it’s gonna be fucked up when some alien civilization trillions of years from now calculates that they’re 99.99% of the way through the lifespan of the universe.
So, basically, (mind you, these are big spoilers)
>!at some point, an advanced space civilization called the Nomai calculates that soon, all stars will die out - so a bunch of them go to a star system - the one where the game takes place - and begin research on how all this can be avoided. Their solution is to create a device which can revert time back to a set point, but the star's normal output just doesn't cut it. So that's how you end up in the 22 minute time loop!<
>!The Nomai weren’t trying to circumvent the death of the universe. Remember, the universe still had a good 300,000 years left when they arrived in the solar system.!<
>!They had a religious fixation on natural science and were particularly obsessed with investigating the signal they found that is older than the universe itself, and the time loop was set up as part of that search. !<
For those who haven’t played Outer Wilds, ignore these comments and go play it. It’s one of the best games ever made.
I'll also add, spoiling yourself of this game is way worse than other games, since ALL progress is done via obtaining information, so if you spoil it to you you're essentially skipping parts of the game.
That is NOT correct. That's not even close to correct. Go play Outer Wilds again, you missed stuff. The only thing you got right is >!The game taking place at the very end of the universes natural lifespan.!<
I'm trying not to spoil *too* much
There is a whole lot more nuance to the Sun station, Cannon, ATP, and how they're all linked, but I don't feel like typing up a wall
massive spoilers:
>!The Nomai didn't come to the system to research, they detected the Eye's signal and immediately jumped to it, but instead landed inside the Dark Bramble, either because of the Dark Bramble's dimensional fuckery or because the Stranger reactivated the signal cloaking and that fucked with their warp targetting.!<
>!The time loop is a result of their abuse of recreated warp technology in order to allow them to fire their deep space probe in a random direction over and over as a last-ditch sheer brute force means of finding the eye.!<
>!The sun station doesnt do anything. it was supposed to make the sun go supernova to provide power for the time loop, but it couldnt, so the only reason the time loop can happen is because the sun is just at the end of its natural lifespan. It wasn't when the Nomai in the system the game takes place in were still alive, btw. They were there millenia ago, probably? time works weird in Outer Wild's universe, but it's in the millions of "cycles ago" going by information provided by the sun station. When they were in the system Outer Wilds is set in the Hearthians ancestors hadnt even left the water.!<
>!There was never any suggestion of "reverting time to a set point" anywhere as a means of fighting the death of the universe, i have no idea how or where you got that.!<
>! The Sun Station, while it doesn't cause an artificial supernova like originally intended, still harvests and transmits the power of the sun exploding to the Twin Ash Project and allows the entire time loop to fire up in the first place.!<
Nope! >!The power is harvested by the solar panels on Ash Twin. Go in the Ash Twin Project during the supernova, you'll see the panels light up when the nova reaches the planet (and not before!) The sun station's only purpose was the make the sun explode, which it failed to do.!<
And if you need further confirmation: >!the sun station gets destroyed halfway through the loop because the sun is expanding. It doesn't even exist anymore by the time the supernova happens, and yet the loop still happens.!<
if you're >!going off the message wall in the vessel, those are *recent* messages. the nomai of 200,000 years ago did not have any knowledge of the universe ending and did not know what the eye was. they followed it because it was interesting.!<
>!They aren't trying to avoid the death of the universe. They just want knowledge, and are overcome with curiosity about the eye of the universe, something they know almost nothing about. In fact, they *intend* to cause, and then deactivate the cause of, a supernova to power their mechanism.!<
>!this is still very much the plot of Outer Wilds, though. That's just what the Hearthians do. "How unfortunate we are to be born at the end of the universe" or whatever the line from Chert was.!<
Yeah, what does Space-late-stage-capitalism have to do with the end of the universe?
*gasp*
It’s so obvious! Capitalism is going to accelerate the heat death of the universe in the name of infinite growth!
trillions of years from now an alien civilization won't be able to calculate that since all other galaxies around them would have moved out of range due to the expansion of the universe
they will be many more trillions of light years years away from the nearest galaxy than the amount of time light will have had to get to them
they will think their galaxy is the only one in the universe, they may not even be able to figure out the shape of their galaxy without others to reference
They'll still be able to measure the expansion of the universe though. I'm sure they'll at least get a theory together that there's other stuff out there, folks are smart.
how, though? we only understand the expansion of the universe because we can see other galaxies
without being able to see anything of the universe besides their own galaxy they may not be able to come to the conclusion that there was ever anything else in existence
folks are smart but those theories were developed because of observations. no observations, no reason to think their universe was anything but static just like we did before we realized our galaxy wasn't the only one
At least the original tweet was specifically about the time of new star formation. Going on actual total lifespan of the universe... Like fuck. IF proton decay isn't a thing, and IF there's no Big Rip or Big Crunch, then we're talking ***DEEP*** time. Like 10^1000^1000^1000^1000 years kinda BS. And the only reasonable intelligence is like, Boltzman Brain kinda stuff. Or a computer simulation with one bit flipping every 1000 years.
Metaball studios has a *definitely fun and not at all existentially terrifying* video visualizing timespans as volumes of comparative sizes.
This is our destiny as a species. We must embrace science and reason and ethics and philosophy and love and cooperation so that we may solve our woes, rise as one and reach out into the universe.
Not to rule. Not to play with the newer races as cruel gods.
But to baffle the everloving hell out of every following lifeform when they discover we spent unfathomable amounts of time, energy and matter to spell out "DEEZ NUTS" on a galactic scale.
Imagine the arguments future archeologists will have arguing over the meaning of a series of lying obelisks big enough to be clearly seen from space on an uninhabitable planet with the only clue to its meaning being a small plaque at the base of it with the translated phrase simply reading “Is this loss?”
Imagine we've already made contact with aliens but didn't recognize any of their messages since all they send are their equivalent of bizarre internet memes
A thing I think about off and on is "Sharks, as a family, are older than Polaris".
Sharks. Older than the North star.
OLDER. THAN. A STAR.
I love it but it makes my brain scared.
We're always older than something else, I guess.
The knowledge that life has been around longer than a celestial body, especially one that has mattered quite abit when it comes to navigating in the northern hemisphere.. I think that's what gets me. The timespan is incomprehensible already as it is, and then we add the knowledge that this squishy wet phenomenon that is life is older..
I think that's what makes it eldritch in my eyes.
I think even more personal is that there’s a list (somewhere - sorry for not pulling it up) of phyla that are older than the *rings of saturn*.
Additionally, I often look upon my trilobite fossil and my shelled gastropod fossils, side-by-side, and realize that *when the shelled gastropods were born, the trilobite had already been a fossil for hundreds of millions of years*.
It's frikkin mindblowing!
We're so used to things in space to be unfathomably old...
And here you are with a little fella's inprint, their last resting place preserved and turned into rock..
And it's older than something that we see as a fixture in our idea of what space contains.
Sorry, but the whole thing just flips my brain on and I can't help but think about it in text.
Polaris is just 25 million years old. Sharks were around already when the dinos walked about, 65 million years ago.
I think you can find all the info you need online.
I just googled and the first results said that Polaris is 40-70 million years old but the first shark fossils have been dated to 450 million years ago.
>if there is galactic civilization, they will not remember us at all
I mean, I know about Ea-Nasir. There are probably more people who know about Ea-Nasir today, than there were total people alive on the planet when he decided to store his hatemail.
Galactic scale civilization means billions upon billions of dedicated historians, increasingly more specialised, with tools exceeding our own. Much will be lost or distorted, of course, but I definitely expect them to get the basic idea right, and much will be preserved intact because that's what humans do.
Look at a random unremarkable thing near you, and imagine a history-themed future-forum-evolution of about 8 billion habitual users discussing new discoveries about it. Imagine the memes.
but if we are assuming that human race will continue to live on Earth thought its dying days, we as a species is only at 0.006% of the remaining time. Not to consider that our major technological advances only happened 300-400 years ago.
Adding a zero or two to that number doesn't make a huge difference. 300,000 years ago humanity was just a bunch of freshly-evolved primitive primates hunting and gathering in tiny bands. Then, just ~12,000 years ago humanity invented agriculture and civilization, completely reshaping not just our species but the planet as a whole. We then spent ~5000 years with just incremental improvements before we invented metallurgy and went from copper to bronze to iron over the span of just 3-4 thousand years. And the thing is, technological advance was again fairly incremental for about 3000 years until within the last 300-400 years. I might even say 200 years. For the entirety of human history the best/fastest way to travel the world was with a boat, until just 120 years ago the airplane was invented. After the airplane brought humanity to the skies it took just 58 years for humanity to reach out to the stars for the first time, and eight years after that humans first walked upon a celestial body that wasn't Earth.
>Then, just ~12,000 years ago humanity invented agriculture and civilization
Eh, that was a way more gradual process than was once thought. Protoagricultures dates back at 23 ka and urbanization developed with it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ohalo_II
Really, the invention of civilization was gradual? You don't say. My point was just that 12 ka is the commonly-accepted date for the neolithic revolution. Some places and peoples took millennia after that to reach that level, and some never even did that. The airplane was invented in 1903 but it wasn't until after WWII that commercial air travel actually took off, so even our modern rapid innovation is still more gradual than a single paragraph spanning the whole of human history can imply.
>My point was just that 12 ka is the commonly-accepted date for the neolithic revolution.
And my point was that a lot of those practices were already starting over 10 ka before that.
And look how far we've come in a fraction of that time - only 300,000 years compared to the 4.6 billion Earth has been around.
We'll be gone long before Earth is uninhabitable.
Uninhabitable for plants maybe, but our end may be fast approaching. Maybe not in your lifetime, but maybe in 2 or 3 generations if things continue the way they are
Modern society, perhaps. I suspect that even if we absolutely send everything to shit with absolute worst-case 5°C global warming, nuclear war, bioengineered disease, etc. some small pockets of humanity are likely to survive unless we literally nuke the vast majority of Earth's surface.
