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too stupid for a space empire

the journal of Michael Werneburg

twenty-seven years and one million words

The space adventurism of billionaires gives me solace that humanity is never going to colonize space. Even if we had lightspeed travel, we’d never get much father than our local cluster of galaxies before the universe dies of heat death and we’d have to somehow set up a form of travel where — again, at lightspeed — tens or hundreds of generations would have to stay focused on the mission (while also not dying of hundreds of things including in-breeding). We can pretend that all the exoplanets we’ve found will be suitable but 90% of stars are very unstable and the natural speed of rotation for a planet is about 9 hours. Nothing run by billionaires will be anything other than a complete disaster, like “oh the ships left about 25 years ago and we never heard anything”.

Then, of course, with the collapse of literacy and society and so on we’ll forget they even existed or that the Earth rotates around the Sun, etc. If I am ever through this current novel’s cycle to print, I’ll restart the one set in the near future which it turns out is not so near because humans have been living in a bubble maintained by our AI’s and that tens of thousands of years shot by while we were all on ice.