on basic facts or being able to even just examine whether all the basic assumptions are correct. How one could expect that to allow us to face of extinction is beyond me. However, it strikes me that lying to oneself of faking it til you make it will simply not impress a cold and calculated mistress as reality.
Well, "biggest" is something else than "urgent and important".
Fair enough, though. It perhaps is true that climate change is assigned undue importance in public discourse when compared with other problems that might be just as important - or even more so.
You'd be hard pressed, however, to find an issue that has as many immediate (or near-future) and potentially severe repercussions for as many people.
Evolutionary divergence certainly seems like a potentially relevant future problem, the key word here being "potentially", though. Climate change, on the other hand, is a certain reality. Assigning the same resources to both problems, even though one of them might never even materialize (or do so in a manner we can't even anticipate yet), therefore would be irrational.
That doesn't mean, however, that we can't work on solving both at the same time. At the very least, 8 billion or so people allow for massive parallelism.
It is hard for me to see a future where humanity lasts long enough for that to be a problem, while not possessing the technology required to address it. I would assume that at that point we would be creating universes to escape to or something else that is unimaginable today.
If we survive 300 years we will have self sufficient spacecraft (probably asteroids) and power not reliant on the sun (fusion)
Once you have that you inevitably have groups heading off into space in different directions, never to return to Earth, but some will survive trips to other stars, and some will multiply and branch out from then
At that point humanity or its descendants will inevitably fill the entire galaxy, although it won’t be a single civilisation.
We'll need to improve our collation and storage of the sum of human knowledge.
Today if you took the scrapable internet + wikipedia + all academic journals, you still probably lack enough detail and method to reproduce techniques in manufacturing, mining, tooling, medicine, and so on.
If the hypothesis is that humans will survive so long as we are off-planet, then the humans leaving the planet need to be able to do everything fully disconnected from the home world to really survive if something happens to the populace on the home world.
I really like the IPFS solution to this. Basically a torrent where each chunk is addressable, so you get deduplication on each mirror even across unrelated file hierarchies.
Assuming humanity will manage to exist that long. On the topic: how do you keep yourself positive? How do you keep your hope for the humanity? I have lost mine and find it hard to keep going, since lots of things become pointless
Enjoy the little things in life. The breeze, a cup of coffee/tea. Read The Tao of Pooh. There is certain comfort in knowing that you can't control everything so try to enjoy whats infront of you today.
Jesus. It is easy to dismiss religion as pre-scientific superstition or opiate for the people, but hear me out for a second.
I find that Jesus gets two things fundamentally right:
- humanity's brokenness
- the moral values that underpin human flourishing
It may seem counterintuitive, but recognizing humanity's brokenness as a whole and on an individual level is actually necessary to have hope. You can't fix a problem you don't see. Seeing the problem is not enough, though. You also need to avail yourself of a solution. Jesus is that solution. He has transformed the lives of people, but it is a deeply personal experience that you have to choose for yourself (if you want it).
I think humanity needs religion (without a religious worldview your cognitive framework is incomplete), and i think Christianity is the most rational, most plausibly effective, and most likely to be true religion we have.
Having said that, i'm not here to argue, though there are myriads of arguments to be had. This is just an invitation in response to a question.
To anyone reading this who has been burnt by Christians who may feel the need to vent their frustration: I am sorry for your negative experiences. There is no perfect system in this world. Even among so called humanitarian aid workers there are rapists who go to foreign lands and leave struggling females pregnant and alone. Yet we all recognize the tremendous good done by charities despite the despicable evil. Let's not throw out the baby with the bathwater.
You don’t need Jesus to become a better person. We are flawed, and we evolved to be aggressive apes, but we also evolved big brains and we can now decide we don’t want to behave the way our ancestors did. One day at a time, all we need to do is to decide not to be that murderous ape.
I've found secular Buddhism to be one of the few philosophies that accurately reflects reality. In life there will be suffering. But there is an end to suffering.
Finding the joy of humanity through the suffering of/by humanity is a hard but worthy goal.
You can also drop matter into black holes and this way recover energy necessary to sustain civilisation long after red dwarves are all dead cold.
Compared to stars, this process is much more efficient and allows converting something like 40% of mass of dropped object into energy.
And so with this mechanism we have much more energy available than all stars in the universe have and will ever have produced. Not only that, we can do it at any rate we want. Rather than radiate 99.999999999999999999999999999999999999999999% of it uselessly, we can make sure that most of it is used to power our civilisation.
