4 ms·

Some of these are ironically myopic: "10,000 years: If globalization trends lead to panmixia, human genetic variation will no longer be regionalized, as the eff

Some of these are ironically myopic: "10,000 years: If globalization trends lead to panmixia, human genetic variation will no longer be regionalized, as the effective population size will equal the actual population size. This does not mean homogeneity, as minority traits will still be preserved, e.g. the blonde gene will not disappear, but it will be rather evenly distributed worldwide." That prediction makes the rather questionable assumption that humans will still be primarily, if not entirely, on Earth in 10,000 years! Interplanetary colonization will likely dwarf the regional evolutionary isolation we've experienced on this planet. In the longrun it will likely even trend towards speciation (as a more reasonable prediction further on does hit on.) Consider that a European, an African, and a Japanese all share an incredibly recent ancestor. The exciting thing about interplanetary colonization is once the technology starts to become robust, our potential growth and expansion is effectively unlimited. It would be like if the western frontier in the US was uninhabited and somehow went on to infinity. The implications of this are difficult to even imagine.

anonytrary 8y ago
It's a bit ironic because you made the exact same mistake they made. Interplanetary colonization only makes sense if humans are even around in 10,000 years. It's possible they will not be -- the speed of light being finite makes interplanetary colonization much less probable. Making any kind of 10,000 year prediction on a population thousands seems myopic.
- TangoTrotFox 8y ago
  Interplanetary is not the same thing as interstellar. Interplanetary just means different planets. E.g. after we colonize Mars we will be an interplanetary species. That's also where the divergence will begin. The development and evolutionary characteristics of individuals that grow up in low g will likely quickly begin to create a group of people radically different from anything on Earth. You're making a common mistake on the speed of light. Understandable as relativity is really really weird. We can get into the hows/whys if you like, but the long and short is that if we can, somehow, develop technology to be able to consistently accelerate at just 1g then we can colonize places that are billions of light years away, all in a single human lifetime. Of course indeed billions of years will have passed for everybody else. It's going to make notions of time, progress, and even extinction get really really weird.
  - anonytrary 8y ago
    I misspoke, assume I said interstellar. > You're making a common mistake on the speed of light. Correcting for my mishap, all I said was that finite c makes interstellar travel much less probable, which isn't wrong. It would take infinite energy for your spaceship to arrive at c as the Lorentz factor blows up. > if we can, somehow, develop technology to be able to consistently accelerate at just 1g This is exactly the kind of long-shot assumption you are forced to make because c is finite. I would say that reduces the probability. Plus, once we start talking about billions of years of time-dilation, we aren't really in the 10,000 year scope we set up earlier, so it's not even wrong.
    - TangoTrotFox 8y ago
      You're completely right that we observe it taking an amount of energy approaching infinity to accelerate a particle as it approaches the speed of light. But what the particle experiences is quite different. Imagine the speed of light is 10 units and you had a thruster on you that, in a vacuum, could generated exactly enough thrust accelerate you 1/10th that speed each time you pressed a button. Nothing suddenly happens causing the thruster to completely fail on the 10th, 11th, or 500th push of that button. All that would happen is that you'd start to experience things getting quite weird. The two biggest things would be that time for everybody would seem to be speeding up and distances would physically contract. This would prevent you from ever perceiving yourself as moving faster than 10 units. The distance from A to B might be 1000 units at rest, but through length contraction it might be perceived