By David Futrelle
You may have noticed a strange explosion of highly surreal memes hitting your Twitter home page of late. Blame the Artificial Intelligence-powered meme generator that you can find here, which will happily generate as many weird and baffling memes as you could ever want.
Now, the meme generator is a fairly basic thing, in principle: it takes in hundreds (thousands?) of human-generated memes in a variety of formats before pooping out something it doesn’t understand, but that we humans might.
Given that the AI-meme-generator literally doesn’t know what it’s saying, most of the memes it puts out tend to be a bit puzzling:
And sometimes it doesn’t seem to understand the meme format at all:
But alongside the surreal memes, the AI-meme-generator somehow manages to spit out others that make perfect (or at least only slightly imperfect) sense. I’ve been fiddling around with it for awhile and have been surprised and intrigued by these memes, which seem very much like the memes an actual human might produce on their own.
Indeed, these memes make a lot more sense than many if not most of the Men’s Rights memes I’ve run across (and written about) over the years — despite the fact that the MRA memes were generated by actual human beings who, at least in theory, should know what they’re saying.
Let’s look at examples from both genres — contrasting some of my, er, favorite MRA memes with memes the AI-meme-generator made for me.
Let’s start with this authentic MRA meme:
Apparently the thought process behind this, er, hilarity is: “Women are stupid! And rape is funny! Sharks!”
This AI-generated meme makes a lot more sense:
I mean, who doesn’t enjoy a nice hot dog once in a while?
Here’s an MRA meme taking aim at women in the military:
Contrast that with this cheerful and wholesome AI-generated meme:
Again, the AI hits the nail on the head. Everyone loves to see people talking about their cool stuff.
Here’s a dark and bewildering MRA meme:
I suppose the message here is supposed to be “even if she says she’s not a feminist, she might secretly be one, and falsely accuse you of rape.” But I’m not sure anyone not steeped in MRA-talk could discern that.
Also, why is “radical/white” in ironic quotes?
By contrast, this next AI-generated meme, while admittedly rude and perhaps a bit sexist, is as clear as a (school) bell.
This MRA meme may leave you scratching at your head as you try to puzzle out its strange “logic.”
This AI meme, by contrast, makes so much sense it hurts.
In the world we live in today, who has the patience to wait until you get home to get sloshed?
So why are MRA memes so illogical and incomprehensible? Part of the problem is that reality is not on their side, and so many of their memes only make sense if you’re already living in the imaginary world of the Men’s Rights movement, where black is white and mean, bitchy women rule over all. I know enough about this world from the many years I’ve spent doing this blog that I can usually make some sort of sense of most of their memes, but I still struggle with some of them. It doesn’t help much that many MRAs are bitter bastards choking on their own aggrieved entitlement; their attempts at jokes are undercut by their meanness and their barely developed sense of humor.
The AI may not have a sense of humor, but it’s also unencumbered by all this baggage, so when it pops out with something that’s funny, it’s genuinely funny.
Congratulations, MRA; it’s official now: You’ve failed the Turing test.
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Thanks for the recommend both!
I’ll try to check that out. I need to get back into reading fiction. I’m currently on a stint of yet again educating myself beyond my capacity with a few courses; but a bit of time out wouldn’t hurt.
Let’s see, I waste all that time between 5 am and 9 am sleeping; so I could fit it in there 😀
I’ll see if there’s an audio version I can listen to whilst out and about.
“Man run over by tractor whilst engrossed in novel…”
While I have considered watching The Expanse, and a few dozen other things, I never bother because I haven’t watched TV in over a decade. This isn’t meant to be humblebragging or whatever, I don’t care if someone else watches TV, it’s just that I’ve been entirely disinclined to spend my spare time that way and it isn’t likely to change any time soon. It does make me a bit out of the loop, as pop-culture osmosis isn’t a substitute for actually watching things.
@ snowberry
As I believe the kids say, relatable!
I haven’t had a TV in 30 years. For some reason I just can’t get into programmes. I like the social aspects though of watching something with mates.
As I prove at every pub quiz.
@Alan Robertshaw
At pub quizzes I‘m good at most areas of academic knowledge, but fail at pop culture. Turns out that when one doesn’t watch TV or many films and only listens to extreme metal music, one tends to not know much about popular culture.
Apropos of earlier in this thread, this Fermi Paradox related article just cropped up:
http://nautil.us/issue/63/horizons/our-attitude-toward-aliens-proves-we-still-think-were-special
If you subscribe to the Quarantine hypothesis, the above might be the proof that we’re not yet mature enough for them to contact us. Who wants to invite in a narcissistic and sometimes-abusive twerp who frequently fouls himself to sit down at the table? Maybe we have to accept the Copernican principle en masse before they’ll let us in.
