[ryandrake]

And it's not just the size of the distance we can see, it's the size of the slice of time when we are looking. We've had the tools to sorta-kinda detect life signatures for what, 10-20 years? Maybe we can keep that up for another (at best) 100-1000 years until we destroy ourselves? The universe is on the order of 10^10 years old. Star formation will end ~10^14 years from now The last black holes will evaporate ~10^100 years from now. So our temporal search window is astronomically small, too.

[smegger001]

Why do you assume we distroy ourselves? If we can make spacecolonies at somepoint between now and your 1000 year figure why kill ourselves when we can leave for another star. It doesn't even have to be a popular strategy just one that a nonzero number choose to take rather that self distruction.

[mdekkers]

> Why do you assume we distroy ourselves?

Seveneves, by Neil Stephenson, discusses the human penchant for self-destruction much better then I can in an HN comment, it is worth a read. In short, though, we cannot, unfortunately, escape our humanity, and pretending we don’t take it with us wherever we go is wishful thinking. As a group, we are ruled by incredibly base instincts that no longer apply to our situation, but they still largely determine our trajectory.

[smegger001]

You mean the book where the nations of the world put everything aside to preserve the human species from distruction by space based natural disaster by throwing almost all their resources at various space programs?

[mdekkers]

Yeah, that one. Where those people then go on with their stupid, petty, political infighting and senseless scheming thereby nearly bringing about the end of human species anyway.

You’ve clearly read the book, I am curious what would drive you to make such an obviously incomplete representation of the story. Being edgy? Contrarian for contrarian’s sake? Since you offer no additional context besides a vague (and uninteresting) insinuation that im somehow wrong, I suspect you are just trolling, smegger001

[peddling-brink]

How long can we teeter on the knife edge of global annihilation without someone pushing the wrong button?

[smegger001]

We made it through the cold war without turning any cities into molten glass and it was more tense than the world right now.

[Nevermark]

"We haven't died yet" is the most selection biased evidence you could possibly invent. 10 on a scale of 10.

It also has no predictive value given the nature of catastrophic threats continues to evolve rapidly in quantity and quality, and the elements of past threats (the cold war -> nuclear war), continue to be threats (autocratic regimes -> fighting or planning wars that could become existential to their leaders -> nuclear war).

[smegger001]

Given we have a sample size of one, its hard to make argument not based on past experience as that's all we have to go on, and we a reasoning about use of weapons that haven't existed for a century yet it hard to make strong argument either way bit MAD seems to have worked so far and most leaders of nuclear armed States are to egotistical to commit suicide when they are living the good-life at the top and that's what launching WMD s, is its is suicide .

[peddling-brink]

But, let’s look forward through the next hundred years, do we seem to be going in the right direction?

[didntcheck]

Putting aside the more sociological arguments about (non-)human nature for a second - roughly speaking, technological development = ability to wield greater amounts of energy. The easier it is to put a satellite in orbit, the easier it is land a missile on another country. The easier it is to harness virtually free energy, the easier it is to rain unimaginable destruction on your enemies. Robot workforces enable robot armies (directed by malicious humans, not Skynet)

The more widely accessible a technology becomes, the more damage a single person or faction can do, and therefore the probability of someone causing mayhem tends to 1. And it's basically always less effort to destroy something than (re)create it

We can hope defensive counterparts to all these risks develop at a greater rate, but I don't think that's a given at all

Also remember that from a SETI/Fermi/Great Filter perspective it doesn't matter whether the species completely kills itself off. It could instead just repeatedly reset itself to steam age technology, and therefore never be stable enough for long enough to become seriously spacefaring

[shiroiushi]

>Why do you assume we distroy ourselves?

Have you not been paying attention to the news? We have a major nuclear power constantly threatening nuclear war, and several very likely conflicts between major nuclear powers.