the time remaining before the sun depletes its helium and becomes a red giant

I meant "hydrogen" there, not helium.

... and to Christopher:

Thanks again, until next time!

I'm familiar with the concept of the Dyson sphere and would be in full support of any project that could create one. I don't see this happening for millenia, but it's a prospect worth considering...

I see humanity escaping (rather than co-existing) with his ecosystem: circumventing natural processes for resources (like plant growth for food) by devising artificial ones that produce similair results (such as alteration of inert matter into edible substance). I see it expanding rapidly through this solar system, building artificial habitats, and unlocking the secrets to intersteller travel. Like you, I see a godless race, but of a different lifestyle: one that conquers new territory in his own namesake, for his own purposes. But I also see a race that has detatched itself from what we now call the natural world (something like the people in Huxley's "Brave New World"); a fortunate (or unfortunate) developement of mankind to love what technology produces more than what nature does.

I think you and I are two sides of the same coin here: we both want humanity to evolve and improve itself, but with radically differing ideas as to what constitutes an evolved humanity. I, the technophile, see man as achieving dominence in the universe while you, the environmentalist, see man as becoming more connected to the natural world: I look forward to the clash between our two schools of thought in the future...

But for now, I will find "The Ascent of Man" and try to gain a better understanding of your viewpoint. I found this discussion enjoyable as well... until next time.

Over the short-run, it is wise to ensure that the planet remains sufficient to maintain life. But in the long-run, we must escape this planet to run free through the cosmos. Only then will our survival be guaranteed beyond earth's eventual demise.

In some sense we agree on this point. But the "short-run" you refer to is about 5 billion years (the time remaining before the sun depletes its helium and becomes a red giant). That's pretty long for a short-run.

Your world view reminds me a little of some of the speculations of the famous physicist Freeman Dyson. He tried to imagine what an extremely advanced intelligent civilization would do that might be detectable at astronomical distances. This line of thinking led him to what is now called the "Dyson sphere". The idea is that this advanced civilization's growth (in population and in technological advancement) would demand so much energy that they would completely enclose their star in a huge artificial sphere that collected all of its visible light, converting it into something that powered their power-hungry gadgets. All that would escape would be the infrared radiation from the waste heat. Dyson described what such a thing should look like to an infrared telescope, in the hope that we might some day discover one.

My world view, as you would probably guess, is quite different, and leads to different speculations on what a highly advanced civilization will be like. In my view, if a technological civilization is to survive for millions of years (let alone billions), it must and will achieve a stable equilibrium with its natural ecosystem. Wilderness will not be seen as something to be "developed", paved over and exploited, but a source, not only of the necessities of physical life (things like fresh water and food), but also of beauty, wonder, and a virtually unending supply of mysteries to explore through the scientific method. If that civilization has anything remotely resembling religion, it won't be fear of and slavish devotion to a mythical creator, but will instead be a feeling of awe and reverence for the process of evolution and the natural biosphere that really was their creator. They will find some way of keeping their population relatively small (much smaller than the human population on Earth is now). They will limit their technology such that all of its waste will be completely and harmlessly recycled. This is the only way they can hope still to be in existence when their star reaches its demise. When that time approaches, they may or may not find a way to preserve themselves by moving off their planet. But if they do, they won't be traveling faster than light, and they won't just take themselves. They will take as much of their natural ecosystem as they can manage to carry, since they will know it is their only hope of survival, and a big part of what will make their lives worth living, on whatever other planet they land on.

I've enjoyed our chat, and I'll take a look at Nietzsche when I get a chance.

Also, I know that exponential increases in nature don't last forever. There is only so much a micoorganism can do to advance its growth, thus it can't expand indefinitely. But we have an advantage they don't: ingenuity. We may hit a proverbial "dead end" in our species growth in one place, but an intelligent being can reallocate resources to other ends; allowing it to evolve in a new direction.

I know new technologies come with drawbacks (the "no free lunches" principal), but that is the price of power: one must be strong enough to weild it, or it will destroy the weilder. I tend see nature selecting out the weak or inattentive (ex: most people killed/maimed in the car crashes you mention were under the influence of drugs or alcohol; people dumb enough to drive impared are slowly filtered out by this natural selection proccess).