The other really plausible hypothesis might be this one, where we could be alone for quite a while: the Hard Step hypothesis. In this, there is some step along the way from abiogenesis to successful interstellar colonization that is really difficult or improbable for some reason. Obvious candidates for the Hard Step itself include: abiogenesis; the emergence of eukaryotes or equivalently complex cells; the emergence of multicellular life; colonization of land from the sea; the emergence of animal life with a brain and goal-directed behaviors; the emergence in a social species of complex and social tool-use; the emergence in such a species of an open-ended, generative language; and the resulting civilization surviving reaching the carrying capacity of its planet without a resource-depletion collapse and/or nuking itself.
Of these, the data now available rule some out as hard steps.
Abiogenesis: Earth is now known to have had life more or less instantly once it had stable bodies of water on the surface. This is highly unlikely if abiogenesis happened here and is hard. So, either it isn’t hard, or it didn’t happen here, arising instead at some likely-late point in the history of some other planet and then spreading, and past a certain point any planet in this galaxy got infected almost as soon as it got liquid water. Hard abiogenesis therefore can’t explain why this galaxy isn’t teeming with civilizations, though it could mean that galaxies with civilizations are rare and most lie fallow.
The emergence of multicellular life: I’m unsure about the LCA of animals and fungi, but it seems certain that multicellularity in plants is independent of that in fungi and animals. So it developed at least twice, and perhaps three times, in Earth’s history. A step hard enough to not happen at all in the habitability lifespans of most planets won’t have likely happened multiple times here. One could argue that there was an “unlocking step” that didn’t immediately produce multicellularity, but solved the hard part, in some eukaryotic common ancestor of all three multicellular kingdoms, but then it’s this unlocking step that’s the hard step and not multicellularity per se. And that unlocking step is probably another of our candidates, the emergence of eukaryotes, anyway.
The emergence of goal-directed animals: Once again this seems to have happened a few times independently on Earth. Octopodes and humans have a LCA that was probably some brainless sessile clam-thing or similar and lacked brainier ancestors. The diversity of Ediacaran fauna points to other, no longer extant branches of cephalized, goal-seeking animals having emerged as well.
The emergence of complex tool use in a social species: The same problem again. When this trait was not known to exist beyond the great apes, it was arguable, but finding the same thing independently evolved in corvids blows it out of the water. It cannot be a hard step.
We’re left with the following candidate hard steps that have, to our knowledge, only happened one (or fewer) times so far on Earth:
* Eukaryotic cells emerging.
* The colonization of land from the sea.
* Language.
* Civilization surviving reaching carrying capacity.
Of these, the second and third might be especially interesting.
The colonization of land, at first, seems to fail for the same reason as several of the others: it’s happened repeatedly, with fungi, plants, and animals all having done it and apparently at separate times. But there is a single organism that may have paved the way: the humble lichen. Only once these hardy things had started covering rocks and breaking them down to produce soils could plants take root on land, and those provided needed food and habitat for animals and non-lichenized fungi. The emergence of a hardy life form that can live away from open water and generate soils might be a hard step!
Another thing that could make it a hard step is if most life-bearing planets don’t have land, or don’t have the right balance of land and sea. This subcase is also a subcase of the Rare Earth hypothesis. In this, the amount of surface water is a fine tuning parameter: if Earth had much less it would have a mostly dry and arid surface and small shallow seas, and if it had much more it would lack land at all. The latter clearly makes land colonization impossible, and likely with it star-faring civilization. The former may have happened right here in this solar system on our neighbor Mars. A planet with only shallow seas, and especially with a low percentage of the surface being water, will be subject to wild temperature extremes; Earth’s oceans act as a thermal mass that buffers huge amounts of heat and helps moderate and stabilize the climate. Mars is double-whammied as its lack of a large moon makes its axial tilt unstable on timescales of millions of years and longer, further wreaking havoc on its climate. Such conditions might promote the emergence mainly of hardy, unintelligent generalists, especially on land. The kind of complex, yet somewhat predictable, resource-scattered environment humans had in east Africa is unlikely in such a world, with most environments being either too stable to make intelligence useful or too unpredictable and random. Planets with both a large moon and large, deep oceans yet still with substantial dry land might be both very rare and necessary for spacefaring civilization to emerge.
As for the third, it’s the only clear trait that separates us, who have footprints on the moon, from the other social tool users who have emerged on Earth and is of a qualitative, rather than quantitative, character. Maybe the emergence of generative grammar and syntax is the hard step. There is debate on the subject:
https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2018/06/toolmaking-language-brain/562385/
There may be another clue as to which, if any, steps are hard steps. There is an article on what the likely timing of such steps would be, on a world that achieved them, but you’re not going to like who wrote it: it was Robin Hanson.
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/228606051_Must_early_life_be_easy_The_rhythm_of_major_evolutionary_transitions
The upshot was that we would expect that the time from life’s emergence to the first hard step achieved, between successive hard steps, and from the final one to the end of the planet’s habitability lifetime would all be similar. The steps I suggested above have these timings:
Life possible (and present): 4 GYa
Eukaryotic life: about 2 GYa
Land colonized by lichens: about 0.4 GYa
Language: about 0.001 GYa
Survival of reaching planetary carrying capacity: 0 GYa (if it happens)
End of Earth’s habitability (absent intelligent intervention): est. 0.6 GY
This suggests that there may be hard steps about every 0.5 or about every 1.5-2 GY; and that either both language and survival of civilizational adolescence cannot both be hard steps, or else, instead, we’ll fail at the latter hard step.
