What is more likely - that the Earth will turn into a hive as humanity digs deeper and deeper and settles in the submarine and underground cities, or that humanity will expand into space?
>inb4 apocalypse/status quo is more likely
Yes, I know, but I'm asking for an answer between the two options above.
>>47349500
Probably both, unless we all die off somehow
>>47349500
The irremediable destruction of today's technological civilization is more likely than both your options.
>>47349500
1. Space travel takes thousands of our best and brightest working together on a labor of love. Even with billions in funding and our most envelope-pushing technology, we remain barely capable of a round trip to Luna. The costs to emigrate and settle there - or beyond - would be orders of magnitude more costly, including brain power and industrial commitment.
2. Digging a hole takes a strong back and a shovel.
You decide.
>>47351054
1. Space travel enjoys continuous fascination of our best and brightest and gets billions in funding. Humanity awes at the grand universe and dreams of living among the stars and in our present day that unreachable goal seems to get closer and closer as we learn more about the universe.
2. Nobody gives a shit about the guy digging a hole. What's in there, dirt and magma? Pass.
Almost certainly space for sheer structural efficiency. Which sounds easier to you: keeping one atmosphere of pressire in, or keeping several hundred atmospheres (or an equivalent mass of rock) out? Not to mention that tectonics completely rules out the idea of a singular, massive underground superstructure. Cities could have large underground sections, but very few have the proper bedrock underneath them to make such a structure stable with current architectural knowledge. It's not impossible- Helsinki and I think Chicago both have sizeable underground sections- but it's unlikely to catch on. Ditto with underwater cities for one simple reason: why wouldn't you just make it float, or at least above water oil rig style?
>>47351494
>presire
Pressure, damn phone keyboard. Also of note: getting stuff into space is a cost concern, but we do have hypothetical solutions like the space elevator which are just waiting for material science to catch up before we start exploring practical implementation, while I'm not aware of any widely considered equivalents or underground or underwater structures.
>>47351124
>2. Nobody gives a shit about the guy digging a hole. What's in there, dirt and magma? Pass.
To begin with you have 500000000000USD/year's worth of highly useful rocks.
>>47351529
We already have extensive underground structures. Deeper down things do get very, very difficult, but the volume we have to work with before we get there is, well, astronomical might not be the right term here I guess, but...
Look up O'Neils Island 1, 2, and 3. He and his class developed a road map in the 80s(?) For getting a self sufficient population in space and growing by 2001. Once there is a population in space further growth is considerably cheaper. It's sending shit up from Earth that is expensive.
From a survival standpoint, no matter how far down you dig, unless you're floating in magma you're still vulnerable to interstellar rkvs. Whereas small space colonies (island 3 O'Neil cylinder style, not on moons and planets) will be so small and spread out that something like a gamma ray burst direct on the solar system is the only extinction level threat.
Let's assume by "hive" you mean something approaching the population density of Manhattan over every single square kilometer of earth that's not underwater. That's 27 000 people per km2 for 148 million km2. That's 3 996 billion people in total. Each person needs about 2000 calories or 8 MJ of nutrients per day. This amounts to roughly 32 exajoules(or 3.2*10^19 joules) of energy each day, just to feed everyone. Earth receives about 173 petawatts of solar energy, which amounts to about 14 947 exajoules per day. So that's about 0.2% of total solar energy that hits the Earth consumed by people. Except... photosynthesis is at most 8% efficient, so that's actually more like 2.5%. Then figure out what it takes to distribute it all. And that's just to ensure that everyone has enough to eat, now think about how much energy people need for other things(like not freezing/boiling to death). Add in things like actually constructing the said "hive" while keeping in mind that even under optimal conditions, you can only collect about 30% of the available solar energy.
This is just some back-of-the-envelope calculations and I've done a lot of rounding(mostly down), but personally I think we'll hit the point where terraforming the moon(and Mars and possibly Venus) is easier long before we get to that point.
>>47351668
Yeah, useful rocks, sure.
But look at the current situation, what's the most popular option? Space has almost all the cool science stuff, space has almost all the cool fiction and speculation,... Ask people on the street where they want to go, space or underground. We even have dopes signing up to spend the rest of their life on mars!
And when I think about underground exploration, I think about this. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kola_Superdeep_Borehole
Looks reaaaaal appealing compared to possible inhabitable planets.
Underground might be a valuable option, but it's not happening, it's not the option humanity is taking.
>imploded, suffocated, frozen/burned to death all at once
>crushed under thousands of tons of rock and soil
I DON'T LIKE EITHER OF THESE OPTIONS OP
>>47350946
But will it be the sweet release of death, or simply the slow suffering of regression?
>>47349500
One day in the coming hundreds of years, the rotation of the earth will cease completly,after the earth tilts on its axis and causes multiple extinction level events.
>>47349500
Some people already have plans in place to get to Mars, no one really has plans to become mole people.
Old sci fi about underground megacities relied on overpopulation pressure. From back when they looked at China's 1950s growth rate and thought there'd be 14 billion people today. Except now it looks like we're going to peak around 10 billion and then drop some. We might dig some tunnels for fun and profit and mass transit, but we won't be homing billions down there.
Space, on the other hand, doesn't rely on population pressure. Just time, technology, and adventurism. For example, we actually just had a few big advances; the price to get a space station module into orbit just dove from "superpowers only" to "a private company can get that there for $60m AND land its first stage rocket".
Whynotboth.jpg mode: we'll build underground cities *on other planets*. I mean, we've already got a bunch of planets and moons right here around the same star, we don't need magical FTL drives.
>>47353996
Living underground does solve all the biggest problems of living on the moon, after all.
Massive population reduction through a combination of VR addiction and voluntary sterilization (in exchange for welfare benefits necessary to survive in a post-fabricator economy) humanity retracts into virtual environments underground or under the sea.
Drones are used to maintain infrastructure until further advances make most maintenance or said infrastructure unnecessary. Mankind's mental network of 'virtual facebook' in synch with AI advancements makes space travel a legitimate option, but inconvenient for networking purposes, thus very few individuals (mostly sociopaths or odd isolationists) take advantage of it (and many of these end up lost within the simulated distractions or hibernation methods used to bypass long periods of space travel.)
Eventually, only a few monolithic megastructures burgeoning with deep, communal thought remain to remember man that was. Nature turns the wheel... and new, nubile sapience rises from the dust, unaware of the frighteningly deep and decadent minds they share the planet with, and the terrible games we could teach them, if only they found out how to ask.
>>47354648
I like this.
