wow way to crush all hope like that? what do you even get out of that???? also, robots by that time will be able to self-create, and they don't need to read the languages, it'll still be very obvious that life existed!!
i didn’t even know that post was still going around! since I’m not the OP, it doesn’t actually show up in my notes. for future reference, this is about this post. I’ll quote the original and my response here:
canonicalmomentum:
swanjolras:
gosh but like we spent hundreds of years looking up at the stars and wondering “is there anybody out there” and hoping and guessing and imagining
because we as a species were so lonely and we wanted friends so bad, we wanted to meet other species and we wanted to talk to them and we wanted to learn from them and to stop being the only people in the universe
and we started realizing that things were maybe not going so good for us— we got scared that we were going to blow each other up, we got scared that we were going to break our planet permanently, we got scared that in a hundred years we were all going to be dead and gone and even if there were other people out there, we’d never get to meet them
and then
we built robots?
and we gave them names and we gave them brains made out of silicon and we pretended they were people and we told them hey you wanna go exploring, and of course they did, because we had made them in our own image
and maybe in a hundred years we won’t be around any more, maybe yeah the planet will be a mess and we’ll all be dead, and if other people come from the stars we won’t be around to meet them and say hi! how are you! we’re people, too! you’re not alone any more!, maybe we’ll be gone
but we built robots, who have beat-up hulls and metal brains, and who have names; and if the other people come and say, who were these people? what were they like?
the robots can say, when they made us, they called us discovery; they called us curiosity; they called us explorer; they called us spirit. they must have thought that was important.
and they told us to tell you hello.
it’s a nice romantic image but
Planet-side space robots last a few years at most before they are unable to function - their radioisotopes too depleted to generate enough heat to give them power to act, their solar panels coated with dust, their wheels clogged up with sand, etc. etc.
Satellites on low orbits inevitably decay and fall back into the atmosphere from friction. Solar panels eventually fail.
And space is so vast, and a solar system is so full of little pieces of rock about the size of a space probe, that even if one day another spacefaring species arises or arrives in our solar system, there is effectively no chance that they might intercept inert, long-dead space probes orbiting the sun indistinguishable at a distance from any other rock. And if a probe hits a planet, there is little to see - “There is an unusual isotope ratio in this barely-noticeable crater”?
But supposing that another species discovers one of our robots, somehow - and they can work out that it was a robot, perhaps even recognise the purpose of some of its instruments… the names of the robots will just be unintelligible scratches, and if they can even be recognised as characters of a language, the significance of the names will have been lost forever with the rest of the English language.
If another species discovers we existed long after our extinction, the only way I imagine it would be done is through the various bits of evidence we’re leaving in Earth’s geological record. Though how far that can be recognised as the influence of a worldwide industrial civilisation, I don’t know.
The exception: if we don’t go extinct, and somehow the distant descendants of humans and our machines survive and spread across the galaxy. Perhaps then something descended from our planet will meet something that isn’t.
But once we’re gone, it won’t take too long (speaking on the scale of planets and galaxies) for all meaningful traces of our lives to be eradicated.
so in my response i took this as being about existing efforts towards robotic space exploration - since it refers to Explorer, Curiosity and Discovery (which admittedly is not a robot, but was a Space Shuttle, as well as the fictional spaceship in 2001). But yes, that was an assumption.
A hypothetical situation in which humans have created self-replicating robots could certainly mean that we leave a much longer-lasting mark on the geological record, if that ever happens. Though honestly I'm not exactly confident the great self-replicating robot Singularity awaits us.
Honestly I don't know why I decided to respond so bleakly to this post (except, well, depression does things like that). Perhaps I'd just read something like the Manifesto of the Committee to Abolish Outer Space which is a fascinating piece of writing, though evidently I remain some kind of space nerd.
Nevertheless I do still feel that it is certain that we will eventually go extinct, and sooner or later - whether it takes thousands or millions or billions of years - nothing will remain to mark our brief existence but some arguably-unusual marks in the geological record of one obscure planet. I do also feel that if anyone is in place to find that evidence, it will probably be future lifeforms that exist on Earth rather than someone from another planet.
But I think that that does not make our present existence less valuable or important or worthwhile. I do not think that spreading through the stars, lasting forever in space, etc. etc. is the mark of our success, or necessarily even something good or even possible.
And perhaps as a result of our existence something really will spread out into space. But it is unlikely, I feel, to resemble us for very long on galactic/evolutionary timescales. A strange new ecosystem unrecognisable to humans, with interplanetary interactions? Maybe. Humans boldy going forth to colonise new worlds? I don't think so. And I expect even in such a future, our original existence will be forgotten.
But that's OK.
We don't have to be remembered forever. We'd better not, anyway, because we won't be.