The problems:
1) The visible universe shrinks, so much less matter will be available to us in trillions of years.
2) Before you drop matter into black hole you need to store it somewhere. The issue here is that over long periods of time orbits decay as gravitational energy is radiated away and so keeping mass in storage actually requires energy to be added.
20% is for uncharged, non-rotating BH. 42% (maximum) is for rotating black hole.
I have to agree with 20%. 42% assumes that you are robbing the black hole of its momentum and that cannot be sustained infinitely, as you are throwing more and more stuff into it your best possible efficiency will drop asymptotically to 20%.
The real long–term plan is to live in orbit of a black hole, the larger the better. You can use the Penrose process to extract energy from one for very long time. Forget about a few paltry trillions of years, a supermassive black hole can last longer than 10¹⁰⁰ years. That’s 10⁹¹ trillion years.
Thanks, I’d not come across that process before. You need a reaction mass reserve that won’t run out in that amount of time though. That’s a lot of reaction mass if you have any significant energy needs.
At the very end we may use proton decay to power virtual world running on computers composed of folded spacetime. Subjective time within the simulation can continue no matter how slow the computation looks from the outside.
> At the very end we may use proton decay to power virtual world running on computers composed of folded spacetime. Subjective time within the simulation can continue no matter how slow the computation looks from the outside.
That sounds like pure science fiction. Is there even any theoretical basis for the construction of "computers composed of folded spacetime"?
The optimum efficiency comes from discarding our meat bodies and uploading ourselves into highly efficient software simulations. At the Landauer limit, the amount of computation is proportional to the total energy; it shouldn't particularly matter how quickly that energy is burned, what the "simulation speed" is in real time.
Maybe the optimal future of humanity is a simulation powered by the radiation of a supernova, simulating 10^100 years in 1 hour. Who knows?
(Top advantage: you wouldn't have to worry about hostile ETI's, since your entire civilization's light cone fits in one light-hour. For all practical purposes, your society's causally disconnected from the universe, as if it had hidden itself inside a black hole).
That’s a very pessimistic take. We are on the verge of having Lunar and Martian settlements. Before the end of this century, those may even be self sufficient.
We’ll be a lot more difficult to eradicate after that.
> We’ll be a lot more difficult to eradicate after that
I think our chief existential risk is nuclear war, which is a political issie that doesn't seem to be going away soon. But perhaps by the end of the century we'll have moved beyond it.
As a techno-optimist myself, I understand where the doomerism is coming from. Civilization-ending wars and disasters are still very much in the cards today, and collectively human behavior shows at best a fluctuating will to live. So far we have detected no hint of alien activity out among the stars, or found any of the remnants we would expect a galaxy-spanning civilization to leave behind in our own neighborhood - leading us ever closer to the conclusion that long-lived interstellar civilizations are either unattainable or that we're the first intelligent life form to arise within billions of light years. So far we don't seem to show any large scale willingness to spread out to other worlds or to even consider the developments necessary for a sustainable long term future. Expected advances have not materialized, especially in medicine and physics. We're hostile to ideas like radical life extension, improving overall quality of life globally, getting rid of systemic injustices and suffering, using technology and foresight to dig ourselves out of environmental disasters.
Finally, instead of steadily gaining public support for science and technology, we seem to have left even more people behind whom we may not be getting back for generations, if ever. It is fully possible that humanity may split into several completely incompatible factions, and that may be the optimistic perspective! The growing fissures dividing us are very visible even on a technology-centered medium like HN.
Outliers notwithstanding, as a civilization the last two decades feel like we have given up on radical improvements. However, I believe outliers could still fulfill some of the promises of optimistic futurism, even though it may take longer and we may not get to a high enough level in time to master the challenges ahead. It's still worth trying, and it's still worth building momentum towards a better public acceptance.
I think that's because Moore's law is dead since about 2005 (?) and all optimistic predictions (Kurzweil etc) pretty much assumed it lasting decades longer. As a consequence we live in an age of technological stagnation since roughly 2008. Better smartphones but that's mostly it - no significant changes in daily life except for taxi apps. Show any nerd from 2008 life in 2022 - and they would get depressed.
Hopefully this decade is better - ubiquitous satellite internet, self driving cars, brain implants, maybe even fusion power plants (ARC)? Self driving cars and brain implants would be truly revolutionary for daily life.
“No human ever steps in the same universe twice. For it's not the same universe and he's not the same human.”
