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>I think it's kinda cool to consider that rogue planets / brown dwarfs [0] could be candidates for extending human life beyond the solar system post-Sol. Assumi

>I think it's kinda cool to consider that rogue planets / brown dwarfs [0] could be candidates for extending human life beyond the solar system post-Sol. Assuming we have enough fissile material (or master cold fusion) to perpetuate the civilization's energy requirements, we could explore the stars in darkness for eons. Every time I read a comment like this I wonder if people have actually taken the time to consider what living off the Earth would actually be like. The quality of life for anyone living off the Earth would be abysmal. Think of the most barren, hostile, nearly uninhabitable places on Earth, they're still magnitudes higher in habitability than anywhere we're likely to find outside Earth. Then if somehow we actually manage to find a place with a climate similar to Earth, that may even have some life or organic material, there's the issue of compatibility. Look at the issues humans have just travelling from one side of the world to the other. Pathogens, the environment, even the food can cause problems, let alone a place with entirely alien life. Take something as simple as the prion that causes mad cow disease, it's a protein. What kinds of bacteria, virii, amoebas, fungi, parasites etc. Will we encounter? Would we even know we're infected until it'a too late? Maybe some kind of strange prion or virus that systemically and harmfully alters humans in a way that's undetectable until the whole population is infected? I mean this happens still here, with life on our own world. But, before all that is the endless darkness, entire generations living like nomads in the cold, black emptiness of space. Entire generations seeing nothing, living their lives only so their children's children's children can maybe someday see something. Overall though, the idea that we can just escape the Earth someday so it'll be fine just leads to shortsighted neglectful actions that destroy the planet. That colonial, we can just expand and keep growing indefinitely and just move to a new place, mindset stopped being reasonable the moment we spread across the world. Moving to a new planet is not the same as just hopping in a ship and sailing across the ocean. It's not a reasonable backup plan, it's not a reasonable solution. We have one home, Earth, we are all made from this place, someday we go back to it. No other place we ever may find will be our home the way the Earth is. The idea we should just use and abandon the Earth is just so incredibly backwards to the way we should be thinking.

