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All Possible Views About Humanity's Future Are Wild

61 points by deegles 5y ago

creamytaco 5y ago
If the current situation wasn't so grim, I would chuckle at the magnitude of delusional thinking it must take to produce a post such as this, when the climate crisis has humanity paralyzed like deer caught in the headlights. We're destroying the earth and suffocating in our own waste, yet "there's a good chance of productivity explosion by 2100 which could quickly lead to what one might call a "technologically mature" civilization"
- deleted 5y ago
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- UnFleshedOne 5y ago
  Right now climate situation is not scary enough even for activists in the area -- they spend their time mixing in unrelated social justice issues and protesting nuclear plants. Such frivolous notions will fall off once it becomes clear we actually need to solve concrete problems or die trying. It is possible for destruction to happen just fast enough for everybody to finally take notice, but not fast enough to preclude geoengineering solutions for good. That's one possible (if not pretty) path to get to a technologically mature stage. The risk is always that we wake up already in a boiling frog state, or that even when dangers become self-evident for everybody, we still spend time on power games instead of fixing the problems. In that case, well, we kinda deserve it...
- thomashop 5y ago
  The climate crisis will probably only wipe poor humans out. I'd also say that it is a rather new phenomenon (the last generation) where people have started worrying about climate change. We are starting to take action. The next generation could already be a lot more sustainable.
  - cableshaft 5y ago
    Humans will wipe out plenty of animals and species on the way to that extinction though (also clearly plenty of other animals are suffering from climate change, see the estimated billion animals that died in Australian wildfires last year, or the baby birds that jumped to their deaths to escape the heat in the PNW heat dome this year, or the bleaching of coral reefs, or all sorts of other ways the climate is killing off animals). Sure there might be some life that survives the climate crisis after we're gone, but the planet is going to lose most of its biodiversity before then.
- nostromo 5y ago
  The fact that global warming is seen as our most dire emergency is a testament to how few crises we actually face now as a species.
  - simiones 5y ago
    Ever since the earliest hunter-gatherer times, there has never been a crisis of this magnitude in the history of the human race, so I'm not sure what you're on about. Ever since we were more than a handful of people living in a single location, there has never before been a situation where, by our own actions, we were this likely to destroy our current way of life for the entirety of the human population.
  - deleted 5y ago
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- simiones 5y ago
  The same magnitude of delusional thinking can be seen in the reactions to your post... Far too many are willing to believe that the climate crisis will be fixed by someone else in the future, and we'll all just forget about it as a minor blip (all the while, being entirely unwilling to accept even the slightest change that could affect economic growth).
- sbierwagen 5y ago
  >We're destroying the earth and suffocating in our own waste To be clear: Global warming is bad. It is going to kill tens of millions of people, drown a lot of cities, and render alarmingly large sections of the planet uninhabitable to unmodified humans. It does not actually pose an existential threat to technological civilization. Even 5C of warming would not kill all humans. The cities will just move north. We are not in danger of running out of oil or coal before transitioning to clean electricity. 2100 will look very different, (less international trade, almost certainly no unified global internet like we have now) but regular ole global capitalism will keep rolling along. Humanity is not dealing with global warming very effectively. But it won't kill 100% of all humans. It won't even kill 50%.
  - tsimionescu 5y ago
    > The cities will just move north. We are not in danger of running out of oil or coal before transitioning to clean electricity. 2100 will look very different, (less international trade, almost certainly no unified global internet like we have now) but regular ole global capitalism will keep rolling along. You're greatly underestimating the societal impact that this will have. Cities don't 'just move' somewhere else in a few decades without causing massive turmoil. For one thing, the countries up north (or south) will not just accept (or be able to handle) a few hundred million immigrants. There will be global war, and it's hard to say what will be left at the end. At the very least, billions will die, not 'tens of millions'. Not to mention, we have no idea what impact this will have on global agriculture. Like it or not, we are not entirely separated from existing ecosystems, and the destruction of most land-dwelling animals living near the equator will not be a small thing.
PicassoCTs 5y ago
Many of us are hoping for a deus ex machina. Some magnificent piece of tech (fusion e.g) that keeps giving us time of plenty indefinitely, allowing us to postpone growing up forever. Because that is what we do, when we get it. Instead what we got, was the ability to self-surveil us (cellphone-panopticon), to entertain us without consuming to much resources (games, stream-movies, electronic communication-social sphere) and other funny mechanical limbs. We got the ability to practice birth control and we are currently working to get a hold of the worser angels of our nature, left, right and center. "You can't always get what you want, but if you try sometimes - you get what you need..." My only worry is that whoever is social engineering this "golden path" has not factored in the tendency to get stuck in feudalistic local optima happily ever after. But im toasting them. This all could be so much worser..
simiones 5y ago
The author's basic arguments in this post are not at all about space expansion, they are simply about how "wild" (that is, unlikely or surprising) any of the options actually are. They present a timeline where they don't believe it's that significant if the predictions they will make will happen in 100 or 100k years, since they intend to claim that this will create a civilization stable for billions of years. I would bet that the whole series will end up being mostly meaningless, in the sense that it will be either trivial or wrong. That is, either it will continue to make trivial observations (either we live in the first ~100k years of a billion-year civilization, or such a civilization will never exist - a truism); or, they will start making obviously wrong claims, such as the AI singularity idea. Edit: In general, talking about stability on the order of billions of years is absurd. This is literally enough time to conceive of self-conscious organisms evolving inside our bodies. It is enough times for the radioactive decay of many stable materials. Imagining that a man-made structure could be stable for this amount of time is laughable.
