A thousand years ago it was unthinkable we could circumnavigate the globe.
We don’t understand quantum mechanics and we don’t understand gravity. There’s no reason to assume that we won’t find ways to travel the universe, e.g. by manipulating space time. We just don’t know what we don’t know.
If you had to bet based on past achievements, humanity will find a way. Our job is to push the limits as much as we can and build a foundation for future generations.
I once watched one of those videos that was a speeded up example of light leaving the sun and showing the time it takes to get to the various planets. It was boring as hell after just a couple of minutes and that's with light way speeded up. My conclusion is that "light is too damn slow."
There are lots of hypotheses, but this is one of my gut feelings for why there are no aliens in view. It's hard to escape your local solar system.
When will we need more resources than exist here? We'll be mining the sun to run future simulations. Do we need more compute? Seems like we'll just stay inside.
Most life is probably similarly bound up to their origin. That and life is hard by many, many, many hard steps. Earth life is nearly 30% the age of the universe and it took us this long to get here.
It'd be near impossible for aquatic life to have an industrial revolution without aqueous chemistry control. Can't do that when you're stuck inside water. It's also hard to evolve reasoning when you can't see far ahead. Little evolutionary pressure on reasoning over time and distance.
And it's hard to leave water. You need to evolve new eyes and lungs to live on land. And then you need an energy source like O2, which tends not to stick around.
So many reasons.
The distances of space are certainly one holding us back now.
One thing I keep wondering, though, is whether “life” is tied more to the particular chemistry and environment it uses or to its patterns (the abstract information structure that can, in principle, be re-instantiated on different substrates).
If it’s the patterns that matter, do you think it’s actually impossible for those patterns to be transmitted across interstellar distances? Just like a cup of ocean water is packed with DNA, it’s at least conceivable that what we call “cosmic background noise” could, in principle, hide extremely compressed life-patterns that only an advanced civilization could recognize and reconstruct back into something we’d meaningfully call “alive.” And of course, the more efficiently you code that information, the more it statistically has to look like random noise.
Not saying this is likely -- just that if the essence of life is informational rather than chemical, "traveling" could look very different for any life that is suitably advanced.
>It's also hard to evolve reasoning when you can't see far ahead.
I think it was the book Pale Blue Dot by Carl Sagan where he hypothesized aliens living in Venus and how they wouldn't be able to see the stars and other planets because their atmosphere is too thick to see through with visible light and also their perpetual, opaque cloud cover made of sulfuric acid.
He described how everything would change if they managed to just escape their planet for the very first time and see a new world out there that they never even imagined existed. A world more vast and complicated than their brightest minds could have ever thought of.
Probably from deconstructing the solar system's asteroids and planets. I imagine a Dyson sphere would be less structurally sound and harder to get right – due to gravitational forces on the material – than a Dyson swarm or matryoshka brain. The latter made of independent satellites orbiting the sun and collecting light from concentric orbits at various distances.
That is it. When you become very aware of just how amazingly far away everything else is, fighting over a speak of dust and the only home we have seems absolutely ridiculous.
A great long form video on this is "Shouting at stars : A history of interstellar messages". It really highlights just how empty it all is.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uFI5WpK2sgg
If mankind exists in 1000 years time and hasn’t regressed then we’ll be able to build fusion powered self sustaining asteroids. Those can be used as airships to colonise every system in the Milky Way in a few million years.
600M years is enough time for Earth to try two or three attempts at intelegence, with full blown fossil fuel replenishment cycles. It won’t be humans - whether we leave for the stars tomorrow or blow ourselves to bits we’ll have evolved to something unrecognisable by then, but there’s very few things which could end life on earth in the next 200 million years (mainly very large out of system asteroids/rogue planets)
My understanding is that ISS is not self-sustaining even in principle. It consistently needs to be resupplied with water and breathable air as the station continuously leaks it. These resupplies happen about once every month or two. This article goes into quite a few details about what would be needed for actual self-sustainable human space exploration and it looks like there's quite a few engineering challenges to work out.
> Of course we are, but my question is why is that notable?
> You also breathe a nitrogen-oxygen-hydrogen mixture, and have a body that is built to walk around at 1g on a planet between 0-100 degrees F.
> That doesn’t seem to bother people.
Humans like to explore. We've populated the globe from our starting position in East Africa.
When we look to the skies, beyond our own galaxy, and into the early history of the universe, we are seeing a world that will never get to explore first-hand. Humans like to explore.
I mean we have a way today to get to a fraction of light speed with the nuclear bombs for propulsion method. Technically it’s even survivable for a person.
We don’t understand quantum mechanics and we don’t understand gravity. There’s no reason to assume that we won’t find ways to travel the universe, e.g. by manipulating space time. We just don’t know what we don’t know.
If you had to bet based on past achievements, humanity will find a way. Our job is to push the limits as much as we can and build a foundation for future generations.