If the hard steps are more widely spaced, they are eukaryotic cells and one of language or surviving civilizational adolescence (and our estimate of the habitable lifespan of Earth is short for some reason; mitigating CO2 loss, cloud cover changes, or other effects?)
If they are more narrowly spaced, they include eukaryotic cells, colonizing the land, and one of language and surviving civilizational adolescence, and there are also three hard steps during the Archaean that we haven’t identified, and two more during the Proterozoic. Candidates for the first include the dominant photosynthesizer producing oxygen (fast animal metabolisms on land will later require this), surviving the dominant photosynthesizer being an oxygen emitter (it’s a very reactive gas!), and possibly intermediate steps toward more complex (eukaryotic) cells. Candidates for the second might include necessary intermediate steps to producing something sufficiently like lichens that it can spread onto dry land and create soils. One candidate for a step that might occur at any of these times or even more than once is surviving “snowball earth” glaciations like the Rodinian, but only if such glaciations are an inevitable feature of any world capable of later producing a starfaring civilization. This might be if to avoid becoming too hot too soon the planet has to be on the very edge of too cold for much of its life-bearing history; that in turn is unlikely unless planets of M-dwarf stars are absolutely and fully ruled out, even if they can evade tide locking in some way (3:2 resonance like Mercury, or actually being a big moon of a close-in Jovian, etc.)
If there’s only a single hard step it should be about halfway from first life to last life, thought to be a 4.6 GY span starting 4 GYa, so the step would have been around 1.7 GYa. The emergence of eukaryotic cells is the only candidate step I know of with this timing, so maybe that is the sole hard step.
@ surplus
Wow; that’s a brilliant piece of analysis. Lots to think about there. I do sometimes wonder if there is a great filter and, if so, is it behind us or ahead of us.
And yes; I can well see that if there were to be an alien culture that understood us then it is unlikely to be impressed.
Apart from anything else aliens, by definition, will be very different to us; and they will have observed how we treat other beings that are barely, or not even, different from us at all.
Or the really obvious one, the one that nothing on Earth has made or ever looks likely to: Actual interstellar travel.
A few more thoughts on the Fermi paradox and “hard steps”, and ancillary matters.
First, the “surviving an oxygen emitter becoming the dominant photosynthesizer” can be a separate step (occurring later in time) because it takes time for oxygen partial pressures to rise to toxic levels after the previous step is achieved. So that step sets up a delayed, future crisis, the passing of which can be itself a subsequent hard step.
Second, a variant Rare Earth hypothesis is that the key rare combination is plate tectonics and dry land. Without plate tectonics, planets do a piss-poor job of recycling certain chemical nutrients and minerals, and are prone to foul their atmospheres over time besides (though Venus and Mars went about doing this in very different ways). The habitability lifespan may be very much shorter in the absence of plate tectonics than with it. On the other hand, plate tectonics appears to require water, and not just a little of it either, but a great deal of it, much of it in the planet’s interior as well as deep bodies within which subduction can occur. So worlds with only shallow surface water bodies may not be capable of plate tectonics. Mars had inadequate water; the moist greenhouse on Venus might have had too much of it in the vapor phase and too-shallow oceans. Neither shows evidence of past, let alone present, plate tectonics. Both ended up in runaway excursions away from habitability in which, eventually, all of the surface water was lost within the first billion years or so, to evaporation on Venus and to freezing on Mars.
In that case the vast majority of worlds with plate tectonics might lack dry land, being water-balls like Kamino. Earth would be quite unusual in having enough water for plate tectonics without drowning the whole surface.
Rare Earth hypotheses are increasingly coming to be tested, as we discover more exoplanets and become capable of learning more about each one. We will soon know how common terrestrial planets with large expanses of both water and land are; if we mostly find a mix of dry Mars-like rocks and water-balls without very many planets with coastlines then Earth is indeed rare. At around the same resolving power achieved we should be able to assay for the presence of large moons, to find out if that climate-stabilizing trait is rare. Telling if the oceans are deep enough to be compatible with plate tectonics is trickier, and might first be accomplished by directly detecting plate tectonics. Long coastal mountain ranges would be diagnostic of this, a telltale sign of subduction just offshore, as would island arcs and chains with certain geometric properties.
