I never understood where the desire to "colonise the galaxy" comes from. Why is this a desirable goal? Compared to anywhere else we know about, Earth is an extremely unique utopia. A "better" planet would be measured in how Earth-like it is - perhaps bigger or with more/different exploitable resources.
The only driver that I can really comprehend is the desire for freedom and autonomy in less populated spaces. The problem with this is that the human condition follows us everywhere. We'll recreate the same problems we have here everywhere we go. We can't run away from ourselves.
It doesn't have to be a desirable goal to everyone.
> The only driver that I can really comprehend is the desire for freedom and autonomy in less populated spaces.
You got one of the big ones. But not the only one. Other is survival. Here on Earth we are all one bad infection outbreak away from ending human society as we know it. We have all of our eggs in one basket. Even if we would have a stable foothold on the moon and mars we would still be vulnerable to gamma-ray bursts and crazy despots with nuclear armed missiles.
> We'll recreate the same problems we have here everywhere we go.
We do. There are still benefits to the people who are "taming the frontier". And that is enough for it to happen. We also see that even though human condition follows us different places have a different feel to them. Some places we got some things better while others worse.
> Compared to anywhere else we know about, Earth is an extremely unique utopia.
To a certain extent. We can adapt the environments to us. And we can adapt ourselves to new environments.
When I move to the arctic I leave my parasol at home and buy a coat. When I move to a gas giant I need to rethink more of my biology. Imagine if some of us can become a buoyant sail with manipulating appendages who feels as much home in the red dot of jupiter as a homid feels home on a dewy meadow. If we could I would for sure give it a go for a few hundred years, then come back and write a book about how it was.
The fact that this is not easy is part of the lure of it.
Mankind will either spread further or die, this is binary. How much spread we can achieve or how much is even possible (ie due to limit of speed of light) is another topic, but if we want even with c being the absolute limit we can colonize milky way in maybe 100 million years if we want... in theory.
But for what? The beings that will have populated the milky way in 100 millionen years will not be humans anymore due to evolution. Some planets will be thousands of light years apart, meaningful communication will be impossible. Species will diverge. Why should I care about such a future?
Some people, both men and women, like to see their specific genes propagating and thriving. Built in by evolution definitely. Most parents do understand this.
I get it, it's an irrational desire, but with the timespans we're talking the evolutionary distance is greater than that between us and whatever fuzzy things was scurrying under the feet of the T-Rex.
Spread the risk and reduce the probability of extinction.
We know for a fact that earth is doomed, on top of our own continuous efforts to kill ourselves off. No not recent climate change type of doomed, but the evolution of our sun is continuously pushing the habitable zone outwards. We might be able to deal with that particular annoyance by hiding underground when it becomes an emergency in half a billion years or so, but our utopia won't be as utopic anymore.
Eventually however, the sun will balloon to a red giant at which point we better have a plan in place other than staying on this planet.
If we're thinking that far out we might as well all just lay down and wait for rain because there's no avoiding the heat death of the universe. Treating the sun dying out like it's a real concern that we need to address in the next 2, 200, 2,000, or 2,000,000 years is comical. Whatever is around to experience that won't be human as we know it.
I don't really think about this much, but your comment made me wonder:
If we do find another earth-like planet within travel distance (impossible afaik but let's suspend disbelief for a moment), how do we determine whether it's worth colonising? And how to we measure it?
"The resources on this planet will last 15.6B person-years which means if we send 5 million people there over time, we will have to prepare for their evacuation in ??? years"?
Obviously totally moot if Earth's resources aren't going to last that long, but just had that thought bubble up.
The "bigger problem" is that it is insufficient to observe the life carrying capacity of a planet for a few decades and conclude that it is stable long term.
For example, the host star could have variability measured in thousands or millions of years that would render the planet inhospitable to humans but not the indigenous life, which would have been adapted to these cycles.
Similarly, the planet could experience regular asteroid impacts due to passing through a recently broken up rock that intersects its orbital path.
Some of these risks can be eliminated through careful study, but this would require something like a century of painstaking geology, thorough astronomic surveys of its neighbourhood, a full fossil record, etc...
> The only driver that I can really comprehend is the desire for freedom and autonomy in less populated spaces
Exploration and seeing what's beyond seems to be innate in some people, not so much in others. Personally, if someone gave me to the opportunity today to "Sit in this rocket and get launched out into infinity and report back what's out there", I'd probably do it, and I'm sure I wouldn't be the only one. Curiosity would be enough for me to go.
I think we have crossed the chasm and the pragmatists have adopted these tools because they are actually useful now. They've thrown out a lot of their previously held principles and norms to do so and I doubt the more conservative crowd will be so quick to compromise.
