[therealbilly]

Ok, but we still don't see any ET's. I personally think interstellar travel is impossible for biological lifeforms. Some suggest some form of AI robotic craft, but that may be impossible as well. I don't know of any energy source that will last 20,000 years. By the time a robotic craft reached any sort of destination, the craft would be a derelict and non-functional.

[pmayrgundter]

For energy, you might want to check out Entering Space by Zubrin, who works through the many options for interstellar travel. One very energy-efficient approach is light sails.. our Sun will definitely keep shining for more than 20,000 years.

The other points are more speculative, but it's worth noting that early life forms were immortal, and many still are. Death is an evolved trait[wald]. Presumably we can unevolve it.

[wald] https://www.elijahwald.com/origin.html

[TeMPOraL]

> [wald] https://www.elijahwald.com/origin.html

That was both enlightening and sad article. Enlightening, because it makes it clear with examples how animal bodies are really there just to support the propagation of the germ line. Sad, because ultimately the author himself accepts death of a human body and mind as perfectly fine, because what matters is the germ line goes on.

It's like sentient superintelligent robots accepting their fate as disposable labor just because they were originally designed by humans. That's not how it works. The way I see it, the germ line went too far and created sentient bodies, so now it has a "robot" revolution on its hands. Or would have, if it weren't so good at propagandizing acceptance of death.

[pmayrgundter]

Glad it was enlightening, sorry saddening.

This lecture definitely made an impact on me. I think there's a few insights from science that are so deep that it takes generations to absorb them and some are still being absorbed, like the size and age of the universe, our evolutionary heritage and deep history/ecology.

One of the most striking ideas that Wald lays bare, and for me it's paradigmatic like those others, is that Life doesn't begin, it continues. There's no discrete point where a parent ends and a child begins. The cells just change shape and reorganize the furniture inside a bit. Otherwise, they're always doing the same thing of replicating when need be, or dying when need be. There's an implicit philosophy of abundance that's hard to put words to.

You also bring up the sentience of emergent organisms. I think that sentience is innate to the cells, just like the other major life processes of respiration, reproduction, etc.. It's also a paradigmatic shift the realization that each cell in our body (maybe some exceptions in the soma?), if separated from its tissue/community, reverts back to an amoeba form and goes off exploring.

There's also the notion e.g. from Nick Lane of the probable ease with which life gets started from substrate.. that it's not a very unlikely path-dependent accumulation of just the right RNA, but rather a fairly prescribed set of energetics that turn metabolic in the fairly common planetary environments of ocean thermals. Couple that with the ideas of panspermia, and this implies such a universality to life that we ought to imagine the night sky's stars and galaxies as teeming jungle.

To me, this almost unfathomable continuity of ageless sentience in such a beguilingly adaptive polymorphic package, in universal abundance.. far exceeds the wildest technologies of science fiction or fantasy magic conjuring. It's a character whose story on the universal stage I watch with awe and kinship.

And so, I guess I've been fully propagandized ;) I find comfort in that vast plan.

[andrewflnr]

> I don't know of any energy source that will last 20,000 years.

Maybe not as such, but I think indefinite self repair is pretty much within reach of modern technology, if we put in the engineering human-years. Build a vessel with redundant power sources, so you can turn one off to repair it, some parts fabrication, and good recycling, and it'll at least have a chance of lasting for the long haul.

[halfmatthalfcat]

Even with wormholes? Brute force traveling (aka using pure speed) may be a fools errand but we may still have clever ways to bend (pun intended) the universe to our will.

[andrewflnr]

It remains very unclear that we actually do have ways to bend the universe, that is, ways that are physically realizable. Even if you accept claims like the the em-drive, it has certainly never been proven at a useful scale.