When you realize there are no hospitable planets, besides earth, within our solar system - you will realize there is no escaping the problems we have created here on earth. No, they must be solved, not avoided.

There is no future where any of us alive today, or for many, many generations (dozens, maybe hundreds or thousands, if it's even possible) will be capable of traveling to another system with potentially hospitable planets.

We don't need to terraform Mars to our incredibly fine tuned biology. What comes next will evolve beyond our limitations. Humans are a stepping stone. Just a blink of an eye in an infinite time scale.

I'm not suggesting putting biological organisms anywhere. I'm suggesting that at some point in the future an AI will be able to rapidly modify its own substrate independent of biology, metabolic inputs, and genetic inheritance. That it won't be subject to information loss due to death or other physical constraints. That it will much more quickly be able to build support systems for itself to harness energy and raw materials wherever it goes.

Unless we kill ourselves in the near future, these systems will likely emerge and will likely proliferate faster than us. They're not going to be stuck on earth with us. There are abundant energy resources and building materials in the solar system and greater galaxy beyond.

HN is quite a bubble, and we often form an echo chamber that strongly agrees with itself.

As a species we have no idea if we peaked or we are in our infancy… one thing that will probably happen is that we too will cease to exist as a whole at some point. I wonder what this does to us as a group, not having that perspective.

There are so many possible outcomes.

It can be true that humanity will peak, yet intelligence will continue to grow and expand beyond humans.

Any outcome where humanity is the utmost pinnacle of intelligence likely means that we do not stray beyond our gravity well. That earth-evolved intelligence will never reach the greater galaxy beyond. It falls far short of earth's potential.

I hope humanity is not the peak. There's so much more that lies beyond us. In a greater developmental timeline, we could be just amoebas. That's exciting to contemplate, even though we can barely fathom it.

So what if it was ? I don’t really understand this ultra-intellectual viewpoint.

A planet is just fine being a planet, we don’t need to out glasses on planets and have them reading Shakespeare to make the universe a special place ? I’m sure they will happen on its own anyway if it’s desirable.

In a similar way, an amoeba doesn’t really need intelligence, it just does what it does until it can’t do it anymore and a new one comes a long. Maybe that’s a fine thing and in some ways, it’s own form of intelligence. Doesn’t need to mess with everything and crate ecology crisis for itself.

The way we’re going, the amoebas will likely outlive us and probably any computer systems we produce. So it’s yet to be proven our intellect is really all that valuable longer term.