nostromo 5y ago
> This view seems "wild": we should be doing a double take at any view that we live in such a special time. The thing about exponential growth is that all points seem "wild" with growth. Humans or AI traveling in space seems like a smaller leap to me than several previous "advancements" like the origin of life itself or the evolution of multicellular organisms.
mooseburger 5y ago
I wonder how many people will actually attempt mind uploads, or believe that completely computer generated agents are sentient. Especially since it seems like a lot of these technologists are willing to use duck typing to determine sentience, which obviously isn't good enough. Seriously, how are you going to prove mind uploads will somehow be different from this: https://www.whompcomic.com/2013/06/19/pork-futures/ https://www.whompcomic.com/2013/06/19/pork-futures/ Even a Moravec transfer boils down to taking a leap of faith on the ship of Theseus thought experiment having a definite answer, not to mention the inherent creepiness of the proposition of slowly replacing your brain with some foreign substance.
- jstx1 5y ago
  Yes, the transporter problem - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nQHBAdShgYI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nQHBAdShgYI
- simiones 5y ago
  I think it is entirely impossible for mind transfers to work differently from this*. I think most people who believe in this sort of technology accept this. In fact, if you do not believe in transcendental souls of some kind, there should be no fear of this type of scenario. You anyway go to sleep each night and awaken after a discontinuity. Why would this be significantly different? Now, killing yourself after having your mind copied to the machine doesn't make any sense. More interestingly though, if we had the necessary technology for this type of transfer, we should also be able to do mind/machine interfaces, such that either copy of you could directly experience what the other does, meaning that this could be experienced differently from a notion of either a single entity OR 2 separate entities. Of course, it would follow that in fact multiple people could share experiences in similar ways, with unclear effects on the very notion of identity. If I could see, feel, hear, even think the same things as you, would the concept of me and you as separate identities actually mean anything to us anymore? I suspect that we can't really imagine what society and humanity would actually look like if/when such technology were widely available.
  - mooseburger 5y ago
AlbertCory 5y ago
Some depressing reasons why I can't get excited about this: 1) Speed of light, that inconvenient fact. Somehow in sci-fi stories, that's supposedly "overcome" someday? What if it never is? 2) Intelligent life on Earth is indeed "unlikely" given all the things that could have extinguished it by now. However, given billions of galaxies, it must have existed in many, many places, maybe even in our own galaxy, and some of them are maybe even still around. 3) Given (1), they will never contact us, nor will we contact them. 4) Even if you don't accept (1) through (3), what could anyone usefully do about it?
- everdrive 5y ago
  Even if intelligent life existed in a nearby galaxy, our civilization might be gone by the time a communication manages to go round trip. More realistically, what are the odds that civilizations in the universe occur near to each other in both space AND time? ie, perhaps an ancient civilization 1,000 light years away came and went 20,000 years ago? Or longer? There's no chance we'd sync up.
- simiones 5y ago
  > 2) Intelligent life on Earth is indeed "unlikely" given all the things that could have extinguished it by now. However, given billions of galaxies, it must have existed in many, many places, maybe even in our own galaxy, and some of them are maybe even still around. "Must" is an extremely strong word to use for something with entirely unknown probability. There is absolutely no basis to calculate a probability of life existing at all (except to say that it is >0, since we exist), and intelligence is many more steps above that. The full extent of what we can say with any kind of certainty at all about intelligent life is that the probability of it existing outside Earth is non-0. Basically anything else is wild speculation. I'll also add that discussing time across the entire universe is meaningless, as we know from special relativity. An event in another galaxy that is outside our light hyper-cone has no time-like relation to our own history. A civilization in a galaxy that's 1M light years away from us can be seen as concurrent with us by some observers, can be seen as existing in our distant past by other observers (up to 1M years ago), or in our distant future by yet others (up to 1M years in our future).
kerblang 5y ago
The essential question is about extrapolating the arc of human progress: If it continues asymptotically, we become as gods "soon"; if it turns into an S trapped by an upper bound, progress grinds slowly to a halt; and if it inverts like a wave, we see a levelling off, equally rapid decline, and maybe some kind of evolutionary rebound rather than simple extinction. All seem mathematically valid (in the broadest sense) but I don't see a reason to dismiss other options in favor of the asymptotic outcome. But like many people I am intuitively skeptical about we-become-as-gods.
- reducesuffering 5y ago
  The chances that we're about to hit the inflection point in #2 and #3 are still very small. There's a huge area where we can be on the rise in #2 and #3 before inflection.
- cogman10 5y ago
  I think progress has already started to hit a local maxima. An argument I heard was that the number of things recognizable by someone from the past has dropped to almost 0. Consider, for example, major inventions like airplanes, refrigerators, automobiles, microwaves, telephones. You take those inventions and people from just 10 years before they became ubiquitous would be completely amazed by them. Most of those inventions took a hold of society from the 1900s -> 1960s. If you look at the 1960s->2020, there are very few stand out inventions that would be completely unrecognizable to the general public. Personal computers and medical treatment options with CRISPER seem to be the only major standouts. From my perspective, we look to be out of the age of invention. Instead, I expect humanity to continue refining and perfecting already existing tools. That's roughly the same state we were in from the 1600s to the 1800s.
