Quote:
Originally Posted by dcl
We should not underestimate the threat to our very existence in the far future when the sun begins to exhaust its supply of hydrogen that stokes its nuclear furnace.
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I don't believe we have that much time. I once did but the new news is the oceans are going to boil within about 100 million years or so, due to an increase in the solar output.
Quote:
Originally Posted by dcl
hollowing out a bunch of asteroids and moving the entire human race into them
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I do not recall anyone saying the entire human race. At least, I never meant to say the entire human race. There will be people left behind, I am sure. Lifeboat ethics will prevail. And I believe there will be a great number of people who would not leave, no matter how much science was provide to them.
I read once that if today, all industrial effort was redirected to putting the population in orbit - assuming some magical place was there - we could not accomplish it. The amount of industry require to move the population would still be outpaced by the free birthing of the masses. Free birthing has to stop or gigadeath will happen.
O'Neil colonies are a very difficult engineering problem but require no new science. This is not space fiction but a NASA study. And if this species does survive the next 1000 years (let alone 10 or 100 millions), we may be able to engineer solar systems. Who knows?
But I am confident that providing a self-sustaining biosphere of some type for a sustainable population will be doable within 10 million years in the least.
But we will miss this planet and it's oceans.
Then
Project Longshot is going to become more important.