Assuming all the engineering nonsense is sorted, what level of existing life are you prepared to sterilise? I mean, I wouldn’t struggle morally with wiping out some alien microbes to provide humans with a home. I’d have a harder time accepting it was OK to nuke a fully functioning and diverse ecosystem with forest-analogues and animaloids (after all, we’re fucking that up pretty roundly here at home).
Would you wipe it clean if it’s an actual civilsation of intelligent beings?
If there were no alternative. The survival of the species is at stake, remember.
An extremely good point. Self-replicating systems need to replicate for many, many, many generations before they become active on a macroscopic scale, let alone an astronomical one. I can imagine a planet that is already seeded with self-replicating tech but looks basically unchanged for centuries- this could lead some other agency to think that the planet is unoccupied. So they introduce their self-repping tech as well. Eventually you have a planet covered in patches of self-replicating tech competing against each other to achieve different goals -a chaotic mess, that achieves nothing, except perhaps an unintended ecology of some sort.
Maybe not this century, but it won’t be long on on a geological timescale. The human brain/body system is far from the most efficient computational system that physics might allow, by many orders of magnitude.
Not sure how that fits in with this thread, but you (and Vonnegut) are absolutely correct.
Well…we know how to heat up and change the climate on this planet, though we don’t know how to control that or fine tune it. Basically, what we are doing on the Earth we could do on Mars, though if you want real terraforming wrt you want to make Mars like the Earth we don’t really have all the pieces to do so. Soil would be pretty difficult to change, so you’d need advances in bio-engineering to craft species that could survive in something like the current environment yet would make changes to it that would be beneficial to us and the other species we’d take with us.
So…possible? Yes. When? No idea, even with all resources on the planet and no monetary limits. My WAG…a couple of centuries, minimum, before Mars or some other planet would be anything like habitable…and then my guess is you wouldn’t have humans or other species just running around outside dancing among the daisies, you are probably talking about perhaps humans in domed settlements able to, maybe, go out without a full pressure suit.
Put down colonies? Sure. We could put down colonies on Mars etc in 50 years, with total efforts and no monetary limits. Those would be colonies of, perhaps, a couple hundred humans in pressurized habitats, perhaps domed or, more likely IMHO in underground old lava tubes or cave systems. I think we could have such a settlement on Mars, the Moon and if you could figure out how to keep it afloat, Venus atmosphere.
Terraforming would take generations if it’s even possible on any of the bodies in this solar system. I think it would be easier to look into megastructures such as orbital rings, rotating habitats, hoopworlds/ringworlds and the like than to try and terraform. Of course, all those things are also beyond our current capabilities as well, but I think they are something we COULD do or at least attempt quicker than terraforming, say, Mars in a time crunch.
Impossible to say, really. There could be breakthroughs in 10 years on fusion and bio-engineering that change everything. But right now I’d say terraforming, say, Mars, is centuries out…and that would be just to get Mars to the point you could wander about without a pressure suit on (you’d still need stuff to protect you from radiation and, well, to breath and all that).
No, I don’t think nukes would be a great idea. I’d say we have the hypothetical tech to change the atmosphere on Mars at least today…we just need to do what we are doing here on Mars, i.e. release a shit ton of greenhouse gasses. This is, of course, purely hypothetical, since we’d need to do a ton of basic work just to figure out what GhG we could potentially use there and how we could use it to achieve what we were trying to achieve. Any atmosphere we put up would eventually be dissipated, as you say there is no magnetic core on Mars, but my understanding is if we built an atmosphere thick enough to at least be able to move around on Mars without a pressure suit it would take a million or so years to dissipate in the solar wind.
Again, personally I think we’d be better off building our own megastructures habitats in the long run…and you could probably do that in the same couple of centuries it would take you to get Mars to the point you could walk around without a pressure suit, but with a lot more potential utility.
I would rate the probability of either of these at vanishingly low. You can’t rule it out…we could, after all, come up with some magic tech that allows us to do anything. But nothing we have today nor even anything we THINK we might have in that time table could create a Mars with a breathable atmosphere in anything like that time table. For this I’d guess an order of magnitude more…500-1000 would be a better bet.
If you are interested, I love this channel on Youtube and the link is to his Megastructures series of videos.
I would. Those alien microbes might eventually evolve into the finest, most noble sentient species in the Multiverse. They probably won’t, but it is a bit of a risk to take.
Humanity is already evolved, and already a technological society capable, at least in potential, of spreading life from this planet throughout the solar system, if not to other worlds in other solar systems. I’d say we are a better bet. I’d go with Mangetout’s assertion.
I have no right to make such a choice, nor does anyone else.
I have no right to orchestrate their extinction, not even to save my own skin.
Ponder this, You are the alien and someone has come here with the same frame of mind that you have.
