I think we will exterminate ourselves, but we’ll probably set off in a generational starship before then.
It will fail.
First, the best way to do non-FTL colonization isn’t generation ships. Assuming biology advances fast enough, a modified Bracewell probe that can build humans out of local raw materials is a lot cheaper, and more reliable.
Still, unless we either discover FTL or destroy ourselves in the near future, I think we’ll probably go through both.
Meanwhile, once we do discover FTL, time travel can’t be far behind. And probably sideways travel along branes, and possibly Sliders-like travel through nearby quantum states, or maybe even the kind of stuff Greg Egan and Greg Bear write about where we can effectively select the space we live in out of infinite possibilities. So, even without any Vingean singularity or new-age cosmic awakening or whatever, FTL colonization may not be all that exciting for very long.
If there is some kind of singularity, we might well end up with some kind of space travel (e.g., the computer system we’ve uploaded ourselves into looking for suns or black holes to use for power, rocks to turn into computronium, whatever), but it won’t be anything like Star Trek.
In fact, I don’t think the Star Trek version involves any designer at all, intelligent or otherwise. IIRC, it goes something like this:
Various very different life forms arise on different planets through evolution. One of them decides to seed a bunch of planets with, it effect, copies of itself. One of those seeded planets is Earth. So, everything interesting about humanity is a result of evolution, not design; it’s just that a lot of that evolution took place in a completely different environment from the one we can see.
The Doctor Who version, on the other hand, at least requires artificial selection:
Various very different life forms arise on different planets through evolution. One of them gets paranoid and decides to look into the future of each world, and destroy any ecosystem that will evolve something significantly different from itself and powerful enough to be threatening. So, humanity only exists because we look a lot like Time Lords.
Fair enough. Some variant notions I’ve heard are that, plus some “design” or “direction” by the seeding people.
Greg Egan’s Incandescence, I believe, postulates multiple panspermia (one of which is DNA-based) of microscopic-level life.
We live on a very tiny island of just the perfect conditions (and come to that, not so much of our tiny island is very liveable at that - mostly covered with very deep water, it is), a VERY far distance from anywhere else even remotely liveable - as far as we know. I’ll bet $20 to $10 against our ever making it out of the solar system.
And if the coming centuries should prove me wrong, I’ll pay up, honest being that I am. But you’ll have to come to collect personally.
I see three likely possibilities.
One, we engineer ourselves into some sort of posthumans or our machines supersede us; something reaches the stars, but it isn’t human.
Two: We smash ourselves down to primitivism and can’t rebuild.
Three: Genetic engineering/mind control is used to create 1984 on steroids, a rigid society that will never advance, never change, and never fall until the Sun eats Earth.
Yes, it’s canon. Although there was some of that seeding that falcotron mentions going on too; a race called the Preservers had a habit of that.
Basically, a humanoid race arose 4.5 billion years ago and found itself the only life in the galaxy higher than pond scum. It seeded planets all across the galaxy with genetic programs that would push evolution towards the emergence of intelligent creatures roughly like themselves, as well as fragments of a message from them.
“So long, and thanks for all the fish?”
Nah, more likely it’s “We apologise for the inconvenience”.
This.
No, FTL isn’t possible, and the nearest planet that is even close to livable for human beings is likely to be too far away for a generation ship to have a fighting chance of making it. Not to mention, the difficulties of discerning, from a great distance, just what stars might harbor such planets. Maybe someday we will have sent probes to every star within 50 light years harboring a planet not too different from Earth mass at 0.1c, and 550 years later they will have signaled back the composition of the atmospheres on those planets, local gravity and air pressure, presence or absence of land and water, etc., and either we’ll have our target for colonization, or we’ll have none that’s habitable without too much work to be done at the other end of a generation ship’s journey.