And the colonization of land by lichens might actually be quite a bit earlier than often thought. The first land plants and animals date to the early Devonian, around 400 MYa. There’s evidence already then for lichens, in the form of Prototaxites: of what use were such huge protuberances except to elevate a big photosynthetic surface area? But there’s no photosynthetic surface area unless it was lichenized. How early, though, could the things have been present? Something as large and complex as Prototaxites did not spring fully-formed from the brow of Zeus. Its ancestors must have been adapting to a land-based existence for a while, which may well move the emergence of land lichens back into the Silurian at least. But why stop there? A land covered in only lichens would produce little in the way of fossils, at first. Lichens lack bones, and soft-tissue fossilization depends on thick moist mud burying a thing. Until the lichens had made enough soil there was no such mud on land! Fragments washed to sea could have fossilized there but could have been mistaken for sea organism fossils, and pre-Devonian lichen fossils would still be much less common than if there were plenty of fossilization sites inland as well. It’s conceivable we just haven’t found them yet. And if that’s the case, there’s little to stop such lichens having existed all the way back as much as perhaps 1 GYa! Especially with all evidence of anything on land before 700 MYa having been erased by the Rodinian glaciation. Perhaps Prototaxites and its ancestors were patiently and slowly building up soil on Earth’s landmasses for hundreds of millions of years before the Devonian finally saw some critical threshold crossed that made the land viable for colonization by early plants like Cooksonia.
This might in turn suggest a billion-year rhythm of key steps: first life; unknown (possible prerequisite step to eukaryote emergence, or oxygen tolerance, or something); eukaryotes; lichens on land; and then language. Or civilizational adolescence survived.
There could be a critical, second oxygenation step related to this, and to plate tectonics. Photosynthesizers at sea are cycled rapidly and may not necessarily lock away a lot of biomass. Whenever a photosynthesizer is quickly and completely eaten, the oxygen it produced is offset by the respiration of whatever ate it. For long-lived increases in oxygen levels in the environment, an equivalent amount of photosynthetically bound carbon has to be buried, or persist in long-lived standing crop biomass. There is precious little of the latter in the oceans, but the former can happen when dead phytoplankton get buried in sediment uneaten. If they decompose there, the oxygen gets consumed by microbes, but if some of this stuff subducts before that happens, then some of the associated oxygen persists in the water and air for geologically noticeable spans of time, allowing oxygen to build up (once the surface rocks have all rusted of course, which took around 2 GY). Land plants (and lichens) can however build up large standing crop biomasses, especially if they are present for several hundred million years before anything else figures out how to live on land by eating them. And the soils produced contain more carbon mass, corresponding to more oxygen persisting in the air.
Paleo-oxygen-levels remained low until the rocks had rusted around 2 GYa. Then they rose to a higher plateau, but still low by our standards: a few percent concentration at sea level, about equivalent to the top of Everest now. Human life could not stand on the sea shore and breathe the air as recently as the late Silurian. There was a further rise once land plants became well-established, and especially once some of them were locked away underground as coal, uneaten. But even the earlier plateau may have been necessary to allow lichens to spread onto the land, and plate tectonics may have been necessary to reach that earlier plateau.
Related to the above, I’d like to offer two maverick opinions that are almost certainly correct and also almost certainly would be laughed at by the current scientific community:
1. There are really only two kingdoms of multicellular life: animals and lichens. Ridiculous! No, wait, hear me out. Land plants seem, without exception that I know of, to prefer (and often to require) fungal symbiotic partners, some of them with a cellular-level intimacy, as in mycorrhizae. Why should this be? Well, an obvious explanation is that they are not descended directly from free-living algae, but instead from lichens. They are lichens where the photosynthetic partner became multicellular and grew large and obvious, while the fungal partner remained relatively small and inconspicuous, or at least the latter, with only the plant part poking up above the soil surface to call attention to itself. And land fungi that are not mycorrhizal are lichens that shed their photosynthetic partner entirely to become saprobic, or turned on those partners and became parasitic, or both (Armillaria, for one, will parasitize live trees, eventually killing them, and then continue to live off their rotting corpses for decades). Both land plants and land fungi have lichenized ancestors, I suspect.
In that event, the land was colonized but twice: first by an ancestor of Prototaxites, whose descendants include every single multicellular thing living on the land that is not an animal, and later by animals, once oxygen levels in the atmosphere were adequate.
2. Earth was colonized by life from space (panspermia). OK, this is a little less maverick, though still a distinctly minority opinion. But I think the case for it has recently become absolutely compelling:
a) We pushed the date of earliest life on Earth’s surface back and back with various discoveries until it is now clear that as soon as the planet had stable bodies of liquid water on its surface, it had life instantly (as geological timescales reckon such things). This seems highly improbable unless it was like an orange left lying around in a highly fecund environment, where it is sure to get moldy in very short order.
