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The nature of the future seems obvious to me, but what I envision, I don't often see mentioned in these sorts of discussions. The engineering people talk about

The nature of the future seems obvious to me, but what I envision, I don't often see mentioned in these sorts of discussions. The engineering people talk about won't get us to self-supporting colonies on other celestial bodies. What will, someday, is re-engineering ourselves until we become the extraterrestrials we've failed to find in the rest of the solar system. It's analogous to how life emerged from the water on Earth. Every cell in our bodies (I'm plagiarizing a little, but I don't recall what) carries a bit of primordial ocean with just the right saltiness, because we really are still sea creatures with built in life support. But at the same time, we aren't adapted to the open sea and can't go back. Some day there will be creatures descended from us, maybe called human and maybe not, who have changes at the cellular level or lower to deal with the harsh environments on other planets. That carry their own atmosphere and ozone layer with them. And they probably will not be able to return to Earth. The litmus test will be whether a place is survivable with stone-age technology. Otherwise it's only a matter of time until a colony is wiped out due to some unforeseen technology failure.

javajosh 5y ago
It's an interesting point. I don't think we can get away with just re-engineering ourselves, though - Life is effectively one big phenomena. We'd need to produce an entire ecosystem. And to do that we could start with the smallest thing that could make a living on the moon. The moon is a good placeholder for "space" - and is arguably a lot kinder than most places. (If the OP is right about Mercury, then it would be somewhere between Earth and the Moon in terms of friendliness.) Earth's moon is far more extreme than the most extreme life we know of could endure[1]. Look at that table of extremophiles - and recognize that the Moon is easily 10x worse than the worst environments. There are only two resources available to potential life on the Moon: rocks and sunlight. There are indeed some interesting atomic elements in the rock[2], but you'll notice two elements not in the list: no hydrogen, no carbon. I don't see a feasible way to bioengineer the Rockeaters from "The Neverending Story" but even if you could you'd have to make sure they didn't need to breath or stay warm. And I'm pretty sure that such creatures would be closer to robots than biological life, anyway. (Note that life in empty space is about as harsh as you can get - you have sunlight, but without mass you can't grow or reproduce, and without gravity you can't move effectively or sustainably. You are forced to lose mass with every movement. As you move away from a star you lose even sunlight, and it's not clear what you could do out there except cool down to ~4K in equilibrium with cosmic background radiation and hope that you warm up enough to come back to life someday.) [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extremophile https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extremophile [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moon_rock#Composition https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moon_rock#Composition : mostly: Aluminum, Iron, Magnesium, Calcium, Silicon, Oxygen, Titanium
- perl4ever 5y ago
  I definitely agree that gravity, some sort of ecosystem, probably some kind of atmosphere, and a source of heat are needed in any case. The idea of "stone age" tech being enough to survive implies an ecosystem that maintains itself. A rogue planet could have heat and water if it was reasonably large or part of a multiple body system with tides. C.f. Enceladus and Io. Then there's Titan.

javajosh 5y ago

It's an interesting point. I don't think we can get away with just re-engineering ourselves, though - Life is effectively one big phenomena. We'd need to produce an entire ecosystem. And to do that we could start with the smallest thing that could make a living on the moon. The moon is a good placeholder for "space" - and is arguably a lot kinder than most places. (If the OP is right about Mercury, then it would be somewhere between Earth and the Moon in terms of friendliness.) Earth's moon is far more extreme than the most extreme life we know of could endure[1]. Look at that table of extremophiles - and recognize that the Moon is easily 10x worse than the worst environments. There are only two resources available to potential life on the Moon: rocks and sunlight. There are indeed some interesting atomic elements in the rock[2], but you'll notice two elements not in the list: no hydrogen, no carbon. I don't see a feasible way to bioengineer the Rockeaters from "The Neverending Story" but even if you could you'd have to make sure they didn't need to breath or stay warm. And I'm pretty sure that such creatures would be closer to robots than biological life, anyway. (Note that life in empty space is about as harsh as you can get - you have sunlight, but without mass you can't grow or reproduce, and without gravity you can't move effectively or sustainably. You are forced to lose mass with every movement. As you move away from a star you lose even sunlight, and it's not clear what you could do out there except cool down to ~4K in equilibrium with cosmic background radiation and hope that you warm up enough to come back to life someday.) [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extremophile https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extremophile [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moon_rock#Composition https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moon_rock#Composition : mostly: Aluminum, Iron, Magnesium, Calcium, Silicon, Oxygen, Titanium

perl4ever 5y ago
I definitely agree that gravity, some sort of ecosystem, probably some kind of atmosphere, and a source of heat are needed in any case. The idea of "stone age" tech being enough to survive implies an ecosystem that maintains itself. A rogue planet could have heat and water if it was reasonably large or part of a multiple body system with tides. C.f. Enceladus and Io. Then there's Titan.