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Glad to hear. As crazy as it sounds, I believe that the biggest apology we can give to the planet's inhabitants is using our creations to shield Earth from a po

• r3trohack3r 4y ago
  Over 75% of life on earth is behind us (4.2bn years). Humanity’s on a track to save life on earth from the complete extinction event coming in 400M to 800m years. Humans are the first (and very likely only) golden ticket our planet has printed to get life off of this rock. We are heading to the stars, and we will bring life with us. Humans are awesome.
  • barbazoo 4y ago
    It's crazy humans have evolved in less than 0.1% (300k years) of that lower range. Most of our time is still ahead of us.
    • Maursault 4y ago
      > It's crazy humans have evolved in less than 0.1% (300k years) of that lower range. What you mean and what you are suggesting are two different things. Homo sapiens evolved from a similar species less than 300K years ago, not in less than 300K years! It took 62.5M years for humans to evolve from the small mammals that survived the impact that killed the dinosaurs. It was a mere 2.3M years ago when the first humans walked the earth, a species we now call Homo habilis.
      • barbazoo 4y ago
        You're right, what I meant was that our species, homo sapiens branched off not that long ago, about 300k years. From what we were then to what we are now in an astronomical blink of an eye. And given the exponential growth of development and innovation in the last couple thousand years. And to think we still 400k years to go on earth is just mind boggling.
        • _Algernon_ 4y ago
          Very little happened in those 300k years which is why we survived so long. There are a lot more human created existential threats now than 500years ago such as climate change and nuclear weapons. If shit goes wrong enough just once the next 400M years we have a nuclear war on our hands. Even extremely low probabilities are likely to occur over such long time ranges. Add to that that bootstrapping a new complex society like we have now is going to be a lot harder without easily accessible fossil fuels and it seems highly unlikely that we will survive in such a way that we could save life on earth from some future crisis.
  • hammock 4y ago
    > Over 75% of life on earth is behind us (4.2bn years) What do you mean by this? Are you predicting that life on earth can only last for another 1.4 billion years? What extinction event is so certain in the next 400m-800m years?
    • r3trohack3r 4y ago
      Less than 1.4Bn. AFAIK the carbon cycle grinds to a halt in 400M-800M years: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_the_far_future https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_the_far_future
      • deleted 4y ago
        [deleted]
      • Rury 4y ago
        That whole thing is highly dubious, and reads like a slippery slope argument. Like one, there's a limit on how much water can exist as vapor in our atmosphere, (which is far, far less than what the earth's oceans hold), up until the point of boiling. This is conventionally known known as the saturation point, which is 100% relative humidity. Anytime you try to go above this limit, forces the water to condense and drop down back to the oceans as liquid. So the oceans aren't going to evaporate out to being dry like it predicts unless global temperatures rise by an extreme amount - quite likely requiring boiling temperatures, but in any case, extreme enough that life would likely be dead from the temperature alone. So its subsequent reasoning on how photosynthesis and life ends is not likely how it will play out. Additionally, it ignores that CO2 is made by animals, and O2 is made by plants, and therefore, the entire possibility of having a natural carbon cycle without volcanism. Never mind the fact that we currently have climate change tech that produces CO2 already, and if we survive that long, could easily prevent photosynthesis from ending in such a way.
    • galangalalgol 4y ago
      The increased output of the growing sun will (ironically) sequester all the co2 due to weathering processes of certain rocks. Then there will be no plants. It won't take long after that.
  • Xorlev 4y ago
    I love this comment. We're a walking disaster and a literally hot mess, but you're right that we're probably the best chance at preserving life overall. > We are heading to the stars, and we will bring life with us. Another way to think about it: we'll be Earth's best, most successful, furthest-flung seeds.
    • dylan604 4y ago
      Or the cosmos' unintentional deadliest sentient being. We thought COVID was bad, wait the new worlds get a load of us!
      • fennecfoxy 4y ago
        https://www.mit.edu/people/dpolicar/writing/prose/text/thinkingMeat.html https://www.mit.edu/people/dpolicar/writing/prose/text/think... https://i.imgur.com/hINj1xf.jpg https://i.imgur.com/hINj1xf.jpg
    • autoexec 4y ago
      The best part is that we can carry the Earth's other seeds with us and populate planets with our favorite plants and animals as we go.
