Our species will face no shortage of existential risks in the come decennium , whether it be from atomic war , climate change , a bioengineered pandemic , artificial superintelligence , molecular nanotechnology , or threats we have yet to conceive . desperation , cynicism , and misanthropy will get us nowhere , and we need to start conceive of virtual ways to see to it the ongoing survival of our specie .
Our existence has been around for almost 14 billion years and will probably continue to be for many more billion age . Homo sapiens have been around for some 300,000 years — not even the wink of an eye , in cosmic term . We should n’t blow our unbelievable opportunity for a prolonged existence .
Of course , by “ we ” I ’m referring to next offshoots of humans , as our species is likely to change dramatically over the coming eons , should we successfully stave in off extinguishing . Moreover , if we are able to obviate an apocalypse and get our dump together , it ’s average to say that the indefinite perpetuation of sprightliness is an inalienable good , assuming we enter into a benign way of existence . We should want to do this , as the alternate — oblivion — isn’t much of a selection . Consequently , it ’s something we should be earnestly consider .
The first footmark will be to ward off the climate emergency we ’re embroiled in . technical , societal , and economic progress will be very difficult if all our energy and resources are used to extenuate the threat posed by a devolve environs . We must also happen ways to prolong a growing worldwide universe , alleviate stresses because of the uneven statistical distribution of wealthiness , and live sustainably on a planet with finite resources .
As urgently , we require to confront a grim realness : Our civilization will shortly have to beguile an increasing raiment ofexistential and catastrophic risks , in which each added doomsday scenario will boost the betting odds of our ego - destruction by rescript of magnitude . That we devise sensible , hardheaded solutions is preponderating , if our civilisation — and our species itself — is to last forever and a day .
https://gizmodo.com/how-the-universe-ends-1829694851
Distributed Humanity
create herculean safeguards , accountable government and introduction , and good , enforceable spheric - weighing machine policies are all of import if our civilization is to make it into the twenty-second century and beyond , but there ’s a sorry fact we have to consider : Our current state of technology is forcing us to keep all our egg in one basket . consequently , we involve to become an interplanetary metal money .
Once we develop the electrical capacity to live off - planet , however , it might be best for us to break off into disjoined groups and head in different direction — even if it means forever misplace middleman with each other . It ’s an thought I call Distributed Humanity .
Finding room for us to live aside from Earth should be one of our biggest priority , but our thinking want to be much grander than that . We also demand to develop an interstellar mindset — mayhap even an intergalactic mindset — should we desire our civilization to string up in there until the terminal daytime of the existence .
As it stand , we have yet to develop a viable , self - sustaining biosphere , which , when you conceive about it , is really discouraging , if not altogether alarming . During the seventies and 1980s , the Sovietsexperimentedwith BIOS-3 in Siberia , but the scheme relied too heavily on resource from the outside to be consider a true biosphere . As for the $ 200 millionBiosphere2 projectof the 1990s , it simply did n’t forge : The dwelling exhibited waver CO2 levels , insufficient amount of oxygen , acidic water , and even denizen who displayed social dysfunction after being cooped up for so long .
These failures mean Earth boast the only functioning biosphere that we sleep together of . This is perturbing news show , because we ’re going to need artificial biosphere if we ’re to populate off the satellite , whether that ’s on the Moon , Mars , or a generation ship point toward the nearest inhabitable exoplanet . We consequently need toreboot our biosphere projects , and not just because they would enable life off the planet ; self - sustaining biospheres could eventually become a requirement on Earth , should our environment cave in to shit . Moreover , they could also inform future efforts to geoengineer our major planet , and possibly other planets , like Mars .
We should also adopt an interstellar approach to place exploration . We wo n’t be able to transmit colonists to another star system for quite some time , but the day is tight approaching when we ’ll be able to slay probe to research remote exoplanets . Anideafloated by the late Stephen Hawking and billionaire Yuri Milner yell for the expression of aninterstellar starshipthat could trip upwards of 20 percent the speed of light . fantastically , we could possess the technologies required to do this in just a few class . Such probes would be sent on reconnaissance mission missions , alerting us to the comportment of potentially habitable worlds . From there , we could ramp up and launching spaceship filled with hopeful colonists .
take up we ’ll regain ways to live off the satellite , a state of Distributed Humanity would aid us to avoid collective mass destruction , whether through innate or ego - inflicted causa . Spreading ourselves across the milklike Way would prevent all of us from getting vote out in a self - inflicted Revelation , for good example , or forbid the far-flung proliferation of existentially dangerous pathogen . Also , if one group were to be destroyed , either by some natural catastrophe ( such as a nearby star going supernova or by its own hired man ) , other groups would inhabit on .
