4 ms·

> That could change in the course of tens or hundreds of millions of years with stellar drift. Not worth worrying that much about it then - in a mere billion y

by Nursie 6y ago

> That could change in the course of tens or hundreds of millions of years with stellar drift. Not worth worrying that much about it then - in a mere billion years (IIRC) the sun's output is predicted to have increased enough that it's unlikely liquid water could exist on the surface of the earth, effectively ending most life. Though it's possible that the level of CO2 in the atmosphere will have dropped enough to make photosynthesis impossible for most plants in around half that time.

yourapostasy 6y ago
So we only have about 500 megayears to both attain a K2 scale civilization and find a way to use that power to protect our cradle world (or work around the extinction of life as we know it). Got it. No pressure.
- EForEndeavour 6y ago
  Bear in mind that our species has only existed for a rough upper limit of 500 KILOyears. The first electric motor was built only ~200 years ago, and we've only been technically spacefaring for ~60 years. We went from first heavier-than-air flight to first space station in 70 years. Our species has a thousand times our current age to figure things out. To unironically quote Dennis Reynolds from It's Always Sunny: we haven't peaked. We haven't even begun to peak. (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tS7ifk26tJc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tS7ifk26tJc)
  - simonh 6y ago
    I’m afraid I don’t see it that way. Technologies don’t improve exponentially for ever, they follow an S curve. The physical properties of the universe are fixed and finite. Eventually we will discover all the technologies that are practical, and we may not be all that far from doing so. Maybe only a few hundred years, and we may be quite far along the S curve of some of the best of them.
    - yourapostasy 6y ago
      While I think there is an "S" curve, I see we have quite a lot more to learn, much longer than a few hundred years' worth. I'd say more on the order of hundreds of millennia more at a minimum, because the scales I see possible are so vast. My metric is where we are on the Kardashev scale, how resilient we are to extinction-level events, and our time horizon. The ultimate "we're pretty close to knowing all the practical stuff" level being figuring out how to work around the entropic end of the universe. I count indefinite life extension among the practical tech tree, and once we accomplish that, the range of "practical" also expands. Even before all that, we're nowhere close to various practical limits we've calculated as theoretically possible in energy extraction, energy conversion, energy conservation, matter properties (compression strength, tension strength, torsion strength, and so on), computational density, information density, etc. For most of our species' history in geological time, we've barely edged over from sentience to sapience. On that scale, we're still at the boundary layer edge, and have yet to really delve into and establish ourselves within the time stream into sapience.
mattigames 6y ago
My guess is that we gonna move to the planets of the solar system farther away from the sun until we reach the last one (Neptune?), then we will make some attempts to go to the next closest remaining star, attempts that will probably fail.
Ancalagon 6y ago
At that point, and with that much time, and assuming we live that long, I imagine humanity could park a larger asteroid slightly outside of Earth orbit to gradually grow Earth's orbit outwards. Of course that would take a while, but a "while" is a relatively small amount of time when you're talking hundreds of millions of years.

by Nursie 6y ago

yourapostasy 6y ago

So we only have about 500 megayears to both attain a K2 scale civilization and find a way to use that power to protect our cradle world (or work around the extinction of life as we know it). Got it. No pressure.

EForEndeavour 6y ago
Bear in mind that our species has only existed for a rough upper limit of 500 KILOyears. The first electric motor was built only ~200 years ago, and we've only been technically spacefaring for ~60 years. We went from first heavier-than-air flight to first space station in 70 years. Our species has a thousand times our current age to figure things out. To unironically quote Dennis Reynolds from It's Always Sunny: we haven't peaked. We haven't even begun to peak. (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tS7ifk26tJc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tS7ifk26tJc)
- simonh 6y ago
  I’m afraid I don’t see it that way. Technologies don’t improve exponentially for ever, they follow an S curve. The physical properties of the universe are fixed and finite. Eventually we will discover all the technologies that are practical, and we may not be all that far from doing so. Maybe only a few hundred years, and we may be quite far along the S curve of some of the best of them.
  - yourapostasy 6y ago
    While I think there is an "S" curve, I see we have quite a lot more to learn, much longer than a few hundred years' worth. I'd say more on the order of hundreds of millennia more at a minimum, because the scales I see possible are so vast. My metric is where we are on the Kardashev scale, how resilient we are to extinction-level events, and our time horizon. The ultimate "we're pretty close to knowing all the practical stuff" level being figuring out how to work around the entropic end of the universe. I count indefinite life extension among the practical tech tree, and once we accomplish that, the range of "practical" also expands. Even before all that, we're nowhere close to various practical limits we've calculated as theoretically possible in energy extraction, energy conversion, energy conservation, matter properties (compression strength, tension strength, torsion strength, and so on), computational density, information density, etc. For most of our species' history in geological time, we've barely edged over from sentience to sapience. On that scale, we're still at the boundary layer edge, and have yet to really delve into and establish ourselves within the time stream into sapience.

mattigames 6y ago

My guess is that we gonna move to the planets of the solar system farther away from the sun until we reach the last one (Neptune?), then we will make some attempts to go to the next closest remaining star, attempts that will probably fail.

Ancalagon 6y ago

At that point, and with that much time, and assuming we live that long, I imagine humanity could park a larger asteroid slightly outside of Earth orbit to gradually grow Earth's orbit outwards. Of course that would take a while, but a "while" is a relatively small amount of time when you're talking hundreds of millions of years.