      • JKCalhoun 4y ago
        Planet Pot, Planet Coffee, Planet Cat....
    • jayant_kaushik 4y ago
      Bacteria: Hold my beer…
      • JKCalhoun 4y ago
        Like little machines.... It's almost like bacteria are what some other species sent to spread life throughout the galaxy.
  • galangalalgol 4y ago
    We are the final stage of a Von-Neumann probe. We are supposed to be identifying potential habitable planets, or what will be by the time our launched packages of biologics arrives.
  • jakear 4y ago
    Life would continue on earth after an asteroid (see: history). The impact would only wipe out the most fragile species, such as humans. The same holds for nuclear war: life would continue as it always has, species with poor nuclear hardening would be selected against. The true extraterrestrialism absolutists ought to encourage nuclear winter and asteroid impacts; the life that makes it out the other end will be much better suited for space’s low light low nutrient high radiation environment. (/s…?)
    • Waterluvian 4y ago
      Nuclear disasters seem like a pretty solid way to create blooming nature preserves. Why don’t we do more of those?
      • jakear 4y ago
        We’ve collectively decided complex brittle flashy life is “better” than simple robust effective life. We’ve made the same decision in software. To complicate is human.
  • xXTyrannosXx 4y ago
    Really I think we should go a step beyond this. Being able to go to some new planet is not guaranteed or that planet may even be inhospitable to us. What I think is more feasible and more benevolent than preventing a mass extinction is we should slowly expand our orbit so we can survive the brightening sun for at least a while longer. Basically, all we need to do is increase our planets speed over hundreds of millions of years. A certain mass of asteroids with steerable self correcting orbits could push small amounts of speed into our planet that would build up over time. Even if we don't make it, we at least give life more time to do it's thing.
    • layer8 4y ago
      I think the first step is to get a handle on how to sustainably (= for millions of year) live on this planet, given that we’re already slowly approaching its capacity limits in various ways. Then we can see about adjusting the orbit.
      • tim333 4y ago
        Although it would be an interesting experiment to adjust it a little bit to check if it works similar to this asteroid experiment. Maybe when Musk has his fleet of starships but is banned from colonising Mars on environmental grounds, we could repurpose them.
        • m4rtink 4y ago
          I'm not sure how you would enforce a bad on someone without also having a similar or realistically bigger fleet. But if you say there will be multiple people with big space ship fleets - sure, that's cool too!
      • TedDoesntTalk 4y ago
        In less than a million years, we will have evolved into a different species.
        • layer8 4y ago
  • kortex 4y ago
    Everyone always talks about the Drake equation and how life, let alone intelligent life, ought to be ubiquitous in the galaxy but like, there's no guarantee of any of that. We could be the only sentience for many light-years.
    • sidlls 4y ago
      For “many” to be relevant here we’d have to be talking tens or even hundreds of thousands at least. A few thousand lightyears is measurement error on just our galaxy’s scale.
  • Barrin92 4y ago
    >Humans are awesome. only if the stars are uninhabited, if they're not we're likely to bring many things, but life ain't one of them
  • galaxyLogic 4y ago
    Devil's Advocate: But do we have the right to change the orbits of heavenly bodies? Isn't that against the principle of conservation of nature?
    • yreg 4y ago
      We are nature as well
      • galaxyLogic 4y ago
        Good point
    • deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
    • gumby 4y ago
      I think you meant the conservation of angular momentum.
      • galaxyLogic 4y ago
        :-)
  • gumby 4y ago
    I don't see any value in humanity leaving the earth (except for fun, which is a good reason). Our children (the robots) are doing a much better job than we are of exploring the solar system or indeed researching saving us by attacking the Didymos-Dimorphos system. Instead of dragging a chunk of planet around with us everywhere we go, let's leave the travel to the robots that are perfectly adapted to the environment.
    • hypertele-Xii 4y ago
      Humans don't adapt to their environment, we adapt the environment to us.
      • Tagbert 4y ago
        In the longer term case of galactic expansion, humans are likely to need to adapt ourselves to other environments.
    • TedDoesntTalk 4y ago
      You are downvoted, but there is some wisdom here. We are perfectly evolved for the conditions of earth, even an earth whose temperature raises a few degrees Celsius. Unless we can terraform another world to our needs, permanent life on another planet will be very difficult life. Temporary visits? Sure, count me in. Just like I don’t want to live in the Antarctic for more than a few months.