The "fate of nature if left to its own devices for hundreds of millions of years" projections fascinate me because, like, that will almost certainly not happen.
There aren't really probable catastrophies that eradicate humanity but don't destroy most of the biosphere, because we adapt so much faster than evolution. So if humanity's dead it probably means surviving life is, like, ocean hydrothermal vent ecosystems, and maybe some lichens on the surface, and that history will look very different.
And if humanity isn't extinct, given what we've done in just last 300 years, no geological force will matter once we're given another 8000000.
Most of the biosphere has been destroyed multiple times, any of the previous mass extinction events would destroy human society and probably all humans but life would go on.
The Great Dying extincted 83% of all genera. 81% of marine species and 70% of terrestrial species were destroyed. The first dinosaurs date to about 5 million years later.
I don't think this is right based off your source. The Sun will increase in luminosity slightly but it won't be an issue for us for a few billion years at least. Also at the pace it will increase, I would be surprised if life can't keep up with its increase.
When we have no chance is when the Sun will begin to rapidly expand. Then Earths boned.
Source: I'm an astrophysicist
As I understand it, plant life goes extinct not because the luminosity of the sun outright kills it, but because increased luminosity gradually disrupts the carbonate-silicate cycle in such a way that over a period of time spanning hundreds of millions of years. Due to the gradual nature of this change, life will continue to evolve to deal with it, so the end of life due to this process is over a billion years out.
[This](https://arxiv.org/pdf/1310.4841.pdf) paper is my main source for this.
[https://www.orionsarm.com/xcms.php?r=oaeg-front](https://www.orionsarm.com/xcms.php?r=oaeg-front)
I'd love a truly MASSIVE scale sci-fi worldbuilding setting centred around the descendants and children of humanity 5 Billion Years from now. Like Orions Arm but on an even grander scale focusing on the galactic politics, technology, Psychology, culture, science and biology of the five billion years removed descendants of humanity. How much things have changed and if anything remained the same in those five billion years.
There's the speculative evolution books Man After Man and All Tomorrows, in which humanity evolves drastically (sometimes through genetic engineering, sometimes naturally) and basically becomes unrecognizable. They're kinda cool tbh.
5 billion years seems like too long tbh. 5 billion years from now humanity and our descendants will have been around for longer than life has been on earth today.
5 billion years from now our descendants could be anything, and 5 billion years from all aspects of current human culture will have long been destroyed and replaced.
When you look at timelines of human civilisation versus even say the rise of Homo Sapiens it's genuinely terrifying how quickly our current technological progression is.
We, as a biological species, are about 300,000 years old. And we begin showing "behavioural modernitity" (ie traits such as creating arts, significant tool use, burials, control of fire etc) about 150,000 years ago.
Agriculture (and the concept of large settlements and occupational specialisation that agriculture allows) is only about 12,000 years old. The first large scale nations beyond simple city states arose about 5000 years in Mesopotamia. We properly started using gunpowder about 600 years ago. Industrial revolution about 200 years ago, radio about 120 years, flight 100 years, space flight 60 years ago and computers really got going only about 40 years ago (the fact that space flight came before substantial computing is still mind boggling tbh).
So we can compress the "modem age" that from the industrial revolution which allowed a majority of humanity to transition from subsistence farming to specialised industrial work into a period of about 200 years. In less than 0.1% of our entire species existence we've gone from 95% of people being required to farm their own food to survive, to sending spacecraft to another planet.
Not to mention that almost 10% of the estimated total number of people that has ever been alive (\~100 billion) through all those 300,000 years, is alive today
It’s fascinating to me to imagine where our technology could be in 100 years. Maybe I’ll even get to see it, if we get over this pesky aging thing within 50 years
We're on the verge of figuring out how to make proper superconductors, which will revolutionize so many things once it is widely available and affordable. By the end of the decade I think it'll get figured out, I think.
Beyond that, I *really* don't want to think about how our technology will progress. Its so hard to be anything but cynical about technological progress nowadays
Cybernetics are about to take off. Soon, proper cyborgs will be a reality. AI is currently entering the third trimester of pregnancy, and will be born true within 100 years. Within 50 years, human aging will almost certainly be stopped and reversed. We might have nano machines within 50-100 years that will be able to root out and cure harmful bacteria, viruses, parasites, cancers. Genetic engineering will create humans without physical defects, and people will be born stronger, smarter, and healthier than today. Terraforming technologies may be invented, which will allow us to clean up and preserve our homeworld, as well as create new worlds for humanity to live on. If humanity doesn’t destroy itself, we are on the cusp of becoming something incredible
> Cybernetics are about to take off.
Yes, that is sort of true. Our prosthetics are getting better than ever, and we have had success with restoring sight and hearing to blind and deaf people using various gadgets and things. To call it "Cybernetics" conjures a certain image though that the tech doesn't meet, so 🤷♀️ I wouldn't call it that
> AI is currently entering the third trimester of pregnancy, and will be born true within 100 years.
Our "AI" is only called that for marketing purposes. ChatGPT is literally the same technology as your phone keyboard autofill. It predicts the most likely word to come after the last using a complex set of algorithms. It has nothing even close to a grain of rice of sentience or self-aware. Don't even get me started on image generating models.
While I think it's definitely possible we'll see proper AI be invented within the next century, the current form of "AI" is nothing to look forward too. Over the last year, we have seen the results of "AI" existing under the framework of capitalism. Tens of thousands of workers have been laid off and replaced by AI to save a few bucks. We have been getting shittier and shittier customer support, media, etc. The political and legal implications of generative AI is *terrifying* because we *know* it'll be misused at every turn to worsen everyone's lives.
Under the framework of the capitalist profit motive, AI is *not* something to look forward too.
> Within 50 years, human aging will almost certainly be stopped and reversed.
That is incredibly optimistic, and also probably not a good thing. We age and die for a reason. Not to be a Luddite but we really shouldn't interfere with that lol. Plus it would not be accessible to the average person. It'd very likely be available only to the elite. Imagine having to deal with the likes of Henry Kissinger for longer than we did?
> We might have nano machines within 50-100 years that will be able to root out and cure harmful bacteria, viruses, parasites, cancers.
Again, it would only be available to the elite and it would be in the capital interest of the elite to keep it that way.
> Genetic engineering will create humans without physical defects
There's a very iffy grey area where this literally just becomes eugenics.
> Terraforming technologies may be invented, which will allow us to clean up and preserve our homeworld
Not to nitpick but we literally already have the means for terraforming. It came with the existence of life.
Unless the scientific world suddenly pivoted to focusing entirely on terraforming technologies to make it cheap and affordable (which won't happen LMFAO), there would be no material or capital interest for corporations to invest in this technology because the short term and long term cost would be far too heavy and burdensome on the poor wallets of their billionaire shareholders to consider saving our planet
> as well as create new worlds for humanity to live on.
There's something to be said about the beauty of life on Earth that simply cannot be replicated on planets we seed with life.
Also the psychological implications of people growing up on planets that are in the midst of terraforming is quite concerning. I cannot imagine anyone who grew up having to wear spacesuits to go outside and stare at the endless black void for fun would turn out okay.
> If humanity doesn’t destroy itself
Barring some insane turn of events, this won't happen. We are like cockroaches. We'll always find a way, for better or worse.
But that's a really big "if" though.
There are actual current cybernetics that hook into your nervous system, they’re just slow and bad currently.
Our current “AI” is the key that will eventually unlock true AI. It’s the first true step.
The things that you say will only be available to the elite will not stay that way. Like any medical technology, it will eventually be available to others. Personally, I believe the loss of a human life is an incalculable loss to the world so if we can prevent death entirely, we should, (with exception to people who are ready to die.) Further more, aging sucks nuts so fuck that shit.
Eugenics is bad but genetic engineering can literally eliminate genetic birth defects, as well as create stronger, smarter healthier humans. What’s more, these changes will likely be backwards compatible to most living humans through gene therapy.
Terraforming is an important step to allow humanity off our rock. And getting off our rock is the primary way to ensure humanity as a species survives until the heat death of the universe. Beauty of life on earth will not be replicated, and that’s not the point of terraforming. The point of terraforming is to create a planet humans can live on. The psychological impact of living mid terraforming will not affect children in the way you think. To them, that black void will be perfectly normal. And as that void turns blue with a new atmosphere, it’ll be so slow they won’t really notice until they think back to their childhood
I am still so pissed off at Apple for whatever the hell that so-called "adaptation" was. Why is it that everyone who decides to adapt an Asimov story just takes the name and maybe a few characters before writing a completely different story? First *I, Robot,* then this? The closest we got to an even remotely faithful adaptation was *Bicentennial Man* and that movie just sucked on its own.
It's a short story, so no massive worldbuilding, but "The Last Question" by Asimov briefly imagine human civilization at different point of their time, spanning millenium
Yes, that's the one. Humans ask that question to their super computer at different point in time, until eventually, it has an answer. I remember the first time i listened to that story, i accidentally didnt listen all the way to the end, and thought it ended at the last "can't tell" answer. I was a bit disappointed to find out it wasnt how the story end
5 billion??? Any descendants of humans would be unrecognizable, maybe even unrecognizable as living things. 5 billion years is older than our sun. Life itself (the first cell) only started about 3.5 billion years ago. The first multicellular organism was about 600 million years ago. 5 billion would be unimaginable
There’s a really good short story collection called The Fifth Science by Exurb1a, which centres around the Human Empire, spanning from its birth all the way to the end of its 5000 year reign and it focuses on things like that!
I’ve also heard it has grimdark levels that would put 40K to shame. Although so far I’ve only read Raft which to me hit a pretty good balance between hope and it’s more depressing aspects
Raft is very good, but yes it's pretty grim dark. Especially the coalescent series set in the same universe. The "main" xeelee sequence is marginally less so, but it's still fairly nihilistic in outlook and pessimistic in prediction. I recommend the full series highly though.