I am thinking you suddenly do not agree with them?
Do you have the ‘right’ to kill another creature to live? As a species, do we have the ‘right’ to do so? What gives us the ‘right’, assuming you agree we have to live?
If aliens were to come here to remake the Earth because their own home planet was gone, would they be worried about whether they have the ‘right’ when their own species (and all the other species they would bring with them) would be extinct otherwise? Why should their species disappear from the universe when ours continues on? Who decides who has the ‘right’ to continue and who should just go extinct?
I am afraid that you will probably find that the majority find it totally acceptable to murder any life form, regardless of sophistication and intelligence in order to save their own hide.
We seem to collectively view ourselves as lords and masters of all creation and everything is beneath us to bend as we wish.
It’s probably a good thing that the opportunity to even do so probably wont be within our reach until long after we have grown up
Everything goes “extinct” there is no immortality in the universe.
Planets, Stars, entire Galaxies are born, and die, it is always changing and nothing is forever except time and energy
But no species that’s a going concern is going to want that time to happen any quicker than it has too. And there is a big difference between going extinct today, and, say, in a million years…or a billion…or a trillion. Or even a thousand or a hundred. The human species COULD last for a very long time (or many species that derived originally from humanity)…and it would be insane if we said ‘well, the planet is going tits up in 150 years, all life will be gone, but we won’t move to Mars because there are some microbes there and we wouldn’t want to go stifle their chance at their own galactic civilization, so might as well go quietly into that good night…’
It is always going to be “Tomorrow” to some person at a given time
100 quadrillion years from now, it is still going to be someones “Tomorrow”
And i dont think humans are going extinct today or tomorrow, unless it is by their own hand.
We wont go to mars because we like to breath air unless we want to live in bubbles, in which case the moon is closer.
Mars’ day for a galactic civilization is long past unless you find something intelligent that loves radiation and breathes thin CO2 and requires low G, which isn’t us in current form.
And why are we moving to Mars?
Did we make a utter mess of Earth? If that is the case maybe we deserve to vanish into the quiet night before we ruin other things?
If the Sun of going to go POP, Mars is no safe Haven, it’s fate is that of Earth.
Hope you build a self sustaining ship that holds several billion people
If its the asteroid of doom, well if you can terraform a planet, you can move a measly asteroid easier, problem solved.
This. Exactly this.
The Red / Blue / Green Mars trilogy by Robinson was real impressive for the thought given to the process and challenges of terraforming. Except when it came to power: everything was driven by Handwavium reactors.
In Red Mars he made one nod to the energy realities. He pointed out that the initial crop of mini windmills created by self-replicators programmed by the crackpot Russell, working over a century or two, had raised the temp of the atmosphere by a couple thousandths of a degree C. That’s how much free energy was available in the environment to be captured. It took Handwavium to provide the rest.
First of all, I’m not talking about nanoscale self replicating machines. Those are a long way off. I’m talking about smarter, more flexible versions of existing factory robots, advanced to the point that they don’t need to be programmed for each task. Which we already have examples of.
Anyone who thinks it is likely to take 350 years for existing factory robots, which already make other factory robots right now, they just need help from human hands for some steps, to be able to make themselves, isn’t a credible source. I don’t actually know why Freitas is saying 350 years for nanoscale versions, either, that timeline is also ludicrous for several reasons.
(it’s a perfect example of a nonlinear problem. While I do think it will take a very long time, I think you could iteratively discover correct, working designs for nanoscale machinery with a good simulator and variants on machine learning and genetic algorithms. Then you need a whole factory full of thousands of multi-head STMs to actually assemble the machinery pieces - sure would be easy to make those million dollar pieces of equipment if other robots can make most of the parts almost for free. So no, 350 years is stupid. The economic edge of self replicating nano machinery is too large, we’ve made too much progress towards AI, and the problem itself is one we clearly understand the nature of. No invention in the history of humanity ever took close to that long)
As for power - first of all, I’m talking about the robots covering the planet. Solar power density out as mars isn’t great, so I guess you assume fission if you aren’t sure fusion will work. Second, I did think it would take another century to actually temporarily make Mars habitable ( the atmosphere will start being lost almost immediately).
Third, just straight solar is fine for lunar orbit resource exploitation. The panels can be wafer thin, in various low lunar orbits, and beam the power to the factories below with microwaves.
Solar’s ROI is a matter of weeks if you are talking about thin orbital panels, by the way, perpetually exposed to light. NREL says 2 years for terrestrial panels to back back the energy cost at ~3 hours per day. Space panels are 10 times better (8 times more exposure and about 30% more light reaches them), plus they can be thinner and even more energy frugal to make. So worst case, the factory needs 2 months to pay back the solar panels it is producing and it might have a total doubling time of 6 months. So you have a million factories in 10 years and infinite factories by 20 years.