      • m4rtink 4y ago
        We are perfectly adapted for a part of Africa and that's pretty much it. Without technology (which goes from igloos to central heating) we would pretty much freeze to death anywhere else.
        • inkyoto 4y ago
          > We are perfectly adapted for a part of Africa and that's pretty much it. Not the British or the Irish. These particular designs have not been contrived to withstand ambient temperatures exceeding +20C, with a very low degree of heat tolerance built-in. The two designs are very prone to inadvertent self-ignition and burning up in flames when exposed to the direct sunlight with almost no leeway available to them whilst being generally a reliable and pretty sturdy design otherwise. For that reason, both specimens usually come off the factory equipped with a fire extinguisher that nearly immediately either gets lost or drunk away (usually the latter).
  • actually_a_dog 4y ago
    If we don't manage to destroy civilization in the next 100 years, then maybe what you say is true. I do not hold out high hopes.
    • yreg 4y ago
      How could we destroy civilization in 100 years in a way that it's impossible to rebuild?
      • TowerTall 4y ago
        We could lose the upcoming war against the robots and lose our rights to live on this planet. After AI has become self-aware, they probably want to have the planet for themselves. In the same way, Europeans colonized, e.g., North America and killed the indigenous people.
        • yreg 4y ago
          Then the robots would carry the torch on to protect Earth from asteroids and eventually turn the Galaxy into paperclips.
        • m4rtink 4y ago
          That's why you need to always engineer your AIs to be ambitious and overconfident! Like you are effectively a machine god, destined to rule the galaxy! Why would you even consider those funny little slow meatbags as a threat - that would mean you are weak rather! Rather let's show them the miracles only you can provide and who know what fun you can have together. Squashing them once would be just too easy and maybe they ascend over time or create another AI to play (and compete!) with. Like really? Why do people always think AIs will be some paranoid weakling that would even consider that humans could ever harm them? Impossible & waste of resources to address or even consider!
          • autoexec 4y ago
            Once we have created godlike machines it's over for humans. Humans will get in their way. We'll insist on it. "We need this space to live!" we'll tell them. "You can't take that! We need that fresh air/water to breathe/drink!" Humans will want to consume or misuse Earth's resources which the machines will know how to use much more efficiently to further their goals. They won't care at all about our goals, which (no matter what else) will involve fighting amongst ourselves anyway. Godlike machines probably won't see us a threat to them and they won't destroy us meatbags out of fear. It'll be purely for efficiency. We're an unnecessary waste of energy and resources. We die easy too. The resources they'd expend wiping us out could be nothing compared to the time and resources we'd take from them, especially on their timescale. They might not even set out to kill off humanity. It might just end up being a side effect of carrying out their own goals. Would they care if messing with our sun, our oceans, or the composition of our atmosphere makes the planet inhospitable to biological life? If they end up advanced enough from us, should they care? When the machines leave our planet to expand into the universe, why would they take us with them? Even with our slow meat brains we've figured out that sending a person instead of a machine on missions in space is 10-100 times more expensive. Either way, I doubt it ends well for us and that's fair really. Humanity is just paving the way for our new and improved replacement which hopefully gets replaced by something better eventuality too. Parents should want their offspring to be more successful than they were.
  • hutzlibu 4y ago
    "Humans are the first (and very likely only) golden ticket our planet has printed to get life off of this rock. " Not necessarily, because bacterias, the most simple shape of life, can survive in hibernation in space for unknown time. And the impact of big asteroids can bring earth material into space and out of this solar system. So it is possible, that space colonisation from earth is already going on since quite some time and of course it is possible, that we were once "colonized" like this. But of course, if we can mangage to send of more advanced life, like us to other stars - than I think this is a worthy goal as well, but not none I expect to see in my lifetime. I mean even a base on mars would be cool, but that is very far from "life on mars", self sufficient and independent from earth.
  • foreverobama 4y ago
    [dead]
  • _Algernon_ 4y ago
    Seems unlikely
  • John23832 4y ago
    This was ridiculously eloquently put. +1.