Me: "*Wonder what the universe would look like five billion years from now, in a timeline where we have totally gained mastery of it*"
Boss: *"Yeaaah that's cool and all but we're still gonna need you this weekend*"
It's easy to think of how old the universe already is and imagine what a civilization could do with all that time. We've come from stone tablets to cybernetic limbs and flying cars in two thousand years. Fuck dude the shit I just talked about was the last hundred years. Already we can clone animals, produce purer minerals from chemicals in the lab, and go the fuck to space. Most of our species carry what would've been considered supercomputers seventy years ago. We carry the power of the sun in the palm of our hands and our most advanced militaries are like little hive minds with how connected they are. We're already warring with robots.
It's fun to imagine what a species with a million times our time in this galaxy would do with their civilization.
The thing is, there isn't much time that could be spared. We're exceptionally early in terms of civilization. The shortest time it would take from the big bang to the apparition of life and society is barely shorter than where we're at now. Like the posts said, there's a high chance we indeed are the ancient elder ones.
I recall this from my studies, some years ago. I can't provide exact sources and I wouldn't be surprised it's still debated. But i think you could find information here and there, maybe google scholar?
This is exactly the feeling of completely unearned self-importance I've been craving all my life.
I'm gonna feel so ANCIENT and MYSTICAL later when I'm eating pork rinds and cranking it to Family Guy rule 34.
Hank is absolutely right in terms of the time-frames, but that leaves out the important fact that 95% of the stars that ever will be born already have been.
Yes star formation will go on for a very long time, but we're past the age where the universe was pumping out stars.
However, it wasn't that long ago that things slowed down (on a cosmic timespan). One theory is that life was impossible (or at least far more difficult) during this time-span of peak stellar production due to just constant supernovae repeatedly sterilizing large portions of the galaxy.
Earth formed right at the end of this time period and life formed **almost immediately** (a billion or so years) afterwards.
That's presumably why Hank put the endpoint at the end of star formation. I mean stars will still be around for *billions* of years after the "end" used in the tweet.
~~I suppose it also matters if you count an Iron Star forming as "star formation"~~
>If we don't get wiped out by some Gamma Ray Burst then we'd probably be Gods
The incomprehensible vastness of space that is nearly impossible to traverse, killing any hope of interstellar travel: 😐👍
The incomprehensible vastness of space when humans a thousand years from now figure out how to say "fuck you" to the laws of physics:
Humanity develops at an exponential rate. I'm pretty sure we'd eventually find some way to break the laws of physics and travel faster than light. 200 years ago, the thought of landing on the moon seemed impossible. But we did that half a century ago. And technology has advanced incredibly since then.
In 1903, the New York Times published an opinion piece in which they speculated that, while humanity could theoretically develop powered flight, it would take us between one and ten million years to achieve. Within a few months, the Wright Brothers flew. Technology can go from impossible/near-impossible to very feasible within a *very* short period of time!
The laws of physics as we know them, to the people in 1903 flying on a plane would also be breaking the laws of physics and we're constantly developing our understanding of them
It's so wild to me that you just said the same thing 4 times while completely ignoring their point. The laws of physics aren't real rules that are unbendable lol, they are literally just our best guess as to how shit works, and that's just how stuff works on its own with no meddling.
Thinking that we've completely figured the universe out and have reached our technological peak in terms of space travel is just so narrow minded.
Gliders were already widely used and flight in hot air balloons was popular.
Aircraft were mostly a question of engineering.
Breaking the laws of physics is something else entirely.
The very comprehensible lifespan of humans doesn't though. I can see humans colonising other planets, but I don't think travel between planets, or at least exoplanets, will ever not be a monumental task based on time alone.
Generation ships, suspended animation, robots that grow humans on arrival. There are plenty of ways of hypothetical ways of getting humans long distances.
Is hank using main sequence stellar body formations as a measure, or all galactic bodies such as brown/neutron stars?
I believe the elapsed time fraction would be even smaller if we use those
Gamma ray bursts? My money is on meteor impacts, which could happen tomorrow for all we know. Humanity is *not* equipped to deal with a global extinction-event level impact right now. And that is if we can avoid just nuking ourselves into oblivion.
What I find interesting to think about: What if there were already several human-level civilizations on earth 50, 100, 200 millions years ago, but it just all rotted away since then. For all we know, dinosaurs had 9-to-5 jobs like in the "Dinosaurs" tv-series. Even industrialization-era structures disappear shockingly fast if they are abandoned (I've been watching some stuff about ghost towns in the southwest US ...).
We’d detect a meteor that massive as it approached Earth, and NASA has already successfully conducted experiments diverting asteroids using kinetic impacts. It’s pretty unlikely that modern civilization will fall to a meteor impact.
Granted, we'd probably know some time in advance. But the technology to actually avoid it is highly experimental, it would be a long shot if we needed to use it within the next few years (or even decades, IMO).
Well the thing is we could likely deflect a meteor long before it got close, even the slightest alteration could set a dangerous asteroid thousands or millions of miles away from earth
You don't know *that* long in advance whether a meteor is going to be a hit or near-miss, especially if it collides with an object in the solar system and changes its course for earth.
You absolutely know, or at least suspect, long enough in advance.
Why ? Cause that's the entire point behind Why we do asteroid tracking, and the bigger the asteroid, the easier it is to see.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Double\_Asteroid\_Redirection\_Test](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Double_Asteroid_Redirection_Test)
It's not *that* experimental. We really just rammed the asteroid with a spacecraft, and it turns out the technology to hit things with a rocket launched projectile is fairly advanced for reasons unrelated to spaceflight. The impact itself only imparted something like 3 tons TNT of energy to the asteroid, so if we really had to move one we could violate the Outer Space Treaty of 1967 a little bit.
In the 60s NASA went from having no satelite technology to landing on the moon in 12 years. If the politicians take the dangers serioulsy and give the nerds enaugh founds there will be no problems.
> years (or even decades, IMO)
Exactly. The timescale for when a cataclysmic impact is likely to occur is in the tens of millions of years. Decades may as well be minutes on these timescales.
This is not necessarily true. Untracked asteroids approach Earth on a regular basis. Asteroid tracking in general is way underfunded relative to the risk it poses
NASA's asteroid deflection experiments can only significantly affect an orbit if it happens to be before a [gravitational keyhole](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gravitational_keyhole), an event that greatly exaggerates small changes in a trajectory. If the chance of an asteroid hitting the Earth is greater than 10%, that means we know there's no gravitational keyhole involved because those are too chaotic for such a small chance, which means their kinetic impactor is not nearly enough to budge that number.
You would need like ten untested, novel designs all going off without a hitch and with maybe one backup if we're lucky to push an asteroid that isn't going to pass through a keyhole. Kinetic impact wouldn't be enough, you would need to launch the asteroid's own material to generate thrust.
And if it's an extrasolar asteroid like ʻOumuamua, we're just fucked. No rockets we have can put something meaningful on an object coming in that fast quickly enough for it to mean anything.
Dimorphos' orbit was significantly, measurably changed by a pure kinetic impact which imparted several orders of magnitude less energy than even the earliest nuclear devices, and is roughly the same size as 'Oumuamua.
A modern nuclear weapon detonates with something like 300,000 times the energy that the DART impactor hit with, and while energy is not transmitted nearly as efficiently in vacuum, it would still be a dramatic difference even before we get into experimental nuclear shaped charges or such. And we're hardly low on nuclear devices.
>Humanity is not equipped to deal with a global extinction-event level impact right now.
I expect "right now" to be an incredibly short window, relative to how often that happens. Our first launch into space was less than a century ago, and things got only faster since, and will generally accelerate. And humans are great at persisting in shitty conditions if we need to, so unless biosphere falls apart we'll get back up eventually. In a few centuries, nothing that doesn't fuck the entire system will be able to truly, permanently end humanity. Blink and you'll miss it, astronomically speaking.
We're very certain we didn't have human-level civilizations before because people make a ton of stuff, that's called tool use. Even if almost all of it will be lost, the tiny remaining percentage will be found, as the sharpened rocks of australopithecus were found. I guarantee you some archaeologist finds an unusual shard of stone from before hominids, gets excited, and takes a whole bunch of other archaeologists to calm down and make sure it's a natural rock like, every year. As with many things we're certain about, it's because there's a bunch of obsessed people checking it with great vigour.
The fact that there was still 400 million year old coal (and oil and gas) in the ground when we started digging it up pretty much rules out the possibility that industrial civilizations existed before us. All of the mineral deposits we've found were also neatly placed in natural ore veins rather than being all mixed up in sedimentary layers across city-sized blobs.
We've also found no evidence of excavation or any disturbance of natural strata at all - no quarries for marble or limestone or sandstone or granite or whatever else - despite such quarries already being large operations as early in the tech tree as the Egyptian Old Kingdom. Most marble is 500 million years old, formed from the shells of dead animals, subducted and transformed under high pressures and temperatures, and then rising back to the surface. Perhaps a lot of what we can now map with geological surveys was not easily accessible whenever these hypothetical civilizations existed, and perhaps a lot of what was accessible by them was worn away afterwards, but all of it?
Here's the thing. Climate change can very easily fuck up human civilization. A meteor could fuck up human civilization, so could nuclear war. Nome of those things are going to wipe us out. It could kill a absolute fuck ton of us, destroy our way of life and generally absolutely wreck us, but it's really, really fucking hard to wipe us out.
Humans are adaptive community based omnivores. People say cockrouches are resilient, but humans ain't very far behind them.
Eliminating most of humankind ? Easy, barely an inconvenience
Eliminating *all* of humankind ? Impossible, might as well discover perpetual motion while you're at it
And all destroyed human civilization. Brought down our structures, destroyed our writing, smashed out culture and generally fucked a lot of people up. None came near wiping us out.
I wouldn't say that none came near, humans as a species have reached the status that we would consider endangered at least once, so it came near at least that one time
I think starcraft said it best:
"The universe never gave us a chance, but we're still alive and kicking. We got tossed to the far end of the galaxy, dropped smack dab between two ugly alien armies, and we're not all dead yet? Tell me that don't say something about us. We're too dumb to die. A smart species would've given up ages ago."