Not exactly magic, lol. If you have self replicating machinery, getting the power through solar is a cinch.
To fight the hypothetical, if we really had the technology to travel to Alpha Centauri and sterilize all life on a planet there, there’d be no need to terraform that planet for human survival. If you can travel to Alpha Centauri and drop 10,000,000 nuclear bombs on the planet, you have the ability to survive indefinitely in space.
The way to sterilise a planet is not to nuke it from orbit but to drop asteroids - dinosaur killers - on the planet. Well, larger than DKs but not too much larger. You don’t want to melt the crust. Nudging those into an impact orbit would take a lot of energy and time.
So what? Why would we be obligated to perpetuate the future survival of the human race, at any cost? Suffering is bad, and to be avoided, death is unfortunate, but inevitable - but the potential future descendants of humans don’t exist yet - so we would not be causing any suffering or death by simply failing to continue as a race.
You do understand that’s the subject of this thread, right? And you interjected that, given that humanity would go extinct on this planet that it wouldn’t be right for us to terraform Mars if there were microbes there. Considering that’s what the thread is about, do you still feel the same way?
So, if humanity were on the edge and Mars was the only choice, and we decided to terraform Mars to make it more habitable to humans, and this would result in the deaths of whatever life might still be there, you’d be ok with that now? Again, that’s what we were talking about.
It’s a hypothetical. Like I said, it’s what this thread is about. Why doesn’t really matter at this point, and, frankly it wouldn’t matter to the central question you and I were discussing anyway.
Yeah, I agree. Assuming the issue is with the Earth and the rest of the solar system and the sun are fine, we’d be better off going the megastructures route from an engineering perspective. We don’t have the ability today to do either, but it’s going to be easier (for some forms of that term :p) to build habitats in space in our solar system more quickly and easily and at larger scales (for more people) than a long duration colony ship sent from Earth to the nearest stars and hope we can terraform the planets there when we arrive. I think that long term, humanity will have to go the latter route, but not in something like what the OP is talking about.
There is zero demonstrated evidence that so-called electrochemical “cold fusion” actually produces net power output or is in any way a result of the fusion of atomic nuclei. It may be that some other form of fusion or power production is developed (I’ve long favored muon-catalyzed fusion, but it would require some fundamental breakthroughs to compensate for the alpha sticking problem) but we can’t say when or if that will happen.
You are correct that we have virtually no data on human or mammalian physiology in fractional gravity. But the cautious extrapolations from microgravity research suggest that there are very likely some degree of adverse physiological effects from long duration exposure to a level of acceleration significantly less than that of Earth, not only upon organism systems such as skeletomuscular, cardiovascular, visual, auditory, and somatosensory systems. This is particularly true for developmental biology, e.g. growth of the organism from birth through maturity. You comment about the “curse” of terrestrial gravity, but there are a lot of subtle effects in a substantially lower or free fall environment, not the least of which is hygiene; in our terrestrial field we can rely upon gravity to limit the spread of disease-causing organisms and the basic carriers of them such as convulsive expellation of mucus, liquid feces, or airborne distribution of contaminants such as fungal spores and infectious agents because they will fall and become fixed on flat surfaces. In much lower gravity they can travel further and be dislodged more easily. This may sound like an easy problem to deal with but it is actually a major problem in space habitation. We are evolved to develop and operate in a 1 g field and there are good reasons to believe that we’re going to have to make some pretty fundamental compensations to live in a lesser acceleration field for extended durations.
Perhaps, but there is no fundamental reason that this should be so. We build structures that resist heavy loading in a 1 g acceleration field as a matter of course, and it is no more difficult to build rotating structures using conventional materials developing an equivalent radial acceleration. I’ve done conceptual design on a large rotating ellipsoid space habitat using a composite water ice, silicates, and long carbon fiber windings containing tens of meters of liquid water and floating “islands” which are well within stress allowable for the material. The greater challenge is the construction and thermodynamic management of such structures, though schemes for those operations are plausible as well (using an internal bladder inflated with low pressure nitrogen, and a thin film parabolic solar collector focusing light into a central optical tube to provide light and heating). It may only be necessary to develop some fraction of terrestrial gravity, which would translate into less material being required, but even a full 1 g of simulated gravity is within material capabilities.
And given sufficient propulsion capability and a techincal infrastructure to process Near Earth Objects (NEO) there is a virtually unlimited amount of material readily available that doesn’t require digging through regolith or having to land equipment and resources on a planet in a controlled, survivable manner. That, too, is well beyond current capability but a plausible roadmap can be drawn toward the mining of NEOs and objects beyond Earth orbit without having to postulate the kind of magic pixie dust technology necessary to transform the climate and ecology of an entire planet.
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