I’d bet on the latter, but even if the former, my suspicion is that it would have to be a lot closer than 50 light years for a generation ship to get there safely. We won’t be able to speed a generation ship at nearly the same speeds as can be managed with a probe containing some instruments, so the journey might take millennia, and too many things can go wrong, most especially (a) energy loss in the void between the stars, and (b) minor imbalances in the ship’s ecology becoming major and eventually catastrophic over the course of many generations.
I think SF has conditioned many of us to think that surely the problems of interstellar travel will be solvable, but the worlds of SF need interstellar travel more than the real world does.
We’ll send a bunch of them out in different directions, with the expectation that some will be lost.
At least I hope so. I mean, I know we’re not that much of a species, but I sort of like us, and would like to think we’ll get off our birth rock and see a little bit of what’s out there.
Not voting because I don’t see anything that really fits my opinion: that humans will never reach other extrasolar worlds because of simple lack of interest or economic incentive (which may amount to the same thing).
I haven’t yet seen a convincing argument of why we would want to reach the stars. Such a huge investment for which we, personally in this generation, will never see a return. (Obviously speaking from the standpoint of any generation that would consider such a thing.) Once it gets to that point technologically, humans could probably terraform Mars or Venus much more easily, and with more immediate benefit, than sending out some ship on a one-way trip.
Yes, and we’ll do it near or past light speed. We have literally billions of years left to us here, assuming we can avert various minor planetary-extinction disasters. For a species that walked on the moon only 65 years after the first powered flight, and who will probably walk on Mars in the next 50, well, we’re going to be hard to contain.
We’re already nibbling around the edges of relativity–and even if it really does prove to be an insurmountable boundary, we should be able to come arbitrarily close to light speed. The technology of 200 years hence will make the toys of today seem quaint, the technology of 2000 years hence will be unimaginable.
The long term survival of intelligent life and civilization.
That obsession with personal reward to the exclusion of all else is an American problem not some intrinsic quality of humans.
America. Suuure, Der Trihs. Now tell me how it’s more specifically all Ronald Reagan’s fault, or reflects the pernicious influence of religion.
Come on, pony, do your trick. It’s just that one, isn’t it?
Yes, America. It is America where capitalism has become a near-religion instead of an economic system, where people are ideologically convinced that profit is the be-all and end-all of human existence, and where people live in denial that anyone on Earth disagrees. The idea that people wouldn’t try to colonize the stars simply because they wouldn’t personally see any return from it is a deeply American sentiment, one that ignores much of human history.
I picked “Come here so I can slap you. Saying “Man” rather than “Humanity” offends me.” because there’s no Other option. I don’t think it will ever make sense from a financial standpoint, rather than the list “no” reasons.
No, because of physics or engineering limitations AND we’ll exterminate ourselves anyway.
Has there ever in human history been a sustained colonization effort that wasn’t primarily motivated and driven by the desire for material gain? A single instance? Any time, anywhere? I must have my American blinders on and am ignoring it despite myself, because not a single one comes to mind, I’m afraid.
nm
I suspect humanity is pretty close to peaking already. We’re already seeing the end of the energy boom, eventually it will just start going downhill again and we’re going to plateu LONG before we reach anything as lofty as interstellar travel. If everything goes well we reach some kind of equlibrium and live out the rest of our days in relative obscurity.
No, it isn’t. I assume you’re referring to inflation, which is a hypothesis that’s not integral to the big bang theory, and even so, the issue is that no object can travel across the grid of space at faster than the speed of light. Space itself expanding can create a condition in which two objects are moving apart at faster than the speed of light, but neither is crossing space beyond that speed - rather, new space is being created between them.
Anyway, there needs to be a “no, the technological hurdles/physics limitations are too great” option. The closest you have is “yes, generational ships” but that’s not really adequate, because generational ships are grandiose, high risk ventures on their own and with limited upside.
It seems unlikely we’ll ever exceed the speed of light. It’s possible we could develop some sort of energy source that would allow us to put out a constant 1g of acceleration somewhere, which would get us to nearby stars in reasonable timeframes, but that seems unlikely.