How to Survive Doomsday | Hacker News Reader

How to Survive Doomsday

nautil.us

39 pointsdnetesn21 comments

If we're still stuck on Earth in the time frames discussed, then we deserve to die.

Or to put it another way, it's extremely unlikely that anything we could recognize as human will be living here in 500M years, give that is 5000 times as long as our species has existed so far (and we're changing ourselves and environment faster and faster).

66 years between first flight and the moon, 500 million years between first rocket landing and ?

Humanity is doomed from within. Wherever we go, we drag that doom with us.

Implying we don't deserve to die anyway

Humanity is cancer, we are parasites on the ecosystem

Oblivion is the only way out

Embrace the void

Human civilization's purpose is to survive long enough to finish preparing the machine civilization to take over.

However it is possible that the perfect machine ends up being largely the same as human beings with a built in evolutionary path for advancement. Such machines would then face the same problems.

And what would be the purpose of machine civilization, then?

To become the pure energy civilization

Turtles? All the way down?

To reverse entropy!

Initially whatever we tell them it is. Eventually whatever they want it to be.

The question is the answer.

I'm not scared of machines taking over, I'm scared of the people currently in power staying in power and replacing us with machines.

Or humanity assimilates itself in to it and evolution of "mankind" just goes on.

Extraordinarism - the ideology to think one is seperate from nature that brought the species into existence. Related to other ideologys that considered humans the crown of creation or the source of all evils. Most distinguishing feature of the ideology? A inability to watch ones own existence and the existence of ones species with a relaxed attitude. Often driven to extremes by massive consumer guilt, and by the dawning realisation that none of the stated statements contributes to problem solving.

"Humanity is so evil, even the devil is afraid we could take his soul. We eat soda cans and drink babys. We should all feel ashamed and do nothing waiting for the end to come, soon.."

If this is indeed an inevitable and predictable luminosity curve, then orbital solar shades or albedo augmentation are obvious solutions.

Of course, there's no solution here for human survival after the red giant stage of the Sun's evolution, when the Sun cools to become a white dwarf.

Non-biological humanity is such a solution. It makes travel to other systems much easier if we don't have to worry about generations of humans or messy biological needs.

And for whatever vestiges wish to remain, we could collect the gasses the Sun sloughs off during its red giant phase and use them for fuel, as well as moving closer in - and we wouldn't need the Earth.

Non-biological humanity or a biologically enhanced humanity? :)

The gas giants could provide a lot of fuel after stars die. Interstellar gas is even more abundant if harder to collect. You can also gain quite a bit of energy from dumping matter into black holes. What to do after that point is a much more difficult question.

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