  - inglor_cz 5y ago
    "From my perspective, we look to be out of the age of invention." One of the possible reasons is that we haven't found a cheaper source of energy for a long time. A lot of things are possible if energy gets cheaper.
Lammy 5y ago
I love humanity's hubris in naming silicon life "artificial" like carbon life totally wasn't.
simmerup 5y ago
It’s very possible we have about as much chance of colonising the nearest star as an ant colony has of getting from Australia to America. In which case our earth will probably end up looking like one of those suffocated ponds that expanded too fast for its given resources.
- wincy 5y ago
  But animals have gone from one continent to another on land rafts [0], so it’s not entirely impossible. And it only has to happen once. [0] http://www.bbc.com/earth/story/20160126-the-monkeys-that-sailed-across-the-atlantic-to-south-america http://www.bbc.com/earth/story/20160126-the-monkeys-that-sai...
  - simmerup 5y ago
    I meant by conscious effort. However, if you’re happy with this, I guess we could just launch balls of biological matter at different planets and be content that in a few thousand years the balls may land and start the seed of life. But it wouldn’t help us much…
- emteycz 5y ago
  Why colonize the nearest star - we have plenty of space around the Sun and surrounding it is more than enough material to construct countless O'Neill cylinders?
  - simmerup 5y ago
    This is definitely possible and very cool, though I'm not sure I'd ever want to live in a space settlement. But the OP aims for galaxy-scale settlement, which is the context I was replying too
smoldesu 5y ago
> A key part of my view (which I'll write about more later) is that within this century, we could develop advanced enough AI to start a productivity explosion. This is the productivity explosion. I hate to break it to you, but it's hard to imagine places where AI isn't being implemented, and while our current research is progressing pretty smoothly on the topic, I don't really see any 10x or 100x improvements in that pipeline, unless we're strictly talking about model training (which can feel like an entirely different discipline altogether).
api 5y ago
I recall speculating years ago that the universe might be starting a phase change from non-living to living matter. Life, left to its own devices, will eventually (after billions and billions more years) transform all matter and energy in the universe into life, causing life to become the dominant physical process for a long epoch of time. The life we see (and are) now is the very beginning of that phase transition, the seed crystals if you will. It also leads to my personal speculation about the Fermi paradox: if the universe is relatively uniform and has cooled and evolved at a consistent rate, we might not see any star-faring aliens because there aren't very many of them around yet. All across the universe there could be a ton of worlds with life approximately as complex as is found on this one. I call this the "uniform cooling hypothesis." We don't see things like alien megastructures because that stuff hasn't happened yet. Of course for the uniform cooling hypothesis to fully explain the Fermi paradox the standard deviation for living complexity/diversity would have to be relatively small. The distribution would have to be tight enough that at least a non-trivial fraction of galaxies do not yet contain any significant number of star-faring aliens. We would therefore have a decent chance of being in one of those not-yet-colonized galaxies, explaining our "paradox." If the distribution is really tight we might go to the stars and run right into others who are on their first journeys, or get visited within a short time frame +/- our first interstellar trips. If some fraction of UFOs are aliens maybe we are seeing them because we are about to do the same thing. It's "steam engine time." Note also that intergalactic travel is many orders of magnitude harder than interstellar travel. It would require speeds close to 'c' and accompanying time dilation to even be imaginable, since over such long time scales complex materials actually start to fall apart at the atomic and molecular level. Sleeper ships could go to Centauri but they won't take you to Andromeda. The uniform cooling hypothesis would easily explain a lack of intergalactic colonists. They simply do not exist yet.
- simmerup 5y ago
  Space by Stephen Baxter explores the uniform idea you have
  - api 5y ago
    On reading list. :) I would be surprised if the idea were novel.
wins32767 5y ago
I think this article misses the possibly that we had a shot to get an interplanetary civilization due to the accumulation of fossil fuels over the last ~400m years, but that we've consumed those resources not getting out into space meaningfully and therefore have missed the window (as it were). We've clearly exceeded the carrying capacity of Earth and the period from the 1950s to the 2050s may well be the only time period where there is enough civilizational/energy surplus to afford the extremely high upfront costs of creating self sustaining ecologies off of Earth. I hope I'm wrong, but if civilization collapses (as they all seem to do eventually), I'm not sure it will ever be possible for another Earth based species to get off planet meaningfully (due, for example, to the unique circumstances required to lay down large coal beds).
- gmadsen 5y ago
  why would you assume fossil fuels are a requirement for space travel? liquid hydrogen doesn't require fossil fuels to make, it is just a lot cheaper to do it that way. we could also use nuclear propulsion, which the russians have been able to successfully do with cruise missles
  - Budabellly 5y ago
    I think OP may be implying the fossil fuels are necessary for the "industrial revolution" part of a civilization's development -- and that industrial revolution is a gating factor for achieving spacefaring technology.
    - wins32767 5y ago
      Yes, it's this. After the collapse of the western Roman empire, the standard of living dropped to bronze age levels in many areas, well below where it was before the Romans took over. Assuming a similar decline after modern civilization collapses (to say pre-industrial revolution levels), I don't see how it's possible to get back without the easy surplus energy. It's much more complicated to build batteries or nuclear or solar than it is to make a steam engine.
  - 5y ago
YossarianFrPrez 5y ago
