Was reminded how Epstien not killing himself was/is so accepted yet it’s still a conspiracy theory. Is there any similar ones you guys believe to be completely true ?

  • progressquest
    47·
    11 months ago

    we could colonize the entire galaxy in 200 million years

    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.

    • TwilightVulpine@lemmy.worldEnglish
      3·
      11 months ago

      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.

    • paddirn@lemmy.worldEnglish
      2·
      11 months ago

      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).