[graemep]

And a few more billion to figure out where to go next after the heat death of the universe.

I think we have more urgent problems.

I very much doubt humanity will be around in a few million years time. We will have died out, or evolved significantly, or altered ourselves. In a billion years there will be nothing even remotely resembling us.

[sandworm101]

It isn't "we" as in humanity. It is "we" as in all life on earth. The bears and the whales will have to do something too, they just don't know it yet.

[amelius]

They will have evolved strong cognitive skills by then.

[gapan]

Except evolution does not work that way. It does not optimize for cognitive skills improvement. Not necessarily at least. Different traits may be more important for different species.

[Nevermark]

Exactly.

Barring a major disaster, by 2100 we will have a vibrant Earth + off-Earth resource ecosystem via machines/AI.

And mastered the ability to adapt food production and our bodies to off earth environments.

Compounding acceleration by science, tech & econ has anlready initiated the trend toward fully-designed, post-biology, post-evolution life.

Time is now hyper-deflationary. Every succeeding year is worth more than the preceding one.

A multi-system economy is only thousands of years away. A galactic civilization, a few hundreds of thousands.

The earth & sun won’t look much different by the time we are sending probes, perhaps with warp drives, to other galaxies.

[icedchai]

2100 seems highly optimistic. We haven't landed a person on the moon in over 50 years. Space travel is really, really hard, and you're talking about sending probes light years away...

[simonh]

Imagine that for the first 50 years of aviation all airplanes had been single use, and then in the 1960s someone figured out how to make them reusable. Thats what’s happening with space flight. The next 75 years are going to be interesting.

I do think 2100 is a stretch, space is hard, but we’ll likely have all the basic elements of that proved out by then.

[Nevermark]

I think the biological difficulties of human space travel, and its unprofitably so far, have given us a very poor perspective on how fast thing progress from here.

Old bottlenecks are evaporating.

Reusable systems, cheaper faster rocket production, & the loss of dependency on traditional pilots are just three profound bottlenecks we have passed in the last few years.

Machines are getting smarter (not even talking about general AI) and smaller, launch costs are collapsing, demand for resources accelerating, and systems for refueling, communication, etc. are bifurcating.

The last & only BIG bottleneck left now, is simple recognition of relative economic profitability. Just as there has been an explosion of satellites, there will be an explosion of resource extraction the moment it becomes relative net profitable, on a forward predictive basis.

(I.e. shareholder returns for demonstrated viability relentlessly accelerate investment, long before positive cash flow is required.)

Human lunar & Martian bases are just a distraction, however intriguing and likely. They are not a brake on the Solar System resource economic loop, any more than the continued inefficiencies of biologically manned orbital stations held back the explosion of communication satellites.

[chgs]

That’s only 75 years away, same time since the first work on developing orbital rockets.

But by 2500 sure. And likely by 2500 some form of self sustaining asteroid with propulsion will leave the solar system.

I used to think ince that happens for a few thousand trips, humanity will survive enough that our descendants will last billions of years. Not the same biology, certainly not a single culture, but once the technology exists nothing can stop the spread.

Then I read about the “light cage” concept.

https://projectrho.com/public_html/rocket/empiremap.php#ligh...

[DaoVeles]

It really does feel like this is 'The Great Filter century'. Either we make it through to a Star Trek society, or the gravity of our externalisations catch up with us.

While I am more on the side of decline and fall (not absolute doom!), I do not rrule out that we overcome a lot of our issues.

[graemep]

> Barring a major disaster, by 2100 we will have a vibrant Earth + off-Earth resource ecosystem via machines/AI.

Except that we have thought similar things before.

With the collapse of the Soviet Union people (in the west) thought that we had been through the great danger of nuclear war, and were set for a peaceful and prosperous future. SO much so that the idea of "the end of history" became extremely influential.

IMO that is why the west is finding it so hard to cope with the world turning out to be a dangerous place.

> The best starting point would be what does interest him and what is he most likely to focus on.

I am not convinced we are seeing compounding acceleration. I think that era is past.

We are still advancing technologically, but I think it is questionable whether we are doing so at an accelerating pace:

Blog post on that topic: https://pietersz.co.uk/2012/05/innovation-crisis

[dmix]

Interstellar space travel and two way communication between them is the largest barrier. So multi system is going to mean multi planet in our solar system probably for a very very long time. Otherwise it’s just sending cryo pods out into the nether without ever knowing if they made it anywhere for the centuries it takes something to (successfully) come back.

[Nevermark]

We won’t ever send physically natural humans to other systems.

Not because we could never do it, but there won’t be any motivation to.

We will send relatively tiny ships, initially as probes, then as resource extraction & reproduction systems.

With laser acceleration & fusion deceleration (potentially fed by hydrogen collected collected from the target system), travel between systems can happen within 1-10% of the speed of light.

So only ten or so years to the closest systems.

That (propulsion) technology is not far off now. The bottlenecks are the need for further miniaturization, and our economy could not yet support the cost of, nor is it ready to benefit from, that scale of investment.

Whatever “format” our technology/lifeform has evolved to, we will be able to be sent it in extremely compact form, given any thing large can be recreated at the destination.

