this post was submitted on 28 Dec 2025
130 points (94.5% liked)
science
23229 readers
492 users here now
A community to post scientific articles, news, and civil discussion.
rule #1: be kind
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
But I guess the takeaway I was trying to illustrate, is that we live on a habitable planet, but most planets only get these conditions for a short blip of time, we seem to have gotten it for a long blip, but it won't last. We need to figure out how to live in the more hostile environments of space and other planets without the magic conditions of earth if we truly want to survive past this blip, especially if we're shortening our time here by burning massive amounts of fossil fuels.
Our tech has increased monumentally in the last couple of hundred years. From horse drawn carriages and parchment, to reusable space vehicles and computers. If this rate keeps up for a billion years, that's 5,000,000x such a technological leap. Of course, disease, war, environmental degradation or other stupid human social idiocy will likely slow this down. But I think we should be able to get off world before the earth is inhabitable. Getting out of the solar system before it's inhabitable is much harder, but we have a lot longer.
I think there’s hope as long as we don’t nuke ourselves back into the stone age. If we keep a steady pace of progress and take good care of our only habitable space ship, we should be able to figure out how to thrive pretty much anywhere in space. Self inflicted extinction events are the biggest threats at the moment.