What you say about our planet may be true today, but the future is uncertain. But one thing is certain: as long as we are tied to this rock we are at its mercy. Over the short-run, it is wise to ensure that the planet remains sufficient to maintain life. But in the long-run, we must escape this planet to run free through the cosmos. Only then will our survival be guaranteed beyond earth's eventual demise.

Also, the "Alpha-Omega-force" is a koinage of mine: it expresses the concept of an entity that can do what it wills, whenever it chooses to do so (my own adage to Nietzsche's superman). The way I see it, man is gaining knowledge on the universe he lives in at an exponential rate; therefore gaining power at an exponential rate (knowledge = power). Once we amass enough knowledge of our universe, we will be able to manipulate reality to suit our needs and desires.

Creating new lifeforms, controling all levels of the atmoshpere, creating/destroying worlds at the push of a button: this is but a sample of what man as an "Alpha-Omega-force" is capable of. In short, his power would be godlike. This is the kind of future I want us to have.

When chatting on a blog like this, it's impossible to know much about the other folks in the conversation. But your ideas suggest to me that you are young, probably under 20. Feel free to correct me if you wish. There's nothing wrong with being young, of course. How I wish I were still under 20! But I'm not. I am not a great or famous scientist, but I am, nonetheless, a real card-carrying scientist. I don't really have the time to convey in this short reply what I would most like to say to you about your desire for god-like power. Probably the best I can do is refer you to chapter 11 of Jacob Bronowski's The Ascent of Man (1973, Little, Brown & Co., ISBN 0-316-10933-9). You should be able to get it at a public library.

In the meantime, I'll just make a few specific comments. Yes our knowledge is growing exponentially, but exponential growth of anything does not continue to be exponential forever. The number of bacteria growing in a Petri dish increases exponentially, but not forever. If it did,every cubic millimeter of our entire solar system, if not the entire galaxy, would be filled with bacteria by now. Exponential growth usually changes, fairly quickly, to sigmoidal growth, as physical limits are encountered. For the bacteria, the limits are the amount of nutrients available in the dish.

Our technical fixes to problems almost always lead to unintended and unforeseen consequences, some good, some bad. Here is just one of many examples I could give: When the automobile was introduced early in the 20th century, it was praised as a boon to public health, because it eliminated the manure that horses had been dumping on city streets. Few if any people imagined that gasoline-powered cars would be responsible for such things as crude oil spills ruining pristine beaches, smog that makes people sick and corrodes works of art, contamination of groundwater by gasoline leaking from rusted gas station tanks. Few would have predicted that car wrecks would end up killing more Americans than all of our wars combined. The number of American traffic fatalities during a single year of the Vietnam war was almost as great as the total number of Americans killed in all 10 years of that war. The number of Americans killed by car wrecks this month, and every month, exceeds the number killed by Osama and his buddies on Sept 11, 2001. And then there's the problem of global warming, caused in no small part by the exhaust of our cars.

So by now you may be thinking "what's the point?" The point is that we live in an extraordinarily thin and fragile habitable zone at the surface of a tiny planet. We depend for our existence on that zone remaining within a relatively narrow temperature range, above or below which our extinction is likely. We depend on the availability of fresh, unpolluted water and arable land. Our continued existence depends on the entire ecosystem within which we evolved. If we ignore or deny these limitations, we do so at our peril.

Let me clear up what I meant by "becoming gods." The idea that man can become god was first popularized by a man named Anton Leveigh: founder of the Church of Satan. Unlike all other forms of religion, they don't worship any gods (personal, impersonal, or otherwise) but instead each individual becomes his own god.

I first became aware thier ideology very late in my christian life through a friend of mine (who revealed his Satanic beliefs to me) and I was intrigued. I seriously considered joining, but, in the end I found some of Leveighs ideas of the super-normal to be incompatable with observable phenomenae. Although I don't want to join, I still have respect for this religion for being honest about what it is they worship: themselves. On occation, I borrow some philosophical terms from them.

