[HN Gopher] Humans could recolonize Earth after mass extinctions... ___________________________________________________________________ Humans could recolonize Earth after mass extinctions with ectogenesis Author : pseudolus Score : 28 points Date : 2021-08-06 21:28 UTC (1 hours ago) (HTM) web link (sciencex.com) (TXT) w3m dump (sciencex.com) | sgt wrote: | Not a new idea. Hasn't there also been an Isaac Arthur episode or | two about this? | TrispusAttucks wrote: | Sounds exactly like the plot from HBOs [1] Raised by Wolves or | [2] Netflix's I am Mother. | | [1] | https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raised_by_Wolves_(American_T... | | [2] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_Am_Mother | bookofsand wrote: | The author needs to familiarize himself with the concept of MTBF. | It's surprisingly short for high order artifacts. Entropy will | introduce errors and break down every single high order system | out there. I am aware of two exceptions: the biosphere and, on a | much much smaller scope, cloud storage. The core characteristic | of both systems is redundancy and repair: every piece of the | system is continuously monitored and replaced by a healthy clone | before enough errors accumulate to render it inoperable. | | Short of developing artificial life, the proposal will not work. | Of course, developing artificial life is one of the big | existential risks humanity faces. I'd rather we study gardening | instead :) | | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mean_time_between_failures | sylens wrote: | I guess the author finally got around to playing Horizon Zero | Dawn? | Teknoman117 wrote: | an apt user name for that reference :) | yodon wrote: | If we were to have a mass extinction event today, the "survivors" | would quickly find that all the readily accessible surface level | fuel sources are long gone and have already been consumed. In the | 1600's or 1700's it wouldn't have been that difficult, but today | the challenge of getting access to power is going to make | restarting civilization somewhere between difficult and | impossible. | | Try finding enough burnable wood near an emerging city/town to | provide warmth and power while you restart civilization and I | think you'll discover that humanity has already cut down the | majority of the forests, tapped the majority of the oil Wells | that can produce oil without lots of supporting tech, and mined | most of the easily mineable coal. Sure, you can get a bit of | power, but it's going to take a lot of both power and specialized | skilled labor to restart our power sources civilization after a | mass extinction event. The chances are extremely good that even | if you can resume making babies you can't resume making the power | those babies will need to achieve the goals we would have for | them. On the surface of the Earth today it takes more power and | skills to gain access to power than survivors are likely to have. | GekkePrutser wrote: | Trees grow back pretty quickly (they're talking timescales of | thousands of years for this plan) and that's all humanity needs | for energy to start. | | The main reason we need all that power is for our creature | comforts. We don't technically need them to survive but we | don't know how to live without them anymore. There being | billions of us doesn't help either. A rebooted humanity | shouldn't have too much difficulty with that though. | [deleted] | yodon wrote: | If you have a mass extinction event and go more than a | generation or two without restarting, all the skills and | education will be gone which means you're restarting from | zero. We needed readily available high grade energy sources | to get to high grade renewables, and those trying to restart | civilization will as well, but by the time the get there | their forest will be consumed just as ours are, and they | won't have oil and coal to discover to get them the bridge to | solar or nuclear or high tech wind and tidal power. | njarboe wrote: | Plenty of water power. | yodon wrote: | It takes a lot of tech to turn a River into a source of heat, | and it takes still more tech to produce that tech that you | need to pull it off. Water is an easy source of power for | some things, but for most chemical processes what you need is | heat (and most of the tech you're going to need to restart | civilization is at some level going to be rooted in chemical | processes) | chmod775 wrote: | > It takes a lot of tech to turn a River into a source of | heat. | | No it doesn't. Turning motion into electricity is fairly | easy, and turning electricity into heat is even more so. | | The biggest hurdle will be manufacturing quality mechanical | parts, but you can do without quality in a pinch. | | Also producing heat is a matter of survival, not | civilization. We can safely assume people will at least be | able to make a fire. | yodon wrote: | You're thinking like a modern resident, not like someone | living a decade after a global extinction event. Turning | water into electricity requires significant | infrastructure for making motors and generators and | transmission lines and the like (even if in principle the | math/physics is easy) | chmod775 wrote: | Turning wind, sun, or water into a good source of electricity | is fairly low-tech. | | There's also still a ton of easily accessible lignite | everywhere, which our present civilization doesn't really care | about for its inefficiency and ecological concerns. | calvinmorrison wrote: | Also wood gasification can trivially take wood inputs and run | internal combustion engines. | bserge wrote: | Not sure anyone will shed a tear for the loss of this | civilization after the mass extinction event was caused by them | (us). | fsiefken wrote: | in the sf novel earthseed by pamela sargent a seed ship is sent | out, when it encounters a habitable planet after a very long | journey the AI of the ship would fertilize human eggs and raise | and teach a diverse group of children for restarting civilization | [deleted] | alex_young wrote: | An artificial womb that not only somehow grows a human for 9 | months, but then exposes this infant to an environment with no | caretakers, and somehow protects and trains them to survive to | reproduce? And you're going to make enough of them to create a | sustainable population? Seems pretty unlikely to me. | PicassoCTs wrote: | This idea and plot are actually one of the "failed colonization | attempts" in the revelation space series. | | https://revelationspace.fandom.com/wiki/Amerikano_era | ezekg wrote: | I Am Mother (2019) is a great movie based on this kind of | premise. ___________________________________________________________________ (page generated 2021-08-06 23:00 UTC)