A downside of Distributed Humanity is the potency for convergent jeopardy . Dispersed chemical group , despite having no contact , could still evolve along parallel line and potentially trip up upon the same ways to die — while at the same clip not being able to alert other groups to predominate menace . These convergent risk could involve the creation of a dangerous kind of artificial superintelligence , a fatal physics experimentation , regressive and unrecoverable mode of existence ( like a totalistic political mode ) , or something else we have yet to conceive .
Post-Biological Existence
deflect extinction is all fine and well , but we also need to become more durable and bouncy as individuals . If we ’re work to survive in space , we ’re give out to have tobiologically re - engineerourselves . But our chances of long - terminal figure survival will be dramatically deepen once we transition from biological to digital modality of existence ( though engineerednegligible senescencefor biologic organism should n’t be ruled out as a possibility ) . go utmost — and it is — but life as either a cybernetic or digital being presents some benefits .
First and foremost , we ’d have indefinite lifetime . Anuploadeddigital being could survive in a racy virtual - reality environment hosted inside a supercomputer , the location of which does n’t really matter ( though anargumentcould be made that it should beplaced somewhere coldto maximize computational efficiency ) . Entire civilizations could live on a single supercomputer , turn on the existence of potentially trillions upon trillion of someone , each of them a single brain emulation . These supercomputer could in turn be duplicated and sprinkled across the coltsfoot and beyond , in what could be describe as Distributed Posthumanity .
Various futurists have speculated about the powerful supercomputers take to run these wit emulations and , collectively , posthuman civilisation . The late physicist Robert Bradbury ( whom I had the privilege of cooperate with on our 2011 JBISpaperon Dysonian SETI ) , omen the world of what he calledMatrioshka Brains . These hypothetical megastructures would pull their superpower from nearby principal , allowing for tremendous computational voltage . A similar idea , calledJupiter Brains , would work on a smaller , planetary scale . Given the finite nature of maven , however , digital civilization would have to eventually relocate to recover alternative energy sources .
Another key welfare of digital existence would be the ability to back ourselves up to the swarm . The death of a Einstein emulation , say on business relationship of a natural disaster or some unforeseen home problem , would be tragical , but a reestablish transcript or copies of that person could live on .
Digital existence could also allow for discorporate travelling through quad at the speed of light . travel as a decompiled flow of 1s and 0s , an interstellar digital traveler would arrive at a relay place on another major planet or some other distant location in space .
This is all highly speculative , of course . We’renot yet entirely sureif the human thinker can be render in the ways described here or if digital life is actually safer or sane than biological existence .
https://gizmodo.com/how-will-future-civilizations-survive-the-accelerating-1827395590
In this posthuman , postbiological digital modality , we could conceivably eke out an creation until the end of the cosmos . Even then , we mightstill find waysto persist until the last potential minutes , quite literally .
Cultural Immortality
neglect all of this , we might still find other room of endure forever , though in a more symbolical signified .
Similar to how NASA ’s Voyager probes were each equip with theGolden Record — a 12 - column inch , gold - plated pig platter encode with sound and images from Earth — we could also commit a cultural time ejection seat into the depths of space , but with considerably more point . The Voyager probes were plunge prior to the digital age , and go forth storehouse technologies will agree a lot more selective information .
Back in 2016 , for instance , scientist developeda new storehouse systemthat can encode data at the atomic shell . In tests , the equipment was able to load down 500 terabits onto a single square inch — enough to store every book of account write by humans onto a drive the sizing of a postage stamp .
In the future , similar technologies could permit us to carry the totality of human culture onto a storage sensitive , adulterate it onto an interstellar investigation , and broadcast it into recondite space . Should an extraterrestrial civilization be prosperous enough to bug this probe , they ’d have an intact civilization ’s worth of information to parse — assume we could produce a kind of Rosetta Stone to assist with the rendering . Alternatively , we could transmit this data into space via wireless wave or optical maser pulses , but the fidelity of this information would be immensely diminished ( sending it out as a repeating digital beacon would aid ) .
In addition to sharing our cultural , scientific , and technical cognition , we could also lend authoritative historical deterrent example , soundness , and advice .
in conclusion , we could leave our cultural artifacts right here on Earth , as a variety of monument to ourselves once we ’re gone . At the same time , these monuments could dish as a cautionary tale to see alien — a warning that they should n’t reiterate the mistake made by a species left alone to fend for itself in a forget turning point of the Milky Way .
colonizationScience
