@stevenaleach You're describing a goal we only have—at best—two social structures capable of achieving: a religion, or a royal family. Both of these have undesirable failure modes. (Most human social structures disintegrate or lose track of their purpose over roughly the same duration as a human life expectancy.)
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Proactive genocide to avoid genocide?
That's taking, "Tolerate anything except intolerance," to a new level.
If you start whacking the Space Nazis early enough in the cycle you don't have to exterminate many of them: whack the Verein für Raumschiffahrt (about 500 members) and you don't get to the Apollo Program (300,000 workers) let alone Dilbert Stark's Mars colony boondoggle!
Nuke a Nazi today, save an alien civilization tomorrow!
@cstross
Nobody goes into space and colonises their galaxy because it's an insane, incoherent goal with no possible return on the investment of energy and resources. Only civilisations infected by the Infinite Growth mind-virus pursue such goals, and their home planets … don't make it.
I sure hope our civilisation isn't throwing irrecoverable resources into a project that can definitely never pay for itself just to make the number go up for as long as possible.
@petealexharris @cstross Didn't they say the same thing about colonizing North America back when the only viable route from the east coast to the west was via Cape Horn? You know, that passage that most ships today avoid like the plague because it's too dangerous?
The only question is whether we'll figure out a working FTL drive or not. If we do, we _will_ coloize the galaxy not for any return but because we don't know what's out there and we want to find out.
That Humans will populate the solar system is 5 Sigma.
"Returns from investment" will be paid to asteroid miners and farmers.
It's what life does.
And we're waiting for the Mars / Ceres Solar Cup
@petealexharris @cstross I think that "colonizing" the galaxy is a reasonable goal, but the "problem" is that the rational way to go about it would take a lot longer than the age of the universe so far.
For the most part, interstellar probes can provide desired scientific exploration info about far away star systems, and these will not be very noticeable for us.
Space colonization makes most sense within a star system, with expansion to other star systems only making sense during close flybys.
This is how I learn that not only did someone make a movie about Nazis living on the moon, they even made a sequel.
@cstross
Works for Mars Nazis, also, too, Charlie, if you know what I mean.
@cstross Not killing Moon Nazis immediately is how you get Daleks.
@Wgere @JamesPadraicR @cstross ah yes. Of course, how could we not have made the connection.
Oddly enough, this is what 'primitive' tribes used to do: kill the sociopaths. We promote them to the highest positions of power.
"Random Fermi Paradox solution of the day:
"Nobody goes into space and colonizes the galaxy because only Moon Nazis want to do that, and after experiencing a few dozen genocides all sapient species learn the safest thing to do when you see a Moon Nazi is to murder them immediately, it's the only way to avoid the genocides."
@cstross My working assumption about extraterrestrials is based on this kind of reasoning.
If a spacefaring species has reached us, there's a non-zero chance that they have a sentinel outpost nearby. The mission for that outpost is to watch for signs that we're in danger of meaningfully colonising other star systems, and to respond by sanitising the entire planet.
Harsh? Well, my reaction to the "interstellar locusts" speech in ID4 was "hey, you just described us!"
@cstross galactic melanoma prevention
@cstross Is that an invitation to watch Iron Sky?
@cstross there is actually a sort of joke about this in the original Dyson Sphere paper.
The whole paper is tongue-in-cheek, a satire of the notion that we could find aliens by observing for radio frequencies (Dyson is making the argument that we know so little about potential alien intelligence that we might as well take all of that processing power and scan the infrared frequency is looking for invisible spheres around stars).
Why spheres around stars? Because clearly the only cultures to develop the technology to become space-faring would be their species version of the Nazis and would be compelled with a desire to maximize land for their progeny.
@mark @cstross The "problem" with Dyson's paper is that he tried to ridicule a perfectly reasonable scientific theory with a supposedly ridiculous scientific theory that ended up being also a perfectly reasonable scientific theory.
Both of these theories would be used for perfectly reasonable scientific experiments, which remain ongoing.
Sometimes this is how things go with science. The "big bang" theory was named by someone ridiculing the theory. Oops?
@cstross Then again, I don't think humans could ever colonize - but I'm horrified by the idea of *what if* there is no other life out there? What if we are "it"? Our sun's gone in a few billion years.
I'm horrified by the idea that there could be trillions of years to the heat death of the universe and nothing to see it or experience it at all.
So if we could get some microbes on probes to nearby red-dwarfs to infest any sterile warm wet rock, then all of human history was worth it.
@cstross Okay - what about a group that takes as given that neither they nor their descendants will be alive aim to establish a foundation/group/club/whatever that can wants to *eventually* build an ark to reach Proxima Centauri at it's closest approach in about 26,000 years.
The ideals, goals, ambition, institutional methods established by the "tree planting" generations just pitching designs and funding research, etc.
Presumably non-nazis.
Basically Long Now foundation + Centauri Dreams.
@stevenaleach You're describing a goal we only have—at best—two social structures capable of achieving: a religion, or a royal family. Both of these have undesirable failure modes. (Most human social structures disintegrate or lose track of their purpose over roughly the same duration as a human life expectancy.)
One could argue that fandom represents a third. (Of course, that just means we'll be stuck because we won't be able to agree on what to name the starship -- 'Enterprise', 'Millenium Falcon', 'Liberator' ...)
@skjeggtroll @cstross Aren't religions just a specific type of fandom?
@cstross @stevenaleach
Universities hang around. Building a department which can sustain an area of study through many generations of graduate students, PhDs and professorships wouldn't be trivial.
#Anathem doesn't seem ridiculous on that.
The Long Range Foundation is even better named for this than the Long Now, albeit the latter is real.
@cstross
that's not quite true. It's true of literate societies.
Whether an illiterate society can go to the stars is left as an exercise to the reader ;)
@stevenaleach
@cstross @stevenaleach true for humans. insects, maybe?
@cstross Yes! And I doubt it could be solved but it's fun to think about. Say a group wants to build a plasma sail vessel -- solar wind speed, so over 4k years to A.C now, shorter leaving at some point closer to A.C's closest approach. For slow enough of a ship, there's some ideal departure date many thousands of years from now to minimize the trip time. And that's an epoch cool timescale to think about that puts the epoch scale of getting to the nearest star into perspective.
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