I think that humanity could definitively fail to colonize the galaxy this century.
I don’t see how the non-renewable resources needed to reach space could last 100,000 years in light of business as usual climate scenarios that lock in to permanent failure (uninhabitable earth) at 500-1000 years in the future.
We may be in the beginnings of a kessler syndrome right now (meaning, the cascading collisions are in progress and cannot be stopped, but the timescale is long enough that we will not be locked out of good orbits for decades to centuries), and even if we are not, an incident with any of the ‘small swarm sat’ constellations (starlink/blue origin) could lock the door on large scale space projects for centuries to milennia, which is time we do not have.
Success requires us to master living (with reproduction) in microgravity and a fully self contained environment, the human-machine interfaces needed for virtual life, the large scale engineering required to build factories on celestial bodies or in space itself, and the energy to power it all. We’re nowhere near any of that, and might have a few decades or as much as a century to solve those challenges, but probably not much more. Maybe a general intelligence could create a von neumann probe and working rocket that escapes earth with a minimum of resources in terms of time, manufacturing capacity, and material; but the minimum will never be ‘zero’ and increasing constraints are certain to increase the difficulty; possibly to the point of impossibility.
A few errors or incidents (massive solar flare, nuclear war, large accident in space, climate catastrophe, etc), or even just failure to reach certain technical milestones in time, could mean that at a certain point, (possibly today?), the spare capacity for this sort of massive scale investment of nonrenewables with limited to no return for the humans living on earth making the investment decision just simply won’t be available.
I dont think we’ve lost the race against the clock yet, but it looks to me like there absolutely is one in progress, and while people alive today may not colonize the galaxy, they may find themselves in a position to definitively say that the human race and its’ robots will not.
Regarding kesler: I understand that’s just science press sensationalism. One method of dealing with it that the “math checks out on” is ground based laser brooms. High powered lasers would use photon pressure to deorbit each piece of debris, or at least enough debris to make spaceflight feasible. Theres a paper study on it if you are interested. Note also over a 100k period that most kesler debris will not be in a stable orbit. Small pieces of debris have high surface area to volume and deorbit quickly. Large pieces by definition are rare because humans have not launched very much mass into orbit and we can evade those pieces or deorbit them with the above mentioned lasers.
Humans as they are now wouldn’t solve this problem. They would be heavily edited and modified, maybe to the point that no living cells are used anywhere. This appears feasible and again it’s the 100k now not the “will the FDA approve a brain implant in 10 years” now.
As for the “fossil fuel trap” that appears to be more sensationalism, the math doesn’t check out on that since 2018. Now that renewable is outright cheaper than fossil fuels economically this means the embodied energy ROI is highly positive (or it could not be outright cheaper unless you believe the equipment manufacturers have a magical source of free energy). I can link sources on this as well. Shortages of lithium and rare earths and copper turn out to be more sensationalism, there are now available on the market, in large quantities, alternatives. (Sodium ion batteries, rare earth free motors, aluminum wiring and motor windings). The alternatives are not quite as good, of course, but they are close in performance.
As for the “fossil fuel trap” that appears to be more sensationalism, the math doesn’t check out on that since 2018. Now that renewable is outright cheaper than fossil fuels economically this means the embodied energy ROI is highly positive (or it could not be outright cheaper unless you believe the equipment manufacturers have a magical source of free energy). I can link sources on this as well. Shortages of lithium and rare earths and copper turn out to be more sensationalism, there are now available on the market, in large quantities, alternatives. (Sodium ion batteries, rare earth free motors, aluminum wiring and motor windings). The alternatives are not quite as good, of course, but they are close in performance.
You’re missing the crux here—say a substantial part of humanity dies and we lose most knowledge and access to the technologies that we use to extract fossil fuels in the ways that we currently do. This creates a “missing stair” for the next group of humans populating the Earth.
Our progrsess:
Burning wood, plants and poo → burning of fossil fuels → nuclear and renewables and whatever.
If fossil fuels cannot be extracted by a society powered by wood (lol):
Burning wood, plants and poo —> (how to use wood-burning machines to extract oil from the beneath the ocean floor ???) —> still burning wood, plants and poo forever.
They would have no way to climb the “energy stair case.”
That’s not even the correct staircase though. It was heating fires → wind/water mills → steam engines → internal combustion engines. But we still use hydroelectric to produce 17% of all electricity used on earth.
