Samiul Bashar Samin
We are doomed. Our best efforts to reproduce, to conserve, protect and survive will, in the end, come to nought. We could sort out climate change, dispose of our nuclear arsenals, ban research into killer AIs, and still the end would come, as surely as night follows day.
The problem is physics itself. Our home – our planet, our Solar System and indeed our entire Universe – has a finite lifespan. All that is will be destroyed, either in fire or, as observations suggest now seems more likely, in a lingering, depressing ‘heat death’. The stars will all go out, and the expanding cosmos will be no more than a colossal, black and freezing void in which nothing of interest ever happens again. The laws of nature insist upon it.
Or do they? Human ingenuity has carried us a long way before now. What’s more, any final cosmic calamity is likely to be a very long way into the future. We have time to prepare.
It strikes me, then, that a Save the Universe Project might not be such a fanciful idea. Just as, in the end, the only sustainable solution to climate change might well require us to venture great engineering projects on a planetary scale, the task of engineering a viable home of thought that will last an eternity will fall to our distant descendants – or to other intelligent beings that might share our universe. The cosmic threats to intelligence are too vast and remote for us to tackle now – but we can start scouting the territory, and seeing the shape of possible solutions.
So, what can be done? Should life surrender to its sad, entropic fate, or should we (for ‘we’ are the only entities we know of who might be able to make a difference) at least begin to think about postponing – perhaps indefinitely – the death of the only home we have? It sounds ridiculous, and out of keeping with the current philosophy to ‘leave nature be’. But the truth is, we face eternal annihilation if we do nothing.
We can certainly delay our demise in our Solar System. As the Sun warms, we could move outwards – to the conveniently placed Mars, or to the moons of Jupiter or Saturn. A billion years’ hence, a balmy Mars will be as warm as Earth is today. Three billion years on, and Titan, Saturn’s icy companion, might be a mild, watery paradise with a thick atmosphere and none of the deadly radiation that afflicts Jupiter’s inner moons.
If we find that we are terribly attached to dear old Earth we could simply move it into a new orbit. Propelling asteroids or comets at near-miss distance would allow us to use their gravitational pull to act as a celestial tugboat, dragging the Earth out of the fiery clutches of our Sun.
But that just buys us time – 3 or 4 billion years. Note that no one is assuming that anything resembling humans will be alive then. I am talking about our successors – either a replacement species, or possibly sentient machine intelligences that have taken over from thinking meat. Either way, we, or they, will need to find a new home.
By then our descendants might have found common cause with extrasolar alien intelligences, assuming they exist. Far-seeing minds will know, as we do, that not even the red and brown dwarfs will last forever. From now on, the battle will not be against the heat of dying suns, but against cold. With no stars, any lifeforms or machines will have to find new ways of powering themselves and their civilisations.