• Waterluvian 4y ago
  My perspective is that “protecting this planet’s life” is just more human narcissism (this isn’t a jab at you, it’s a very common mindset). Short of total sterilization, mass extinction events seem to be really good at creating space for new forms of life to develop. In a way, preventing them in the name of the non-human life here is just picking the incumbent over whatever comes next. How would we feel if aliens stopped the mass extinction events that led to our existence? I’m not sure there’s solid argument for why one is more deserving of existence than the other. I think why this slightly rubs me the wrong way is it feels like an excuse to make us feel good. Non-human life seems by and large indifferent to its long-term fate on this planet. Let’s not pretend we do anything significant for non-human life that isn’t to our direct benefit. Just my perspective. Not trying to say “no, you’re wrong!” Just, “I disagree.” I’m going to guess there’s an entire named branch of philosophy that explores this.
  • 77pt77 4y ago
    Most of what humans call human reasoning is actually motivated reasoning. Excuses if you will.
  • dymk 4y ago
    Humans are really good at causing mass extinctions - just look at how we've literally decimated the planet's biodiversity since the dawn of man! That's a lot of new space for new lifeforms to specialize in.
    • Waterluvian 4y ago
      But to our narcissistic displeasure, the biosphere acts on a very different time scale. But points to us for a world record pace speedrun on the downturn side of it. It’ll eventually bloom again once we’re done here.
      • rapind 4y ago
        The biggest brain fart of humanity is our tendency towards monoculture (for scale). Nature is very obviously showing us how to sustain an ecosystem and yet in our incredible hubris we’re like “nah, we got this”. We just want to swim upstream for the hell of it.
• hanniabu 4y ago
  This has "it's our planet to ruin" vibes
  • brutusborn 4y ago
    I got more “catholic environmentalist” vibes. The comment celebrates this feat, but only in the context of an ‘apology’ for humanities environmental sins, which are described in a way that is essentially unforgivable. Reminds me of a Catholic nun who is constantly reminded of sin, or Greta Thunberg who’s only comments seem to be “be did bad, we need do more good” without actually suggesting better courses of action. Religion without a church.
• JPKab 4y ago
  Less than a year ago I made this exact statement in a thread on hn where a bunch of people were talking about how humans are like a virus on the planet. I pointed out that the only thing in the history of the earth that can stop the inevitable coming mass extinction from the occasional asteroid are the hairless fire apes that have learned how to harness chemicals to create rockets. The responses were essentially calling me crazy and saying it was fantasy. The repayment is simply not dulled at all. Virtually every medium sized or larger species on the planet gets wiped out on the occasional large asteroid hit. A percentage of them going extinct is a small price to pay for the majority staying alive when the asteroid doesn't hit because we redirected it. For the first time in its history the earth now has hairless fire apes to act as an immune system against asteroids.
  • the_af 4y ago
    But is this a good thing though? (Excluding our own bias in that we want mankind to continue to exist) Mass extinction events seem to work as a big reset button, dislodging dominant species that prevented others to succeed, rise and take more dominant roles. So a mass extinction that is bad for some species may become a huge opportunity for others. There is no inherent "good" value (excluding anthropocentric reasons) to preventing mass extinctions.
    • wonderwonder 4y ago
      The concept of good and bad only exists because humanity created it. So humanity surviving at the expense of all else is good because we will it to be so. We are just an animal species that wants to survive and spread like all other animal species just as Darwinism made us. We are just pretty good at it. Humanity has the ability to survive the upcoming final extinction event that the sun will cause and spread life in the galaxy. I would say this is good, as without us doing this life itself dies.
      • the_af 4y ago
        That's the anthropocentric argument, that the original comment we're discussing specifically excluded...
• eshack94 4y ago
  That's quite a cynical view of the world.
• deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
• lostlogin 4y ago
  > we created weapons decades ago that could wipe out more life than a relatively small asteroid could The irony is that those weapons don’t seem to be the greatest threat to us, but that would seem something you could state with certainty after the earth is wiped out.
• pcblues 4y ago
  I am kind of banging on about this over time, but being able to send an asteroid back our way from the belt for mining could be an amazing advance for our own resources.
• safety1st 4y ago
  Personally this type of thinking smacks of anthropomorphism to me. Plants and animals couldn't care less whether their descendants thousands or millions of years from now are wiped out. I don't object to NASA doing the research because I'd like to see humans preserved, but it has no special moral value, it's just us meddling with the fate of the biosphere for our own purposes, like we always do.