Comment by cl42 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by cl42 | Hacker News Reader

Here are the ones I'm thinking about quite a bit when I think about the long-term viability of our species or society-as-we-know-it.

(1) Food security. Not many people talk about the fragile system that supports our ability to stay nourished. At the same time, "nourishment" is relative -- we're getting fatter, it's unclear whether industrial agriculture is sustainable, etc.

(2) Social inequality, lack of social mobility, etc. This is something that will have a major impact on our way of life in the coming decades if it continues. Look at Europe and the US to see how fragile and unstable our societies are (and how much worse it's getting).

(3) AI. OK, everyone is talking about it, but I don't worry about it in the context of AI destroying the world, but rather how problem #2 above and #3 mean fewer jobs, more inequality, etc. At this rate, we will not become a society where our subservient AI-robot-slaves do our work for us while every human is enlightened and self-actualized. Instead, automation will drive the cost of labour down and thus cause more inequality in the decades to come. Of course people will continue working -- this defines them, and whatever meagre salary they make is necessary to survive.

(4) Our inability as a species to accept that galactic space exploration will probably be painful, slow, and require generations of space travlers to sacrifice their egos and lives to enable their ancestors to arrive at the destination they set out for. Maybe I'm pessimistic but there won't be "warp speed" and if that's the case, then space travel and galactic colonization will require re-defining what it means to be a human race -- it'll be more akin (and more extreme) to the way colonists visited the Americas -- they gave up their families, communication with the "Old World", etc. to start a new life. Now imagine these same colonists would set off but accept that they would die on the journey, as would their children, and their grandchildren, and only their grand-children would arrive at the destination to maybe prosper, or maybe die... We need to accept that this might be what galactic colonization looks like. I don't think we're ready for this as a race/species/society.

(4) - The driving force behind space exploration is the idea that Earth will eventually be made uninhabitable by climate change. However, for any planet or moon in our solar system to be a viable alternative, we're going to have to induce "climate change" there as well, but on a far larger scale that what Earth is experiencing. No other body in our solar system experiences the same range of surface temperatures as Earth, has breathable air, fertile soil, fresh water, comparable gravity, a food chain, weather patterns, or countless other things necessary for large scale sustainable human life.

Doesn't it stand to reason that in the course of developing those technologies, we'd be able to fix the Earth's comparatively minor problems long before we could transform a planet or moon. One could even argue that the advancement required would probably first arrive at asteroid defense, scalable food solutions and small scale climate control to provide more habitable land on earth for future population growth.

Perhaps exploring space is an appropriate vehicle to spur those developments, but it just doesn't seem like a plausible endgoal.

It's the only end goal that supports human life after the death of the earth.

The earth is not likely to die for billions of years. Its ability to sustain human life on a large scale is certainly at risk. What I'm saying is that the technological advances required to make even the best candidate planet a superior alternative to earth, in terms of human habitability, are an enormous superset of the those required to fix every one of the earths problems that drove us to consider a replacement planet in the first place.

This assumes we won't find a viable alternative. I really like Interstellar for this reason -- I can see us sending x ships to x planetary systems with the understanding that all but one of those ships will likely perish for a greater good.

I think the other reason we want to be on multiple planets is less about climate change, but cataclysmic shocks (asteroid impact, nuclear war, etc.) -- if we're on multiple planets, we have a greater chance of surviving a cataclysmic shock to one planet.

Your point on climate change is great, though -- you're right that if we can terraform Mars or the Moon, we have the technology to fix whatever climate issues are happening on Earth! Funny that this doesn't come up more.

The chances of finding a preexisting viable alternative actually make the prospect of developing all that technology seem trivial.

Life has evolved over hundreds of millions of years, influenced by the earths environment, which itself has been influenced by its size/gravity, proximity to the sun, axial tilt, air composition, our atmosphere, and countless other macro scale variables, many of which are random and independent of each other. Most of these quantities have exceedingly small windows that can support human life. Furthermore, the particular sequence of these variables changing over millions of years has shaped evolution.