This sort of thinking, which has been enjoyed by many great sci-fi writers over the last ~seventy years, is cool on one hand, and is the sort of thing I enjoyed in high school. But it turns out that the big problems facing us aren't exclusively technological. Renewable energy is an example of a technological problem; greed is an example of a psycho-cultural one. Both are vitally important to address, but sci-fi authors have generally tackled the technical problems and not the cultural ones.
ctoth 5y ago
There's just so much negativity here. Get off Twitter, read a good science fiction novel outside!
- minikites 5y ago
  Outside for me happens to be full of climate change induced wildfire smoke.
- mooseburger 5y ago
  I don't actually believe technology can save us, don't find the techno-utopias concocted by sci-fi authors to actually be utopias, and don't accept the thesis that we have progressed because we're better at satisfying bodily appetites to be compelling.
pcrh 5y ago
I think we have a very poor chance of colonizing any other planets. We can barely manage to colonize the antarctic....
excalibur 5y ago
> Ultimately, it's very hard for me to see a case against thinking something like this is at least reasonably likely: "We will eventually create robust, stable settlements throughout our galaxy and beyond." It seems like saying "no way" to that statement would itself require "wild" confidence in something about the limits of technology, and/or long-run choices people will make, and/or the inevitability of human extinction, and/or something about aliens or simulations. Human extinction bit seems pretty probable, not particularly wild. It will be wild if we can stick around long enough to get our technology to the point where it can continue advancing indefinitely without us.
mcguire 5y ago
"Actually, no, let's go even more conservative. You think our economic and scientific progress will stagnate. Today's civilizations will crumble, and many more civilizations will fall and rise. Sure, we'll eventually get the ability to expand throughout the galaxy. But it will take 100,000 years. That's 10x the amount of time that has passed since human civilization began in the Levant." How far will these civilizations crumble? What will they use for energy, given that we have exhausted the easily accessible sources of coal and oil? "Spreading throughout the galaxy would certainly be harder if nothing like mind uploading (which I'll discuss in a future piece, and which is part of why I think future space settlements could have "value lock-in" as discussed above) can ever be done." "Mind uploading" is the wrong way to look at it. How about "mind copying" for a best case (whether that copying requires the destruction of the original is another issue); "mind simulation" is a less palatable case. "But space expansion seems feasible, and our galaxy is empty. These two things seem in tension. A similar tension - the question of why we see no signs of extraterrestrials, despite the galaxy having so many possible stars they could emerge from - is often discussed under the heading of the Fermi Paradox." Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. (Yeah, that's pretty lame.)
- macintux 5y ago
  > What will they use for energy, given that we have exhausted the easily accessible sources of coal and oil? That’s a source of much depression for me. We’re so close to being ready to fill the galaxy, while simultaneously close to a collapse that might prevent any future civilization from doing the same. And what if we really are the only hope in the galaxy, or even beyond that, to propagate life that can truly appreciate the universe?
  - Robotbeat 5y ago
    You can bootstrap without fossil fuels. It’s tough to rely on biomass with ~8 billion people, but if the population is smaller, it works fine. Also, we used to rely on hydroelectric produced hydrogen for nitrogen fertilizer for decades before steam reforming of fossil fuels became cheaper and proven (around 1950). Trains ran on biomass in much of the US. Early European American settlers used biomass and bio-sourced iron (bog iron made of deposits from iron bacteria) for iron implements. We used a lot of hydro for industrial prime motive power, too, in the 1800s in the US, for grinding grains, etc, etc. before that, the Netherlands and others harnessed wind for industrial purposes. Wind, hydro, and biomass is enough to kickstart a hydrogen economy and bootstrap into solar, modern wind, modern batteries, nuclear, etc. Fossil fuels are just a convenient shortcut and not always as useful as they seem (see: the Resource Curse, how resource-poor Japan is still able to industrialize, etc). If the Fracking Revolution hadn’t happened, the US would still be burning a lot more coal, but we’d probably have more electrification of transport, etc. So I think if humanity used up every scrap of fossil fuel, we’d still be able to bootstrap to industrialization and modernity. But using up all fossil fuels is actually pretty hard (which is why climate change is hard to mitigate…). There’s hundreds of years of gas and oil, probably a thousand years of coal, etc. Biomass can be used up over a faster time, but if you modulate its harvesting, it can last indefinitely and even when you scour the landscape of trees and desertify the landscape, over tens of thousands of years, nature will reverse what you did (minus extinct species).
JohnWhigham 5y ago
Good article, however I think it's too pessimistic about the possibility of extraterrestrials. I don't know if it's human exceptionalism or poor understanding of how mind-breakingly massive the universe actually is, or a combination of the two, but there is life out there. We've only been searching for a couple decades with our primitive tools and haven't even begun to scratch at an atom of the surface of places to look for life.
Animats 5y ago
Why does interstellar expansion seem feasible? Unless special relativity is wrong, it's just going to take too long to get anywhere.
varelse 5y ago
So seems like some sort of front loading that the singularity isn't going to happen between the years 2030 to 2040 after all... But I'm biased to think the Galaxy is already inhabited for the same reasons people think we are living in a simulation. What continues to amaze me is why people think the Earth must be so very very special and that if aliens were out there they would be paying attention to us other than at best monitoring us like a beehive to make sure we don't start stirring up the galactic pot. As to why they don't just wipe us out, I figure any world with billions of years of evolutionary progress is valuable IP and worth preservation if possible. Or as I joked for a very long time: worlds like ours are the equivalent of reality television for advanced species. And I loved it when South Park covered that very subject.