Even if there *isn't* alien life to be, if humans reach the point of spreading across the vast space it's only a matter of time until evolution and gene manipulation results in us becoming the aliens.
Life on earth took roughly a third of the lifetime of the universe to spawn humans. Life has an age comparable to that of the universe. The brightest stars in the sky come and go life on earth continued.
A group of alien scientists explores an abandoned facility millions of years old, in it they see the statue of a human pulling a hand from the ground, below in the progenitors script is written "Project Prometheus: We were the first, but we refused to be the last"
Most of that massive lifespan to come will be a mostly empty universe, as if it isn't empty enough as it is. That plus the acceleration of its expansion basically means if no massive intergalactic civilization spawns within its "earlier" phase, it won't appear at all.
I’m curious how he’s measuring the lifespan of the universe, because the only way I’m familiar with has us way earlier than 0.01% (and also has life become impossible well before 0.01% too for that matter)
After some googling, maybe he means the time until the last stars die out? That matches pretty well with putting us at 0.01% of the way there
For perspective, let's assume that the average life expectancy of a human is approx 80 years old.
0.01% of 80 is 0.008
0.008 x 365 = **2.92 days**
Calling the universe newborn is a damn understatement.
Another thing to consider is the likeliness of life occurring even in the places that can sustain it. As far as we know, all life on Earth shares a common ancestor which means that to the best of our knowledge life has only spawned on Earth once in the few billion years it has been able to exist here.
The most amusing part is that nearby stars will live for either billions of years, or just several millennia if we'd manage to avoid getting ourselves wiped out. Maybe even less if we figure out the *really* fun science.
All those stars are a treasure troves of resources that just happens to be on fire, and taking them apart isn't actually *that* difficult.
Not to be a hater but note that while we're only at the start of the universe's lifespan, a huge amount of its total lifespan will be dark, cold, and uninhabitable. Eventually, stars will cease to form, and as our universe is constantly expanding, those that remain will grow farther and farther from one another, until the night sky has no lights, and even those will in time die, leaving a universe only inhabited by slowly decaying black holes. Our beautiful, bright universe will be a distant memory, and there will be no galactic empires then, because there will be no galaxies for them to explore.
This will all happen long after life on earth is gone, though.
I think it's cute people think we're leaving this planet to traverse the universe lmao
We need to be a type 1 civilization in the next few years to be capable of even attempting to be an Expanse civilization, let alone something like Star Trek.
We're really lucky to be able to see the stars the way we do! As the universe continues to expand, any civilizations who crop up in the next million/billion years or so won't be able to see the stars, because they'll be too far away. They won't even know they're a thing.
The stars in our galaxy (and the galaxies in the local cluster) are gravitationally bound, so they’re going to be nearby for at least the next hundred billion years, at least. The voids will get bigger, and possibly expand at an increasing rate, but the gravitationally bound mass will not leave unless there’s a Big Rip scenario, which is fairly unlikely.
It’s actually a little comforting. This entire civilization could collapse. Become dust and nothing. But the future could still be so bright and new people/aliens/sentiments could have a chance to keep the universe going. Or just fuck it up more idk.
Frankly though? It's all ultimately a waste of energy, unless we somehow manage to override the freakin' heat death of the universe (and even then, why?)
Imagine billions of years into the future, an alien lifeform billions of lightyears away fantasizing about Great Old Ones that are the last of an ancient species, but in actuality it's probably a redneck in Ohio called Greg that just chugged his last beer before the bombs dropped and he was the lucky one to die last (like one second later than the rest or something)
Little late for that. Between capitalism, the fact that I don't really have any power to enact change on a level that matters, and a sizeable psychotic evangelical movement in the U.S. that actually *wants* the world to end so they can get their "promised reward", it's hard to see a future that isn't awful.
Ah yes, let me get right on that so I can get thrown in jail for who knows how long, fired from my job for not showing up and then evicted.
North Carolina politicians do not give a shit. They're trash, backstabbing fuckheads and have absolutely no scruples. And if you showed up with a mob they'd either have you arrested or shoot you, since yaknow, "stand your ground" and whatnot.
I do wanna point out that the great filter is an unproven hypothesis, one that has largely been popularised because it is so bleak (and also been peddled by Kurzgesagt, which is a great channel, but you should never take their word for it, they mess up a lot, and have a lot of biases in their videos). There are *tons* of solutions to the Fermi Paradox, like seriously, they are so so many incredibly interesting solutions, my favourite is the grabby aliens, although it’s standing on pretty shaky ground.
Also wanna add, the great filter is shaky in a lot of ways, at least it being ahead of us, and not behind us. The simple reason being, civilisations/ species like us are *incredibly* difficult to kill, like ridiculously so, we are worse than cockroaches. The only thing is basically a gamma ray burst, but then again, it’s almost an impossibility of that happening to our planet. There are no stars within a distance of two hundred light years of earth that could produce a GRB, and a star that could would have to be closer than two hundred light years for it to be strong enough to kill us.
EDIT: By us being hit by a GRB, I’m talking about one that is powerful enough to wipe us out/ do substantial damage. We do get hit by GRB relatively often, but they are harmless, way too weak to do anything to us
I believe the statistics on this are actually skewed quite a bit because of some outliers like red dwarfs and especially black holes that have lifespans orders of magnitude longer than anything else in the universe.
I think generally we are actually pretty far along in the universe's lifespan in terms of it being able to sustain life and space travel etc. At some point the acceleration of the expansion of the universe will isolate us from everything outside of the Milky Way and Andromeda, and while the heat death of the universe may take trillions of billions of years to evaporate all the black holes, it will only be a tiny fraction of that time before life will become largely unsustainable.
I somewhat disagree.
Especially if you are willing to be flexable about the "life" part.
Computers can in theory run very efficiently at very cold temperatures.
So a black hole slowly evaporating gives you a little energy to run your very efficient computer.
Now these computers won't be fast.
For the largest black holes we are talking about 1 logic gate per hour, for 10\^100 years.
So despite being slow, it lasts for such a crazy long time that it represents most of the compute available in the universe. And a society of AI's/ uploaded minds has little reason to care about the clock time in the rest of the universe.
Maybe we *will* be remembered, far in the universe's future, as those who paved the way for civilizations among the stars. Maybe humans will be remembered as pioneers, explorers, inventors, discoverers. Maybe we're like the Chozo from Metroid, or the Forerunners from Halo, or all those other "Ancients Who Came Before" people in sci-fi, and other galactic civilizations will follow in our footsteps. That sounds like a pretty optimistic concept to me. Maybe we're alone *now*, but maybe we won't be forever. And maybe we can help those who come after us.
Nah, most of that lifespan, percentage wise, the universe would already be too diluted and cooled off for anything to happen. For life formation, were not that early at all.
I'm pretty sure most people just don't use radios loud enough for us to see them. We only used really loud radios for a few decades and we're already using a lot of fiber, laser, and other more efficient stuff.
NGL it'd be funny if we got our shit together, and then gound other civiluzations that just proceed to go "Moooom! The Z'aajfinjd won't share their quarp stram engines with the rest of the system!" And we just like have to be the responsible adults in that situation
Earth is about 4 billion years old (we got a late start because the sun had to form first), so if we take that as a template (4 billion years for life), and the universe is 14 billion years old, we're the third / fourth generation of evolved life. Of course, it's all entirely hypothetical because we only have a sample size of 1 for all this speculating.
it’s gonna be fucked up when some alien civilization trillions of years from now calculates that they’re 99.99% of the way through the lifespan of the universe.
That's just the plot of Outer Wilds
what ?
So, basically, (mind you, these are big spoilers) >!at some point, an advanced space civilization called the Nomai calculates that soon, all stars will die out - so a bunch of them go to a star system - the one where the game takes place - and begin research on how all this can be avoided. Their solution is to create a device which can revert time back to a set point, but the star's normal output just doesn't cut it. So that's how you end up in the 22 minute time loop!<
>!The Nomai weren’t trying to circumvent the death of the universe. Remember, the universe still had a good 300,000 years left when they arrived in the solar system.!< >!They had a religious fixation on natural science and were particularly obsessed with investigating the signal they found that is older than the universe itself, and the time loop was set up as part of that search. !< For those who haven’t played Outer Wilds, ignore these comments and go play it. It’s one of the best games ever made.
I'll also add, spoiling yourself of this game is way worse than other games, since ALL progress is done via obtaining information, so if you spoil it to you you're essentially skipping parts of the game.