Which requires that the space the planet swims in is “a highly fecund environment”.
b) The shortest known self-replicating RNA is around 165 bases long (last I checked). There are 4^165 RNAs of this length. If we assume that there are even many millions of self-replicators that long, and maybe even a few that are a bit shorter, maybe it takes trying about 4^150 combinations to come up with a replicator, or maybe even 4^100. Earth has maybe 3 petagrams of carbon available near the surface to participate in life-producing chemical reactions. That’s 3×10^12 grams, or about 6×10^34 carbon atoms, enough to make about 5×10^33 RNA bases, or 5×10^31 100-base RNAs, at one time. So Earth could “try” a maximum of 5×10^31 combinations at a time to produce a hypothetical one-in-4^100 (1.6×10^60) replicator. It would take 3.2×10^28 successive tries, each time of 5×10^31 more combinations in parallel, before exhausting this search space, and half that long on average to hit a replicator, so 1.6×10^28. If we assume that trying a new combination with the same carbon atoms as a previous takes about the same time that a PCR cycle would take, which is about 1 minute per kilobase and thus 6 seconds per 100 bases, we would expect Earth to hit on a replicator (achieve abiogenesis) after around 1.6x6x10^28 seconds, which comes out to about 3×10^21 years. Earth hasn’t even existed for that long, but it got life within as little as 10^6 years of the appearance of surface water, which is 3×10^15 times shorter an interval. This doesn’t prove pansperma, per se: if 3×10^15 Earthlike planets were all trying for a million-year span, one of them would get a replicator, and that’s just a few galaxies worth of Earthlike planets.
But most planets that got a replicator would get it at a much greater age than 1 million years after the first liquid water on that planet. It would be odd to find ourselves on one of the rare ones that got a replicator that fast, even given the anthropic necessity of being on one of the ones that got a replicator at all.
Panspermia, however, neatly explains the early appearance of a replicator. (And moreover, the thing we know was present by then was a freaking bacterium, not a mere 100-nucleobase free-swimming single gene!)
c) A study of the complexity of genomes of life forms that emerged at various times, and the estimated complexities of those of their common ancestors, led to a curve of rising complexity with time that was exponential, like Moore’s law. Extrapolating it backward indicated that a short replicator ancestor of a few hundred bases would have existed about nine billion years ago, twice Earth’s age. One paper even estimates ten:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1526419/
d) ‘Oumuamua happened along. As soon as that happened, I reasoned that since we had only had the technological capability to detect something like that for maybe fifty years before actually detecting one, it was highly probable that our solar system got a visitor of this sort at least once a century on average.
Two years later, 2I/Borisov cropped up.
What’s more:
https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/observations/6-strange-facts-about-the-interstellar-visitor-oumuamua/
Copernican assumption: ‘Oumuamua is an entirely typical member of its class, as we would be an unusual observer if we were one of the rare ones whose first such observation happens to be of an atypical member of its class.
The clear implication of this is that the galaxy is littered with these things, essentially stationary rocks that the stars move past in their gyrations. Such objects are subjected to periodic heat shocks and are way more numerous than terrestrial-type planets. They need only abundant hydrogen, carbon, and other light elements to form, without need for huge heaps of silicon and iron, so they may also have started forming earlier, in lower-metallicity places and times. How do they get there? Likely they can quietly enter or leave a star’s Oort cloud by small gravitational perturbations, so stars are constantly littering them about as well as collecting them, like cosmic trading cards. Carbon-rich ones subjected to pulses of heat and mutation-inducing radiation. Plausible crucibles of simple life. Even if life didn’t start among these things, they’re excellent rafts for moving it about after some impact blasts a bacteria-infested chunk of someone’s seabed into orbit. So if any planet in the galaxy gets life and then gets smacked by a Chicxulub, that life can hitch a ride from star to star on one of these trans-stellar comet objects.
The objects themselves are perfect dispersal devices. If some Klingon marauders deliberately wanted to infect Earth with the Andromeda Strain they’d be hard-pressed to make a technological dispersal machine as effective: as ‘Oumuamua passed close to the sun, surface evaporation of ices drove dust particles gently off of it and into space, enough to disturb the object’s trajectory noticeably (and stir excitement among the usual UFO crowd for a while). Any bacteria present would have been able to drift off, in spore form, in this dust, and the solar wind would have pushed it outward into the spaces where the planets are. Some would have hit Earth’s upper atmosphere, at a low velocity, and been entrained there, drifting eventually to the surface, with the larger (sand-grain-sized) accompanying dust specks scratching brief meteor trails.
If one object of this type got bacteria on it, every time it went close to a star they’d have a chance to replicate some, and every time it went really close, the system’s terrestrial planets will get dusted with bacterial spores. If the planet already has life that has adapted itself well to local conditions, these will be quickly eaten or outcompeted by what’s already there; if it’s freshly got liquid water and never had any before, these will have a good chance to establish a permanent foothold and bring the planet into the ranks of those worlds with biospheres. And if the first one fails to seed the planet, it can expect another in a century, or perhaps in only a year or two. And then another. And another.
In light of this, the appearance of life the very instant Earth had liquid water would not be surprising at all — it would be inevitable.
@Dalillama:
That depends on a lot of factors which we don’t yet know about.
Can we avoid civilizational collapse in the next century? If not, we probably never will.
Is faster than light travel both possible and eventually practical? If not, we may never expand much further than a handful of nearby stars.
However, note the “may”. There’s something most people don’t think much about which I’ve mentioned before: can humans survive indefinitely in much lower gravities than Earth? Or can we easily genetically modify ourselves to do so? If the answer is yes, then there will be a race to claim the surface of every chunk of mass of sufficient size, despite it being an extremely inefficient use of surface area and complicating things with unnecessary gravity wells. This will provide a drive towards claiming things further and further out, even if interstellar colonization is extremely expensive and risky.
