Alan Boyle posted some thoughts on the next 50 years of spaceflight at his MSNBC CosmicLog. The comments were what I’d expect from enthusiasts and cynics. A lot of doom & gloom, plus runaway enthusiasm.
I am not a moderate on the importance of spaceflight, interstellar colonisation.
Is there a middle ground? Or is there a BIGGER reason for spaceflight? How about the survival of the Universe?
Life is insignificant NOW, but in a few billion years our descendents could be shaping entire segments of the visible universe. And in a few trillion years, as the last stars die, they’ll be doing even more dramatic things to sustain Life.
One possibility is that, left to itself, the Universe will “crash” because all the quantum information that makes the laws of physics possible will be erased by black hole decay – if the Universe expands forever. Can we stop the expansion? One theory is that the current acceleration is caused by the Higgs field not being in its true vacuum state, due to the presence of baryonic matter. If Life uses baryons, via reverse baryogenesis, for power then the Higgs field will cancel out and the Universe will recollapse.
Now a Big Crunch sounds bad, but guided by Life shifting mass around on a cosmic scale, the recollapse can both provide energy for Life and a heat-sink to make that energy usable. And that infinite recollapse energy can power infinite experiential states – infinite subjective time for an infinite number of beings – between Now and the End Point.
Thus Life doesn’t have to end – if we set out and “conquer” the Universe. Don’t worry about wars between intelligent life elsewhere in the cosmos – They’re too far away for us to meet up until a few trillion years from now. Else They would be here by now, if they were closer than about 13 billion light years. And in a few trillion years we, and They, will know how to get on better than we do now.
Or else we don’t have a future.
A simple choice:
Everything – real Infinity for all of us;
or Nothing.