Now extend this to billions of years. Do we still call it humanity, or use English, or same Homo Sapiens?
Based on what? Might well be that humanity has an entry in the universe's database says we have nukes, go to war for irrational reasons, and kills each other for random reasons.
If humanity is still around stars won't exist anymore. It's a horrific waste of resources. Any advanced civilization would deconstruct all stars with active fusion to prevent them from losing energy to fusion - and keep that mass for black hole power plants.
There is absolutely zero chance that humanity will last long enough to use Red Dwarfs as a home. Barring some sort of ultra conservation efforts, constant mutations will have created an entirely new species. Humanity will have less relation to the red dwarf inhabitants than Eutherians from the cretaceous era have to us.
lol if humanity survives the next thousand years I’d be really surprised. There’s a nonzero chance we’ll all live to (briefly) see the end of our species.
I don’t think we need to worry about exceeding the lifespan of our own sun let alone all others.
71 comments
[ 2.7 ms ] story [ 148 ms ] threadBut with that the life span of a class M-K sun can easily extend the age of the current universe several times.
Call me a pessimist, but I would be extremely surprised if humans are still around then.
There is un circumstance: that a group of humans today (or in the near future) just time "travels in the future" (e.g. by moving at relativistic speeds, etc, while in cryogenic sleep or whatever) and just happen to witness the late universe without the time actually ticking for them. In that (unlikely) case the same effect that would prevent the species from diverging is the same that would prevent them from getting extinct (not enough time)
There’s an interesting way to get to relativistic speeds - to get close enough to a supermassive black hole, steal enough momentum so you get very close to c, then, a subjective week later, you do the same around another black hole in a different galactic core to shed your momentum and get back to a manageable speed. An intergalactic civilisation would use supermassive black holes as train stations.
Why is that? Despite what pessimists - and even the occasional realist - have been saying for decades now, so far humanity has avoided extinction or civilization collapse. Even the arguably most urgent as well as most important problem for decades to come (climate change) isn't an extinction-level event, even in a worst-case scenario.
So far, mankind's continued existence depended on a rather fragile foundation. Once mankind develops into a multi-planetary species, which we are on the verge of becoming, simply all bets are off and things might work out either way.
Becoming a multi-planetary species might be the Great Filter we seem to be observing. Paradoxically, that we have yet to meet any species that has already passed that filter, makes it more likely for humans to simply be the first ones to do so.
Just alone the fact that people cannot even speak freely without censorship and of certain topics in order to discuss objectively whether they are legitimate or possibly a greater risk than climate change, specifically because the conversation and topics themselves are forced and enforced, is also a very good indicator that things will not go as well as people want to tell themselves.
You say we are on the cusp of interplanetary existence? Just alone the realities of that state are likely to cause more problems that could lead to extinction than not. For example, it is far more likely that humans will rather rapidly diverge in evolution between planets for several reasons, which can lead to all kinds of issues not directly related to whether one of the species of human will survive.
We are in a global toxic relationship with each other and are not even clear about fundamental questions of agreeing on basic facts or being able to even just examine whether all the basic assumptions are correct. How one could expect that to allow us to face of extinction is beyond me. However, it strikes me that lying to oneself of faking it til you make it will simply not impress a cold and calculated mistress as reality.
Arguable indeed.
Fair enough, though. It perhaps is true that climate change is assigned undue importance in public discourse when compared with other problems that might be just as important - or even more so.
You'd be hard pressed, however, to find an issue that has as many immediate (or near-future) and potentially severe repercussions for as many people.
Evolutionary divergence certainly seems like a potentially relevant future problem, the key word here being "potentially", though. Climate change, on the other hand, is a certain reality. Assigning the same resources to both problems, even though one of them might never even materialize (or do so in a manner we can't even anticipate yet), therefore would be irrational.
That doesn't mean, however, that we can't work on solving both at the same time. At the very least, 8 billion or so people allow for massive parallelism.
Once you have that you inevitably have groups heading off into space in different directions, never to return to Earth, but some will survive trips to other stars, and some will multiply and branch out from then
At that point humanity or its descendants will inevitably fill the entire galaxy, although it won’t be a single civilisation.
Today if you took the scrapable internet + wikipedia + all academic journals, you still probably lack enough detail and method to reproduce techniques in manufacturing, mining, tooling, medicine, and so on.
