REM%IMSSS@SU-AI.ARPA (Robert Elton Maas) (03/01/86)
ET> Date: 24 Feb 86 22:21:15 GMT ET> From: hplabs!hao!noao!astrovax!elt@ucbvax.berkeley.edu (Ed Turner) ET> ... several people have offered the opinion that dispersal of people ET> throughout the Solar System and/or to the stars would offer us ET> protection from self-destruction. Surely this is a failure of ET> imagination; it seems inevitable to me that our capability for ET> destruction will grow as fast (faster if history is a guide) as our ET> other capabilities. Of course, the time scales may change but that is ET> a different issue. I imagine the various historical colonizers of ET> remote regions of the Earth must have felt that putting "eggs in a ET> different basket" would guarantee the safety of their societies in a ET> similar way. (P.s. I like your initials.) As you are aware, I'm one of those who say getting our eggs in more baskets will help long-term survival. I have rebuttal to your proposed counterexample. The Lewis&Clark expedition and the following wagon trains and sailing ships were essentially the last pushing of the frontier. Sure there are little nooks and crannies that got explored later, such as Antarctica, the Amazon jungle, outback of Australia, Papua New Guinea, and some places not yet explored much such as the ocean floor, but mostly we've been for the past century just filling in the gaps rather than pushing the frontier. It took a hundred years of this non-frontier after Lewis&Clark before thermonuclear weapons made this all one basket again. If there had been a black death in Europe, the New World might been able to escape it by careful restrictions on cross-Atlantic travel. Now as we go into space during the next century, probably we can escape total anihilation simply by being dispersed. Weapons will eventually catch up with solar-system inhabitants, but by that time the frontier will have been extended to nearby stars. Weapons will eventually catch up with nearby stars, but by that time the frontier will have been extended to the whole galaxy. Perhaps somebody will someday figure out a doomsday machine for the whole galaxy, but by that time we will have extended to the whole Universe. Due to billions of years transit time across the Universe, I doubt any doomsday machine could possibly destroy the whole Universe; it'd evolve into something else before it managed to traverse all that time, probably waging war against variants of itself and leaving miniscule humans untouched. In short, I'm not sanguine, weapons might catch up with us and destroy us even in large space, but I rather doubt it and would rather rely on that strategy than stay here on teensy Earth.