61 points by deegles 5y ago

If the current situation wasn't so grim, I would chuckle at the magnitude of delusional thinking it must take to produce a post such as this, when the climate crisis has humanity paralyzed like deer caught in the headlights. We're destroying the earth and suffocating in our own waste, yet "there's a good chance of productivity explosion by 2100 which could quickly lead to what one might call a "technologically mature" civilization"

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
UnFleshedOne 5y ago
Right now climate situation is not scary enough even for activists in the area -- they spend their time mixing in unrelated social justice issues and protesting nuclear plants. Such frivolous notions will fall off once it becomes clear we actually need to solve concrete problems or die trying. It is possible for destruction to happen just fast enough for everybody to finally take notice, but not fast enough to preclude geoengineering solutions for good. That's one possible (if not pretty) path to get to a technologically mature stage. The risk is always that we wake up already in a boiling frog state, or that even when dangers become self-evident for everybody, we still spend time on power games instead of fixing the problems. In that case, well, we kinda deserve it...
thomashop 5y ago
The climate crisis will probably only wipe poor humans out. I'd also say that it is a rather new phenomenon (the last generation) where people have started worrying about climate change. We are starting to take action. The next generation could already be a lot more sustainable.
- cableshaft 5y ago
  Humans will wipe out plenty of animals and species on the way to that extinction though (also clearly plenty of other animals are suffering from climate change, see the estimated billion animals that died in Australian wildfires last year, or the baby birds that jumped to their deaths to escape the heat in the PNW heat dome this year, or the bleaching of coral reefs, or all sorts of other ways the climate is killing off animals). Sure there might be some life that survives the climate crisis after we're gone, but the planet is going to lose most of its biodiversity before then.
nostromo 5y ago
The fact that global warming is seen as our most dire emergency is a testament to how few crises we actually face now as a species.
- simiones 5y ago
  Ever since the earliest hunter-gatherer times, there has never been a crisis of this magnitude in the history of the human race, so I'm not sure what you're on about. Ever since we were more than a handful of people living in a single location, there has never before been a situation where, by our own actions, we were this likely to destroy our current way of life for the entirety of the human population.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
simiones 5y ago
The same magnitude of delusional thinking can be seen in the reactions to your post... Far too many are willing to believe that the climate crisis will be fixed by someone else in the future, and we'll all just forget about it as a minor blip (all the while, being entirely unwilling to accept even the slightest change that could affect economic growth).
sbierwagen 5y ago
>We're destroying the earth and suffocating in our own waste To be clear: Global warming is bad. It is going to kill tens of millions of people, drown a lot of cities, and render alarmingly large sections of the planet uninhabitable to unmodified humans. It does not actually pose an existential threat to technological civilization. Even 5C of warming would not kill all humans. The cities will just move north. We are not in danger of running out of oil or coal before transitioning to clean electricity. 2100 will look very different, (less international trade, almost certainly no unified global internet like we have now) but regular ole global capitalism will keep rolling along. Humanity is not dealing with global warming very effectively. But it won't kill 100% of all humans. It won't even kill 50%.
- tsimionescu 5y ago
  > The cities will just move north. We are not in danger of running out of oil or coal before transitioning to clean electricity. 2100 will look very different, (less international trade, almost certainly no unified global internet like we have now) but regular ole global capitalism will keep rolling along. You're greatly underestimating the societal impact that this will have. Cities don't 'just move' somewhere else in a few decades without causing massive turmoil. For one thing, the countries up north (or south) will not just accept (or be able to handle) a few hundred million immigrants. There will be global war, and it's hard to say what will be left at the end. At the very least, billions will die, not 'tens of millions'. Not to mention, we have no idea what impact this will have on global agriculture. Like it or not, we are not entirely separated from existing ecosystems, and the destruction of most land-dwelling animals living near the equator will not be a small thing.

PicassoCTs 5y ago

Many of us are hoping for a deus ex machina. Some magnificent piece of tech (fusion e.g) that keeps giving us time of plenty indefinitely, allowing us to postpone growing up forever. Because that is what we do, when we get it. Instead what we got, was the ability to self-surveil us (cellphone-panopticon), to entertain us without consuming to much resources (games, stream-movies, electronic communication-social sphere) and other funny mechanical limbs. We got the ability to practice birth control and we are currently working to get a hold of the worser angels of our nature, left, right and center. "You can't always get what you want, but if you try sometimes - you get what you need..." My only worry is that whoever is social engineering this "golden path" has not factored in the tendency to get stuck in feudalistic local optima happily ever after. But im toasting them. This all could be so much worser..

simiones 5y ago

The author's basic arguments in this post are not at all about space expansion, they are simply about how "wild" (that is, unlikely or surprising) any of the options actually are. They present a timeline where they don't believe it's that significant if the predictions they will make will happen in 100 or 100k years, since they intend to claim that this will create a civilization stable for billions of years. I would bet that the whole series will end up being mostly meaningless, in the sense that it will be either trivial or wrong. That is, either it will continue to make trivial observations (either we live in the first ~100k years of a billion-year civilization, or such a civilization will never exist - a truism); or, they will start making obviously wrong claims, such as the AI singularity idea. Edit: In general, talking about stability on the order of billions of years is absurd. This is literally enough time to conceive of self-conscious organisms evolving inside our bodies. It is enough times for the radioactive decay of many stable materials. Imagining that a man-made structure could be stable for this amount of time is laughable.