moralestapia 6y ago
>The quality of life for anyone living off the Earth would be abysmal. I agree with the general sentiment of your post, however, this may not be necessarily true. If you have a shelter that provides adequate conditions for life, that's it. Sure, no more walks in the park, but still doable. Plenty of people have not left their homes at all in the past few months and they seem to be ok-ish.
- tomrod 6y ago
  Indeed. We humans adapt our environments to our needs. There is no reason this would not occur off Terra Firma.
- grawprog 6y ago
  No...that sounds pretty abysmal to me. But I guess if you don't appreciate the outside world on your own planet it doesn't really matter. >If you have a shelter that provides adequate conditions for life, that's it. I mean so do prisons, generally, or well they're supposed to, most people wouldn't choose to live in one though.
  - wcarss 6y ago
    This (and the parent) both require a kind of paucity of vision or imagined capability -- endless subterranean hospital hallways and infinities of military bunkeresque quarters would indeed be abysmal, but there is no particular reason we could not instead build sweeping open spaces full of light and life and visions we've never dreamed, if we were so capable as to profitably settle a rogue world. Sure, it could (and likely would!) be hard to make it not suck to live in a place like that. But if we're going to indulge in wild future space colonization fantasies, we certainly don't need to stop and get mired in the economic feasibilities of the potential lifestyles there to the point that they become depressing. Imagine "Halo", not "HAL"!
    - radu_floricica 6y ago
      Yeap. Indoor space in a seismically dead world is very cheap. Energy is presumably also cheap. Paint the ceiling blue and you ciuld have real sized California. For a contemporary example, people pay a premium to go to the mall. Just scale it up - not even a lot, 10x or 100x, and you basically have paradise. Far from abysmal.
wruza 6y ago
Fair points, but only assuming that "we humans" will still remain mostly biological by that time. Which is barely suitable for anything complex, including modern tasks and parts of life.
booleandilemma 6y ago
Maybe any expansion does require a few generations to toughen up and live a spartan frontier lifestyle. It wasn’t easy for the first colonists to come to the new world, it won’t be easy for the first colonists in space. But in the long run humanity will be better for it. We have to take the first step, otherwise we never would have left Africa.
michaelmrose 6y ago
The kind of people apt to be excited about humanity expanding beyond this globe in the future is literally the exact same population that is enthused by environmental causes. The problem we face isn't thinking that we can throw away the earth and get another one it's the fact that we are short lived and short sighted. You are taking pot shots at exactly the wrong people.
- grawprog 6y ago
  >You are taking pot shots at exactly the wrong people. These fantasies tend to come from technocrats and transhuminists. Transhumanists very much would like a world where everything is sterile and manmade, where the natural world doesn't get in the way of human technological progress and advancement. The belief that humans are very much above nature and the world around them and that it needs to be controlled and manipulated to suit our whims, whether that's exploiting it for resources, or trying to manipulate it to some ideal state. The idea that we can leave this world and turn space or some other world into some 'humanified' place that's suitable to us stems from this same idea of human superiority over our own world and the universe and that somehow, we can make it better, more suitable for us.
  - whatshisface 6y ago
    >that somehow, we can make it better, more suitable for us. Assuming you live in a house, car, tent, lean-to or any other kind of shelter, you're calling yourself a "transhumanist" with this extremely broad definition.
    - perl4ever 6y ago
      It seems to me that "transhumanist" implies changing oneself to fit the environment, more than the other way around. I wouldn't call myself such, but I think if humans do colonize anywhere off of Earth, it will require modifying what a "human" is to where it is possible to live with much less technology in today's sense.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
PaulHoule 6y ago
With my math I see it is just possible with materials we have to build an O'Neil style colony large enough that it doesn't need a roof, a spacecraft could graze the atmosphere, re-enter and land, it would be a large and comfortable place, but it's hard to afford large amounts of relief (e.g. make some alps to climb) Not sure if people then would think Nitrogen is too dear to do such a thing. Show me a journal bearing that is good for 10 km/sec velocity difference on the outside and you could 'pack' the habitable section with a non-rotating structure that holds it in and then you can imagine a 'small ringworld' similar in diameter to the Earth but with much better ratio of living area to mass. Either way that is a large environment that people could make the way they like. If one wants to live on a 'planet', I would picture the base on Luna will be one of those SpaceX starships turned on it's side somewhere near iron deposits and soon it will be joined by steel cylinders made by indigenous material. Oxygen and Iron will be abundent, but I worry about Carbon and Nitrogen. Either way the cylinders will be buried under a few meters of soil -- it will be like spending all your time inside widebody airliners but having to be careful not to jump too high or you'll hit your head.
senko 6y ago
> Every time I read a comment like this I wonder if people have actually taken the time to consider what living off the Earth would actually be like. Parent is explicitly refering to human life post-Sun: >> extending human life beyond the solar system post-Sol. It took us only a few million years to get off the trees and invent Bitcoin. If, by some chance, civilization once called human will exist at that time (2000x longer than current span of human species), all the problems you described should be trivial for them. And if by then, by some chance, due to countless generations of people sharing your view on the matter, they don't set off for the stars - they deserve to burn.
perl4ever 6y ago
>entire generations living like nomads in the cold, black emptiness of space The most logical objection to interstellar travel, which I don't see you making, is that once you have your generation ship, another star is only an unnecessary risk and an infinitesimal chance of a congenial planet. If you can live without a solar system, why do you want to camp next to an unshielded nuclear reactor and poke around the surrounding debris? On the other hand, if something the size of the K-T asteroid or larger was headed for Earth and there was a substantial amount of time to prepare (say 1000 years) then it doesn't matter if people want to abandon it. And I think in that time, it's reasonably possible.
keithwhor 6y ago
You've set up a very strange strawman; never have I argued that we should "use up" or "abandon" the Earth. I specifically said post-Sol. The reality of this planet is that it has a finite lifespan. I hope with all my heart we maximize that lifespan, but we have about 1.3B years before life (as we know it today) is no longer possible on Earth without major geoengineering projects on a planetary scale -- which would presumably also enable us to settle other planets. The Sun will simply get too hot, our planet will not be able to maintain any sort of thermal equilibrium and carbon cycle. It's a physical inevitability. Within 2.8B years, the average surface temperature of the Earth will be 147C [0]. Dreaming of the stars is one of the most natural and wondrous human experiences. It's the only constant across hundreds, thousands of generations; a single canvas we've pointed to and asked questions about for millennia. Do not mistake optimism for our species as a dismissal of the problems we face today. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_the_far_future https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_the_far_future

moralestapia 6y ago

>The quality of life for anyone living off the Earth would be abysmal. I agree with the general sentiment of your post, however, this may not be necessarily true. If you have a shelter that provides adequate conditions for life, that's it. Sure, no more walks in the park, but still doable. Plenty of people have not left their homes at all in the past few months and they seem to be ok-ish.

tomrod 6y ago
Indeed. We humans adapt our environments to our needs. There is no reason this would not occur off Terra Firma.
grawprog 6y ago
No...that sounds pretty abysmal to me. But I guess if you don't appreciate the outside world on your own planet it doesn't really matter. >If you have a shelter that provides adequate conditions for life, that's it. I mean so do prisons, generally, or well they're supposed to, most people wouldn't choose to live in one though.
- wcarss 6y ago
  This (and the parent) both require a kind of paucity of vision or imagined capability -- endless subterranean hospital hallways and infinities of military bunkeresque quarters would indeed be abysmal, but there is no particular reason we could not instead build sweeping open spaces full of light and life and visions we've never dreamed, if we were so capable as to profitably settle a rogue world. Sure, it could (and likely would!) be hard to make it not suck to live in a place like that. But if we're going to indulge in wild future space colonization fantasies, we certainly don't need to stop and get mired in the economic feasibilities of the potential lifestyles there to the point that they become depressing. Imagine "Halo", not "HAL"!
  - radu_floricica 6y ago
    Yeap. Indoor space in a seismically dead world is very cheap. Energy is presumably also cheap. Paint the ceiling blue and you ciuld have real sized California. For a contemporary example, people pay a premium to go to the mall. Just scale it up - not even a lot, 10x or 100x, and you basically have paradise. Far from abysmal.