2 years sounds more likely than 2 months since the established norms and practices need to mature a lot more than this to be worthy of the serious consideration of the considerably serious.
I do similar but it's incredible how our threat model has changed so much to allow this. I have to trust this one node package (and all its dependencies) and Anthropic more than I trust my email provider, my ISP or my browser.
Who'd have imagined remote code execution as a service would have caught on as much as it has!
This is why I don't use Claude Code on my personal machine. My work machine, sure, my work encourages that. My personal machine, I use Claude through Zed with an API key, and manually approve every command.
Open source culture has changed so much over the past couple of decades that it seems totally reasonable now for up-and-coming maintainers to question the whole thing.
Scale has changed everything. There are orders of magnitudes more users than contributors compared to some of the early OSS and the balance between grateful and entitled end-users has skewed expectations much more towards maintainers as a support role with similar responsibilities to a product engineer in the commercial world. Why would you want to enter into that social contract now? Why would you want to risk your library taking off and the associated costs that would bring (as well as benefits)?
An alternative evolutionary pathway for OSS is for developers and communities to self-host their own git projects. Projects get to define their own ethos and workflow. Discovery remains high-friction which prevents the commodification of maintainer effort. The bar for writing custom tools to support things like this got a whole lot lower so it might start to make sense more than it did in the past (there are both push and pull forces at work here). It might even make OSS fun again.
I agree with all of this, and as I've mentioned elsewhere in this thread, anything I release now is going to be a tar.gz/zip with a LICENSE file in it, and people can do what they want with it, but they're not getting tech support on it.
However, this is a really sad state of affairs, and I'm wondering if we can't have scale _with_ friction to counter some of these pain points?
I think srchut is one solution. Its email workflow does successfully deter less experienced/curious people, for better or worse, and it still has some project discovery bit not social signals like stars.
It’s not a neutral service though. The owner is very opinionated and likes to get involved in what projects are and are not allowed to be hosted there, and changes these rules on a whim.
In my eyes, this disqualifies Sourcehut for anything serious. You could get booted off any second, if Drew decides that he does not like you.
(I like Drew, and I like opinionated and outspoken people. But Service Providers should be neutral, and only involve themselves as far as required by law.)
I think Sourcehut is the more portable of Git forges. Everything is stored in standard formats, its workflow isn't anything bespoke but just a good automation for git send-email, and I believe the source code should be all published.
In my eyes, if this ever does become a problem, migrating elsewhere wouldn't be that much trouble. When the "cryptocurrency purge" happened, maintainers were given 2 months of advance notice, which is a little short but reasonable.
Governmental organizations and corporate firms is the vibe (or maybe that was obvious and you're just trolling).
I think the point was that open source hasn't often been supported by companies serving these kinds of markets and the interests of the broader community are often sidelined.
Does this kind of general shift more firmly establish a marketplace and business model for eminent "peers" to more easily create independent journals? Universities increasingly price in this pay to publish model so groups of editors could very easily corner their respective niches with independent publications if they cooperate with one another. The market is ripe for fragmentation.
Maybe this is wishful thinking but a proliferation of openly accessible and competing independent publications could correct for a lot of the ills of the Goodhart effect in academic publishing. Market shifts that make this evolutionary pathway feasible and realistic are exiting.
To the proud contrarian, "the empire did nothing wrong". Maybe Sci-fi has actually played a role in the "memetic desire" of some of the titans of tech who are trying to bring about these worlds more-or-less intentionally. I guess it's not as much of a dystopia if you're on top and its not evil if you think of it as inevitable anyway.
I don't know. Walking on everybody's face to climb a human pyramid, one don't make much sincere friends. And one certainly are rightfully going down a spiral of paranoia. There are so many people already on fast track to hate anyone else, if they have social consensus that indeed someone is a freaking bastard which only deserve to die, that's a lot of stress to cope with.
Future is inevitable, but only ignorants of self predictive ability are thinking that what's going to populate future is inevitable.
Yet "peer review" would absolutely scale if it were actually the review of peers (and not just an editorial board). A large number of publications where submissions are reviewed by previous and prospective authors would be much like how open source peer review works, though not without its own set of issues.
Discovery is a search problem and its pretty clear that we have the technical capacity to solve that problem if there is enough of a signal from wide-spread peer review.
Major journals become those that re-publish and report on the big debates and discoveries of the actually peer-reviewed journals and this would be the work of "journalists".
The only driver that I can really comprehend is the desire for freedom and autonomy in less populated spaces. The problem with this is that the human condition follows us everywhere. We'll recreate the same problems we have here everywhere we go. We can't run away from ourselves.
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