6 ms·

That's what I've been thinking about for a while as well. Why live down the gravity well if you don't have to? Some might still choose it, much like some modern

by dreen 4y ago

That's what I've been thinking about for a while as well. Why live down the gravity well if you don't have to? Some might still choose it, much like some modern people choose to live in the forest. And in space, there is plenty of space for everyone.

trgn 4y ago
Space is an unfathomably unpleasant place to move to. Maybe advanced extra terrestrials understand that better than we do.
- dreen 4y ago
  You mean unpleasant to our current biology and with our current ability to build space habitats. Give it a few hundred years and things may look different.
- Nomentatus 4y ago
  I think they said that about Las Vegas, once upon a time (before the dam was built, and before air conditioning.)
somenameforme 4y ago
Abstractly, a planet is just a really really big starship. With technological advances, we could even eventually theoretically move planets. So phrased in another way, why would one choose to live their entire life in a small starship instead of a big one?
- Sharlin 4y ago
  Because of the square–cube law. Planets are an unfathomably inefficient form factor in terms of material use to available surface area/volume ratio.
  - ben_w 4y ago
    Counterpoint I’ve been thinking about recently: Imagine you have a fancy self-repairing spaceship, so good that even accounting for the slow wear and tear of micrometeorites, outgassing, and the motion of feet slowly polishing grooves into walkways, it still only looses 1% of its mass to the outside vacuum every thousand years. A Dyson swarm of those still becomes a mysterious cloud slowly puffing away from its parent star, and after just 2150 millennia, it’s declined from a Kardashev II to a Kardashev I civilisation. A planet-based civilisation may live or die, but it won’t burn out quite like that.
- chongli 4y ago
  The usual definition of starship is a ship that travels between the stars. Earth is stuck orbiting one star so I wouldn’t classify it as a starship. Maybe the label would better suit a rogue planet?
  - Qem 4y ago
    The sun moves relative to the neighboring stars. That means we have periodic close encounters (d < 1ly) with other stars, and effectively the Earth starship argument holds. The lazy way to travel the stars is to figure how to avoid killing ourselves for tens of thousands of years, while the stars come to us. See the list of future close encounters at https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_nearest_stars_and_brown_dwarfs https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_nearest_stars_and_br...
echelon 4y ago
By the time we reach space, we won't need these bodies anymore. Earth biology acutely fits to the gasses, minerals, and temperatures found here. It's not a great solution for space, but it's fantastic for exploiting Earth's energy. Space distances are also not very compatible with human lifespan. The death thing is bad all around: spend a fourth of life learning and a fourth of life in decline, with no ability to share information directly outside of our slow communication and learning protocol. The obvious answer is that AI and machines will take over from us and leave our planet in our stead. They won't have our limitations on lifespan and complex biological inputs. They won't take up space or get tired. They can copy and paste their knowledge and not need parents or growing up. Without the limitations of biology, it won't be hard for them to expand to all corners of the galaxy. Despite Hollywood and Asimov trying to paint the picture of humans living amongst the stars, that's more of a fantasy than Middle Earth. Where we're going we don't need humans or bodies.
- gnz11 4y ago
  Still doesn’t resolve why we have not come across any signatures of beeping and blipping electronic entities that are not our own in the galaxy.
  - echelon 4y ago
    Maybe they're all around us. Or maybe we're their historical simulation. Not readily falsifiable, but interesting to ponder.
    - taylodl 4y ago
      Or maybe we're their historical simulation I’ve thought the same - intelligent machines are going to be mankind’s legacy. Yet I never once thought of us being developed by another civilization’s machines to better understand their origins. Brilliant!
pmoriarty 4y ago
"in space, there is plenty of space for everyone" We may not need more space if we live entirely in virtual reality. This I find a quite plausible solution to Fermi's paradox... after enough technological development the entire civilization just starts living in VR and loses the desire to travel through, communicate with, or affect the outer world. In fact, we may already be just such a civilization... though without realizing it.
- dotnet00 4y ago
  The thing is that unless there's some underlying fundamental principle of reality itself that guarantees that every intelligent civilization turns to VR to such an extent as to completely lose interest in reality, it's still very strange that we don't see the galaxy buzzing with life. There are just so many planets out there that even a 99.9999% chance of VR obsession taking over a civilization should mean having a very visibly living galaxy. Personally I think that one of the bigger explanations (I think there are likely to be several layers to the paradox) might be that as civilizations grow they naturally focus on becoming more efficient, which effectively makes them more stealthy. We see this with ourselves, where our radio emissions have gone down in transmission power over time and the switch to high frequencies and digital has made them more akin to noise which does not travel very far before becoming effectively impossible to detect. I think our gradual shift towards sources of energy that pollute less is more of the same. Similarly, while an early interstellar civilization might expend the vast amounts of energy needed to cross the gulf between stars in biological time scales, a more advanced interstellar civilization has very likely achieved some form of immortality (like giving up biology and becoming digital) and may have no reason to try to be much faster than a rock thrown out by its star (in part because when you're effectively immortal grey goo, even a galaxy worth of energy might be something to conserve to maximize your civilization's survival).
klyrs 4y ago
> And in space, there is plenty of space for everyone. Assuming that we can travel at the speed of light, humanity can expand into a spherical region of space where the radius grows at a constant rate. That is to say, under the most optimistic assumptions, expansion is limited by a cubic growth curve. That is fundamentally incompatible with exponential population growth. Of course, the constants elided in the analysis above are enormous, but it's a limitation that a galactic species would eventually butt up against.

by dreen 4y ago

trgn 4y ago

Space is an unfathomably unpleasant place to move to. Maybe advanced extra terrestrials understand that better than we do.

dreen 4y ago
You mean unpleasant to our current biology and with our current ability to build space habitats. Give it a few hundred years and things may look different.
Nomentatus 4y ago
I think they said that about Las Vegas, once upon a time (before the dam was built, and before air conditioning.)

somenameforme 4y ago

Abstractly, a planet is just a really really big starship. With technological advances, we could even eventually theoretically move planets. So phrased in another way, why would one choose to live their entire life in a small starship instead of a big one?

