The Astronomy Thread

Gavinmad_sl said:

In my opinion, we'll never make any serious inroads into exploration of our solar system, much less interstellar travel, until we transition into some sort of post-scarcity global government. Obviously that can't happen unless someone conquers everyone else, or until we experience a partial/major collapse of civilization and a global government (or its predecessor) rises from the ashes.

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So basically Jesus and Mohammed are responsible for ending the human race.

I'm betting on the eventuality of Skynet. Perhaps nothing quite so apocalyptic as the films - but an advanced technological biological species will be replaced by a machine intelligence of their own creation. Either willingly or by accident.

Honestly, biological organisms are quite unsuitable for space exploration - short life spans and complete inability to deal with the extreme radiations of space. For an advanced machine these would be a non-issue. Who cares if it takes 10,000 years to reach the next nearest star when you're effectively immortal.

The thoughts of beings like ourselves whisking around the galaxy in a star-ship ala Star Trek is a romantic one. But I think that will never be realized. Much like the older concepts of people using balloons to reach Mars, it's just ideas based on our current scientific and technological understanding.

Let's not pretend that wormholes are the Star Trek variety and only traverse within the same galaxy. Now you're thinking with portals.

Radiation is a very solvable problem, and the relevant lifespan of software and hardware is much shorter than ours right now. We could engineer ourselves to be immortal and figure out how to download skillsets directly. We're on the cusp of learning how to tinker with human DNA and make substantial changes. What humanity is or can be could be radically different in 2100. We envision this future with invincible metal superintelligence, but current robotic platforms are very limited and vulnerable just as we are. Adjusting humanity itself has just as much potential. The big fear right now is because machines can be networked, only one AI is necessary to start assuming control of all objects in the network. What if humans could be networked? The same potential for a dominant intelligence to enslave every other biological thing suddenly seems plausible. What if humans networked all their things? Your dog, lawnmower, children, garage door, turtle, vehicle, TV, etc. are all on your network. Dystopia or Utopia? There are a lot of shades of grey there.

Biology has a lot of potential, and on a small enough level machine intelligence is made of the same stuff we are. Humanity could spread far beyond two legs, two arms. We could adapt to solar feeding vacuum dwelling organisms that live in asteroid belts or air whales that live in the atmosphere of gas giants, each with their own plethora of complimentary species forming an ecosystem. All of it could be networked.

Malakriss_sl said:

Now you're thinking with portals.

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^_^

Selfish utopia if I am the boss of it and the tip of the pyramid. Dystopia if I am just one of the slave-cogs.

So, pretty much the same as now.

I've posted it before, a board or two back, but it's always relevant to these sort of discussions. And I just like it

While we're on the subject...

Gavinmad_sl said:

In my opinion, we'll never make any serious inroads into exploration of our solar system, much less interstellar travel, until we transition into some sort of post-scarcity global government. Obviously that can't happen unless someone conquers everyone else, or until we experience a partial/major collapse of civilization and a global government (or its predecessor) rises from the ashes.

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I tend to agree. But sociologists will tell you that low-scarcity societies are end-state moribund places where the old outnumber and rob the young. In the US we're already in a low-scarcity society where even the poorest individuals are the most likely to be obese. Aside from the US, all of the top economies in the world are the ones facing extreme demographic collapse BECAUSE of a moribund, post-scarcity policies. Japan is famously well and thoroughly fucked with its low fecundity and aging population that just won't die. Recently it's become clear that Germany will actually outdo Japan in thegetting-fucked-in-the-ass-by-demographics arenaand some German cities are actually drafting "last kraut turns off the lights" plans for shutting services down at low population levels.



Anyways, I don't wanna derail the thread. My point was simply that most apocalypse scenarios lists the hierarchy of extinction risks as Biological Pandemic then Giant Space Rock then Skynet then Nuclear War etc. But if the Drake Equation is correct about the proliferation of human-style intelligent civilizations, then human-stylecraven populismmust ALSO be considered as an extinction risk. Just as the Kerbals have a space program out there, they must also have their proportion of thoughtless collectivists who exploit the poors for their votes to shut down "pie-in-the-sky" missions.

If we consider the only empirical body of data available to us about the rate a civilization expands beyond low earth orbit and the rate at which it exhausts planetary resources, it doesn't look like "intelligent civilizations" need a Skynet or a bioengineered crop failure or giant fucking spacerock to wipe them out. They just need to keep re-shuffling the priorities for "suffering people on earth" until the population grows so vast and the resources grow so scarce that they're locked into a malthusian death-spiral and it becomes impossible to ever leave.

Tuco_sl said:

The Guardian making a shitty article doesn't mean we don't have a massive amount of resources dedicated to all the fields of science that we know about that will help us get into space. Is it as much focus as we futurologists want? No. But to say "There's no point in amazing research if congress is more worried about being re-elected" is silly. I agree that we should push elections to being more research focused, but it's not as futile as you indicate.

