5 ms·
It comes down to which side of the human spirit you are betting on. Do you think that no matter how hard and how smart we try in the next 200-300 years we will
by suprgeek 15y ago
It comes down to which side of the human spirit you are betting on. Do you think that no matter how hard and how smart we try in the next 200-300 years we will never overcome some of the fundamental challenges of space and time? Then yes, what Stross says would make sense.
Personally I am an optimist on these things - in 1711 you could not have imagined regular Aircraft - something we take for granted today much less Spacecrafts. Electricity, Computers, Cell-phones, Internet, etc would have been inconceivable.
Today we have been to the moon ~40 years ago. Villagers in India use cellphones and electricity and a fifth of humanity is interconnected via the net.
So I have to believe that by 2311 we will have cracked the problems around Interstellar travel and be living around a different Sun than our Sol.
Anything else is just underestimating the Human Spirit.
- cstross 15y agoYou're also assuming that this hypothetical Human Spirit is immune to E. O. Wilson's biophilia hypothesis: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biophilia_hypothesis http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biophilia_hypothesis (Otherwise it's not just human colonization you're talking about -- it's Terrestrial biosphere colonization, which is a vastly more complex matter than most people seem to be willing to contemplate.)
- suprgeek 15y agoThanks for the link. The hypothetical human spirit is the same mindset that drives the likes of this chap http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ranulph_Fiennes http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ranulph_Fiennes or the early (American) settlers. So barring an extinction level event there is better than even odds that Humanity will overcome the Gravity well of the sun en-mass to colonize another Solar system.