Think of it like this: there are 68 teams in the NCAA men's basketball tournament. This makes for 9.2 quintillion possible outcomes. There are certainly many orders of magnitude more variables that have shaped the evolution of life on earth. I'm not saying only one of those permutations results in a planet suitable for humans, just that the sheer scale of how large of a cosmic accident we are makes me think we'll run out of time before we ever find another earth suitable for normal human life.

Hmm... You're just getting me thinking now: if we get sophisticated enough to travel hundreds/thousands of light years, etc... Then wouldn't it also stand to reason that we wouldn't even need to find planets, but rather can build our own artificial "microplanet"?

Curious what you think.

That's a far more difficult prediction: what technology will be developed in the next several hundred years. What sticks out as some problems with building a planet are where do you get all of the material, and how would you manage its rotational and revolutional speeds as it grew larger? Propelling a space ship seems fairly simple compared with propelling a planet.

Douglas Adams had some things to say about designing planets.

I was going to rebuff about not necessarily needing a second earth, but after re-reading your earlier comment and considering sustainability issues like oxygen and food production, you may have convinced me.

I guess I should spend more time being productive and less time considering how I could survive the heat death of the universe.

While I'd prefer avoiding a longer discussion of this myself here, my own view is that interplanatery and/or interstellar travel by lifeforms is far more likely to happen at the bacterial level than primate / mammalian.

As a mode to ensuring life proceeds, possibly. Humans: less likely.

Given the nature of a few past evolutionary bottlenecks (cyanobacteria ⇒ anaerobes, mitochondrial symbioticism, single-cell ⇒ multi-cell, this might represent a significant evolutionary acceleration on other worlds.

A good set.

On social inequality and mobility: this has been suggested by quite a few respondants (I'm inquiring in multiple forums). I'd like to ask you, and others:

Why do you feel this is a problem? What are the consequences?

Actually, a "5 Whys" approach is strongly encouraged.

(That applies generally to _all_ of what are considered problems.)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/5_Whys

Also, as a "space pessimist": what do you see as the benefits of interplanetary or interstellar space colonization?

Regarding the interstellar space colonization question -- ultimately it's a question of whether we want our species to survive. In a billion years, the Earth will be swallowed up by the Sun's expanding size, and certainly will be obliterated when the Sun goes Super Nova. It's nice to think this won't obliterate the human species!

However, you ask a good question -- and one related to the 5 Whys: why do we want the human species to survive permanently? And are we just extending the timeline of an inevitable demise? This leads me to think about the heat death of the universe and then I get depressed. :)

In terms of social inequality and immobility, here we go:

Why #1: extreme social immobility and inequality often destabilizes a society. This is why I'd consider it a problem/threat. At the very least, many economists argue that social inequality slow down the rate of innovation and economic growth.

Why #2: when you look at Western capitalist societies there appears to be a strong correlation between social mobility and access to opportunities (e.g., education, health care, etc.) and a society's ability to innovate. Note that "innovation" here refers to the society being able to solve other problems affecting said society. In a sense, social inequality and immobility stifle innovation and thus, it is "meta-problem" -- it makes it difficult to solve other problems the society is facing.

Why #3: a lot of literature (in management theory, education theory, etc.) argues that giving people the ability to grow, develop, learn, etc. makes them more productive, creative, and better able to solve problems. Social immobility and inequality is a form of oppression, in this regard.

Why #4: this sort of mobility ultimately aligns incentives -- you are encouraged to be creative, solve important problems, etc. that are valuable for society because doing so will enable you to enrich yourself.

Why #5: because humans need incentives to succeed, and human ingenuity is something that need to be cultivated.

TL,DR: social inequality and immobility is a meta-problem because (a) it makes society unstable and leads to the other issues we are worried about, and (b) reduces humanity's ability to innovate and thus solve other problems.

Thanks.

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