—-

Ironically though, despite a decade or so sounding very fast to us now, with time deflation (I.e. absolute time translating to higher & higher subjective time as “we” and our ability to process information & act speed up), decades between systems will subjectively Become be aeons of time.

But resource needs will also accelerate, so the necessity will be there.

So space will be deflationary, along with time. A meter & a second today will have much more relative meaning in the future as everything becomes more compact and faster.

Think about how the digital latency around the planet remains a constant, but as computing centers increasingly compactly, and grow in processing power, by orders of magnitudes, distributed computing with any serial or regular merging component will have to become ever more & more local.

Mars is big latency today. In 50 years, cross planet communication will be a relatively big latency.

[icedchai]

Where's "10 or so years" come from? Proxima Centauri is over 4 light years away. At 10% light speed, that's ~40 years minimum. At 1%, over 400 years. We'll ignore any time needed to accelerate and decelerate. It's a long time. I hope someone still remembers the project exists.

[Nevermark]

Ok yes, thanks. 4-40 decades, so 40-400 years, as you say.

Likely 40 years eventually, for the first trip, because no point sending a craft that takes 400 when waiting results in tech that takes 40.

[insane_dreamer]

> Barring a major disaster, by 2100 we will have a vibrant Earth + off-Earth resource ecosystem via machines/AI.

In my opinion, this is wildly overoptimistic.

[JohnFen]

By 2100? Assuming that such a future is a thing that will happen at all, I think the chances of it happening that soon are very near zero.

[aguaviva]

Barring a major disaster, by 2100 we will have a vibrant Earth + off-Earth resource ecosystem via machines/AI.

Sounds like climate change is already, and major military conflict/genocide very soon will be, basically entirely solved problems in your book.

[Nevermark]

I don’t think they are solved, but not bottlenecks for beyond Earth, post biological life.

They still matter.

How long intelligent life depends or cares about a “natural” Earth biosphere is impossible to predict. “We” will for a while. But for how long?

Wars and any destructive conflict will always matter. They increase existential risk for individuals and collectives, and waste resources.

We are used to casually equating the future of the Earth, the biosphere, intelligence, civilization, humanity, our systems & communities, and each of us as individuals.

But they are all different things, whose trajectories are increasingly separating.

[aguaviva]

Well that's my definition of a "vibrant Earth" -- namely, having those problems solved first, before we go out and start wrecking the rest of the universe.

"A basically fucked Earth, but with the surviving elites continuing to party on as usual" by 2100 is where we seem to be headed on our current trajectory.

[Nevermark]

You prescribe forbidden lines of progress.

But profitable problems get solved when they are solvable.

And advances in different areas are increasingly non-separable.

—

In any case, space resource extraction & manufacturing will replace harmful counterparts on Earth.

And provide vast wealth, sustainable materials, energy, and other advancements that could enable serious Earth greening & rehabilitation efforts.

Better to welcome & harness increasing options, than command the tides to stop.

[Ekaros]

Military conflict might help a lot. Enslave the population in misery so we can get those off planet resources and weapon platforms to fight better.

[phs318u]

Love the optimism but unless we master ourselves first, WE will be the major disaster.

Right now, all we seem to be doing is putting ever more powerful tools in the hands of the same, barely evolved ape minds. Not a recipe for long term success AFAICT.

[Nevermark]

I agree, our communal lack of wisdom and recklessness is the only real risk. But maybe not as much as we think.

Ironically many of our biggest worries, like climate collapses, extreme pollution, inequality, huge regional wars (Taiwan), population collapses, pandemics, don’t present much risk for expansion into space.

Only a full civilization collapse or extinction event would do it.

So definitely a long term optimistic outlook for “life”.

But the specific ways things play out could still be catastrophic from individuals perspectives. The rate and nature of changes these next decades will be profoundly disruptive & challenging to every aspect of our existence, all at once.

—

If we don’t reflect the universes non-human created resources as a joint inheritance, in a legally and economically explicit way, there is going to be a great culling of some kind - there is no way around that.

We need formal recognition and a societal structure supporting that, for a shared ownership of raw natural resources in some way, to have a soft transition.

I don’t see this as a violation of capitalism, but as a completion of property rights under capitalism.

It accomplishes what communism tries to do by mistakenly socializing production, instead by joint shareholding of nature’s original undeveloped resources as a gifted asset nobody created. And allowing capitalism to do its job of maximizing that value for all of us.

Bidding to extract resources, rental of limited shared resources (land) etc can continue unchanged. But everyone will be compensated for their part of raw resources as they are privatized or used exclusively.

[oceanplexian]

A billion actually seems weirdly tangible.

I can imagine a billion dollars or a billion bits. Working with computers we deal with units of a billion pretty often. I also know how long a year is and as I get older they feel pretty short. Obviously we won’t personally be around to see it but it does feel like the clock is ticking.

[gffrd]

Let me see if I can un-tangible that for you …

Let's say you live to be 97—quite old!!

1 Billion years is … 10,309,278 of those 97-year lifetimes, if strung end-to-end.

[chgs]

So the combined lifetime of people in a large city.

[roywiggins]

One reference point is that about billion years ago the Earth had just invented multicellular life.