LogFAQs > #972329748

wolfy42 posted...

More to the point waaaaay before the planet even becomes uninhabitable by means other than humanities hubris, we would colonize mars and then the moons of saturn/jupiter etc and be able to even survive the sun expanding.

Except we probably won't.

People love the idea of space colonization, but the complications are waaay more difficult to overcome than most people realize, and anything outside of the solar system likely becomes functionally untenable unless we somehow figure out a workable method for FTL travel. Mars likely isn't viable for long-term independent colonization on a massive scale (smaller settlements, sure. a full transfer of the bulk of the human population, no), and even if we do pull it off it would basically have to be hermetically sealed underground hives (at which point we'd almost be on par with just burrowing into the surface of the Earth anyway).

There isn't much else of any value in the solar system apart from a couple of the moons of the gas giants, but even there you're talking logarithmic issues of scale and other complications that kind of render them poor choices for long-term colonization. And free-floating space station or ship-based colonies would be even more complex and problematic on anything other than the smallest of scales.

The most likely scenario is that if we manage to get off this mudball at all we never really progress beyond establishing mostly-automated mining colonies to acquire resources, but still center human civilization on Earth itself. And when Earth dies, we die.

As much as people love to fantasize about us getting off-world and spreading across the entire galaxy (or beyond) like a virus, the realistic likelihood is that it's never going to happen.

Sure, it's possible that we might discover the multiple borderline-magic level scientific breakthroughs we'd need to change that in the future (cue comments about how modern science would look like magic to people in the 1500s), but no matter how much people have come to assume that all scientific progress is forward and everything is always getting better (and how much American schools have lied to students about the myth of "Progress" in general), there is always the potential for backsliding, setbacks, and ultimately resets that prevent us from ever reaching that point, even if that point is possible at all in the first place.

The real interesting question is whether or not we survive the next 100 years. The entire Industrial Age (and the Technological Age that followed it) is basically built on the back of fossil fuels, and while we can talk all we want about switching to alternative fuels and, that doesn't mean we're going to successfully manage to make that switch without catastrophic consequences. And even if we do there's the added issues of damage already done to the environment, innate and inevitable climate shifts that will happen regardless of what we do or don't do to cause/prevent them, current political conflicts that will shape future geopolitics, and issues most people don't even think about at the moment like water rights crises, overmedication leading to virus resistances and more plagues, and the growing instability of global economies. People assume we'll be easily heading back and forth to Mars by 2150, when we might actually living in caves and hitting each other with sticks again.