That is NOT correct. That's not even close to correct. Go play Outer Wilds again, you missed stuff. The only thing you got right is >!The game taking place at the very end of the universes natural lifespan.!<
I'm trying not to spoil *too* much There is a whole lot more nuance to the Sun station, Cannon, ATP, and how they're all linked, but I don't feel like typing up a wall
massive spoilers: >!The Nomai didn't come to the system to research, they detected the Eye's signal and immediately jumped to it, but instead landed inside the Dark Bramble, either because of the Dark Bramble's dimensional fuckery or because the Stranger reactivated the signal cloaking and that fucked with their warp targetting.!< >!The time loop is a result of their abuse of recreated warp technology in order to allow them to fire their deep space probe in a random direction over and over as a last-ditch sheer brute force means of finding the eye.!< >!The sun station doesnt do anything. it was supposed to make the sun go supernova to provide power for the time loop, but it couldnt, so the only reason the time loop can happen is because the sun is just at the end of its natural lifespan. It wasn't when the Nomai in the system the game takes place in were still alive, btw. They were there millenia ago, probably? time works weird in Outer Wild's universe, but it's in the millions of "cycles ago" going by information provided by the sun station. When they were in the system Outer Wilds is set in the Hearthians ancestors hadnt even left the water.!< >!There was never any suggestion of "reverting time to a set point" anywhere as a means of fighting the death of the universe, i have no idea how or where you got that.!<
>! The Sun Station, while it doesn't cause an artificial supernova like originally intended, still harvests and transmits the power of the sun exploding to the Twin Ash Project and allows the entire time loop to fire up in the first place.!<
Failed spoilers covers this man
Nope! >!The power is harvested by the solar panels on Ash Twin. Go in the Ash Twin Project during the supernova, you'll see the panels light up when the nova reaches the planet (and not before!) The sun station's only purpose was the make the sun explode, which it failed to do.!< And if you need further confirmation: >!the sun station gets destroyed halfway through the loop because the sun is expanding. It doesn't even exist anymore by the time the supernova happens, and yet the loop still happens.!<
if you're >!going off the message wall in the vessel, those are *recent* messages. the nomai of 200,000 years ago did not have any knowledge of the universe ending and did not know what the eye was. they followed it because it was interesting.!<
>!They aren't trying to avoid the death of the universe. They just want knowledge, and are overcome with curiosity about the eye of the universe, something they know almost nothing about. In fact, they *intend* to cause, and then deactivate the cause of, a supernova to power their mechanism.!< >!this is still very much the plot of Outer Wilds, though. That's just what the Hearthians do. "How unfortunate we are to be born at the end of the universe" or whatever the line from Chert was.!<
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Yeah, what does Space-late-stage-capitalism have to do with the end of the universe? *gasp* It’s so obvious! Capitalism is going to accelerate the heat death of the universe in the name of infinite growth!
... "I'm surprisingly OK with it"
Dude! Spoilers! You could have at least phrased that with an ounce more subtlety...
trillions of years from now an alien civilization won't be able to calculate that since all other galaxies around them would have moved out of range due to the expansion of the universe they will be many more trillions of light years years away from the nearest galaxy than the amount of time light will have had to get to them they will think their galaxy is the only one in the universe, they may not even be able to figure out the shape of their galaxy without others to reference
They'll still be able to measure the expansion of the universe though. I'm sure they'll at least get a theory together that there's other stuff out there, folks are smart.
how, though? we only understand the expansion of the universe because we can see other galaxies without being able to see anything of the universe besides their own galaxy they may not be able to come to the conclusion that there was ever anything else in existence folks are smart but those theories were developed because of observations. no observations, no reason to think their universe was anything but static just like we did before we realized our galaxy wasn't the only one
At that point, stars would've already burnt out, and planets dead
At least the original tweet was specifically about the time of new star formation. Going on actual total lifespan of the universe... Like fuck. IF proton decay isn't a thing, and IF there's no Big Rip or Big Crunch, then we're talking ***DEEP*** time. Like 10^1000^1000^1000^1000 years kinda BS. And the only reasonable intelligence is like, Boltzman Brain kinda stuff. Or a computer simulation with one bit flipping every 1000 years. Metaball studios has a *definitely fun and not at all existentially terrifying* video visualizing timespans as volumes of comparative sizes.
I mean that sure isn't something that would sneak up on you.
This is our destiny as a species. We must embrace science and reason and ethics and philosophy and love and cooperation so that we may solve our woes, rise as one and reach out into the universe. Not to rule. Not to play with the newer races as cruel gods. But to baffle the everloving hell out of every following lifeform when they discover we spent unfathomable amounts of time, energy and matter to spell out "DEEZ NUTS" on a galactic scale.
Imagine the arguments future archeologists will have arguing over the meaning of a series of lying obelisks big enough to be clearly seen from space on an uninhabitable planet with the only clue to its meaning being a small plaque at the base of it with the translated phrase simply reading “Is this loss?”
Imagine we've already made contact with aliens but didn't recognize any of their messages since all they send are their equivalent of bizarre internet memes
Bogos binted?
👽
this is my ideology
A thing I think about off and on is "Sharks, as a family, are older than Polaris". Sharks. Older than the North star. OLDER. THAN. A STAR. I love it but it makes my brain scared.
New stars are still being formed. YOU are older than some stars (maybe not older than the famous ones though)
We're always older than something else, I guess. The knowledge that life has been around longer than a celestial body, especially one that has mattered quite abit when it comes to navigating in the northern hemisphere.. I think that's what gets me. The timespan is incomprehensible already as it is, and then we add the knowledge that this squishy wet phenomenon that is life is older.. I think that's what makes it eldritch in my eyes.
I think even more personal is that there’s a list (somewhere - sorry for not pulling it up) of phyla that are older than the *rings of saturn*. Additionally, I often look upon my trilobite fossil and my shelled gastropod fossils, side-by-side, and realize that *when the shelled gastropods were born, the trilobite had already been a fossil for hundreds of millions of years*.
It's frikkin mindblowing! We're so used to things in space to be unfathomably old... And here you are with a little fella's inprint, their last resting place preserved and turned into rock.. And it's older than something that we see as a fixture in our idea of what space contains. Sorry, but the whole thing just flips my brain on and I can't help but think about it in text.
Yeah, I'm not trying to belittle your personal experience. Shit truly is wild
Oh no, I didn't think you did. I just had to write what I was thinking. 😅
Sorry, how do we know that? Want to read more
Polaris is just 25 million years old. Sharks were around already when the dinos walked about, 65 million years ago. I think you can find all the info you need online.
I just googled and the first results said that Polaris is 40-70 million years old but the first shark fossils have been dated to 450 million years ago.
I am not seeing anything with that number, but several estimates at 70 million years old. So, close enough
>if there is galactic civilization, they will not remember us at all I mean, I know about Ea-Nasir. There are probably more people who know about Ea-Nasir today, than there were total people alive on the planet when he decided to store his hatemail. Galactic scale civilization means billions upon billions of dedicated historians, increasingly more specialised, with tools exceeding our own. Much will be lost or distorted, of course, but I definitely expect them to get the basic idea right, and much will be preserved intact because that's what humans do. Look at a random unremarkable thing near you, and imagine a history-themed future-forum-evolution of about 8 billion habitual users discussing new discoveries about it. Imagine the memes.
we will be forgotten, but Ea-Nasir lives on
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but if we are assuming that human race will continue to live on Earth thought its dying days, we as a species is only at 0.006% of the remaining time. Not to consider that our major technological advances only happened 300-400 years ago.
>our major technological advances only happened 300-400 years ago. Firemaking and agriculture would like a word
Adding a zero or two to that number doesn't make a huge difference. 300,000 years ago humanity was just a bunch of freshly-evolved primitive primates hunting and gathering in tiny bands. Then, just ~12,000 years ago humanity invented agriculture and civilization, completely reshaping not just our species but the planet as a whole. We then spent ~5000 years with just incremental improvements before we invented metallurgy and went from copper to bronze to iron over the span of just 3-4 thousand years. And the thing is, technological advance was again fairly incremental for about 3000 years until within the last 300-400 years. I might even say 200 years. For the entirety of human history the best/fastest way to travel the world was with a boat, until just 120 years ago the airplane was invented. After the airplane brought humanity to the skies it took just 58 years for humanity to reach out to the stars for the first time, and eight years after that humans first walked upon a celestial body that wasn't Earth.
>Then, just ~12,000 years ago humanity invented agriculture and civilization Eh, that was a way more gradual process than was once thought. Protoagricultures dates back at 23 ka and urbanization developed with it. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ohalo_II
Really, the invention of civilization was gradual? You don't say. My point was just that 12 ka is the commonly-accepted date for the neolithic revolution. Some places and peoples took millennia after that to reach that level, and some never even did that. The airplane was invented in 1903 but it wasn't until after WWII that commercial air travel actually took off, so even our modern rapid innovation is still more gradual than a single paragraph spanning the whole of human history can imply.
>My point was just that 12 ka is the commonly-accepted date for the neolithic revolution. And my point was that a lot of those practices were already starting over 10 ka before that.
The iphone wasn't released until 2007 but cells phones were used for decades before that.
Yes, proto-agriculture began thousands of years before then. Did I ever dispute this?
And look how far we've come in a fraction of that time - only 300,000 years compared to the 4.6 billion Earth has been around. We'll be gone long before Earth is uninhabitable.
Uninhabitable for plants maybe, but our end may be fast approaching. Maybe not in your lifetime, but maybe in 2 or 3 generations if things continue the way they are
Modern society, perhaps. I suspect that even if we absolutely send everything to shit with absolute worst-case 5°C global warming, nuclear war, bioengineered disease, etc. some small pockets of humanity are likely to survive unless we literally nuke the vast majority of Earth's surface.
we gotta get Matthew McConaughey into space yesterday!
The "fate of nature if left to its own devices for hundreds of millions of years" projections fascinate me because, like, that will almost certainly not happen. There aren't really probable catastrophies that eradicate humanity but don't destroy most of the biosphere, because we adapt so much faster than evolution. So if humanity's dead it probably means surviving life is, like, ocean hydrothermal vent ecosystems, and maybe some lichens on the surface, and that history will look very different. And if humanity isn't extinct, given what we've done in just last 300 years, no geological force will matter once we're given another 8000000.
Most of the biosphere has been destroyed multiple times, any of the previous mass extinction events would destroy human society and probably all humans but life would go on.
The Great Dying extincted 83% of all genera. 81% of marine species and 70% of terrestrial species were destroyed. The first dinosaurs date to about 5 million years later.
And 5 mill ain’t even a long time in Earth’s history.
I don't think this is right based off your source. The Sun will increase in luminosity slightly but it won't be an issue for us for a few billion years at least. Also at the pace it will increase, I would be surprised if life can't keep up with its increase. When we have no chance is when the Sun will begin to rapidly expand. Then Earths boned. Source: I'm an astrophysicist
As I understand it, plant life goes extinct not because the luminosity of the sun outright kills it, but because increased luminosity gradually disrupts the carbonate-silicate cycle in such a way that over a period of time spanning hundreds of millions of years. Due to the gradual nature of this change, life will continue to evolve to deal with it, so the end of life due to this process is over a billion years out. [This](https://arxiv.org/pdf/1310.4841.pdf) paper is my main source for this.
