This is a story of the very far future.
Imagine thousands of years ahead of where we are now.
The world would be as unrecognizable to you as our world would be to a random human transported
from the days of Charlemagne to the present.
We talk about things like the technological singularity, where we sit upon the precipice
of the incomprehensible where our technological development could snowball like an avalanche
down a mountain, and overwhelm us, moving so rapidly that we can’t really even understand
it, we must simply go with the flow as AI begins to dictate the invention and implementation
of new technologies.
I don’t think it will quite play out that way, but there are those that do.
But imagine that future, regardless of where you think technology will lead us.
In doing so, you must think in the sense of what you know is possible, or at least plausible,
because you can’t know the unknowable.
You can entertain ideas such as unknown, undiscovered physics where faster than light travel becomes
possible and also time travel, When you do that though, paradoxes appear and abound until
you ultimately conclude that if such things were happening in the future, we’d know
about it and see time travelers all around us and not just human ones, but alien time
travelers as well.
And given the collective time the universe has been able to support life, billions of
years, we’d see a lot of them.
Especially in light that most alien civilizations that will ever exist in the universe lie in
its future, rather than its past.
Seeing such a traveler, if it were possible, would be as ubiquitous as watching someone
go through a huge line in a drive through just to desperately purchase some tacos.
Since we do not see aliens lining up for a burger and fries, we can safely assume that
our idea that nature prohibits such travel is either correct, or such travelers are unbelievably
subtle and have no taste for Kentucky linked fried foods constructed with some unholy secretive
mix of multiple herbs and spices.
But such things are what is in store for the universe at large as humanity flexes its wings
and brings order to the chaos through colonization of the milky way galaxy.
The lesson of the fast food drive through is that we as humans seek, and will put great
effort into finding what we’re looking for.
It’s in our nature, whether we’re combing the internet in the hope of finding the vintage
star wars figure of that weird creature that sat on Jabba the Hutt’s tail cackling maniacally
at his every utterance, my ultimate fate should aliens ever invade, I for one welcome our
new alien overlords as it were, or searching the cosmos as best we can for any signs of
life and to attempt to understand the natural world around us.
Fast forward, should we survive our trials and tribulations as a technological species,
we will push out into the cosmos to become at the very least a multiplanetary species,
and very probably a multi-star system civilization or group of civilizations.
But this may not unfold as you might imagine.
Our standard view of galactic expansion is to hop in a multigenerational starship and
traverse the expanse to get to the next star system.
Many people would successively be born, live and die all on that starship.
We can do this with our current technology, the nearest star system is only about 4 and
a half light-years away, meaning that we could hop in a starship at birth and be there in
extreme old age.
But that doesn’t really make a lot of sense; who wants to spend their entire lives in a
hollowed out asteroid starship when there are mountains to be climbed on Mars?
Rather we are more likely to send robots, which aren’t so sensitive to the passage
of time.
But there are instances where the distances shrink, such as when star systems pass within
a light-year of Earth, as has happened many hundreds if not thousands of times in the
past.
Imagine a long distant past encounter where another star system passed within close proximity,
even within the Oort cloud, gracing our skies with a bright star, a second sun not totally
unlike Tattoine but not bound to the sun gravitationally, and far more distant and dimmer but conceivably
could cast shadows at night if it were a large star, or not be visible at all without a telescope
if it were a red dwarf.
At that moment, had someone technological been around to see it, it would have been
an opportunity for easy colonization.
Perhaps even necessary colonization, given that such a passing star system might very
well perturb a hail of comets in the Oort cloud and send them careening our way, arriving
any day now.
If that were happening today, and we found a passing star system with a habitable planet
in close proximity, we would be going there, especially if that planet was better than
earth.
Yes, it is possible for an exoplanet to be superior than earth in certain characteristics,
especially if you can terraform.
But that’s all down to luck and our luck is that we happened to appear on this world
when a close stellar encounter isn’t occurring, but if we’d have had different luck our
global priorities and how history is unfolding might be very different, in the same way as
the discovery of the americas was in the past.
A new world, literally, would be in our hands.
And in the future, should we make it, this will come to pass.
There will be a stellar encounter in our future that will make it viable for us to colonize
another star system.
Granted, this process takes millions of years, we have a long wait ahead of us.
But it then becomes exponential.
Once you colonize a second star system, then that system also undergoes stellar encounters
of its own, and a third, fourth, fifth, hundredth, thousandth colonization occurs.
Soon you’ve spread across the galaxy simply by close encounter.
Time defeats the distances of the galaxy for biological colonization.
So long as we survive and persist, we will do this.
But we may not do it in our present form.
We are homo sapiens and we evolved and are adapted for this specific world.
Off it, we get frail, as is shown by astronauts spending months in LEO on the international
space station having to spend a considerable amount of time readjusting to the conditions
on earth when they return from long missions.
To explore space directly, we literally have to bring a bubble of earth with us.
We need oxygen, food, and even gravity to spend truly large amounts of time in space
or on other worlds that have less or for that matter more gravity.
High gravity is easily envisioned.
Think of a world, a super earth, with twice the gravity of earth.
Imagine how hard it would be to move around, how exhausting it would be, and how hard your
heart would have to be pumping just to get blood to your brain.
