"we might end up collapsing our own civilization before we ever make it beyond our solar system."

Given what I see in the past 15 years, I don't particularly see that as a problem, honestly.

Or like Apollo 8 in the incredibly funny book Unsong.

thanks, title is updated.

It's already true because implied precision and comparing continuous measurements for equality and all that. It's both pedantic and meaningless to say it's true on (all of) Nov 13 2026 but not true today.

For the next 300-500 years, yes. But there is plenty of things to do, stuff to build and room to expand within a light-day from Sun.

Yeah, pretty much:

> It will take about 300 years for Voyager 1 to reach the inner edge of the Oort Cloud and possibly about 30,000 years to fly beyond it.

I once watched one of those videos that was a speeded up example of light leaving the sun and showing the time it takes to get to the various planets. It was boring as hell after just a couple of minutes and that's with light way speeded up. My conclusion is that "light is too damn slow."

until next "General Relativity" is discovered, and maybe we can get both voyagers back.

Sandboxed. Yep.

There are lots of hypotheses, but this is one of my gut feelings for why there are no aliens in view. It's hard to escape your local solar system.

When will we need more resources than exist here? We'll be mining the sun to run future simulations. Do we need more compute? Seems like we'll just stay inside.

Most life is probably similarly bound up to their origin. That and life is hard by many, many, many hard steps. Earth life is nearly 30% the age of the universe and it took us this long to get here.

It'd be near impossible for aquatic life to have an industrial revolution without aqueous chemistry control. Can't do that when you're stuck inside water. It's also hard to evolve reasoning when you can't see far ahead. Little evolutionary pressure on reasoning over time and distance.

And it's hard to leave water. You need to evolve new eyes and lungs to live on land. And then you need an energy source like O2, which tends not to stick around.

So many reasons.

The distances of space are certainly one holding us back now.

Of course we are, but my question is why is that notable?

You also breathe a nitrogen-oxygen-hydrogen mixture, and have a body that is built to walk around at 1g on a planet between 0-100 degrees F.

That doesn’t seem to bother people.

I mean we have a way today to get to a fraction of light speed with the nuclear bombs for propulsion method. Technically it’s even survivable for a person.

> Who remembers the Star Trek movie where one of the voyagers came back as v’ger - the humongous sentient entity of accumulated space junk?

Everyone.

I watched it the first time around in a cinema in West Germany. That was a British cinema in Deutchland - a BFBS jobbie.

Times have changed somewhat!

It was more like assimilating everything it encountered in minute detail, but the living beings were no longer "living" as such once assimilated. It was creepy.

I doubt that’s true. At minimum it’s going to hit an enormous quantity of micrometer sized objects.

It’s gravitationally bound to the Milky way so it’s going to keep wandering into and out of star systems for a very long time. We’re talking a large multiple of the age of the universe meanwhile plenty of space rocks show encounters with other space rocks on a vastly smaller timescale. If nothing else it’s got decent odds of being part of the star formation process. Stars are ~10% of the milky way’s mass and star formation is going to continue for a while.

Its gonna prove the closed manifold hypothesis when it shows up coming from the opposite direction in a few hundred million years

> I heard once it will eventually lose it's form entirely

It will be sitting at something like -450F. Could it really lose form!? Is the idea that all the phonons could converge to one point, shifting an atom of metal (which will happen infinitely with infinite time)? Maybe with random photons/hydrogen/whatever "continuously" adding energy?

Neat.

Ah, so this is how asteroids are made!

No chance of it ever being hit by anything?

It's cold out there, why would it melt?