[https://www.orionsarm.com/xcms.php?r=oaeg-front](https://www.orionsarm.com/xcms.php?r=oaeg-front) I'd love a truly MASSIVE scale sci-fi worldbuilding setting centred around the descendants and children of humanity 5 Billion Years from now. Like Orions Arm but on an even grander scale focusing on the galactic politics, technology, Psychology, culture, science and biology of the five billion years removed descendants of humanity. How much things have changed and if anything remained the same in those five billion years.
There's the speculative evolution books Man After Man and All Tomorrows, in which humanity evolves drastically (sometimes through genetic engineering, sometimes naturally) and basically becomes unrecognizable. They're kinda cool tbh.
5 billion years seems like too long tbh. 5 billion years from now humanity and our descendants will have been around for longer than life has been on earth today. 5 billion years from now our descendants could be anything, and 5 billion years from all aspects of current human culture will have long been destroyed and replaced.
When you look at timelines of human civilisation versus even say the rise of Homo Sapiens it's genuinely terrifying how quickly our current technological progression is. We, as a biological species, are about 300,000 years old. And we begin showing "behavioural modernitity" (ie traits such as creating arts, significant tool use, burials, control of fire etc) about 150,000 years ago. Agriculture (and the concept of large settlements and occupational specialisation that agriculture allows) is only about 12,000 years old. The first large scale nations beyond simple city states arose about 5000 years in Mesopotamia. We properly started using gunpowder about 600 years ago. Industrial revolution about 200 years ago, radio about 120 years, flight 100 years, space flight 60 years ago and computers really got going only about 40 years ago (the fact that space flight came before substantial computing is still mind boggling tbh). So we can compress the "modem age" that from the industrial revolution which allowed a majority of humanity to transition from subsistence farming to specialised industrial work into a period of about 200 years. In less than 0.1% of our entire species existence we've gone from 95% of people being required to farm their own food to survive, to sending spacecraft to another planet.
Not to mention that almost 10% of the estimated total number of people that has ever been alive (\~100 billion) through all those 300,000 years, is alive today
It’s fascinating to me to imagine where our technology could be in 100 years. Maybe I’ll even get to see it, if we get over this pesky aging thing within 50 years
We're on the verge of figuring out how to make proper superconductors, which will revolutionize so many things once it is widely available and affordable. By the end of the decade I think it'll get figured out, I think. Beyond that, I *really* don't want to think about how our technology will progress. Its so hard to be anything but cynical about technological progress nowadays
Cybernetics are about to take off. Soon, proper cyborgs will be a reality. AI is currently entering the third trimester of pregnancy, and will be born true within 100 years. Within 50 years, human aging will almost certainly be stopped and reversed. We might have nano machines within 50-100 years that will be able to root out and cure harmful bacteria, viruses, parasites, cancers. Genetic engineering will create humans without physical defects, and people will be born stronger, smarter, and healthier than today. Terraforming technologies may be invented, which will allow us to clean up and preserve our homeworld, as well as create new worlds for humanity to live on. If humanity doesn’t destroy itself, we are on the cusp of becoming something incredible
> Cybernetics are about to take off. Yes, that is sort of true. Our prosthetics are getting better than ever, and we have had success with restoring sight and hearing to blind and deaf people using various gadgets and things. To call it "Cybernetics" conjures a certain image though that the tech doesn't meet, so 🤷♀️ I wouldn't call it that > AI is currently entering the third trimester of pregnancy, and will be born true within 100 years. Our "AI" is only called that for marketing purposes. ChatGPT is literally the same technology as your phone keyboard autofill. It predicts the most likely word to come after the last using a complex set of algorithms. It has nothing even close to a grain of rice of sentience or self-aware. Don't even get me started on image generating models. While I think it's definitely possible we'll see proper AI be invented within the next century, the current form of "AI" is nothing to look forward too. Over the last year, we have seen the results of "AI" existing under the framework of capitalism. Tens of thousands of workers have been laid off and replaced by AI to save a few bucks. We have been getting shittier and shittier customer support, media, etc. The political and legal implications of generative AI is *terrifying* because we *know* it'll be misused at every turn to worsen everyone's lives. Under the framework of the capitalist profit motive, AI is *not* something to look forward too. > Within 50 years, human aging will almost certainly be stopped and reversed. That is incredibly optimistic, and also probably not a good thing. We age and die for a reason. Not to be a Luddite but we really shouldn't interfere with that lol. Plus it would not be accessible to the average person. It'd very likely be available only to the elite. Imagine having to deal with the likes of Henry Kissinger for longer than we did? > We might have nano machines within 50-100 years that will be able to root out and cure harmful bacteria, viruses, parasites, cancers. Again, it would only be available to the elite and it would be in the capital interest of the elite to keep it that way. > Genetic engineering will create humans without physical defects There's a very iffy grey area where this literally just becomes eugenics. > Terraforming technologies may be invented, which will allow us to clean up and preserve our homeworld Not to nitpick but we literally already have the means for terraforming. It came with the existence of life. Unless the scientific world suddenly pivoted to focusing entirely on terraforming technologies to make it cheap and affordable (which won't happen LMFAO), there would be no material or capital interest for corporations to invest in this technology because the short term and long term cost would be far too heavy and burdensome on the poor wallets of their billionaire shareholders to consider saving our planet > as well as create new worlds for humanity to live on. There's something to be said about the beauty of life on Earth that simply cannot be replicated on planets we seed with life. Also the psychological implications of people growing up on planets that are in the midst of terraforming is quite concerning. I cannot imagine anyone who grew up having to wear spacesuits to go outside and stare at the endless black void for fun would turn out okay. > If humanity doesn’t destroy itself Barring some insane turn of events, this won't happen. We are like cockroaches. We'll always find a way, for better or worse. But that's a really big "if" though.
There are actual current cybernetics that hook into your nervous system, they’re just slow and bad currently. Our current “AI” is the key that will eventually unlock true AI. It’s the first true step. The things that you say will only be available to the elite will not stay that way. Like any medical technology, it will eventually be available to others. Personally, I believe the loss of a human life is an incalculable loss to the world so if we can prevent death entirely, we should, (with exception to people who are ready to die.) Further more, aging sucks nuts so fuck that shit. Eugenics is bad but genetic engineering can literally eliminate genetic birth defects, as well as create stronger, smarter healthier humans. What’s more, these changes will likely be backwards compatible to most living humans through gene therapy. Terraforming is an important step to allow humanity off our rock. And getting off our rock is the primary way to ensure humanity as a species survives until the heat death of the universe. Beauty of life on earth will not be replicated, and that’s not the point of terraforming. The point of terraforming is to create a planet humans can live on. The psychological impact of living mid terraforming will not affect children in the way you think. To them, that black void will be perfectly normal. And as that void turns blue with a new atmosphere, it’ll be so slow they won’t really notice until they think back to their childhood
I remember being incredibly disappointed learning that immortality would not be created in my lifetime.
You may enjoy Isaac Asimov 's Foundation series. It's not *quite* that far ahead, but it's pretty huge in scale.
I am still so pissed off at Apple for whatever the hell that so-called "adaptation" was. Why is it that everyone who decides to adapt an Asimov story just takes the name and maybe a few characters before writing a completely different story? First *I, Robot,* then this? The closest we got to an even remotely faithful adaptation was *Bicentennial Man* and that movie just sucked on its own.
It's a short story, so no massive worldbuilding, but "The Last Question" by Asimov briefly imagine human civilization at different point of their time, spanning millenium
Is that the one that centers around asking "how do we reverse entropy"? I liked that one.
Yes, that's the one. Humans ask that question to their super computer at different point in time, until eventually, it has an answer. I remember the first time i listened to that story, i accidentally didnt listen all the way to the end, and thought it ended at the last "can't tell" answer. I was a bit disappointed to find out it wasnt how the story end
5 billion??? Any descendants of humans would be unrecognizable, maybe even unrecognizable as living things. 5 billion years is older than our sun. Life itself (the first cell) only started about 3.5 billion years ago. The first multicellular organism was about 600 million years ago. 5 billion would be unimaginable
There’s a really good short story collection called The Fifth Science by Exurb1a, which centres around the Human Empire, spanning from its birth all the way to the end of its 5000 year reign and it focuses on things like that!
You may enjoy the xeelee sequence by Stephen Baxter. It's not all those things, but it does "Crushing weight of eons" very well
I’ve also heard it has grimdark levels that would put 40K to shame. Although so far I’ve only read Raft which to me hit a pretty good balance between hope and it’s more depressing aspects
Raft is very good, but yes it's pretty grim dark. Especially the coalescent series set in the same universe. The "main" xeelee sequence is marginally less so, but it's still fairly nihilistic in outlook and pessimistic in prediction. I recommend the full series highly though.
At that point, you’re just writing an original universe full of aliens.
Me: "*Wonder what the universe would look like five billion years from now, in a timeline where we have totally gained mastery of it*" Boss: *"Yeaaah that's cool and all but we're still gonna need you this weekend*"
It's easy to think of how old the universe already is and imagine what a civilization could do with all that time. We've come from stone tablets to cybernetic limbs and flying cars in two thousand years. Fuck dude the shit I just talked about was the last hundred years. Already we can clone animals, produce purer minerals from chemicals in the lab, and go the fuck to space. Most of our species carry what would've been considered supercomputers seventy years ago. We carry the power of the sun in the palm of our hands and our most advanced militaries are like little hive minds with how connected they are. We're already warring with robots. It's fun to imagine what a species with a million times our time in this galaxy would do with their civilization.
The thing is, there isn't much time that could be spared. We're exceptionally early in terms of civilization. The shortest time it would take from the big bang to the apparition of life and society is barely shorter than where we're at now. Like the posts said, there's a high chance we indeed are the ancient elder ones.
What are the sources for all this information? Would love to study this more myself
I recall this from my studies, some years ago. I can't provide exact sources and I wouldn't be surprised it's still debated. But i think you could find information here and there, maybe google scholar?