Also, the "Alpha-Omega-force" is a koinage of mine: it expresses the concept of an entity that can do what it wills, whenever it chooses to do so (my own adage to Nietzsche's superman). The way I see it, man is gaining knowledge on the universe he lives in at an exponential rate; therefore gaining power at an exponential rate (knowledge = power). Once we amass enough knowledge of our universe, we will be able to manipulate reality to suit our needs and desires.

Creating new lifeforms, controling all levels of the atmoshpere, creating/destroying worlds at the push of a button: this is but a sample of what man as an "Alpha-Omega-force" is capable of. In short, his power would be godlike. This is the kind of future I want us to have.

You mention that there are fundamental laws of physics that can impede progress. But in the last century many "fundamental" laws of physics have been shown to be false. The example you use is that we can't travel faster than light, but we know how to make light even faster than it is now! Furthermore, there are a number of physicists that find tachiyon particles (matter that exeeds light speed) to be a possibility.

But, then again, only time will tell if this is possible (of course, I firmly believe that it is).

Pardon my ignorance, but what do you mean by "become a god in a Leveighan sense"? Who is Leveigh? And what do you mean by "being Alpha-Omega forces by ourselves"? What is an Alpha-Omega force?

You're right that yesterday's sci-fi can become tomorrow's reality, but only those elements of sci-fi that do not violate fundamental laws of physics have a chance at this. For example, huge starships that ferry hundreds of people across the galaxy at faster-than-light speeds are a staple of much our popular sci-fi today. Sadly, that will never be reality.

I know that, at present, we don't have this kind of power. But what about a century from now? After all, just 100 years earlier nearly everyone believed such things as "underwater boats" and "moon rockets" to be simple flights-of-fancy. Today's sci-fi has a tendency of becoming tommarow's reality.

I find this man's line of thinking to be very limited: he sees man as being a mere mortal for the rest of his existence. I, on the other hand, see humanity as the one known lifeform that can become gods (not just in a Leveighan sense, but in terms of being Alpha-Omega forces by ourselves). They way I see it, his line of thinking may be fine for the short-term; but we have to break out of this world before we can attain the level of existence I want to live to experience.

Earth is only one planet out of billions: colonizing new planets would be the most efficient way of preserving our species because our fates will no longer be tied exclusively to the earth.

This may be a good idea in a thousand years or so, assuming we're still around by then, but for human technology at its present level, colonizing new planets is just not an option. Space travel is incredibly difficult, incredibly expensive, and incredibly dangerous. The International Space Station, which can support all of two people in low-earth orbit, is estimated to cost $100 billion over its lifetime. (To put this in perspective, it is so expensive to launch a payload into orbit that if there was pure gold floating around up there, free for the taking, it would not pay to go get it.) And that's only 200 miles up. By contrast, Mars, the nearest planet where human beings could possibly live, is over thirty million miles away. Any expedition that could put a sufficient number of humans there to establish a sustainable colony would very likely be ruinously expensive to the entire global economy.

And then we can talk about the danger. The ISS has the advantage of still being under quite a bit of the atmosphere, which protects its crew from some cosmic radiation. Even so, being up there is the radiation equivalent of getting about 50 chest X-rays per week. Living in space for two months results in a radiation dose comparable to the maximum allowed dose for a nuclear power plant worker for an entire year. Getting to Mars using any known technology would take much longer than two months, possibly a year or more, and again, that would be without the shelter of the atmosphere. By some estimates, on such a trip every cell in your body would be traversed at least once by a high-energy cosmic ray. Forget about cancer or infertility (which is itself a serious problem for a space colony) - we're talking acute effects here. An astronaut might be dead of radiation poisoning before they ever reached Mars. The amount of shielding that would be needed to prevent this would make an already astronomically expensive mission (so to speak) even more so. And I haven't even addressed how anyone would live on Mars, a sterile desert planet with no oxygen, no liquid water, frequent planet-wide dust storms, average surface temperatures of 70 degrees below zero, and no ozone layer, resulting in solar ultraviolet flux high enough to kill almost any known form of life. Extremophile microbes might dwell beneath Mars' surface, but no part of Mars is suitable for human life for any length of time.

Like it or not, the Earth is going to be our home for the foreseeable future. I think we'd better learn to live together peacefully down here before we start turning our eyes to the heavens.