Ask Lemmy
A Fediverse community for open-ended, thought provoking questions
Please don't post about US Politics. If you need to do this, try [email protected]
Rules: (interactive)
1) Be nice and; have fun
Doxxing, trolling, sealioning, racism, and toxicity are not welcomed in AskLemmy. Remember what your mother said: if you can't say something nice, don't say anything at all. In addition, the site-wide Lemmy.world terms of service also apply here. Please familiarize yourself with them
2) All posts must end with a '?'
This is sort of like Jeopardy. Please phrase all post titles in the form of a proper question ending with ?
3) No spam
Please do not flood the community with nonsense. Actual suspected spammers will be banned on site. No astroturfing.
4) NSFW is okay, within reason
Just remember to tag posts with either a content warning or a [NSFW] tag. Overtly sexual posts are not allowed, please direct them to either [email protected] or [email protected].
NSFW comments should be restricted to posts tagged [NSFW].
5) This is not a support community.
It is not a place for 'how do I?', type questions.
If you have any questions regarding the site itself or would like to report a community, please direct them to Lemmy.world Support or email [email protected]. For other questions check our partnered communities list, or use the search function.
Reminder: The terms of service apply here too.
Partnered Communities:
Logo design credit goes to: tubbadu
view the rest of the comments
We're either alone as an intelligent species in this galaxy or the great filter is true
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Filter
Even with our current level of technology which has gone from first flight to landing on the moon in just 66 years we could colonize the entire galaxy in 200 million years which is a blink of an eye.
I think life is common but humans are special or we're fucked.
This is just extrapolating based on math, while ignoring the reality of the actual situation.
Even if we have an amazing breakthrough tomorrow, the reality of interstellar colonization is that you would necessarily be creating two different species by doing so. They would have very little reason to cooperate after a relatively short time. Space is huge, y'all. Communication would be cumbersome at first, and rapidly get worse as the two different species diverged, first culturally, then physically.
And that's even assuming that we would do it. You're basically asking a large group of people to sacrifice enormously for, at best, a marginal benefit. We can't even convince people to stop burning coal, and that's for our own enormous benifit.
Smack a religion on it and you're good to go
Oh boy oh boy, here I go, schisming again!
I get your point but it's only marginal benefit for our limited immediate perspective. Even if we stop actively destroying our planet, we are still at risk of catching a stray asteroid and that would be it for our whole civilization and most of life. We really need to learn better self-preservation at an interstellar scale.
Yea, we're talking about sending people out on trips that could last for hundreds/thousands of years, with no way to provide support or backup if anything goes wrong along the way, to go to other planets that may not even be habitable when they get there. We don't know if there's any other sort of faster-than-light travel even possible, so there very well may not be any space travel shortcuts. Chances are "the great filter" is just the astronomical distances between everything and so all life eventually figures out it's better to just stay home. If anything, maybe the best we can hope for is to convert all the mass in our solar system into a Dyson sphere and just wait out our Sun for a few billion years, that may be more realistic than travel to another star system (maybe slightly less impossible).