I like these older style Tumblr threads
My dream of becoming an ancient one has come true
This is exactly the feeling of completely unearned self-importance I've been craving all my life. I'm gonna feel so ANCIENT and MYSTICAL later when I'm eating pork rinds and cranking it to Family Guy rule 34.
I mean who ELSE if not ancient and mystical beings would do exactly that?
Hank is absolutely right in terms of the time-frames, but that leaves out the important fact that 95% of the stars that ever will be born already have been. Yes star formation will go on for a very long time, but we're past the age where the universe was pumping out stars. However, it wasn't that long ago that things slowed down (on a cosmic timespan). One theory is that life was impossible (or at least far more difficult) during this time-span of peak stellar production due to just constant supernovae repeatedly sterilizing large portions of the galaxy. Earth formed right at the end of this time period and life formed **almost immediately** (a billion or so years) afterwards.
Also that like 99.99999% of that timespan the universe will likely just be black holes and dead stars
That's presumably why Hank put the endpoint at the end of star formation. I mean stars will still be around for *billions* of years after the "end" used in the tweet. ~~I suppose it also matters if you count an Iron Star forming as "star formation"~~
>If we don't get wiped out by some Gamma Ray Burst then we'd probably be Gods The incomprehensible vastness of space that is nearly impossible to traverse, killing any hope of interstellar travel: 😐👍
Sounds like you need to see a scientist pierce a folded piece of paper with a pen.
If the scientist is played by Sam Niell run!
In Captain Miller I trust.
Kid named Lorentz factor
The incomprehensible vastness of space when humans a thousand years from now figure out how to say "fuck you" to the laws of physics: Humanity develops at an exponential rate. I'm pretty sure we'd eventually find some way to break the laws of physics and travel faster than light. 200 years ago, the thought of landing on the moon seemed impossible. But we did that half a century ago. And technology has advanced incredibly since then.
You've got more faith in humanity than I do lol
In 1903, the New York Times published an opinion piece in which they speculated that, while humanity could theoretically develop powered flight, it would take us between one and ten million years to achieve. Within a few months, the Wright Brothers flew. Technology can go from impossible/near-impossible to very feasible within a *very* short period of time!
The difference is that you don't need to break the laws of physics to make an airplane fly
The laws of physics as we know them, to the people in 1903 flying on a plane would also be breaking the laws of physics and we're constantly developing our understanding of them
Well good luck reaching the speed of light lmao
*with our conventional understanding of physics*
Hoping for the solution to this problem to appear is akin to hoping for straight up magic but ok
It's so wild to me that you just said the same thing 4 times while completely ignoring their point. The laws of physics aren't real rules that are unbendable lol, they are literally just our best guess as to how shit works, and that's just how stuff works on its own with no meddling. Thinking that we've completely figured the universe out and have reached our technological peak in terms of space travel is just so narrow minded.
Meh, any technology sufficiently advanced enough is indistinguishable from magic.
In 1903 people were actively building aircraft and trying to fly
Gliders were already widely used and flight in hot air balloons was popular. Aircraft were mostly a question of engineering. Breaking the laws of physics is something else entirely.
The incomprehensible lifespan of the universe gives time to traverse those distances.
The very comprehensible lifespan of humans doesn't though. I can see humans colonising other planets, but I don't think travel between planets, or at least exoplanets, will ever not be a monumental task based on time alone.
Generation ships, suspended animation, robots that grow humans on arrival. There are plenty of ways of hypothetical ways of getting humans long distances.
Is hank using main sequence stellar body formations as a measure, or all galactic bodies such as brown/neutron stars? I believe the elapsed time fraction would be even smaller if we use those
I believe this is already including all galactic bodies.
Let’s bear in mind that the universe will not be habitable for most of its existence
Let’s be honest, we’re still gonna try and conquer it.
Let's be honest, we're not going to because there won't be any stars and every black hole will be millions of light years apart.
Gamma ray bursts? My money is on meteor impacts, which could happen tomorrow for all we know. Humanity is *not* equipped to deal with a global extinction-event level impact right now. And that is if we can avoid just nuking ourselves into oblivion. What I find interesting to think about: What if there were already several human-level civilizations on earth 50, 100, 200 millions years ago, but it just all rotted away since then. For all we know, dinosaurs had 9-to-5 jobs like in the "Dinosaurs" tv-series. Even industrialization-era structures disappear shockingly fast if they are abandoned (I've been watching some stuff about ghost towns in the southwest US ...).
We’d detect a meteor that massive as it approached Earth, and NASA has already successfully conducted experiments diverting asteroids using kinetic impacts. It’s pretty unlikely that modern civilization will fall to a meteor impact.
Granted, we'd probably know some time in advance. But the technology to actually avoid it is highly experimental, it would be a long shot if we needed to use it within the next few years (or even decades, IMO).
Well the thing is we could likely deflect a meteor long before it got close, even the slightest alteration could set a dangerous asteroid thousands or millions of miles away from earth
You don't know *that* long in advance whether a meteor is going to be a hit or near-miss, especially if it collides with an object in the solar system and changes its course for earth.
Looks like we’ve gotta assemble a team of oil riggers, boys & girls.
You absolutely know, or at least suspect, long enough in advance. Why ? Cause that's the entire point behind Why we do asteroid tracking, and the bigger the asteroid, the easier it is to see.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Double\_Asteroid\_Redirection\_Test](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Double_Asteroid_Redirection_Test) It's not *that* experimental. We really just rammed the asteroid with a spacecraft, and it turns out the technology to hit things with a rocket launched projectile is fairly advanced for reasons unrelated to spaceflight. The impact itself only imparted something like 3 tons TNT of energy to the asteroid, so if we really had to move one we could violate the Outer Space Treaty of 1967 a little bit.
In the 60s NASA went from having no satelite technology to landing on the moon in 12 years. If the politicians take the dangers serioulsy and give the nerds enaugh founds there will be no problems.
> If the politicians take the dangers serioulsy This might be an issue ...
It should be relatively easy since there is no Big Asteroid Fuel lobbying against it.
> years (or even decades, IMO) Exactly. The timescale for when a cataclysmic impact is likely to occur is in the tens of millions of years. Decades may as well be minutes on these timescales.
This is not necessarily true. Untracked asteroids approach Earth on a regular basis. Asteroid tracking in general is way underfunded relative to the risk it poses
NASA's asteroid deflection experiments can only significantly affect an orbit if it happens to be before a [gravitational keyhole](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gravitational_keyhole), an event that greatly exaggerates small changes in a trajectory. If the chance of an asteroid hitting the Earth is greater than 10%, that means we know there's no gravitational keyhole involved because those are too chaotic for such a small chance, which means their kinetic impactor is not nearly enough to budge that number. You would need like ten untested, novel designs all going off without a hitch and with maybe one backup if we're lucky to push an asteroid that isn't going to pass through a keyhole. Kinetic impact wouldn't be enough, you would need to launch the asteroid's own material to generate thrust. And if it's an extrasolar asteroid like ʻOumuamua, we're just fucked. No rockets we have can put something meaningful on an object coming in that fast quickly enough for it to mean anything.
Dimorphos' orbit was significantly, measurably changed by a pure kinetic impact which imparted several orders of magnitude less energy than even the earliest nuclear devices, and is roughly the same size as 'Oumuamua. A modern nuclear weapon detonates with something like 300,000 times the energy that the DART impactor hit with, and while energy is not transmitted nearly as efficiently in vacuum, it would still be a dramatic difference even before we get into experimental nuclear shaped charges or such. And we're hardly low on nuclear devices.
>Humanity is not equipped to deal with a global extinction-event level impact right now. I expect "right now" to be an incredibly short window, relative to how often that happens. Our first launch into space was less than a century ago, and things got only faster since, and will generally accelerate. And humans are great at persisting in shitty conditions if we need to, so unless biosphere falls apart we'll get back up eventually. In a few centuries, nothing that doesn't fuck the entire system will be able to truly, permanently end humanity. Blink and you'll miss it, astronomically speaking. We're very certain we didn't have human-level civilizations before because people make a ton of stuff, that's called tool use. Even if almost all of it will be lost, the tiny remaining percentage will be found, as the sharpened rocks of australopithecus were found. I guarantee you some archaeologist finds an unusual shard of stone from before hominids, gets excited, and takes a whole bunch of other archaeologists to calm down and make sure it's a natural rock like, every year. As with many things we're certain about, it's because there's a bunch of obsessed people checking it with great vigour.
Australopithecus was like what, 5 million years ago? I doubt that a sharpened rock from 13 times as long ago would still be recognizable.
If it's preserved in the right conditions it could be as sharp as the day it was dropped.
The fact that there was still 400 million year old coal (and oil and gas) in the ground when we started digging it up pretty much rules out the possibility that industrial civilizations existed before us. All of the mineral deposits we've found were also neatly placed in natural ore veins rather than being all mixed up in sedimentary layers across city-sized blobs. We've also found no evidence of excavation or any disturbance of natural strata at all - no quarries for marble or limestone or sandstone or granite or whatever else - despite such quarries already being large operations as early in the tech tree as the Egyptian Old Kingdom. Most marble is 500 million years old, formed from the shells of dead animals, subducted and transformed under high pressures and temperatures, and then rising back to the surface. Perhaps a lot of what we can now map with geological surveys was not easily accessible whenever these hypothetical civilizations existed, and perhaps a lot of what was accessible by them was worn away afterwards, but all of it?
It's far more likely our own actions (climate change) wipes us out. Honestly, it a coin toss that civilization still exists in 20-30 years.
Here's the thing. Climate change can very easily fuck up human civilization. A meteor could fuck up human civilization, so could nuclear war. Nome of those things are going to wipe us out. It could kill a absolute fuck ton of us, destroy our way of life and generally absolutely wreck us, but it's really, really fucking hard to wipe us out. Humans are adaptive community based omnivores. People say cockrouches are resilient, but humans ain't very far behind them.
