Complex Numbers

Gotta Have Space

No escaping human nature. Not yet, anyway.

http://nautil.us/blog/why-we-should-think-twice-about-colonizing-space

Why We Should Think Twice About Colonizing Space

Um, have you read science fiction? We've thought about it more than twice.

And the late astrophysicist Stephen Hawking has conjectured that if humanity fails to colonize space within 100 years, we could face extinction.

The phrase "necessary but not sufficient" comes to mind.

To be sure, humanity will eventually need to escape Earth to survive, since the sun will make the planet uninhabitable in about 1 billion years.

For reference, that's about as long as there have been eukaryotes on land  

For example, the astrobiologist Milan Cirkovic calculates that some 10⁴⁶ people per century could come into existence if we were to colonize our Local Supercluster, Virgo. This leads Nick Bostrom to argue that failing to colonize space would be tragic because it would mean that these potential “worthwhile lives” would never exist, and this would be morally bad.

What the hell kind of stupid, irrelevant argument is that? If you're going to assert that any life that could have existed but didn't is morally bad, you have a lot to answer for.

My conclusion is that in a colonized universe the probability of the annihilation of the human race could actually rise rather than fall.

And we could get hit by another dinosaur-killer-sized comet. Which is why people talk about inhabiting other places besides Earth.

Consider what is likely to happen as humanity hops from Earth to Mars, and from Mars to relatively nearby, potentially habitable exoplanets like Epsilon Eridani b, Gliese 674 b, and Gliese 581 d.

Really, I should have stopped reading right there. I'm no expert in exoplanetary science, but really quickly: EpEri b is basically Jupiter; G674b is basically within the photosphere of its star; and that last one is "potentially habitable" only in the most esoterically theoretical sense; it's a super-Earth.

I have heard of no exoplanets that are what we'd consider Earthlike (remember, to an astronomer, a "terrestrial planet" includes such familiar worlds as Mercury, Venus and Mars), and I'm absolutely certain that I would have heard of one if it had been announced. Hell, you would have too. You haven't. You only think you have because science reporters fucking love the merest glimmer of the possibility of a faint hope that maybe something in a star's habitable zone might be life-capable, and play that up.

I will note that, in a rare case of me actually being arsed to look this shit up, I saw that someone had rather humorously vandalized the Epsilon Eridani b Wiki page thus: Epsilon B was famously visited by the mysterious super space pirate who's life was greatly documented by the late Disco Beavers. There it is said he found vast amounts of funky juice and many beautiful space women, as well as meeting his life long friend and later enemy, Diamond Prince. I'd link it but these things tend to disappear fairly quickly.

Okay, my point is that while there might be "potentially habitable exoplanets," especially since we really couldn't find Earth if we were looking at our solar system from, say, Epsilon Eridani b, we haven't found any, and any claims that we have are spurious.

Anyway, back to the philosophizing.

In other words, natural selection and cyborgization as humanity spreads throughout the cosmos will result in species diversification.

I think that's a fair prediction, though speciation takes a very long time. Your guess is as good as mine as to how quickly some of us become the Borg Collective.

At the same time, expanding across space will also result in ideological diversification.

You know, I haven't read everything in science fiction. That would be impossible. But I have yet to read any fiction where a Mars colony doesn't declare its independence, usually resulting in interplanetary war. Maybe this is because it would be boring if they didn't, or maybe it's because SF authors have already figured out this little tidbit about human nature.

The author goes on to explain the difficulties of having a top-down governing system for far-flung human colonies. But as the argument hinges on not having warp drive, I should note that not having warp drive would also make inter-system war very, very difficult. I mean, imagine, say, Planet England and Planet France.

PF: You have infringed upon our trade rights!

(PF assembles a war fleet)

(70 years pass as a war fleet crawls from PF to PE)

PE: What is that war fleet doing here, and why are they signaling for help with their engines and life support systems?

I mean, really, someone should write books about this stuff. Oh, wait, they have.

The lesson of this argument is not to uncritically assume that venturing into the heavens will necessarily make us safer or more existentially secure. This is a point that organizations hoping to colonize Mars, such as SpaceX, NASA, and Mars One should seriously contemplate. How can humanity migrate to another planet without bringing our problems with us?

In the end, though, I can't disagree with the basic premise here. Which doesn't mean we shouldn't do it. It just means we need to account for human nature.

And this last bit, written in 2018, seems prescient enough:

Human beings have made many catastrophically bad decisions in the past. Some of these outcomes could have been avoided if only the decision-makers had deliberated a bit more about what could go wrong—i.e., had done a “premortem” analysis.

And that's enough prognostication for one day.