You might get muscular in such an environment, but it would be way harder than simply going
to the gym.
And that’s only a super earth just a little larger than this one, go much beyond two earth
masses and it’s frankly fatal.
This means that the universe’s most common types of planets, the gas giants, ice giants
and super earths are immediately fatal to us.
Less so for smaller terrestrial planets, you can land on a lower gravity environment and
walk around for a bit, as the Apollo astronauts did, but one mistake, one rip in the space
suit as it were, and it’s curtains.
So the question here is does it have to be that way?
Can we make a better human, more suited to the realities of space?
The answer is yes.
In principle you can make a human that’s streamlined, and can handle more or less gravity
indefinitely, or more suitable function in deadly environments.
You won’t get past certain realities, such as the reactivity and suitability of oxygen
as a source of energy, but you can mitigate some of the bad effects of space.
Another example here would be the realities of living on an o'neill cylinder in artificial
gravity induced by the spinning of the cylinder through centrifugal force.
One of the issues that’s been pointed out with this is that while you would feel the
effect of gravity, turning your head would cause vertigo at least.
It may be that normal humans under those conditions can adapt and become used to it, but if not,
you could redesign the inner ear or the brain to be suitable for it, though going back to
earth and living in real gravity might then become the problem.
This has been well explored in science fiction, such as in the Expanse, where humans bred
in space and to some degree optimized for it, have serious problems returning to earth.
There may come a point in the far future that there will be humans, ostensibly members homo
sapiens, or if you will Martians or Oberonians or Plutonians that if they were sufficiently
adapted for the environments they were born in, might find Earth, their planet of distant
origin, deadly to visit.
They would have evolved, in this case artificially, to have progressed past their original evolutionary
starting point.
Or none of that will happen and we just stay home.
It’s one thing to dream of space colonization, but the reality of it is that it’s so harsh
that living on earth just becomes an inevitability and heading into space becomes the next century’s
equivalent to hopping on cruise ships when the fares are low.
Mars might be a nice place to visit, but you may not want to live there.
Especially if the local water disagrees with you.
Actually, physically loading yourself onto a spacecraft for other star systems in reality
may not be the best way to spread humanity throughout the galaxy to call it our own.
There are several other hypothetical ways, but one very obvious one is through the use
of a von neumann probe.
Say we built a probe that could replicate itself from local raw materials it finds in
other star systems, all while moving at sub light comfortable doable speeds.
Nothing crazy going on here as far as the laws of physics go, just a robotic probe that
can repair itself and indefinitely travel and make copies of itself.
The end result is that even at slow, sub light speeds, it will have entirely colonized the
galaxy in under ten million years, which is not really that much time.
The dinosaurs proper have been dead over six times longer than that, though ever persists
the birds.
Can’t live with them, can’t live without them.
Such a far future highly technological probe needs only the genetic information of humans
to print one of us out, and possibly even install within the memories and personality
of someone long dead.
It can be envisioned here that an entire civilization of natural humans, or augmented ones, could
be created specific to exoplanet environments where they are encountered and found suitable
for colonization.
This brings us to technologically assisted panspermia, where nature itself isn’t transporting
and depositing life, though it in principle can, but technology doing so.
But that actually may prove uninteresting and even dangerous to a future humanity.
If we send out copies of ourselves, we may run the risk of coming into contact with them
as we directly colonize and conflict develops as we physically move out in the galaxy.
It may be better to do it on a much smaller scale, by sending out the genomes of tailorable
microbes.
This is much simpler of a proposition, but an unbelievably powerful one.
Make no mistake, life on this world, especially microbial life has terraformed it.
This planet would not have the huge oxygen levels it does without photosynthesis and
a lot of time.
But if you’re in no hurry, or have no other choice, you could send out advanced probes
to populate suitable worlds with microbes that over time will transform them into something
you can live on.
That’s if you’re willing to wait, but through genetic engineering and planning on
the part of your seeder probe, you could cut the time down significantly from what it took
earth to reach us under natural conditions.
Of course, we may go extinct before we get anywhere near this technology, it’s at least
centuries off, but it could eventually serve as a means where humanity could spread its
genome, or it’s microbial life’s genomes, tailor them to promising exoplanets, and create
artificial habitability where it may not have previously existed, and then take our time
to travel to those worlds and colonize them, even by sitting around and waiting for stellar
encounters.
After all, if we do indeed survive our technological infancy, then we really do have trillions
of years to burn in this universe.
We are in fact here, very early in the universe’s lifetime.
Thanks for listening!
I am futurist and science fiction author John Michael Godier currently contemplating the
month of November.
In the united states where I originate, this is the month where we pick a day, which differs
from Canada somehow, to gather up and collectively roast a large bird and then fall upon it and
consume it, amid much mirth and celebration, various pies, and occasionally arguments over
religion and politics culminating with the watching of sporting events.
Some would say that this behaviour is why aliens don’t contact us, but I counter with
this, what if the first SETI message we receive is send more football and dance music.
Not sure how I feel about that, but any message would be nice and be sure to check out my
books at your favorite online book retailer and subscribe to my channels for regular,
in depth explorations into the interesting, weird and unknown aspects of this amazing
universe in which we live.