[no1youknowz]

Let's be a bit more positive on Humanity's progress eh?

Humanity is on the cusp of three major technological breakthroughs that will quite literally change everything.

1) AI. Even if we don't reach ASI in the near term, we'll have ANI to help us research new technologies in months/years rather than decades.

2) Asteroid Mining. Whether it's Musk/Bezos/A. N. Other, the very first time someone brings down an asteroid. It will herald the dawn of abundance for precious metals. What will happen to prices is another topic. But this will allow researchers to develop even more exotic materials.

With better materials resistant to heat, more conductive elements, etc, etc. Humanity be able to build what can only be dreamt of.

3) 7 Billion (now). 13 Billion with Mars, 50+ Billion with Europa, Titan, Ganymede, etc, etc, etc. There will be a time where Humans will stretch beyond this solar system. Imagine how many breakthroughs will be possible with 100m researchers and AI trying to crack something?

What will make this possible? With 1 and 2, we'll be able to finally crack fusion reactors. This will enable faster space travel than with current engines. Habitats will evolve from those initial Mars missions and will sprawl into mega cities. Who knows, there may even be Luxury apartments hovering in the upper atmosphere of Venus.

All this progress is exponential and if you stop to look around. The seeds are being sewn right now. By 2050, some things we consider Sci-fi will be reality.

Oh and I'll just throw this one in.

4) Nasa has been doing some work on the Alcubierre drive. Who is to say, that the issues that cannot be surmounted now, will be in the future? For those that want to know more. I'll leave a channel that goes into such things [0].

[0]: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC2kkCGRqZWaSIK3BmLC8vaw/vid...

[jcranmer]

> 2) Asteroid Mining. Whether it's Musk/Bezos/A. N. Other, the very first time someone brings down an asteroid. It will herald the dawn of abundance for precious metals. What will happen to prices is another topic. But this will allow researchers to develop even more exotic materials.

Say what? The idea that asteroid mining will enable material science revolutions is fanciful. We're not exactly short on metals (even precious metals). And interplanetary space is less extreme than environments we can create in terrestrial situations, so we're not going to find weird new stuff by poking around asteroids.

[whatshisface]

>We're not exactly short on metals (even precious metals).

Last I checked, the price of most metals was greater than zero. They're commodity markets, so that means they're scarce. If you mean "available at any price," then we were not short on iron during the Bronze age or short on Aluminum during the early 1800s.

[dwaltrip]

Well, it is possible that if rare and expensive metals become dirt cheap, new exotic alloys may be developed that were previously economically inconceivable.

I don't know how likely this is. I imagine plenty of research has already been done on exotic alloys, however I wonder how much that research has been affected by economic constraints.

[sethrin]

Alcubierre drives require exotic matter which is not quite ruled out by the laws of physics. Hopefully they don't require Jupiter-sized masses of the stuff, although some have suggested as much. However, that solved, there are two slight problems with this idea. One is that FTL inherently violates causality, which is sort of a problem. The other is that the spacecraft is expected to pick up and accelerate with it basically any matter it runs into along its superluminal path, releasing these as a spectacular shower of near-c particles whenever it stops. Your other speculations have their own defects, but I'll let others address them.