[ExI] extropy-chat Digest, Vol 98, Issue 14

[Samantha Atkins]

On Nov 11, 2011, at 7:38 AM, Keith Henson wrote:

> On Fri, Nov 11, 2011 at 5:00 AM,   BillK <pharos at gmail.com> wrote:
> 

<snip>

>> But advanced civilisation is the opposite of breeding like rabbits.
>> Evolutionary expansion no longer applies. They *choose* their
>> environment and build it to suit themselves. They *choose* how many
>> progeny they want to create and for what purpose. If they have
>> thousand-year lifespans they will probably create very few offspring.
> 
> I suspect they will live practically forever and have *no* offspring at all.
> 
> Along that line, it seems to me humans could be extinct by the
> definition of "a breeding population" before the end of this century.
> That probably closes off space for good.  Speed of light delays might
> limit people to the planet if they can't stand to be more than so many
> nanoseconds from the center of things.  People are already spending
> hundreds of millions of dollars to chop off a few ms from the New York
> to London fiber path.

Well, unless you can use one of the speculative ways to keep a planet warm without a local sun and send the earth on a journey outwards..    Then you take the entire center civilization with you. 

Also, technology is headed rapidly to the entire knowledge base of the species in a smaller and cheaper volume. Once we also have the ability to do massive intellectual churn with similarly small embedded greater than human intelligence a reasonable size starship can be an extremely rich and fast moving development space.  As you are starting fresh without much of the clutter and previous constrains of the home system it could be argued that the fastest and richest development is away from the species cradle planet.

But before we can fly we have to walk.  Until we can exploit near earth space and the inner system it is rather pointless to dream of flying away to the stars - except to escape the many poisonous inanities and lock-ins of the inner system.

- samantha

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