nostromo 5y ago

> This view seems "wild": we should be doing a double take at any view that we live in such a special time. The thing about exponential growth is that all points seem "wild" with growth. Humans or AI traveling in space seems like a smaller leap to me than several previous "advancements" like the origin of life itself or the evolution of multicellular organisms.

mooseburger 5y ago

I wonder how many people will actually attempt mind uploads, or believe that completely computer generated agents are sentient. Especially since it seems like a lot of these technologists are willing to use duck typing to determine sentience, which obviously isn't good enough. Seriously, how are you going to prove mind uploads will somehow be different from this: https://www.whompcomic.com/2013/06/19/pork-futures/ https://www.whompcomic.com/2013/06/19/pork-futures/ Even a Moravec transfer boils down to taking a leap of faith on the ship of Theseus thought experiment having a definite answer, not to mention the inherent creepiness of the proposition of slowly replacing your brain with some foreign substance.

jstx1 5y ago
Yes, the transporter problem - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nQHBAdShgYI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nQHBAdShgYI
simiones 5y ago
I think it is entirely impossible for mind transfers to work differently from this*. I think most people who believe in this sort of technology accept this. In fact, if you do not believe in transcendental souls of some kind, there should be no fear of this type of scenario. You anyway go to sleep each night and awaken after a discontinuity. Why would this be significantly different? Now, killing yourself after having your mind copied to the machine doesn't make any sense. More interestingly though, if we had the necessary technology for this type of transfer, we should also be able to do mind/machine interfaces, such that either copy of you could directly experience what the other does, meaning that this could be experienced differently from a notion of either a single entity OR 2 separate entities. Of course, it would follow that in fact multiple people could share experiences in similar ways, with unclear effects on the very notion of identity. If I could see, feel, hear, even think the same things as you, would the concept of me and you as separate identities actually mean anything to us anymore? I suspect that we can't really imagine what society and humanity would actually look like if/when such technology were widely available.
- mooseburger 5y ago

AlbertCory 5y ago

Some depressing reasons why I can't get excited about this: 1) Speed of light, that inconvenient fact. Somehow in sci-fi stories, that's supposedly "overcome" someday? What if it never is? 2) Intelligent life on Earth is indeed "unlikely" given all the things that could have extinguished it by now. However, given billions of galaxies, it must have existed in many, many places, maybe even in our own galaxy, and some of them are maybe even still around. 3) Given (1), they will never contact us, nor will we contact them. 4) Even if you don't accept (1) through (3), what could anyone usefully do about it?

everdrive 5y ago
Even if intelligent life existed in a nearby galaxy, our civilization might be gone by the time a communication manages to go round trip. More realistically, what are the odds that civilizations in the universe occur near to each other in both space AND time? ie, perhaps an ancient civilization 1,000 light years away came and went 20,000 years ago? Or longer? There's no chance we'd sync up.
simiones 5y ago
> 2) Intelligent life on Earth is indeed "unlikely" given all the things that could have extinguished it by now. However, given billions of galaxies, it must have existed in many, many places, maybe even in our own galaxy, and some of them are maybe even still around. "Must" is an extremely strong word to use for something with entirely unknown probability. There is absolutely no basis to calculate a probability of life existing at all (except to say that it is >0, since we exist), and intelligence is many more steps above that. The full extent of what we can say with any kind of certainty at all about intelligent life is that the probability of it existing outside Earth is non-0. Basically anything else is wild speculation. I'll also add that discussing time across the entire universe is meaningless, as we know from special relativity. An event in another galaxy that is outside our light hyper-cone has no time-like relation to our own history. A civilization in a galaxy that's 1M light years away from us can be seen as concurrent with us by some observers, can be seen as existing in our distant past by other observers (up to 1M years ago), or in our distant future by yet others (up to 1M years in our future).

kerblang 5y ago

The essential question is about extrapolating the arc of human progress: If it continues asymptotically, we become as gods "soon"; if it turns into an S trapped by an upper bound, progress grinds slowly to a halt; and if it inverts like a wave, we see a levelling off, equally rapid decline, and maybe some kind of evolutionary rebound rather than simple extinction. All seem mathematically valid (in the broadest sense) but I don't see a reason to dismiss other options in favor of the asymptotic outcome. But like many people I am intuitively skeptical about we-become-as-gods.

reducesuffering 5y ago
The chances that we're about to hit the inflection point in #2 and #3 are still very small. There's a huge area where we can be on the rise in #2 and #3 before inflection.
cogman10 5y ago
I think progress has already started to hit a local maxima. An argument I heard was that the number of things recognizable by someone from the past has dropped to almost 0. Consider, for example, major inventions like airplanes, refrigerators, automobiles, microwaves, telephones. You take those inventions and people from just 10 years before they became ubiquitous would be completely amazed by them. Most of those inventions took a hold of society from the 1900s -> 1960s. If you look at the 1960s->2020, there are very few stand out inventions that would be completely unrecognizable to the general public. Personal computers and medical treatment options with CRISPER seem to be the only major standouts. From my perspective, we look to be out of the age of invention. Instead, I expect humanity to continue refining and perfecting already existing tools. That's roughly the same state we were in from the 1600s to the 1800s.
- inglor_cz 5y ago
  "From my perspective, we look to be out of the age of invention." One of the possible reasons is that we haven't found a cheaper source of energy for a long time. A lot of things are possible if energy gets cheaper.