If the hypothesis is that humans will survive so long as we are off-planet, then the humans leaving the planet need to be able to do everything fully disconnected from the home world to really survive if something happens to the populace on the home world.
And turn off the news and social networks.
Surprisingly enough, this social network is quite inhabitable. Even when we disagree, we do so in civilised ways.
I find that Jesus gets two things fundamentally right:
- humanity's brokenness - the moral values that underpin human flourishing
It may seem counterintuitive, but recognizing humanity's brokenness as a whole and on an individual level is actually necessary to have hope. You can't fix a problem you don't see. Seeing the problem is not enough, though. You also need to avail yourself of a solution. Jesus is that solution. He has transformed the lives of people, but it is a deeply personal experience that you have to choose for yourself (if you want it).
I think humanity needs religion (without a religious worldview your cognitive framework is incomplete), and i think Christianity is the most rational, most plausibly effective, and most likely to be true religion we have.
Having said that, i'm not here to argue, though there are myriads of arguments to be had. This is just an invitation in response to a question.
To anyone reading this who has been burnt by Christians who may feel the need to vent their frustration: I am sorry for your negative experiences. There is no perfect system in this world. Even among so called humanitarian aid workers there are rapists who go to foreign lands and leave struggling females pregnant and alone. Yet we all recognize the tremendous good done by charities despite the despicable evil. Let's not throw out the baby with the bathwater.
Finding the joy of humanity through the suffering of/by humanity is a hard but worthy goal.
Compared to stars, this process is much more efficient and allows converting something like 40% of mass of dropped object into energy.
And so with this mechanism we have much more energy available than all stars in the universe have and will ever have produced. Not only that, we can do it at any rate we want. Rather than radiate 99.999999999999999999999999999999999999999999% of it uselessly, we can make sure that most of it is used to power our civilisation.
The problems:
1) The visible universe shrinks, so much less matter will be available to us in trillions of years.
2) Before you drop matter into black hole you need to store it somewhere. The issue here is that over long periods of time orbits decay as gravitational energy is radiated away and so keeping mass in storage actually requires energy to be added.
3) Not gonna save us from Big Rip.
20% is for uncharged, non-rotating BH. 42% (maximum) is for rotating black hole.
I have to agree with 20%. 42% assumes that you are robbing the black hole of its momentum and that cannot be sustained infinitely, as you are throwing more and more stuff into it your best possible efficiency will drop asymptotically to 20%.
At the very end we may use proton decay to power virtual world running on computers composed of folded spacetime. Subjective time within the simulation can continue no matter how slow the computation looks from the outside.
That sounds like pure science fiction. Is there even any theoretical basis for the construction of "computers composed of folded spacetime"?
Maybe the optimal future of humanity is a simulation powered by the radiation of a supernova, simulating 10^100 years in 1 hour. Who knows?
(Top advantage: you wouldn't have to worry about hostile ETI's, since your entire civilization's light cone fits in one light-hour. For all practical purposes, your society's causally disconnected from the universe, as if it had hidden itself inside a black hole).
Smoke me a kipper, I'll be back for breakfast...
Lots of other possible energy sources will still be around.
Earth Will Be Humanity’s Last Home Before Humanity Dies
Here, I fixed that for you.
We’ll be a lot more difficult to eradicate after that.
I think our chief existential risk is nuclear war, which is a political issie that doesn't seem to be going away soon. But perhaps by the end of the century we'll have moved beyond it.
Finally, instead of steadily gaining public support for science and technology, we seem to have left even more people behind whom we may not be getting back for generations, if ever. It is fully possible that humanity may split into several completely incompatible factions, and that may be the optimistic perspective! The growing fissures dividing us are very visible even on a technology-centered medium like HN.
Outliers notwithstanding, as a civilization the last two decades feel like we have given up on radical improvements. However, I believe outliers could still fulfill some of the promises of optimistic futurism, even though it may take longer and we may not get to a high enough level in time to master the challenges ahead. It's still worth trying, and it's still worth building momentum towards a better public acceptance.
Hopefully this decade is better - ubiquitous satellite internet, self driving cars, brain implants, maybe even fusion power plants (ARC)? Self driving cars and brain implants would be truly revolutionary for daily life.
The odds are against intelligent life, it seems.
Why would any intelligent life contact us?
Actually he has a whole series on Civilizations at the End of Time.[0]
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pld8wTa16Jk&list=PLIIOUpOge0...
Also pointing a couple big mass drivers to Earth so to incentivise humans down here behave.