What life could be like for civilizations 1 trillion years from now • Hacker News Board

Re: What life could be like for civilizations 1 trillion years from now

#111

Post by yogeshp » Sat, Jun 30, 2018, 5:04 PM UTC

I think the movie Interstellar closely depicts how life on Earth may turn out. Climate change is never going to stop, humans except few just don't care. Instead they will try to create more machines which will try to use carbon engineering to reduce CO2(as one discussed few days back on HN). With less need for trees and more need to fulfill population demand, if this technology becomes successful, it can be a doomsday scenario for trees and land everywhere will slowly start to erode resulting in greater imbalance in the ecosystem and eventually worldwide famines. Add to that, thawning of permafrost will release large amount of methane along with bacteria which were inactive since ages and for which humans may have no cure.

Most of CO2 is absorbed by oceans, and humans may never be able to find a way to tame CO2 there, this will result in much faster melting of ice in Arctic and Antarctica than anticipated.

No, humans aren't going to find an alternative habitable planet anytime soon where they can travel.

Re: What life could be like for civilizations 1 trillion years from now

#112

Post by ben_w » Sat, Jun 30, 2018, 5:09 PM UTC

ryandrake wrote: post #109

krapp wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think that, a trillion years from now, any trace of humanity's existence will have long since vanished from the universe, and nothing that comes after us will know that we were ever here, there or anywhere.

Chances are we'll have self-annihilated or been beaten by disease within 10K years. After that, it will only take millions of years for all traces of humanity's existence to vanish. Cement structures, plastics, garbage, etc. will mostly be gone in tens of thousands of years.

Diseases have evolutionary pressure to not wipe out their hosts. While it’s not impossible, I literally don’t expect anything that bad in a million years.

Re: What life could be like for civilizations 1 trillion years from now

#113

Post by martincmartin » Sat, Jun 30, 2018, 5:11 PM UTC

yogeshp wrote: post #111

I think the movie Interstellar closely depicts how life on Earth may turn out. Climate change is never going to stop, humans except few just don't care. Instead they will try to create more machines which will try to use carbon engineering to reduce CO2(as one discussed few days back on HN). With less need for trees and more need to fulfill population demand, if this technology becomes successful, it can be a doomsda…

In the '70s, movies like Soylent Green depicted how people thought Earth may turn out: more and more people supported by limited resources, food riots, etc. e.g. China introduced the one child policy to head this off.

In the '80s, movies like War Games and The Day After depicted how people thought Earth may turn out: nuclear war triggered through Mutually Assured Destruction. (Source: I lived through the '80s.)

you get the idea.

Re: What life could be like for civilizations 1 trillion years from now

#114

Post by [deleted] » Sat, Jun 30, 2018, 5:12 PM UTC

clon wrote: post #7

Isaac Arthur made a compendium called Civilizations at the End of Time [1] that goes into this territory. This guy, in my opinion, goes above and beyond even your typical hard scifi. Can't recommend highly enough. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p58yFf7aZsM&list=PLIIOUpOge0...

[deleted]

Re: What life could be like for civilizations 1 trillion years from now

#115

Post by ben_w » Sat, Jun 30, 2018, 5:23 PM UTC

akvadrako wrote: post #70

tomrod wrote: post #55

By this time in the future I hope we have worked out wormholes.

Highly unlikely. Unless wormholes are setup with strange restrictive configurations they allow sending messages back in time, without needing any new physics. Once you have a wormhole, if you use gravity to accelerate one of the ends away then bring it back near the other end, they will have a time difference, due to general relativity. If you bring them close enough, that time difference will be greater than it take…

I’ve recently become dissatisfied with the two standard ways to make closed timelike curves.

Gravity: that’s treating gravity like it doesn’t go through the wormhole. I expect it would. If it does, both sides are time dilated equally.

Acceleration: what, exactly, are you accelerating? If it’s made of stuff, you time dilate the stuff. If it’s not made of stuff… can you even move it in any meaningful sense, or is that like trying to move a patch of curved space from here to the moon to create artificial gravity?

Re: What life could be like for civilizations 1 trillion years from now

#116

Post by mLuby » Sat, Jun 30, 2018, 5:27 PM UTC

novalis78 wrote: post #72

OscarCunningham wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even in a trillion years, a star won't burn up so much of its energy that less than 10^-30 of it remains. So the wait is worth it.

I'd argue the opposite: it only takes one non-hibernating species out to dominate and it will hunt down every sleeping civilizations data center and annihilate them - so that they remain the most dominant species. Such a "hibernation data center" must thus be the most well guarded / hidden place in the galaxy...

Imagine if humans decided to hibernate en masse on Earth (maybe because of an ice age or fallout or something). We'd almost certainly set up alarms so if one hibernation center were damaged or destroyed another one nearby would thaw out some people (or machines) to go investigate. If the damn dirty apes really had become an existential threat to our sleepers, I'm sure we'd wake everyone up to reassert our planetary dominance before returning to a secure slumber.

Same thing would make sense on larger scales.

Re: What life could be like for civilizations 1 trillion years from now

#117

Post by fullstackchris » Sat, Jun 30, 2018, 5:39 PM UTC

21 wrote: post #103

oldcynic wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They'll probably wonder why all the fragments they find seem to indicate we preferred damaging technologies over benign. Then like archaeologists everywhere will conclude it was of religious significance.

Are you saying that we shouldn't have had the industrial revolution, because burning coal and oil was very polluting?

Yeah I'm getting huge nihlistic vibes from a few comments in this thread...

Re: What life could be like for civilizations 1 trillion years from now

#118

Post by practice9 » Sat, Jun 30, 2018, 5:41 PM UTC

some_account wrote: post #52

a3n wrote: post #2

I think tools 1 trillion years from now that stumble across that headline will wonder what humanity was.

> I think tools 1 trillion years from now that stumble across that headline will wonder what humanity was. We will be lucky to still be here in 100 years.

We've already come this far, we probably will be here for a while longer

Re: What life could be like for civilizations 1 trillion years from now

#119

Post by [deleted] » Sat, Jun 30, 2018, 5:44 PM UTC

clon wrote: post #7

Isaac Arthur made a compendium called Civilizations at the End of Time [1] that goes into this territory. This guy, in my opinion, goes above and beyond even your typical hard scifi. Can't recommend highly enough. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p58yFf7aZsM&list=PLIIOUpOge0...

[deleted]

Re: What life could be like for civilizations 1 trillion years from now

#120

Post by maxerickson » Sat, Jun 30, 2018, 5:48 PM UTC

jcranmer wrote: post #98

mrep wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The 2 biggest health problems that I am aware of with spaceflight are due to weightlessness and radiation. However, both can be probably be solved with enough money (make the spaceship a rotating one with artificial gravity and add more shielding). There might be others but I am pretty confident you could engineer your way past each and every one given a large enough budget.

You're sort of missing the biggest health problem of all: how do you make a self-sustaining closed ecosystem?

The article suggests moving stars.