wruza 6y ago

Fair points, but only assuming that "we humans" will still remain mostly biological by that time. Which is barely suitable for anything complex, including modern tasks and parts of life.

booleandilemma 6y ago

Maybe any expansion does require a few generations to toughen up and live a spartan frontier lifestyle. It wasn’t easy for the first colonists to come to the new world, it won’t be easy for the first colonists in space. But in the long run humanity will be better for it. We have to take the first step, otherwise we never would have left Africa.

michaelmrose 6y ago

The kind of people apt to be excited about humanity expanding beyond this globe in the future is literally the exact same population that is enthused by environmental causes. The problem we face isn't thinking that we can throw away the earth and get another one it's the fact that we are short lived and short sighted. You are taking pot shots at exactly the wrong people.

grawprog 6y ago
>You are taking pot shots at exactly the wrong people. These fantasies tend to come from technocrats and transhuminists. Transhumanists very much would like a world where everything is sterile and manmade, where the natural world doesn't get in the way of human technological progress and advancement. The belief that humans are very much above nature and the world around them and that it needs to be controlled and manipulated to suit our whims, whether that's exploiting it for resources, or trying to manipulate it to some ideal state. The idea that we can leave this world and turn space or some other world into some 'humanified' place that's suitable to us stems from this same idea of human superiority over our own world and the universe and that somehow, we can make it better, more suitable for us.
- whatshisface 6y ago
  >that somehow, we can make it better, more suitable for us. Assuming you live in a house, car, tent, lean-to or any other kind of shelter, you're calling yourself a "transhumanist" with this extremely broad definition.
  - perl4ever 6y ago
    It seems to me that "transhumanist" implies changing oneself to fit the environment, more than the other way around. I wouldn't call myself such, but I think if humans do colonize anywhere off of Earth, it will require modifying what a "human" is to where it is possible to live with much less technology in today's sense.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]

PaulHoule 6y ago

With my math I see it is just possible with materials we have to build an O'Neil style colony large enough that it doesn't need a roof, a spacecraft could graze the atmosphere, re-enter and land, it would be a large and comfortable place, but it's hard to afford large amounts of relief (e.g. make some alps to climb) Not sure if people then would think Nitrogen is too dear to do such a thing. Show me a journal bearing that is good for 10 km/sec velocity difference on the outside and you could 'pack' the habitable section with a non-rotating structure that holds it in and then you can imagine a 'small ringworld' similar in diameter to the Earth but with much better ratio of living area to mass. Either way that is a large environment that people could make the way they like. If one wants to live on a 'planet', I would picture the base on Luna will be one of those SpaceX starships turned on it's side somewhere near iron deposits and soon it will be joined by steel cylinders made by indigenous material. Oxygen and Iron will be abundent, but I worry about Carbon and Nitrogen. Either way the cylinders will be buried under a few meters of soil -- it will be like spending all your time inside widebody airliners but having to be careful not to jump too high or you'll hit your head.

senko 6y ago

> Every time I read a comment like this I wonder if people have actually taken the time to consider what living off the Earth would actually be like. Parent is explicitly refering to human life post-Sun: >> extending human life beyond the solar system post-Sol. It took us only a few million years to get off the trees and invent Bitcoin. If, by some chance, civilization once called human will exist at that time (2000x longer than current span of human species), all the problems you described should be trivial for them. And if by then, by some chance, due to countless generations of people sharing your view on the matter, they don't set off for the stars - they deserve to burn.

perl4ever 6y ago

>entire generations living like nomads in the cold, black emptiness of space The most logical objection to interstellar travel, which I don't see you making, is that once you have your generation ship, another star is only an unnecessary risk and an infinitesimal chance of a congenial planet. If you can live without a solar system, why do you want to camp next to an unshielded nuclear reactor and poke around the surrounding debris? On the other hand, if something the size of the K-T asteroid or larger was headed for Earth and there was a substantial amount of time to prepare (say 1000 years) then it doesn't matter if people want to abandon it. And I think in that time, it's reasonably possible.

keithwhor 6y ago

You've set up a very strange strawman; never have I argued that we should "use up" or "abandon" the Earth. I specifically said post-Sol. The reality of this planet is that it has a finite lifespan. I hope with all my heart we maximize that lifespan, but we have about 1.3B years before life (as we know it today) is no longer possible on Earth without major geoengineering projects on a planetary scale -- which would presumably also enable us to settle other planets. The Sun will simply get too hot, our planet will not be able to maintain any sort of thermal equilibrium and carbon cycle. It's a physical inevitability. Within 2.8B years, the average surface temperature of the Earth will be 147C [0]. Dreaming of the stars is one of the most natural and wondrous human experiences. It's the only constant across hundreds, thousands of generations; a single canvas we've pointed to and asked questions about for millennia. Do not mistake optimism for our species as a dismissal of the problems we face today. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_the_far_future https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_the_far_future