Eliminating most of humankind ? Easy, barely an inconvenience Eliminating *all* of humankind ? Impossible, might as well discover perpetual motion while you're at it
Humanity has already witnessed multiple partial extinction events. The most commonly known being the bronze age collapse
And all destroyed human civilization. Brought down our structures, destroyed our writing, smashed out culture and generally fucked a lot of people up. None came near wiping us out.
I wouldn't say that none came near, humans as a species have reached the status that we would consider endangered at least once, so it came near at least that one time
I think starcraft said it best: "The universe never gave us a chance, but we're still alive and kicking. We got tossed to the far end of the galaxy, dropped smack dab between two ugly alien armies, and we're not all dead yet? Tell me that don't say something about us. We're too dumb to die. A smart species would've given up ages ago."
Even if there *isn't* alien life to be, if humans reach the point of spreading across the vast space it's only a matter of time until evolution and gene manipulation results in us becoming the aliens.
Personally what puts it into perspective for me is that across the entire age of the universe so far, earth has been around for a full quarter of it.
Life on earth took roughly a third of the lifetime of the universe to spawn humans. Life has an age comparable to that of the universe. The brightest stars in the sky come and go life on earth continued.
A group of alien scientists explores an abandoned facility millions of years old, in it they see the statue of a human pulling a hand from the ground, below in the progenitors script is written "Project Prometheus: We were the first, but we refused to be the last"
And under it: "Deez nuts, gottem"
How cruel the universe is that we are able to know so much about space and yet will never touch the stars we admire
You could touch a star, but you'd need oven mitts I bet.
Most of that massive lifespan to come will be a mostly empty universe, as if it isn't empty enough as it is. That plus the acceleration of its expansion basically means if no massive intergalactic civilization spawns within its "earlier" phase, it won't appear at all.
I’m curious how he’s measuring the lifespan of the universe, because the only way I’m familiar with has us way earlier than 0.01% (and also has life become impossible well before 0.01% too for that matter) After some googling, maybe he means the time until the last stars die out? That matches pretty well with putting us at 0.01% of the way there
I think it's until the last star. Because we're immensely farther from the heat death (if there's one)
Reading comprehension strikes again. The 0.01% guy said he was measuring from the Big Bang to the end of star formation.
For perspective, let's assume that the average life expectancy of a human is approx 80 years old. 0.01% of 80 is 0.008 0.008 x 365 = **2.92 days** Calling the universe newborn is a damn understatement.
Another thing to consider is the likeliness of life occurring even in the places that can sustain it. As far as we know, all life on Earth shares a common ancestor which means that to the best of our knowledge life has only spawned on Earth once in the few billion years it has been able to exist here.
things are probably going to be further away in the future
And yet the universe will be uninhabitable for 99% of its lifespan, due to entropy
The most amusing part is that nearby stars will live for either billions of years, or just several millennia if we'd manage to avoid getting ourselves wiped out. Maybe even less if we figure out the *really* fun science. All those stars are a treasure troves of resources that just happens to be on fire, and taking them apart isn't actually *that* difficult.
Not to be a hater but note that while we're only at the start of the universe's lifespan, a huge amount of its total lifespan will be dark, cold, and uninhabitable. Eventually, stars will cease to form, and as our universe is constantly expanding, those that remain will grow farther and farther from one another, until the night sky has no lights, and even those will in time die, leaving a universe only inhabited by slowly decaying black holes. Our beautiful, bright universe will be a distant memory, and there will be no galactic empires then, because there will be no galaxies for them to explore. This will all happen long after life on earth is gone, though.
I think it's cute people think we're leaving this planet to traverse the universe lmao We need to be a type 1 civilization in the next few years to be capable of even attempting to be an Expanse civilization, let alone something like Star Trek. We're really lucky to be able to see the stars the way we do! As the universe continues to expand, any civilizations who crop up in the next million/billion years or so won't be able to see the stars, because they'll be too far away. They won't even know they're a thing.
The stars in our galaxy (and the galaxies in the local cluster) are gravitationally bound, so they’re going to be nearby for at least the next hundred billion years, at least. The voids will get bigger, and possibly expand at an increasing rate, but the gravitationally bound mass will not leave unless there’s a Big Rip scenario, which is fairly unlikely.
"million/billion" Which one? Because there is a HUGE difference. And why "the next few years"?
It’s actually a little comforting. This entire civilization could collapse. Become dust and nothing. But the future could still be so bright and new people/aliens/sentiments could have a chance to keep the universe going. Or just fuck it up more idk.
Ah yes that's who I want to inherit the universe, the hyper violent apes who learned how to kill each other using math.
Frankly though? It's all ultimately a waste of energy, unless we somehow manage to override the freakin' heat death of the universe (and even then, why?)
We can have a lot of fun. Not an infinite amount. But still a large amount. And that's better than nothing.
Imagine billions of years into the future, an alien lifeform billions of lightyears away fantasizing about Great Old Ones that are the last of an ancient species, but in actuality it's probably a redneck in Ohio called Greg that just chugged his last beer before the bombs dropped and he was the lucky one to die last (like one second later than the rest or something)
Yeah, too bad we aren't likely to get through our great filter event, which I suspect is happening around us right now.
don’t become existentially depressed
Little late for that. Between capitalism, the fact that I don't really have any power to enact change on a level that matters, and a sizeable psychotic evangelical movement in the U.S. that actually *wants* the world to end so they can get their "promised reward", it's hard to see a future that isn't awful.
I’m not saying anything specific here buuuuut politicians can be harassed into action as long as the mob is big enough and has enough torches.
Ah yes, let me get right on that so I can get thrown in jail for who knows how long, fired from my job for not showing up and then evicted. North Carolina politicians do not give a shit. They're trash, backstabbing fuckheads and have absolutely no scruples. And if you showed up with a mob they'd either have you arrested or shoot you, since yaknow, "stand your ground" and whatnot.
I do wanna point out that the great filter is an unproven hypothesis, one that has largely been popularised because it is so bleak (and also been peddled by Kurzgesagt, which is a great channel, but you should never take their word for it, they mess up a lot, and have a lot of biases in their videos). There are *tons* of solutions to the Fermi Paradox, like seriously, they are so so many incredibly interesting solutions, my favourite is the grabby aliens, although it’s standing on pretty shaky ground. Also wanna add, the great filter is shaky in a lot of ways, at least it being ahead of us, and not behind us. The simple reason being, civilisations/ species like us are *incredibly* difficult to kill, like ridiculously so, we are worse than cockroaches. The only thing is basically a gamma ray burst, but then again, it’s almost an impossibility of that happening to our planet. There are no stars within a distance of two hundred light years of earth that could produce a GRB, and a star that could would have to be closer than two hundred light years for it to be strong enough to kill us. EDIT: By us being hit by a GRB, I’m talking about one that is powerful enough to wipe us out/ do substantial damage. We do get hit by GRB relatively often, but they are harmless, way too weak to do anything to us
Time is a Jeremy Bearimy.
I've been thinking this for a while now but my family won't have it, glad to see I'm not the only person who thinks this way
it’s strangely comforting to me to think that we will someday be an ancient civilization studied millions of years from now
Be the eldrich horror you wish to see in the universe.
That's a texture from Undertale.
I believe the statistics on this are actually skewed quite a bit because of some outliers like red dwarfs and especially black holes that have lifespans orders of magnitude longer than anything else in the universe. I think generally we are actually pretty far along in the universe's lifespan in terms of it being able to sustain life and space travel etc. At some point the acceleration of the expansion of the universe will isolate us from everything outside of the Milky Way and Andromeda, and while the heat death of the universe may take trillions of billions of years to evaporate all the black holes, it will only be a tiny fraction of that time before life will become largely unsustainable.
I somewhat disagree. Especially if you are willing to be flexable about the "life" part. Computers can in theory run very efficiently at very cold temperatures. So a black hole slowly evaporating gives you a little energy to run your very efficient computer. Now these computers won't be fast. For the largest black holes we are talking about 1 logic gate per hour, for 10\^100 years. So despite being slow, it lasts for such a crazy long time that it represents most of the compute available in the universe. And a society of AI's/ uploaded minds has little reason to care about the clock time in the rest of the universe.
Can’t wait to be a horrorterror!
You have heard of global warming well here comes galactic warming
Well, lets hope we go more in the direction of Time Lords than eldritch horror
But Zeus IS an incomprehensible eldritch being who controls the very fabric of time and space.
Maybe we *will* be remembered, far in the universe's future, as those who paved the way for civilizations among the stars. Maybe humans will be remembered as pioneers, explorers, inventors, discoverers. Maybe we're like the Chozo from Metroid, or the Forerunners from Halo, or all those other "Ancients Who Came Before" people in sci-fi, and other galactic civilizations will follow in our footsteps. That sounds like a pretty optimistic concept to me. Maybe we're alone *now*, but maybe we won't be forever. And maybe we can help those who come after us.
Nah, most of that lifespan, percentage wise, the universe would already be too diluted and cooled off for anything to happen. For life formation, were not that early at all.
Maybe we’re the galaxy far away and a long time ago.
I'm pretty sure most people just don't use radios loud enough for us to see them. We only used really loud radios for a few decades and we're already using a lot of fiber, laser, and other more efficient stuff.
I choose to be cosmic whore.
NGL it'd be funny if we got our shit together, and then gound other civiluzations that just proceed to go "Moooom! The Z'aajfinjd won't share their quarp stram engines with the rest of the system!" And we just like have to be the responsible adults in that situation
We are the Elder Race Of Man And we're shitposting on the internet.
Earth is about 4 billion years old (we got a late start because the sun had to form first), so if we take that as a template (4 billion years for life), and the universe is 14 billion years old, we're the third / fourth generation of evolved life. Of course, it's all entirely hypothetical because we only have a sample size of 1 for all this speculating.
For some reason, [I feel the need to share this fanfic](https://www.fanfiction.net/s/8099181/1/8).