Lammy 5y ago

I love humanity's hubris in naming silicon life "artificial" like carbon life totally wasn't.

simmerup 5y ago

It’s very possible we have about as much chance of colonising the nearest star as an ant colony has of getting from Australia to America. In which case our earth will probably end up looking like one of those suffocated ponds that expanded too fast for its given resources.

wincy 5y ago
But animals have gone from one continent to another on land rafts [0], so it’s not entirely impossible. And it only has to happen once. [0] http://www.bbc.com/earth/story/20160126-the-monkeys-that-sailed-across-the-atlantic-to-south-america http://www.bbc.com/earth/story/20160126-the-monkeys-that-sai...
- simmerup 5y ago
  I meant by conscious effort. However, if you’re happy with this, I guess we could just launch balls of biological matter at different planets and be content that in a few thousand years the balls may land and start the seed of life. But it wouldn’t help us much…
emteycz 5y ago
Why colonize the nearest star - we have plenty of space around the Sun and surrounding it is more than enough material to construct countless O'Neill cylinders?
- simmerup 5y ago
  This is definitely possible and very cool, though I'm not sure I'd ever want to live in a space settlement. But the OP aims for galaxy-scale settlement, which is the context I was replying too

smoldesu 5y ago

> A key part of my view (which I'll write about more later) is that within this century, we could develop advanced enough AI to start a productivity explosion. This is the productivity explosion. I hate to break it to you, but it's hard to imagine places where AI isn't being implemented, and while our current research is progressing pretty smoothly on the topic, I don't really see any 10x or 100x improvements in that pipeline, unless we're strictly talking about model training (which can feel like an entirely different discipline altogether).

api 5y ago

I recall speculating years ago that the universe might be starting a phase change from non-living to living matter. Life, left to its own devices, will eventually (after billions and billions more years) transform all matter and energy in the universe into life, causing life to become the dominant physical process for a long epoch of time. The life we see (and are) now is the very beginning of that phase transition, the seed crystals if you will. It also leads to my personal speculation about the Fermi paradox: if the universe is relatively uniform and has cooled and evolved at a consistent rate, we might not see any star-faring aliens because there aren't very many of them around yet. All across the universe there could be a ton of worlds with life approximately as complex as is found on this one. I call this the "uniform cooling hypothesis." We don't see things like alien megastructures because that stuff hasn't happened yet. Of course for the uniform cooling hypothesis to fully explain the Fermi paradox the standard deviation for living complexity/diversity would have to be relatively small. The distribution would have to be tight enough that at least a non-trivial fraction of galaxies do not yet contain any significant number of star-faring aliens. We would therefore have a decent chance of being in one of those not-yet-colonized galaxies, explaining our "paradox." If the distribution is really tight we might go to the stars and run right into others who are on their first journeys, or get visited within a short time frame +/- our first interstellar trips. If some fraction of UFOs are aliens maybe we are seeing them because we are about to do the same thing. It's "steam engine time." Note also that intergalactic travel is many orders of magnitude harder than interstellar travel. It would require speeds close to 'c' and accompanying time dilation to even be imaginable, since over such long time scales complex materials actually start to fall apart at the atomic and molecular level. Sleeper ships could go to Centauri but they won't take you to Andromeda. The uniform cooling hypothesis would easily explain a lack of intergalactic colonists. They simply do not exist yet.

simmerup 5y ago
Space by Stephen Baxter explores the uniform idea you have
- api 5y ago
  On reading list. :) I would be surprised if the idea were novel.

wins32767 5y ago

I think this article misses the possibly that we had a shot to get an interplanetary civilization due to the accumulation of fossil fuels over the last ~400m years, but that we've consumed those resources not getting out into space meaningfully and therefore have missed the window (as it were). We've clearly exceeded the carrying capacity of Earth and the period from the 1950s to the 2050s may well be the only time period where there is enough civilizational/energy surplus to afford the extremely high upfront costs of creating self sustaining ecologies off of Earth. I hope I'm wrong, but if civilization collapses (as they all seem to do eventually), I'm not sure it will ever be possible for another Earth based species to get off planet meaningfully (due, for example, to the unique circumstances required to lay down large coal beds).

gmadsen 5y ago
why would you assume fossil fuels are a requirement for space travel? liquid hydrogen doesn't require fossil fuels to make, it is just a lot cheaper to do it that way. we could also use nuclear propulsion, which the russians have been able to successfully do with cruise missles
- Budabellly 5y ago
  I think OP may be implying the fossil fuels are necessary for the "industrial revolution" part of a civilization's development -- and that industrial revolution is a gating factor for achieving spacefaring technology.
  - wins32767 5y ago
    Yes, it's this. After the collapse of the western Roman empire, the standard of living dropped to bronze age levels in many areas, well below where it was before the Romans took over. Assuming a similar decline after modern civilization collapses (to say pre-industrial revolution levels), I don't see how it's possible to get back without the easy surplus energy. It's much more complicated to build batteries or nuclear or solar than it is to make a steam engine.
- 5y ago