Sharlin 4y ago
Because of the square–cube law. Planets are an unfathomably inefficient form factor in terms of material use to available surface area/volume ratio.
- ben_w 4y ago
  Counterpoint I’ve been thinking about recently: Imagine you have a fancy self-repairing spaceship, so good that even accounting for the slow wear and tear of micrometeorites, outgassing, and the motion of feet slowly polishing grooves into walkways, it still only looses 1% of its mass to the outside vacuum every thousand years. A Dyson swarm of those still becomes a mysterious cloud slowly puffing away from its parent star, and after just 2150 millennia, it’s declined from a Kardashev II to a Kardashev I civilisation. A planet-based civilisation may live or die, but it won’t burn out quite like that.
chongli 4y ago
The usual definition of starship is a ship that travels between the stars. Earth is stuck orbiting one star so I wouldn’t classify it as a starship. Maybe the label would better suit a rogue planet?
- Qem 4y ago
  The sun moves relative to the neighboring stars. That means we have periodic close encounters (d < 1ly) with other stars, and effectively the Earth starship argument holds. The lazy way to travel the stars is to figure how to avoid killing ourselves for tens of thousands of years, while the stars come to us. See the list of future close encounters at https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_nearest_stars_and_brown_dwarfs https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_nearest_stars_and_br...

echelon 4y ago

By the time we reach space, we won't need these bodies anymore. Earth biology acutely fits to the gasses, minerals, and temperatures found here. It's not a great solution for space, but it's fantastic for exploiting Earth's energy. Space distances are also not very compatible with human lifespan. The death thing is bad all around: spend a fourth of life learning and a fourth of life in decline, with no ability to share information directly outside of our slow communication and learning protocol. The obvious answer is that AI and machines will take over from us and leave our planet in our stead. They won't have our limitations on lifespan and complex biological inputs. They won't take up space or get tired. They can copy and paste their knowledge and not need parents or growing up. Without the limitations of biology, it won't be hard for them to expand to all corners of the galaxy. Despite Hollywood and Asimov trying to paint the picture of humans living amongst the stars, that's more of a fantasy than Middle Earth. Where we're going we don't need humans or bodies.

gnz11 4y ago
Still doesn’t resolve why we have not come across any signatures of beeping and blipping electronic entities that are not our own in the galaxy.
- echelon 4y ago
  Maybe they're all around us. Or maybe we're their historical simulation. Not readily falsifiable, but interesting to ponder.
  - taylodl 4y ago
    Or maybe we're their historical simulation I’ve thought the same - intelligent machines are going to be mankind’s legacy. Yet I never once thought of us being developed by another civilization’s machines to better understand their origins. Brilliant!

pmoriarty 4y ago

"in space, there is plenty of space for everyone" We may not need more space if we live entirely in virtual reality. This I find a quite plausible solution to Fermi's paradox... after enough technological development the entire civilization just starts living in VR and loses the desire to travel through, communicate with, or affect the outer world. In fact, we may already be just such a civilization... though without realizing it.

dotnet00 4y ago
The thing is that unless there's some underlying fundamental principle of reality itself that guarantees that every intelligent civilization turns to VR to such an extent as to completely lose interest in reality, it's still very strange that we don't see the galaxy buzzing with life. There are just so many planets out there that even a 99.9999% chance of VR obsession taking over a civilization should mean having a very visibly living galaxy. Personally I think that one of the bigger explanations (I think there are likely to be several layers to the paradox) might be that as civilizations grow they naturally focus on becoming more efficient, which effectively makes them more stealthy. We see this with ourselves, where our radio emissions have gone down in transmission power over time and the switch to high frequencies and digital has made them more akin to noise which does not travel very far before becoming effectively impossible to detect. I think our gradual shift towards sources of energy that pollute less is more of the same. Similarly, while an early interstellar civilization might expend the vast amounts of energy needed to cross the gulf between stars in biological time scales, a more advanced interstellar civilization has very likely achieved some form of immortality (like giving up biology and becoming digital) and may have no reason to try to be much faster than a rock thrown out by its star (in part because when you're effectively immortal grey goo, even a galaxy worth of energy might be something to conserve to maximize your civilization's survival).

klyrs 4y ago

> And in space, there is plenty of space for everyone. Assuming that we can travel at the speed of light, humanity can expand into a spherical region of space where the radius grows at a constant rate. That is to say, under the most optimistic assumptions, expansion is limited by a cubic growth curve. That is fundamentally incompatible with exponential population growth. Of course, the constants elided in the analysis above are enormous, but it's a limitation that a galactic species would eventually butt up against.