But if we can’t? All those useless giant matter spheres are getting dismantled and turned into megastructures. Mercury alone can be turned into trillions of structures which can collectively and comfortably house quadrillions of physical beings or quintillions of virtual ones. You can have a whole galaxy’s worth of independent, inhabited worlds right here in the solar system. Why go anywhere else?
Though in that case humans or their descendants will probably go somewhere else anyway, just because, but they probably won’t go very far. Not unless the population gets so high that even a handful of star systems can’t contain them, or until those stars burn out, and there are theoretical ways of putting off the latter for an ungodly amount of time.
@Surplus to Requirements: Geez, write these up as an article or blog entry, and then link it here or something. Probably most people aren’t even paying attention to this thread anymore, and this is a site which isn’t even dedicated to science speculation; it feels like your efforts are wasted here. Okay, I don’t have much room to talk given what I just wrote, but you’re going well beyond that.
@Naglfar, @Alan Robertshaw:
.
Years ago, my family lived in Kobe for a year (my dad was involved in a kind of academic exchange program); this was a shortly after Trivial Pursuit had first come out, and we were, at one point, gifted a copy by an older American couple who’d been living in Japan since the late 1960s or early ‘70s, and who begged us to take it off their hands, as it had been sent to them by relatives in the US and none of the pop-culture questions meant anything to them.
@Alan Robertshaw
A pet theory on the filter: war. Warlike species are likely to develop and use weapons of mass destruction and destroy their civilizations or even drive themselves to extinction long before developing interstellar travel. OTOH, more peaceful and cooperative species will not do this. If this is the case, I can’t say things look good for humans, we tend to be rather warlike.
@Surplus
I don’t agree with the classification of lichens as a kingdom of life. This is because they have both bacterial and fungal cells and as colonies do not have the same DNA in all cells like other life forms do, which would imply they are not a kingdom. They certainly play an important role on Earth, but are not one kingdom, rather two.
In addition, most scientists regard fungi as closer to animals than plants because they do not photosynthesize and engage in digestion (albeit externally rather than internally).
I find it interesting that we somehow got from a discussion of AI memes, to being interrupted by a troll, to a discussion of extraterrestrial life.
@Snowberry (and working to get us back on the meme track)
https://imgflip.com/i/41or7v
[Edited to add: crap; how the hell do you embed images, again?]
@Gaebolga
Paste the image url with image extension.
Like this:
https://i.imgflip.com/41or7v.jpg
Gives:
Thanks, Naglfar!
@Snowberry
Define ‘civilizational collapse’. There’s basically no chance that 2120 will see the perpetuation of anything closely resembling the present geopolitical situation, but there’s an excellent chance that there’ll still be humans with high-tech societies about the place. They definitely won’t be keeping on with any long-term projects we started in the present. The real world ain’t a game of Civilization.
How would we do that?* Also, why would we do that?
No.
Again, no.
There will never be that many humans. The idea that continual population growth is an inevitability was discredited in the 1980s, if not before.
*Note: there’s no realistic prospect of ‘cold-sleep’ ever being a thing and we can’t even build a sustainable ecosystem in a plastic bubble here on Earth.
@Dalillama
If we wreck the biosphere badly enough, even if humans survive it, we’d be rebuilding from a much more resource-poor world. The odds of our far-future descendants rebuilding to present levels of technology and beyond aren’t great.
We probably can’t – the currently most promising methods of doing so would require negative mass fields… and while not forbidden by the laws of physics as we know them, as far a we know it’s only a mathematical construct. That doesn’t stop people from trying anyway. Who knows?
As for why, because. Even if the vast majority of people aren’t explorers, if you can get humans there to explore a place in person, there will eventually be humans there.
Assertion is not evidence. Earth gravity at sea level is 1.00. We know the minimum tolerance levels are somewhere between 0.99 and 0.001. Considering we know that humans can handle 1.50 long-term, and we’re not sure how much higher, it’s unreasonable to assume that gravity tolerance falls off just below 0.99. It might, but it’s not likely. How much lower, though? Venus’s 0.91? Mars’s and Mercury’s 0.38? Luna’s 0.16? Titan’s 0.14? Europa’s 0.12? You might scoff, especially at the lower numbers, but given how physics effects are exponentially proportional and not arithmetically proportional, it’s not as unlikely as it might seem.
Also, we’re a long way from knowing the practical limits of what we can do with genetics.
And if the facts involved with that discrediting suffer an existence failure?
Under the presently existing and projected near-future conditions, humans will almost certainly never exceed 10 billion. Now imagine most people having families every few centuries and lifespans averaging millennia. That’s (probably) still a long way off, but as long as there’s new space being built for all those new people, the population will grow again, no matter how slowly.
And if you scoff at people wanting to live “forever”, some people won’t. That’s fine, they don’t have to. Over time, they’d become greatly outnumbered by those who do. If you scoff at the idea of it even being possible… let’s just point to “genetic engineering” above as just one possible path to that.