YossarianFrPrez 5y ago

This sort of thinking, which has been enjoyed by many great sci-fi writers over the last ~seventy years, is cool on one hand, and is the sort of thing I enjoyed in high school. But it turns out that the big problems facing us aren't exclusively technological. Renewable energy is an example of a technological problem; greed is an example of a psycho-cultural one. Both are vitally important to address, but sci-fi authors have generally tackled the technical problems and not the cultural ones.

ctoth 5y ago

There's just so much negativity here. Get off Twitter, read a good science fiction novel outside!

minikites 5y ago
Outside for me happens to be full of climate change induced wildfire smoke.
mooseburger 5y ago
I don't actually believe technology can save us, don't find the techno-utopias concocted by sci-fi authors to actually be utopias, and don't accept the thesis that we have progressed because we're better at satisfying bodily appetites to be compelling.

pcrh 5y ago

I think we have a very poor chance of colonizing any other planets. We can barely manage to colonize the antarctic....

excalibur 5y ago

> Ultimately, it's very hard for me to see a case against thinking something like this is at least reasonably likely: "We will eventually create robust, stable settlements throughout our galaxy and beyond." It seems like saying "no way" to that statement would itself require "wild" confidence in something about the limits of technology, and/or long-run choices people will make, and/or the inevitability of human extinction, and/or something about aliens or simulations. Human extinction bit seems pretty probable, not particularly wild. It will be wild if we can stick around long enough to get our technology to the point where it can continue advancing indefinitely without us.

mcguire 5y ago

"Actually, no, let's go even more conservative. You think our economic and scientific progress will stagnate. Today's civilizations will crumble, and many more civilizations will fall and rise. Sure, we'll eventually get the ability to expand throughout the galaxy. But it will take 100,000 years. That's 10x the amount of time that has passed since human civilization began in the Levant." How far will these civilizations crumble? What will they use for energy, given that we have exhausted the easily accessible sources of coal and oil? "Spreading throughout the galaxy would certainly be harder if nothing like mind uploading (which I'll discuss in a future piece, and which is part of why I think future space settlements could have "value lock-in" as discussed above) can ever be done." "Mind uploading" is the wrong way to look at it. How about "mind copying" for a best case (whether that copying requires the destruction of the original is another issue); "mind simulation" is a less palatable case. "But space expansion seems feasible, and our galaxy is empty. These two things seem in tension. A similar tension - the question of why we see no signs of extraterrestrials, despite the galaxy having so many possible stars they could emerge from - is often discussed under the heading of the Fermi Paradox." Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. (Yeah, that's pretty lame.)

macintux 5y ago
> What will they use for energy, given that we have exhausted the easily accessible sources of coal and oil? That’s a source of much depression for me. We’re so close to being ready to fill the galaxy, while simultaneously close to a collapse that might prevent any future civilization from doing the same. And what if we really are the only hope in the galaxy, or even beyond that, to propagate life that can truly appreciate the universe?
- Robotbeat 5y ago
  You can bootstrap without fossil fuels. It’s tough to rely on biomass with ~8 billion people, but if the population is smaller, it works fine. Also, we used to rely on hydroelectric produced hydrogen for nitrogen fertilizer for decades before steam reforming of fossil fuels became cheaper and proven (around 1950). Trains ran on biomass in much of the US. Early European American settlers used biomass and bio-sourced iron (bog iron made of deposits from iron bacteria) for iron implements. We used a lot of hydro for industrial prime motive power, too, in the 1800s in the US, for grinding grains, etc, etc. before that, the Netherlands and others harnessed wind for industrial purposes. Wind, hydro, and biomass is enough to kickstart a hydrogen economy and bootstrap into solar, modern wind, modern batteries, nuclear, etc. Fossil fuels are just a convenient shortcut and not always as useful as they seem (see: the Resource Curse, how resource-poor Japan is still able to industrialize, etc). If the Fracking Revolution hadn’t happened, the US would still be burning a lot more coal, but we’d probably have more electrification of transport, etc. So I think if humanity used up every scrap of fossil fuel, we’d still be able to bootstrap to industrialization and modernity. But using up all fossil fuels is actually pretty hard (which is why climate change is hard to mitigate…). There’s hundreds of years of gas and oil, probably a thousand years of coal, etc. Biomass can be used up over a faster time, but if you modulate its harvesting, it can last indefinitely and even when you scour the landscape of trees and desertify the landscape, over tens of thousands of years, nature will reverse what you did (minus extinct species).

JohnWhigham 5y ago

Good article, however I think it's too pessimistic about the possibility of extraterrestrials. I don't know if it's human exceptionalism or poor understanding of how mind-breakingly massive the universe actually is, or a combination of the two, but there is life out there. We've only been searching for a couple decades with our primitive tools and haven't even begun to scratch at an atom of the surface of places to look for life.

Animats 5y ago

Why does interstellar expansion seem feasible? Unless special relativity is wrong, it's just going to take too long to get anywhere.

varelse 5y ago

So seems like some sort of front loading that the singularity isn't going to happen between the years 2030 to 2040 after all... But I'm biased to think the Galaxy is already inhabited for the same reasons people think we are living in a simulation. What continues to amaze me is why people think the Earth must be so very very special and that if aliens were out there they would be paying attention to us other than at best monitoring us like a beehive to make sure we don't start stirring up the galactic pot. As to why they don't just wipe us out, I figure any world with billions of years of evolutionary progress is valuable IP and worth preservation if possible. Or as I joked for a very long time: worlds like ours are the equivalent of reality television for advanced species. And I loved it when South Park covered that very subject.