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How much futility do you want? I only linked that article because it was still fairly raw but there are tons of stuff like the urgent retrenchment against "inequality" out of Davos and the OECD. You want insanity? There's shit like people lobbying to shut down human longevity research unlessit's free for poor gay and transgender people. There are well-intentioned but thoroughly wrong-headed people who want to ban advanced robotics because it would displace uneducated fast-food workers or nursing-home attendants.

You remember Norman Borlaug? The nobel-prize winning biologist whose workrevolutionizing agriculture literally saved a billion lives? Would you be shocked to learn that there are people who want his Nobel prize revoked because"waaaaah GMO frankenfoods are Monsanto-rape"? No, of course you aren't. Because it's obvious we live with some fucking crazy people who know that the easiest way to seize power is to turn the MANY against the FEW. Do you imagine other intelligent civilizations would be immune to that impulse? Well if you do and we're some kind of freakish non-cooperative and self-destructive outlier on the spectrum of intelligent civilizations then the Fermi Paradox WOULN'T be a paradox and we'd see evidence of intergalactic UN's all over the place.

My point was simply that if we accept the Drake Equation's premise that there are around 300+ recognizably intelligent civilizations out there, then they must also have the same thermoeconomic impulses to restrain individuals who concentrate resources for long-term goals instead of short-term redistributive social relief. All the sentient jellyfish and the cannibal Ewok space-pirates must also have their Occupy Endor freakouts unless we're totally wrong about the laws of thermodynamics and that entropy doesn't govern social economies like it does everything else. But in this universe, it must.

I don't find that particularly outrageous that a sociologist, when presented with the potential of space colonization, instead of being all starry-eyed, asks: "Ok, but with what kind of society?" A lawyer would probably wonder about things like jurisdiction and a philosopher about the purpose of such endeavor. There are many important questions that need to be answered between now and a hypothetical space age and a lot of them are not in the domain of expertise of rocket scientists.

Tuco_sl said:

Sorry I still don't really understand. Are you arguing that dumbasses are preventing or will prevent us from continuing our incredible technological progress?

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They're dumbasses to you and other technocrats but they're "important" to folks like Szlia. They're "raising many important questions" that need to be answered that can't be answered by, well, technocrats.

Questions like: "why should Elon Musk live to 1,000 if his lifestyle means we need bioengineered pesticides?" Or philosophical ones like "Why shouldn't we go extinct anyway, we just shit on everything?"

It was mentioned, but to think about future space travel, it really does help to try and think about what your own life might be like if you lived some arbitrary length of time. 500 years or a 1000 seem on the far edge of imagining for us. But just some simple questions.

If you live to be 500 hundred, a few things also stick out. Nations with the best current life expectancy are mid 80's so using a number like 85.

We currently go to school for (18+8 years of college), or 26/85. That's 30% of your life expectancy acquiring knowledge in a school setting. Future you will go to school until they are 152 if the proportions stay the same. How much knowledge will the "average" man have in a world with a 500 year lifespan. Think of having a doctorate in an unnamed amount of fields.

When will you have children, at what age, how many, and when will they "leave home". These questions become almost hard to ponder because what kind of society forms around a 500 year lifespan. Perhaps humans would be intrinsically more patient than we are now merely because our understanding of our own existence.

I'm hardly equipped to give great answers to these questions, but really that's not the point of the exercise. Its extremely hard to place yourself in another actual persons shoes, to think their thoughts, to have their knowledge, their emotion. Suffice to say most individuals have not really practiced this kind of thought about others. We are each consumed with the reality of our own existence - its what we know.

What if our generation had lived for the last 500 years. How would that change each of us if we were contemporary to the founding of the United States? That's almost such a ridiculous questions I don't even know what I'd start with. But clearly it would have changed things immensely. Here are some of our thoughts/stats on the longest lived organisms of merely our own planet,

List of longest-living organisms - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

In scope and context of time, Ken Burns made a documentary about our National Parks. Which, if you've never seen I highly recommend. Things such as littering, private abuse of this land, no power to enforce. The previous 300 years of taming the wilderness of our continent taking as much wealth from nature as we could. I don't think any of us can even fathom what the Buffalo herds were like. Without Yellowstone, without ultimately the laws that gave them the power to protect that land. We might not even know a wild bison for example. The fights to save these places spanned generations of Americans. Would they have been the same type of fights, if for example, a man like John Muir was still alive today writing about nature.

Link to the documentary wiki page

The National Parks: America's Best Idea - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Mild de-rail, maybe someone will get use out of this. Maybe not the astronomy thread, but its important to understand our relationship to time that came before our own individual time and the time that will come after us.