*Note: It’s not realistic that humans will ever fly. Sorry, DaVinci, even your weird “aerial screw” thing won’t work. ~1500 CE
[This is a joke not just because of dirigibles, and later airplanes, but also because people have built working models of the aerial screw using some improvements which didn’t exist in DaVinci’s lifetime. It just doesn’t work well, but eventually inspired the helicopter and jet turbine.]
I mean, you could be essentially right, but for the wrong reasons. I prefer to be more optimistic, thank you.
@Snowberry
People who want to explore aren’t going to make a generation ship: they’d die before they saw anything. That means FTL, which requires unobtainium in great amounts, coldsleep, which as mentioned is a nonstarter, or sufficiently high speeds to take massive advantage of relativistic effects. This requires carrying a functionally infinite fuel supply, which again is a complete nonstarter.
Meaning that at present, and indeed for the foreseeable future, we can’t easily engineer humans for anything.
Millennia-long lifespans will be available 20 years after cold fusion. And people being what we are, accident, malice, and just plain damn foolishness will reliably maintain a steady death rate for as long as there are entities meaningfully recognizable as human beings, regardless of how slowly we might age. (It’s looking increasingly like ~150 years is pretty much a hard limit on that one as long as we’re made out of meat).
Genetic engineering isn’t magic, and living tissues come with an expiry date. Mammalian tissues particularly aren’t warranteed for above a couple centuries (there’s some kinds of whales that can reach ~300 years old, and then there’s your famous Galapagos Tortoise or the Greenland Shark, which doesn’t even reach sexual maturity for nearly two centuries. But sharks are put together rather a lot differently to us).
Da Vinci had a firm theoretical framework for what he was doing, and could demonstrate smaller working models of human-made flying machines. Conversely, no person or animal has ever been frozen in liquid nitrogen and revived, nor can proponents provide a workable explanation for how such a thing might be done in the future. Da Vinci could say, well, if I were just stronger, or had some power source, this would work, and he’d be right. He has a clear picture of a specific thing that’s needed to turn these sketches into reality. Cryogenics has fuckall.
Optimism is one thing. Blind faith supported by handwaving is something else entirely. Trust when I say I’m not throwing cold water on this out of contempt for your dreams. My shelves hold better than half a century’s worth of plans and prophecies of our bright future in space, and I wish more than anything that we were gonna get it. But the equations turned out to be colder than anyone ever imagined, and there’s just no way to make them come out in our favour.
One of the big reasons if why people would expand their way to celistial bodies and other stars, would be for several reasons.
1. Optimistically speaking: the wonders of exploration of final frontiers that lay’s in the heart of the human species. We are a race of explorers, nomads and travelers on the frontiers of the unknown. We are an instinctual and inherently curious species.
2. Scientific study, research and understanding. Tied in to the curiosity of humankind: the scientific possibility of understanding the universe and reality and answering the questions of “what is stuff” will open up doors of new scientific understanding and learning.
3. Practically and pragmatically speaking: Resources, rare elements and new living space for humans when things on starship Earth either get too crowded or the supply chains get too bottled up and backlogged logistically and the resources so overtaxed or over used to support the sheer mass and demand of current human earth populations. A new set of Resources, Elements and living space means a wider pool to draw from to sustain humanity and it’s economic, social and logistical interests, even if considering the admitted detail that it would mean a new logistical supply chain to link; it will be one that at least will be one with a newer, bigger and fresher set of resources to draw from. Although pessimistically this would also be a detail rife with potential exploitation by Governments, Corporations and Military’s.
4. Cynically speaking: Military and Strategic launching point and military industrial complex assets. Don’t have much to say that except; as humanity is now; we are still trying and have yet to throw off the tribalism in-group and out-group bs that will feed the desire to “have advantage over the other guy: and thus give new motivation for a space race military expansion and resource/economic war.
@Dalillama:
I think one factor your overlooking is that the entirety of the human genome has not been fully mapped or fully understood yet; though we have made very big and impressive leaps to those ends. Heck quite recently their has been a scientific study that shows a strand of the human genome is actually responsible for activating “growth and aging”, although the specifics of how/why is not fully parsed out; but it has raised some questions on the implications of this discovery and further questions on the potential cause and effects and resultant potential of trying to ‘tinker’ with that specific genome and it’s relationship and interactions with other genomes and what other genetic blocks may yet be found or yet be understood what they do, how they do it and why.
Waterbears/Tardigrade’s actually have done this, at least as far as ones I can name off the top of my head; scientific studies have seen Waterbears immersed in liquid air at -200 °C for 21 months, in liquid nitrogen at -253 °C for 26 hours, and in liquid helium at -272 °C for 8 hours. Afterwards the tardigrades sprang back to life as soon as they came into contact with water, apparently. Tardigrade’s are an extreamafile life-form and can even survive the vacuum of space.