In a hypothetical world with zero fossil fuels in concentrated, easily combusted form the tech tree would have been:
wind/water powering factories near rivers → electricity → well positioned factories powered by remote wind/water. Cities would need to be denser and to use electric busses and trolleys and elevators for all the transport. Most long distance transport would have to be by train, where all the major links use overhead electric wiring.
The industrial revolution might have taken longer but the outcome would have been the same, and obviously once that civilization figured out efficient windmills, effective battery chemistries, solar PV, and advanced elements of electrical engineering they would have a growth rate similar to ours.
You’re focused more on technology and less on fuel sources.
Given what goes in to constructing a modern windmill, I don’t see it being viably done with a wood-burning stream engine. Consider all of the materials that go in to make a pencil and what parts of the world they come from, the multiply it by at least 1000.
17 percent of the total electricity is still a lot of energy. You aren’t taking the question seriously when you assume someone would make a pencil the same way in a world without fossil fuels. (And implicitly the same problems with nuclear we have now)
Focusing on the technology let’s you develop a gears level model and predict how industrial and supply chains could adapt to more scarce energy and little in portable forms.
I’m not sure what the 17 percent of total electricity figure is related to.
I’m assuming that building a wind turbine would be a lot more difficult than building a pencil.
Imagine it’s 1783, but all coal, oil, natural gas and rare Earth metals on Earth only exists in the places where they’re now in 2021.
How do you build something like the Deep Water Horizon using 1783 technology?
How do you build a the Smokey Hills Wind Farm using 1783 technology?
How do you build a lithium ion battery using 1783 technology?
How do you then Chicago Pile-1 using 1783 technology?
And, yes, you have to think about the whole supply chain. We use fossil fuel burning machines to move parts around, to log, etc. You can log a bit and move them down rivers, then those trees are gone and what do you do?
The problem is there’s only so much energy concentrated in wood, and it would be the most energy-dense material available. You’d burn it all and then you’d be done. The population would ultimately be limited by the amount of energy we have available to us, and there would be nothing we could to about it.
The percentage of global electricity provided by hydroelectric power.
With 1783 technology you obviously don’t need to build the things you mentioned. Your needs are much smaller, for textiles and to drive machinery. You have a vastly smaller population and cities so wood is sufficient for heating and metal forging, as it was in the real 1783.
You cannot grow as fast but in 1783 you have developed and are using the critical technologies that changed everything, the scientific method and the printing press. The printing press means that as people tinker and find ways to make progress despite the obstacles, many copies of what they learn can be printed. And scientific method let’s you filter to knowledge more likely to be useful.
To get to the Chicago pile will probably take longer without fossil fuel but the intermediate steps are mostly done with hydroelectric power. Wind might be used to pump water backwards to store it for later use. Populations probably have to be smaller, trains used everywhere, fields with tractors probably use long cables or overhead wires, basically an extension cord. It’s more difficult to make steel without much or any coal, maybe charcoal and electric furnaces are used. Maybe more use of aluminum.
I think you’re making a great case for optimism. Based on your last line, I don’t think our positions are too far apart.
Laser brooms on the ground are a heavier infrastructure investment than just the rocket, and they haven’t been built yet. Rockets with no brooms are cheaper and easier. So needing the broom raises the threshold, perhaps the raised threshold is still in reach, but at some theoretical point, it will not be.
The fossil fuel comment was more in the direction of ‘if we insist on burning everything currently in the ground, the runaway greenhouse effect is lethal to the species at 500-1000 year timelines’.
I assert that we could screw ourselves permanently, in this century, by digging into a hole (through inadequate investment of non renewable resources like helium or failure to solve engineering challenges) which we cannot exit before we wreck our habitat (plenty of non co2 scenarios for this). I’m not sure how much pessimism is warranted, I certainly don’t think that failure is inevitable, but I absolutely do think it’s on the table.
Well the fossil fuel scenario has the issue that as the earth gets hotter it would be more and more expensive and obviously a bad idea to extract and burn more fossil fuels. Moreover more and more of the earth would be uninhabitable and also difficult to drill or mine for hydrocarbons.
The other scenarios, we are very close I think far closer that most realize to self replicating machinery. All tasks involved to manufacture machinery are vulnerable to already demonstrated machine learn algorithms it is just a matter of scale and iterative improvement. (By self replicating I mean robots made of parts in robots now with gears and motors and circuit boards and wiring bundles. And all tasks involved to manufacture the parts and assemble them are done by other such robots. This is likely possible with a few hierarchial general agents similar to the recent deepmind paper, https://deepmind.com/blog/article/generally-capable-agents-emerge-from-open-ended-play
By hierarchial I mean use an agent made of several subagents trained with a state of the art method like this or better, and each subagents is specialized. Iike a perception agent then a planning agent.
