do you think that things will be like star trek one day?

[Mister Agenda]

Why Jenny?

I don't think travel over the speed of light is possible. Without that, where would we go?

I calculated once that if we could get generation or hibernation ships up to 10% of light speed, we could colonize the entire galaxy in a couple of million years. Assuming we never develop an FTL travel method, the result would be millions of species descended from humans occupying every habitable corner of the galaxy, with almost no contact with each other.

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Niven and Pournelle in The Mote in God's Eye imagined intelligent aliens on a distant planet, stuck in their own solar system for apparently over a million years.

They would build up a civilization in a thousand years or so, then through overpopulation and war, they would collapse all the way back to the stone age, and they would do that over and over and over and over.

I think humanity is headed down a very similar path. Subsequent rises of civilization are going to be VERY difficult for many, many tens of thousands of years because we have done so much damage and used up so many resources in the first climb out of a primitive state. Future rises of civilization will be exponentially more difficult because all the easy energy sources like coal and oil will be used up and cannot reform during the time of inevitable collapse.

Hmm. But wouldn't the collapse also take longer because they'll be using 'greener' energy sources so it will take them much longer to damage the environment to the extent we are?

But I don't think we'll collapse to the Stone Age. Or necessarily at all. If we do, we might be set back to the 19th Century maybe. It's not that easy to forget all of our technology, I think. If we don't get a handle on things, we're in trouble, sure. But we're not going back to the Stone Age short of all-out Nuclear or Biological global warfare.