to instead only be 15, traversing that distance in thus 1.5 units of time would not be perceived as exceeding the speed of light. However, an outside observer would see you passing through those 1000 units at some speed asymptotically approaching 10 units of speed, but never getting there. They see you taking approximately 100 units of time, you see yourself doing it in 1.5 units of time. Both are right. A really cool (and handy) area where these two worlds of observer and observed intersect is in particle decay. For instance in particle accelerators we can observe particles that decay after 1 units of time, yet the odd thing is we get observe these particles existing for 4 or 5 units of time! Actually the same effect also applies to things in nature. Muons are created as a product of atmospheric particle collisions, and these muons do make their way down to Earth's surface, yet their lifetime (before decay) is less than the time it would take to get from our atmosphere to the surface of earth at the speed of light! Our universe is seriously weird. ---- These are all very practical problems, or solutions, depending on how you look at things. You can travel billions of years in a human lifetime. Here [1] is a handy converter. It'd take about 45 years at 1g accelerator for a person to travel 15 billion light years - to the ends of the currently observable universe. So the only question is how long it will take us to develop or discover such technology. This is one of the many reasons the possibility of an EM drive, though improbable, was so tantalizing! Forget infinite energy, we're going exploring! These are also the reason I said that things like extinction become quite difficult to define. For instance, imagine in 200 years that we send out 1000 exploration+colonization ships each with some 5,000 people on them (or whatever the magic number to create a genesis population without inbreeding is). And then 1000 years later humanity on Earth kills itself off. Are humans extinct? Well, we still have those 5 million humans traveling not only in different places in space but in different times in space. So you'd probably say no, but once again... it's weird. [1] - http://convertalot.com/relativistic_star_ship_calculator.html http://convertalot.com/relativistic_star_ship_calculator.htm...
mockingbirdy 8y ago
> our potential growth and expansion is effectively unlimited It's still finite. I recommend this famous Asimov story [1]. I don't think that it makes humanity "more meaningful" or something similar if we start interplanetary colonization. Really, it doesn't matter even if we inhabit the whole observable universe. We will die and it doesn't matter if I die on an exoplanet as a 1500y/o guy in a young body or if I die on earth as a 80y/o. Maybe I will experience more and whatever, but I don't really give a sh*t because life will always be finite (even if you can be billions of years old). And the implications of becoming so old can be seen in the Netflix series "Altered Carbon": You will develop weird sexual fetishes because you're bored af. And if we "overcome humans" and become some other weird sentient being it's still limited and if it's not limited it still doesn't matter from some other angle. I don't understand why everybody is excited about interplanetary colonization and immortality. There's this quote: "To philosophize is to learn to die" - I think this is more important than trying to increase your life span or do some other stuff to delay death or even become immortal. I think most of those Silicon Valley tycoons who want this, e.g. Peter Thiel, just like the thought of accumulating power over hundreds of years. Sounds hedonistic to me + all that "will to power" ego talk. [1]: http://www.multivax.com/last_question.html http://www.multivax.com/last_question.html
- TangoTrotFox 8y ago
  Excellent short story. We each have to find our own personal meaning to life. For myself it's simply knowledge. And starting to colonize other planets, and more generally become a genuinely space faring civilization, is going to revolutionize our knowledge and understanding of this universe. To what end? Well, I'll tell you when we run out of things that we don't know. I expect, even if immortality should come to pass, this is a question I will not have to answer.

