The millennial project

What Hacker News says

1. carapaceJul 2022
   Wendell Berry has a great essay called "What are people for?" (in the book of the same name) As several people have already pointed out, the article leaves the question open. Too many or few for what?

   A recent comment here on HN seems to me to provide the missing piece of the puzzle:

   > There is this nonsense idea that the earth would be fine if humans didn’t come along. It wouldn’t. This planet is in its death throes. Life has delicately established itself in a habitable zone that is coming to an end. The carbon cycle has a good 800M years left before photosynthesis starts grinding to a halt. That might seem like a long time, but life’s been here for a good 4B years - we are 75% through life on earth. It’s taken evolution 4B years to print its first ticket off this rock: humans.

   https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31411743

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   Carrying capacity is a very broad measure. People can generates more life than we consume, it's fun and easy. (E.g. the "Grow Biointensive" system is a turn-key method that produces a nutritionally-complete diet and increases soil mass and fertility over time in aprox 500 square meters per person. http://growbiointensive.org/ )

   So the "carrying capacity" is something that can actually increase with the population. If we live in ecological harmony then the limit to population growth will be something else.

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   There's no free lunch. Exponential population growth will lead to a crash (or sea change) eventually. Even if we postulate Faster-than-Light spaceships, the end comes eventually. The internal volume of the "known universe" will eventually produce people faster than they can escape to unpopulated regions even if they have FTL spaceships.

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   "The Millennial Project: Colonizing the Galaxy in Eight Easy Steps" by Marshall T. Savage has a wonderfully inspiring image of a green galaxy on the cover: humanity has brought life to the stars. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Millennial_Project

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2. carapaceJun 2021
   Two things: 1) Check out "The Millennial Project":

   https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Millennial_Project:_Coloni...

   > The Millennial Project: Colonizing the Galaxy in Eight Easy Steps by Marshall T. Savage is a book (published in 1992 and reprinted in 1994 with an introduction by Arthur C. Clarke) in the field of exploratory engineering that gives a series of concrete stages the author believes will lead to interstellar colonization. Many specific scientific and engineering details are presented, as are numerous issues involved in space colonization.

   I find the cover image of a green galaxy is very inspiring!

   2) Due to the nature of exponential growth, we will eventually feel a population crunch when reproduction overwhelms the rate of expansion. This is true even if we invent FTL ships. The crunch would be delayed (perhaps for millions or billions of years) but it is inevitable.

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3. bjelkeman-againMar 2020
   The Millennial Project, Colonizing the Galaxy in Eight Easy Steps, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Millennial_Project

   Not a fiction book as such, but the subject matter border on science fiction.

   It did make me think of how to start contributing to humanity in better ways than I was doing. It took some time for me to change my trajectory, but eventually I did.

   Through several steps partially parallel to step one in the book I ended up doing what I do today.

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4. jasonpeacockMar 2016
   This is an older, but very practical and educational read: http://smile.amazon.com/Millennial-Project-Colonizing-Galaxy...
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5. jpaDec 2010
   Really, really good book on this subject: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Millennial_Project:_Coloniz...

   http://www.amazon.com/Millennial-Project-Colonizing-Galaxy-E...

   The book does a nice job of capturing all the hard engineering problems. His proposed solutions are interesting but a bit superficial.

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6. carapaceJul 2020
   https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Millennial_Project

   > "The Millennial Project: Colonizing the Galaxy in Eight Easy Steps" by Marshall T. Savage is a book (published in 1992 and reprinted in 1994 with an introduction by Arthur C. Clarke) in the field of exploratory engineering that gives a series of concrete stages the author believes will lead to interstellar colonization. Many specific scientific and engineering details are presented, as are numerous issues involved in space colonization.

   Show morethread