Self replicating machinery would trivially blow past any of these traps and make them moot. The problems we would have are ones we might not have thought of.
I think that humanity could definitively fail to colonize the galaxy this century.
I don’t see how the non-renewable resources needed to reach space could last 100,000 years in light of business as usual climate scenarios that lock in to permanent failure (uninhabitable earth) at 500-1000 years in the future.
We may be in the beginnings of a kessler syndrome right now (meaning, the cascading collisions are in progress and cannot be stopped, but the timescale is long enough that we will not be locked out of good orbits for decades to centuries), and even if we are not, an incident with any of the ‘small swarm sat’ constellations (starlink/blue origin) could lock the door on large scale space projects for centuries to milennia, which is time we do not have.
Success requires us to master living (with reproduction) in microgravity and a fully self contained environment, the human-machine interfaces needed for virtual life, the large scale engineering required to build factories on celestial bodies or in space itself, and the energy to power it all. We’re nowhere near any of that, and might have a few decades or as much as a century to solve those challenges, but probably not much more. Maybe a general intelligence could create a von neumann probe and working rocket that escapes earth with a minimum of resources in terms of time, manufacturing capacity, and material; but the minimum will never be ‘zero’ and increasing constraints are certain to increase the difficulty; possibly to the point of impossibility.
A few errors or incidents (massive solar flare, nuclear war, large accident in space, climate catastrophe, etc), or even just failure to reach certain technical milestones in time, could mean that at a certain point, (possibly today?), the spare capacity for this sort of massive scale investment of nonrenewables with limited to no return for the humans living on earth making the investment decision just simply won’t be available.
I dont think we’ve lost the race against the clock yet, but it looks to me like there absolutely is one in progress, and while people alive today may not colonize the galaxy, they may find themselves in a position to definitively say that the human race and its’ robots will not.
Regarding kesler: I understand that’s just science press sensationalism. One method of dealing with it that the “math checks out on” is ground based laser brooms. High powered lasers would use photon pressure to deorbit each piece of debris, or at least enough debris to make spaceflight feasible. Theres a paper study on it if you are interested. Note also over a 100k period that most kesler debris will not be in a stable orbit. Small pieces of debris have high surface area to volume and deorbit quickly. Large pieces by definition are rare because humans have not launched very much mass into orbit and we can evade those pieces or deorbit them with the above mentioned lasers.
Humans as they are now wouldn’t solve this problem. They would be heavily edited and modified, maybe to the point that no living cells are used anywhere. This appears feasible and again it’s the 100k now not the “will the FDA approve a brain implant in 10 years” now.
As for the “fossil fuel trap” that appears to be more sensationalism, the math doesn’t check out on that since 2018. Now that renewable is outright cheaper than fossil fuels economically this means the embodied energy ROI is highly positive (or it could not be outright cheaper unless you believe the equipment manufacturers have a magical source of free energy). I can link sources on this as well. Shortages of lithium and rare earths and copper turn out to be more sensationalism, there are now available on the market, in large quantities, alternatives. (Sodium ion batteries, rare earth free motors, aluminum wiring and motor windings). The alternatives are not quite as good, of course, but they are close in performance.
You’re missing the crux here—say a substantial part of humanity dies and we lose most knowledge and access to the technologies that we use to extract fossil fuels in the ways that we currently do. This creates a “missing stair” for the next group of humans populating the Earth.
Our progrsess:
Burning wood, plants and poo → burning of fossil fuels → nuclear and renewables and whatever.
If fossil fuels cannot be extracted by a society powered by wood (lol):
Burning wood, plants and poo —> (how to use wood-burning machines to extract oil from the beneath the ocean floor ???) —> still burning wood, plants and poo forever.
They would have no way to climb the “energy stair case.”
(Edits: clarity)
That’s not even the correct staircase though. It was heating fires → wind/water mills → steam engines → internal combustion engines. But we still use hydroelectric to produce 17% of all electricity used on earth.
In a hypothetical world with zero fossil fuels in concentrated, easily combusted form the tech tree would have been:
wind/water powering factories near rivers → electricity → well positioned factories powered by remote wind/water. Cities would need to be denser and to use electric busses and trolleys and elevators for all the transport. Most long distance transport would have to be by train, where all the major links use overhead electric wiring.