anonytrary 8y ago

It's a bit ironic because you made the exact same mistake they made. Interplanetary colonization only makes sense if humans are even around in 10,000 years. It's possible they will not be -- the speed of light being finite makes interplanetary colonization much less probable. Making any kind of 10,000 year prediction on a population thousands seems myopic.

TangoTrotFox 8y ago
Interplanetary is not the same thing as interstellar. Interplanetary just means different planets. E.g. after we colonize Mars we will be an interplanetary species. That's also where the divergence will begin. The development and evolutionary characteristics of individuals that grow up in low g will likely quickly begin to create a group of people radically different from anything on Earth. You're making a common mistake on the speed of light. Understandable as relativity is really really weird. We can get into the hows/whys if you like, but the long and short is that if we can, somehow, develop technology to be able to consistently accelerate at just 1g then we can colonize places that are billions of light years away, all in a single human lifetime. Of course indeed billions of years will have passed for everybody else. It's going to make notions of time, progress, and even extinction get really really weird.
- anonytrary 8y ago
  I misspoke, assume I said interstellar. > You're making a common mistake on the speed of light. Correcting for my mishap, all I said was that finite c makes interstellar travel much less probable, which isn't wrong. It would take infinite energy for your spaceship to arrive at c as the Lorentz factor blows up. > if we can, somehow, develop technology to be able to consistently accelerate at just 1g This is exactly the kind of long-shot assumption you are forced to make because c is finite. I would say that reduces the probability. Plus, once we start talking about billions of years of time-dilation, we aren't really in the 10,000 year scope we set up earlier, so it's not even wrong.
  - TangoTrotFox 8y ago
    You're completely right that we observe it taking an amount of energy approaching infinity to accelerate a particle as it approaches the speed of light. But what the particle experiences is quite different. Imagine the speed of light is 10 units and you had a thruster on you that, in a vacuum, could generated exactly enough thrust accelerate you 1/10th that speed each time you pressed a button. Nothing suddenly happens causing the thruster to completely fail on the 10th, 11th, or 500th push of that button. All that would happen is that you'd start to experience things getting quite weird. The two biggest things would be that time for everybody would seem to be speeding up and distances would physically contract. This would prevent you from ever perceiving yourself as moving faster than 10 units. The distance from A to B might be 1000 units at rest, but through length contraction it might be perceived to instead only be 15, traversing that distance in thus 1.5 units of time would not be perceived as exceeding the speed of light. However, an outside observer would see you passing through those 1000 units at some speed asymptotically approaching 10 units of speed, but never getting there. They see you taking approximately 100 units of time, you see yourself doing it in 1.5 units of time. Both are right. A really cool (and handy) area where these two worlds of observer and observed intersect is in particle decay. For instance in particle accelerators we can observe particles that decay after 1 units of time, yet the odd thing is we get observe these particles existing for 4 or 5 units of time! Actually the same effect also applies to things in nature. Muons are created as a product of atmospheric particle collisions, and these muons do make their way down to Earth's surface, yet their lifetime (before decay) is less than the time it would take to get from our atmosphere to the surface of earth at the speed of light! Our universe is seriously weird. ---- These are all very practical problems, or solutions, depending on how you look at things. You can travel billions of years in a human lifetime. Here [1] is a handy converter. It'd take about 45 years at 1g accelerator for a person to travel 15 billion light years - to the ends of the currently observable universe. So the only question is how long it will take us to develop or discover such technology. This is one of the many reasons the possibility of an EM drive, though improbable, was so tantalizing! Forget infinite energy, we're going exploring! These are also the reason I said that things like extinction become quite difficult to define. For instance, imagine in 200 years that we send out 1000 exploration+colonization ships each with some 5,000 people on them (or whatever the magic number to create a genesis population without inbreeding is). And then 1000 years later humanity on Earth kills itself off. Are humans extinct? Well, we still have those 5 million humans traveling not only in different places in space but in different times in space. So you'd probably say no, but once again... it's weird. [1] - http://convertalot.com/relativistic_star_ship_calculator.html http://convertalot.com/relativistic_star_ship_calculator.htm...

mockingbirdy 8y ago

> our potential growth and expansion is effectively unlimited It's still finite. I recommend this famous Asimov story [1]. I don't think that it makes humanity "more meaningful" or something similar if we start interplanetary colonization. Really, it doesn't matter even if we inhabit the whole observable universe. We will die and it doesn't matter if I die on an exoplanet as a 1500y/o guy in a young body or if I die on earth as a 80y/o. Maybe I will experience more and whatever, but I don't really give a sh*t because life will always be finite (even if you can be billions of years old). And the implications of becoming so old can be seen in the Netflix series "Altered Carbon": You will develop weird sexual fetishes because you're bored af. And if we "overcome humans" and become some other weird sentient being it's still limited and if it's not limited it still doesn't matter from some other angle. I don't understand why everybody is excited about interplanetary colonization and immortality. There's this quote: "To philosophize is to learn to die" - I think this is more important than trying to increase your life span or do some other stuff to delay death or even become immortal. I think most of those Silicon Valley tycoons who want this, e.g. Peter Thiel, just like the thought of accumulating power over hundreds of years. Sounds hedonistic to me + all that "will to power" ego talk. [1]: http://www.multivax.com/last_question.html http://www.multivax.com/last_question.html

TangoTrotFox 8y ago
Excellent short story. We each have to find our own personal meaning to life. For myself it's simply knowledge. And starting to colonize other planets, and more generally become a genuinely space faring civilization, is going to revolutionize our knowledge and understanding of this universe. To what end? Well, I'll tell you when we run out of things that we don't know. I expect, even if immortality should come to pass, this is a question I will not have to answer.