What about orbital colonies, like those Gerard K. O’Neill designed? Granted, we might not get out of the solar system, but is it reasonable to assume we could colonize the Moon or the sky?
Welcome, oh other sock puppet. We must have pissed off Reddit again. Did someone mention gamergate?
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Who is Ken?
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The trouble is that, since O’Neil’s genuinely visionary plans, we’ve come to really appreciate some of the difficulties of eco-engineering. As much as a mile-long space habitat might make us feel dwarfed, it’s still small potatoes by tree-of-life standards. The real trouble is that we’ve learned enough now to realize how much we still need to learn. But it’s become apparent that, from an economic point of view, xenoformed (adapted for extraterrestrial environments) human decedents would have a decisive advantage over baseline humans in inhabiting space. It’s not that so much that life can’t exist in space, as that our somewhat narrow view of life evolved for the specific niches open to us here on this rather large biosphere we call Earth.
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KSR is running an experiment on all of you.
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you mean i’ve been breeding humans with tardigrade’s for nothing? 
Wait what? Balderdash, that is pure alchemy! What organism pray tell achieves fusion of fission?
LOL. I appreciate your optimism though!
I do think this the most likely possibility, biological or artificial life adaptations would allow us to spread to currently uninhabitable niches, which is kinda evolution’s shtick. the life won’t be human though. if we can survive long enough to become that technologically advanced, we might spread some form of life past our own biosphere. The main problem I see is humans are prone to self destructive paths, for all our smarts we might not make it far enough technologically to get off this rock before we wipe ourselves out alas.
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My favorite SF migration novel is still Greg Egan’s “Diaspora”:
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It would get much more relevant over the span of ‘the rest of humanity on that planet’. If it takes a minimum of 120 years (at 1/10 light speed) to reach a possibly hospitable planet, you probably aren’t going to be able to send more than a small village worth of people over there. Any emergencies that can’t be solved locally will take almost 140 years to fix.
I can understand the argument that you don’t want to put all your eggs in one basket, but from what I can see, the chance that we can build a permanent settlement on another planet is far lower than the chance that we can use this planet’s resources sustainably. We aren’t even close to that. I mean, we don’t even seem to have a credible chance of lasting two centuries at this rate, and we’re much better equipped on this planet than any spaceship we can build. Scientific development may or may not be exponential, but our use of resources certainly looks that way. Once I have some sort of evidence that we can use resources that are right here in a way that considers the lives of people 150 years in the future, or that politicians can consistently make and implement decisions that benefit other people living on our own planet right now, or we can show that we are capable of colonising Mars permanently (terraforming is not required - just build a permanent settlement that actually works and doesn’t need to be supplied regularly), then I will start to believe that this is more plausible science fiction than the Noah’s Ark story.
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Barbie’s gay husband. Didn’t you see Toy Story 3?
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Ken Goffman Foree Kesey E. Bunkport
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The somewhat chilling and most immediately useful conclusion I draw from this is: our planet is the starship. And if a starship requires a totalitarian system of governance in order to survive its voyage, well then, so do we. Since this is in effect our one and only Ark.
decedents
I think you mean ‘descendent’. A ‘decedent’ is someone who’s died.
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The more robust and varied your ecology is, the more flexible and redundant its homeostases. Consider how long life was able to run amok in this big system before anything really threatened the balance here. The smaller, more sterile it is, the less options there are.
Also, the idea of totalitarianism is predicated upon the notion that there are sharp differences between individual/collective, competition/cooperation. But I think people have increasingly realized that these boundaries are quite fluid. A harmonious culture can downplay those differences to the extent that they aren’t very relevant.
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Clarke’s First Law: When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is
possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is
impossible, he is very probably wrong.
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I’ll take those odds.
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@popobawa4u is one of a kind. It requires no ‘those’ to describe it.
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Err, considering we don’t even know how to measure sentience and reason means it is more than a few decades away. Emergent behaviors, intelligence included, are wildly difficult nuts to crack.
And why send nanobots when we could already send e. Coli?
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We don’t need to measure sentience. We only need to make a copy of something that exhibits it.
Nanomachines able to assemble organic matter are within reach.
[citation needed]
Computing power is a necessary condition for artificial intelligence. Until not too long ago, machines fell short of the computing power necessary to just emulate “brain hardware” by several orders of magnitude.
There are several variants of the singularity theory where I had to conclude “I don’t know enough to decide whether there is something to it or not”. Some others where I believe them to be false, but have so far failed to formulate a conclusive argument as to why I am convinced that they are false. I’m glad you understand things well enough that you can immediately know them as cranks.
