We’ll fill the stars and conquer death. The spark of intelligence and sentience will not extinguish.
No we won’t, barring new physics. Even if our civilization avoids catastrophe and invents great improvements in therapies for aging, or brain emulation, that won’t let us change the 2nd law of thermodynamics, or prevent the distant galaxies from accelerating out of our reach.
There is some possibility that physics turns out to allow indefinitely long lifespans (and large populations), and that may be important in terms of expected value, but it’s rather unlikely. The term life extension better reflects this than talk about the conquest of death.
We’ll fill the stars and conquer death. The spark of intelligence and sentience will not extinguish.
No we won’t, barring new physics. Even if our civilization avoids catastrophe and invents great improvements in therapies for aging, or brain emulation, that won’t let us change the 2nd law of thermodynamics, or prevent the distant galaxies from accelerating out of our reach.
But we can claim every star that now burns. Even if in the vast, long, unimaginably long future of this universe, complexity itself must someday die, we should at least do what we can in the meantime. Perhaps we can’t beat physics, but we do have some headroom still!
I found this thread to be “vapid and melodramatic” at first, but I now recognize that humanity did indeed lose something highly valuable with the death of Neil Armstrong, outside and beyond the tragedy that is inherent to the death of any mind.
A spark of intelligence and sentience, a very keen observer, but also, literally the first member of our species to transcend to another world, even if it were for a very brief time. Within a decade or two, human kind will likely no longer have visitors to other worlds among us. Were I a journalist, I would write: “A small death for a man, a giant leap backwards for mankind.”
Armstrong, and his fellow Apollo astronauts are to us like the astronauts in Carl Sagan’s novel Contact. Ambassadors from the Blue Dot to the vast dead Cosmos. Humanity no longer has it’s eyes facing outwards to the other pebbles, to the other stars that burn with unspent opportunity. With their deaths we lose the steady gaze of those who look up, since they have been there, whereas we have not. We lose their voices, and their dreams of someday returning, of someday going beyond 1969.
O you who turn the wheel and look to windward, Consider Phlebas, who was once handsome and tall as you.
May his footprints someday be lost to the footprints of many.
Someday going beyond 1969 is a crazy ambitious idea today, but seemingly wasn’t so crazy before the late seventies/mid-eighties. I’m too young to tell, but it seems this ambition went from bold to crazy somethime around end of the cold war, perhaps as the salient threat of thermonuclear doom faded.
No, we can’t. As I said, distant galaxies that we can see today are receding, such that no probe we send can ever reach them. Barring aliens already nearby, they will burn unclaimed.
No, we can’t. As I said, distant galaxies that we can see today are receding, such that no probe we send can ever reach them. Barring aliens already nearby, they will burn unclaimed.
Ouch! I had originally written “every star that burns in the night sky”. But that sounded cheesy and pompous even in the context of the comment above. Apparently I failed to replace it with something reasonable before hitting the button.
Perhaps only every star and planet in every galaxy within a sphere centered at earth with a radius of at least a couple of billion light years will be in reach of our technologically mature descendants.
Even as distant civilizations trillions of years hence are lost to each other, forever separated by the expansion of space, their neighbors receding over the cosmological horizon, there can still be rich life in those bubbles.
If we survive this eon, life can flourish for the next hundred trillion years.
After that we may be in trouble. After that the cynics may win.
Perhaps only every star and planet in every galaxy within a sphere centered at earth with a radius of at least a couple of billion light years will be in reach of our technologically mature descendants.
That’s assuming nobody else will have a problem with us reaching them...
No we won’t, barring new physics. Even if our civilization avoids catastrophe and invents great improvements in therapies for aging, or brain emulation, that won’t let us change the 2nd law of thermodynamics, or prevent the distant galaxies from accelerating out of our reach.
There is some possibility that physics turns out to allow indefinitely long lifespans (and large populations), and that may be important in terms of expected value, but it’s rather unlikely. The term life extension better reflects this than talk about the conquest of death.
But we can claim every star that now burns. Even if in the vast, long, unimaginably long future of this universe, complexity itself must someday die, we should at least do what we can in the meantime. Perhaps we can’t beat physics, but we do have some headroom still!
I found this thread to be “vapid and melodramatic” at first, but I now recognize that humanity did indeed lose something highly valuable with the death of Neil Armstrong, outside and beyond the tragedy that is inherent to the death of any mind.
A spark of intelligence and sentience, a very keen observer, but also, literally the first member of our species to transcend to another world, even if it were for a very brief time. Within a decade or two, human kind will likely no longer have visitors to other worlds among us. Were I a journalist, I would write: “A small death for a man, a giant leap backwards for mankind.”
Armstrong, and his fellow Apollo astronauts are to us like the astronauts in Carl Sagan’s novel Contact. Ambassadors from the Blue Dot to the vast dead Cosmos. Humanity no longer has it’s eyes facing outwards to the other pebbles, to the other stars that burn with unspent opportunity. With their deaths we lose the steady gaze of those who look up, since they have been there, whereas we have not. We lose their voices, and their dreams of someday returning, of someday going beyond 1969.
May his footprints someday be lost to the footprints of many.
Someday going beyond 1969 is a crazy ambitious idea today, but seemingly wasn’t so crazy before the late seventies/mid-eighties. I’m too young to tell, but it seems this ambition went from bold to crazy somethime around end of the cold war, perhaps as the salient threat of thermonuclear doom faded.
No, we can’t. As I said, distant galaxies that we can see today are receding, such that no probe we send can ever reach them. Barring aliens already nearby, they will burn unclaimed.
Ouch! I had originally written “every star that burns in the night sky”. But that sounded cheesy and pompous even in the context of the comment above. Apparently I failed to replace it with something reasonable before hitting the button.
Perhaps only every star and planet in every galaxy within a sphere centered at earth with a radius of at least a couple of billion light years will be in reach of our technologically mature descendants.
Even as distant civilizations trillions of years hence are lost to each other, forever separated by the expansion of space, their neighbors receding over the cosmological horizon, there can still be rich life in those bubbles. If we survive this eon, life can flourish for the next hundred trillion years.
After that we may be in trouble. After that the cynics may win.
That’s assuming nobody else will have a problem with us reaching them...