{"id":1579,"date":"2026-09-18T11:09:04","date_gmt":"2026-09-18T08:09:04","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/diurnsky.com\/?p=1579"},"modified":"2026-09-18T11:09:09","modified_gmt":"2026-09-18T08:09:09","slug":"1579","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/diurnsky.com\/?p=1579","title":{"rendered":""},"content":{"rendered":"\n
Humans will never be space creatures. Not for any considerable stretch of time at least. They're too volatile.

Time, not the lack of technology or resources, becomes your greatest enemy when you try to build something across star systems.

Take a look at Earth. Countries can stand strong for centuries\u2014and all their citizens can eagerly want it to remain that way\u2014and then shatter in an instant because of one person's whim or mistake. Countries with no supreme leaders aren't exempt from it, too, because societies aren't exempt from whims or mistakes, either.

Those who aren't *nerds*<\/em> may have no clue what an enormous hurdle time becomes when you think interstellar.

The fastest ever, unmanned, human spacecraft managed to reach a mere 0.064% of the speed of light. But let's imagine, for a moment, that with enough breakthroughs humans can now enter cryosleep and travel at a safe and steady 1%. The average distance between *neighboring*<\/em> stars in the Milky Way is 5 light years. This results in 500 years of travel.

In other words, a commute for any reason other than to colonize a new system is meaningless. Some colony requests resources, experts, or diplomats? Maybe they amiably welcome some humans to interbreed, so you all remain the same species? By the time of arrival, their needs and moods will have changed ten times over.

But maybe you don't care about any such cooperation. Scattered and autonomous, evolving in somewhat different directions, humans can still reign the galaxy. Right?

Well, let's imagine an even more fantastic best-case scenario. Let's imagine we outsource everything related to colonization to a superintelligent AI that *never*<\/em> blunders or diverges from its protocol. It travels at 10% of the speed of light and never slows down. In each new star system, it momentarily creates a few copies of itself, terraforms planets, establishes all the amenities for the perfect colonies, and animates thousands of exemplary specimens to inhabit them. Thus, to become space creatures, humans are left with one directive only: survive.

By the time this miracle of an AI crosses half of our galaxy, more than 500,000 years pass. Do you have such a strong faith in humanity to believe they can survive this long while wielding the technology to eradicate all settlements on a planet with the press of a button?

Let me remind you, for context, that, knowing how to build weapons of mass destruction, we only managed to survive 100 years so far, and we are only getting started. First it was nukes, today we can engineer a disease, and soon we may have an AGI. Even as a species using nothing more destructive than a long stick, Homo sapiens didn't happen to surpass that threshold, living for about 300,000 years. (Perhaps some other long-stick hominids didn't survive even that.)

Humans can try their best. They can establish a rigorous screening system to eliminate *anyone*<\/em> who wishes to undermine peace, prosperity, and stability, even in their deepest dreams. But think about it: a substantial portion of communists really believed that to achieve peace, prosperity, and stability they had to steal peasants' grain, exterminate all sparrows and bourgeoisie, etc. And then, how can you guarantee this system won't evolve, or the very definitions of peace\/prosperity\/stability won't change? Human biology dictates a malleable brain. You learn one new thing and millions of neurons readjust their weights, and you are now a new person.

I estimate that the average lifespan of a human colony won't exceed 10,000 years, and whatever few colonies manage to survive more than 500,000 years will only do so because they become so drastically alien we can't call them mammals anymore. The proud conglomerate of space humans, thus, would be just a thin sliver of dying colonies, like a strip of fire traveling through a field of dry grass.

We assume faster-than-light travel is impossible. But even if it *is*<\/em> possible, building new colonies, in reality, can't be done in an instant. By the time you establish a hundred new colonies, another hundred may already blow to smithereens.

Okay, suppose you don't care about any of that. \"So we can't build anything sustainable and cohesive across stars. So what? The only thing that matters is that we create new colonies at the same rate or faster than we lose them. Surely our volatile humans can achieve that much, right?\"

I admit, that sounds like something within the realm of possibility. Perhaps they can flutter across the galaxy for millions of years while staying true to their human nature. Perhaps that is *something*<\/em> on a cosmic scale. Perhaps that would qualify them as space creatures. But living long enough to see the Andromeda collide with the Milky Way, 4.5 billion years from now? Saying hello to the indigenous aliens? Not possible.

And I'm not saying that because billions of years of evolution make species unrecognizable\u2014let's assume they are still human, no matter how brutally natural evolution disfigures them. We can also imagine that through some insane luck there is never a time when all existing colonies can't or don't want to expand before collapsing. Still our nomadic civilizations won't be able to persist, for the same reason that nomadic nations are no longer a thing on Earth. Something stronger emerged\u2014something that knew how to secure borders and extract wealth from every living and non-living thing within\u2014and overtook the planet.

Even if there are no aliens within the Milky Way to begin with, some of the colonies will undergo a transformation. They will throw their vertebrate brains in a dumpster, stop thinking in terms of \"How do I squeeze the most out of this presidential cycle?\", and start thinking in terms of \"How do I squeeze the most out of this star before it explodes?\"

Let me emphasize: this is *not*<\/em> something you can achieve through culture. Human biology doesn't allow for any one culture to remain unperturbed for any meaningful stretch of time. Persisting for millions of years, the urge to build new colonies won't be guided by culture either. It won't be \"We gotta think big and advance our civilization\"\u2014not most of the time. Most of the time, it will default to \"This colony will turn to shit in my lifetime; I gotta escape.\"

These new lifeforms, planning for billions of years ahead, building sustainable and cohesive interstellar domains, won't appreciate humans jumping from one star to another and sucking up resources and turning everything to shit. Earth states today view pillagers and vagabonds in a more positive light: at least they are of the same species and can be given a pickaxe and sent to the mines.

What use will humans have? They will see us as locusts. Maybe they will build us a terrarium. Probably not.<\/pre>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Humans will never be space creatures. Not for any considerable stretch of time at least. They’re too volatile.Time, not the lack of technology or resources, becomes your greatest enemy when you try to build something across star systems.Take a look at Earth. Countries can stand strong for centuries\u2014and all their citizens can eagerly want it […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/diurnsky.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1579"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/diurnsky.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/diurnsky.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/diurnsky.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/diurnsky.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1579"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/diurnsky.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1579\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1580,"href":"https:\/\/diurnsky.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1579\/revisions\/1580"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/diurnsky.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1579"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/diurnsky.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1579"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/diurnsky.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1579"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}