Sorry, Jeff Bezos we may have Space Colonies but we are never going to have even trillion humans!
Like many, I recently watched Jeff Bezos video on Blue Moon his new lander.
Jeff was, of course, correct about a lot. The human race does not have the resources to carry on the way it has and in time we are going to need to build a small Dyson Swam.
Here is a link to his video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GQ98hGUe6FM
So what did Jeff and some many like him like Isaac who runs a well known Youtube channel think https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCZFipeZtQM5CKUjx6grh54g
and could anyone with 365000 followers be wrong?
The answer is they believe the human will carry on growing? The truth is, however (and you only need to speak to a few of my friends with families in the 21st century Europe) is that is not the recent trend not just in #Europe and much of #China, #Japan, and #SouthKorea but in the rest of the world too.
Since the 1960s as women have gained more freedom there has been slow but growing decline fertility rates (which was a good idea as fewer of their children were dying from Childhood illnesses like Smallpox. Women have been given the freedom over their own fertility which I myself (as an only child unlike my great grandparents who were one of seven) do not think has been such a bad thing.
I noticed a fairly recently BBC story talk about the ‘Remarkable’ decline in fertility rates ;
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-46118103
Even now in the poorest states in the world, most families are aiming for as many as two children. Which is something I have noticed as I date both men and women in the 21st century want to build careers not just pop out babies (that is what my date said last week).
The result is Earth is likely in just a couple of centuries not to have 20 billion but maybe as few as 2 billion.
Bezos talked about making the Earth a light industrial zone during his talk. I think that is also very unlikely. Earth is larger than the moon and it costs less to mine on Earth then off world.
Will most people leave Earth one day?
I think that is unlikely unless climate change makes the planet uninhabitable (which could happen I guess). The problem is even with all these problems Earth is still better than any other planet in the solar system.
No matter how great the inside of a space habitat is I believe most people will not want to move to them apart from the wealthy and those who cannot do stuff that they want to do back in their home nations. I can see #weathlyislandstates, #Biohackers and #exiles moving up there. But most people I believe will remain down on Earth doing what they have always done.
So why are space colonies and habitats still important?
The truth is that they will be important tools in the development of mankind beyond Earth be that as orbital settlements as we terraform Mars or Venus or as Interstellar city-sized space Arks. People will still want to go beyond Earth and to do that they will need to learn how to export the Earth.
I think the first stage will be low orbit space stations (which we have already build) followed by low Earth orbit Space habitats. Over time we will master the Moon and build bigger space habitats in Luna and CisLuna orbit. Such projects will build on knowledge gained when we built bases and habitats under our Oceans, deserts and both Poles.
Soon after we will build bases on Mars if not the rest of the Solar system. By that point, once we understand those worlds it is likely that some people will get bored and many will want to build a planet-sized society on #Mars and #Venus.
Transforming these dead desert worlds into Earth-like desert worlds will take more energy than we could make from nuclear power (both fission and fusion). At that point, it will be time to build a Dyson swarm for some Solar wide improvement projects. If we can catch just one per cent of the Sun’s power we will be able to terraform both Venus and Mars as well as start a few other great projects like leaser highways and power settlements all over the outer solar system.
After the two planets have been terraformed we could start building O'Neil cylinders space arks (think the Nauvoo in the Expanse https://expanse.fandom.com/wiki/Nauvoo). these trips may take centuries but by then humans may have life extension that means we could live centuries? Our slow growth could mean we settled Earth-like planets within a light century.
That life extension Arthur is right that could trigger a baby boom. But I believe we are already seeing that and as people live longer they have fewer children.
Of course, everything I have said could be wrong but I believe as long as children are born in families the growth of the human population will be slow. You could, of course, clone millions (and we will have the technology for that soon) or just copy human mind millions of times to a vast moon-sized computer.
But I do not think that is the route most of the human race will go. For one thing, it makes me very uncomfortable to think of a Posthuman future von Neumann probe or vast clone armies are not what I think either Jeff or Isaac are thinking (I would not want two or three of me never mind two or three billion of me). It makes me think in fact of Interstellar Spam and making limitless copies of yourself just seems an awful idea.
In truth the human race I believe sooner or later will change and move to the post-human era (just we are unlikely to even then to breed beyond billions). A good example of where we are going is on John Michael Godier channel where one of his early videos talked about the Promise of Molecular Nanotechnology https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qape78ZyF8E&t=
it could be in my view that John is correct and that in a few centuries some aliens come across three Earth-like planets (#Venus, #Earth, and #Mars) and a heavily mined #Mercury
They look down and find that the planets look nature apart from some old cities but a vast cloud covers the planets. These aliens after centuries have come back to the planets their forefathers. Later they find out that the humans on the planets that mankind developed downloaded themselves into their technology.
For me, that seems a lot more likely than Jeff’s or Isaac vision of trillions of meat humans building billions of habitats around the Sun. It may be viewed by some as a waste of resources letting that Sun-light go to waste but the idea of taking the planets apart (including Mercury) seems wrong and my feeling is we will find we will rarely need to get 100% the power of any star including the Sun!
That may be the reason Dyson sphere are not common in Science Fiction because as humans we get the feeling it is just not a great idea to dismantle a planet or it’s moons. I have to say I view the large rockily planets (even Mercury) of the solar system even if that was not the case as having more value that billions or trillions of habitats.