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"Alexander Berezin, a theoretical physicist at the National Research University of Electronic Technology in Russia, has proposed a new answer to Fermi's paradox — but he doesn't think you're going to like it. Because, if Berezin's hypothesis is correct, it could mean a future for humanity that's 'even worse than extinction.'
'What if,' Berezin wrote in a new paper posted March 27 to the preprint journal arxiv.org, 'the first life that reaches interstellar travel capability necessarily eradicates all competition to fuel its own expansion?'" foxnews.com/science/2018/06/04/aliens-are-real-but-humans-will-probably-kill-them-all-new-paper-says.html
In other words, could humanity's quest to discover intelligent life be directly responsible for obliterating that life outright? What if we are, unwittingly, the universe's bad guys?
And if you are not sure what the Fermi paradox is then the link should help, and there is a long explanation of that one in the article.
(Score: 2) by Immerman on Wednesday June 06 2018, @09:47PM (2 children)
Can we make it to 2100? As a species I'm fairly confident - we're almost as hard to kill as cockroaches. Anything short of a grey-goo scenario or incredibly ever-engineered superplague is unlikely to wipe us out. As a civilization capable of supporting offworld colonies? I'm much less optimistic. We'll shortly have much more immediate problems to deal with. Which is why any offworld colony would have to work hard to reach the point that they could support themselves. On the bright side, if civilization collapses on Earth, but an offworld colony manages to reach the point of producing advanced technology (computers, solar panels, etc) they'll likely have trade goods to offer in exchange for ecological materials and methane for their rockets to get back to the colony.
My point was really just that a colony of 5-10 people doesn't matter in a survival scenario except symbolically. If they got nuked in a war, so what? Just means they don't have to watch their only hope of survival dying above them. Even a colony of a thousand people with a self-sufficient industrial and ecological base is likely to collapse without ongoing support and population infusions from Earth. Though maybe not - our species has been down to those sorts of numbers before, and with sufficient automation civilization might be maintained long enough for the population to grow to something less fragile.
(Score: 2) by takyon on Wednesday June 06 2018, @10:02PM (1 child)
Propellants can be produced on Mars. They don't need to trade to get methane.
I've addressed the rest in other comments.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 2) by Immerman on Wednesday June 06 2018, @10:09PM
Yeah, but they probably can't take off from Earth using propellant made on Mars - they'll need a local supply at least to get from Earth's surface to orbit.