So their is a life form that meets that criteria, of a lifeform frozen in liquid nitrogen and revived (or again, at least off the top of my head). And right now scientists are studying the hows and whys of the ways in which this is done and how it can be applied to human benefit.
@ dali & snowberry
I think suitably motivated people could engage in a long term project even if they themselves wouldn’t see the end result. There’s plenty of precedent for this. The medieval cathedral builders began work knowing their grandkids would be the ones attending the opening. And whilst the Conquistadors were after a quick return, lots of migrants have been willing to travel to new lands knowing they would live in squalor but their descendants might have a better life.
I’m also reminded of how the whole of the western Americas was colonised by a bunch of people wondering down from the Bering Straight. Or even how we got to Australia and all those Pacific Islands.
Of course there would be no predicting what would happen on a generation ship over time. Heinlein’s Double Star makes this a plot device (as does Dr Who a few times). The societal challenges might be greater than the technical ones.
But speaking of technology, NASA’s helical drive project throws up some interesting possibilities.
https://ntrs.nasa.gov/archive/nasa/casi.ntrs.nasa.gov/20190029294.pdf
I doubt if we currently have the technology to make even a feasibility study worthwhile into whether such a project is possible within the foreseeable future; but who knows where we might be in a few thousand years. Which is the blink of an eye in the grand scheme of things.
Photon drives. These have a solid physics basis, don’t need tremendous amounts of fuel, can probably reach at least 0.2c, and could even be built within a few decades if it weren’t for the fact that the necessary fuel is antimatter. Combine that with extended lifespans and you don’t even need FTL or cold sleep.
I’m going to admit that it might not happen because antimatter farms (in close orbit to the sun, not on Earth) might end up not being a thing for any number of reasons, but that’s one of the more promising possibilities.
Absent any other factors, a steady death rate of about 0.1% per year. According to my calculations, that’s an average lifespan of roughly 700 right there. Foolish people taking themselves out will likely do so relatively early in their lifetimes, resulting in an even longer average lifespan for everyone else. And even if 700 is the best we can do, most people having new families every, say, 200 years, still results in a significant (if slow) degree of population growth.
Liquid nitrogen? Pffft. I mean, it’s not like cryonicists have any better options on their limited budgets, especially given current laws and technology levels, and that’s almost certainly a dead-end approach. I would like to point out, however, that cryonicists have to work in the now. They freeze today’s people in hopes of them being able to be revived in the future. They can’t wait for future developments when all those people will be long dead and decayed.
There are other theoretical approaches, most of which have barely even been explored yet. I already wrote up one back when this thread went off on an “aliens eating humans” tangent (admittedly a possibly not very practical one). And then there are other potential approaches to suspend consciousness and/or biology which couldn’t meaningfully be called “cold” or “sleep”.
My optimism is grounded in the fact that the currently known possibilities are far vaster than most people are aware, with varying degrees of solid grounding in science. You can argue against any one of them, and almost certainly be right, but unless they’re all wrong…
@Snowberry
The problem is that antimatter is exceedingly expensive to make, I heard it estimated that with current techniques it would be about $6.5×1013 per gram. Unless we find new ways to make it, it isn’t a viable fuel.
Again, it seems that the physical limit of human flesh is unlikely to be much higher than 150 or so, so I don’t think anyone will be living to 700 unless we somehow upload brains which gets into a whole new world of questions about the mind, consciousness, and what’s possible in a different field.
I’ll take cryogenics seriously as a field when it can demonstrate how someone could be revived. AFAICT places like Alcor are slowing decay but there is almost no chance anyone frozen there will ever be revived. Add in a shaky understanding of biology by the key players and shoddy working quality and it seems like a pipe dream.
@Alan Robertshaw: I had a bit of trouble at first figuring out how that helical drive was even supposed to work, but I think I have a pretty good idea. My intuition says that the acceleration would be extremely slow, too slow for interstellar travel. My intuition is sometimes wrong, though.
There’s no way that thing could actually do .99024c, though. That’s through a perfect vacuum. Ain’t no such thing. For practical purposes, no matter how good of an idea we come up with, we’re effectively limited to something like 0.91c.
@Naglfar:
Absent effective intervention, yes. For all practical purposes, more like 120. But given that “absent intervention” is not a state which has existed since the advent of medicine, we would need to work on the “effective” part.
Based on what we know about aging, it is fundamentally a gradual simplification of things which need to be complex in order to effectively function. That is in itself something of a simplification, but the point is that most of our efforts have been in the slowing of this process, and only very recently has there been any real efforts towards rebuilding.
ALCOR isn’t cryogenics. It’s cryonics. That’s kind of like saying “I’ll take Alchemy seriously as a field when…” cryonics is almost certainly a dead end. As I said, there are other approaches to suspending biology, and not all of them involve cold temperatures. None that I’m aware of involve subzero temperatures, unless it involves first converting the body to a nonbiological substrate, because that’s a terrible idea.
@Snowberry
My apologies, I thought you were referring to what Alcor does. Sorry. I still don’t know how a sci-fi style hibernation would work, though.