The industrial revolution might have taken longer but the outcome would have been the same, and obviously once that civilization figured out efficient windmills, effective battery chemistries, solar PV, and advanced elements of electrical engineering they would have a growth rate similar to ours.
You’re focused more on technology and less on fuel sources.
Given what goes in to constructing a modern windmill, I don’t see it being viably done with a wood-burning stream engine. Consider all of the materials that go in to make a pencil and what parts of the world they come from, the multiply it by at least 1000.
17 percent of the total electricity is still a lot of energy. You aren’t taking the question seriously when you assume someone would make a pencil the same way in a world without fossil fuels. (And implicitly the same problems with nuclear we have now)
Focusing on the technology let’s you develop a gears level model and predict how industrial and supply chains could adapt to more scarce energy and little in portable forms.
I’m not sure what the 17 percent of total electricity figure is related to.
I’m assuming that building a wind turbine would be a lot more difficult than building a pencil.
Imagine it’s 1783, but all coal, oil, natural gas and rare Earth metals on Earth only exists in the places where they’re now in 2021.
How do you build something like the Deep Water Horizon using 1783 technology?
How do you build a the Smokey Hills Wind Farm using 1783 technology?
How do you build a lithium ion battery using 1783 technology?
How do you then Chicago Pile-1 using 1783 technology?
And, yes, you have to think about the whole supply chain. We use fossil fuel burning machines to move parts around, to log, etc. You can log a bit and move them down rivers, then those trees are gone and what do you do?
The problem is there’s only so much energy concentrated in wood, and it would be the most energy-dense material available. You’d burn it all and then you’d be done. The population would ultimately be limited by the amount of energy we have available to us, and there would be nothing we could to about it.
The percentage of global electricity provided by hydroelectric power.
With 1783 technology you obviously don’t need to build the things you mentioned. Your needs are much smaller, for textiles and to drive machinery. You have a vastly smaller population and cities so wood is sufficient for heating and metal forging, as it was in the real 1783.
You cannot grow as fast but in 1783 you have developed and are using the critical technologies that changed everything, the scientific method and the printing press. The printing press means that as people tinker and find ways to make progress despite the obstacles, many copies of what they learn can be printed. And scientific method let’s you filter to knowledge more likely to be useful.
To get to the Chicago pile will probably take longer without fossil fuel but the intermediate steps are mostly done with hydroelectric power. Wind might be used to pump water backwards to store it for later use. Populations probably have to be smaller, trains used everywhere, fields with tractors probably use long cables or overhead wires, basically an extension cord. It’s more difficult to make steel without much or any coal, maybe charcoal and electric furnaces are used. Maybe more use of aluminum.
I think you’re making a great case for optimism. Based on your last line, I don’t think our positions are too far apart.
Laser brooms on the ground are a heavier infrastructure investment than just the rocket, and they haven’t been built yet. Rockets with no brooms are cheaper and easier. So needing the broom raises the threshold, perhaps the raised threshold is still in reach, but at some theoretical point, it will not be.
The fossil fuel comment was more in the direction of ‘if we insist on burning everything currently in the ground, the runaway greenhouse effect is lethal to the species at 500-1000 year timelines’.
I assert that we could screw ourselves permanently, in this century, by digging into a hole (through inadequate investment of non renewable resources like helium or failure to solve engineering challenges) which we cannot exit before we wreck our habitat (plenty of non co2 scenarios for this). I’m not sure how much pessimism is warranted, I certainly don’t think that failure is inevitable, but I absolutely do think it’s on the table.
Well the fossil fuel scenario has the issue that as the earth gets hotter it would be more and more expensive and obviously a bad idea to extract and burn more fossil fuels. Moreover more and more of the earth would be uninhabitable and also difficult to drill or mine for hydrocarbons.
The other scenarios, we are very close I think far closer that most realize to self replicating machinery. All tasks involved to manufacture machinery are vulnerable to already demonstrated machine learn algorithms it is just a matter of scale and iterative improvement. (By self replicating I mean robots made of parts in robots now with gears and motors and circuit boards and wiring bundles. And all tasks involved to manufacture the parts and assemble them are done by other such robots. This is likely possible with a few hierarchial general agents similar to the recent deepmind paper, https://deepmind.com/blog/article/generally-capable-agents-emerge-from-open-ended-play
By hierarchial I mean use an agent made of several subagents trained with a state of the art method like this or better, and each subagents is specialized. Iike a perception agent then a planning agent.
Self replicating machinery would trivially blow past any of these traps and make them moot. The problems we would have are ones we might not have thought of.