[HN Gopher] Humans could recolonize Earth after mass extinctions...
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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.
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(page generated 2021-08-06 23:00 UTC)