Infinite Life: Trapped in a lifetime

If you ask people who were in their eighties in their previous life,

Basically, they don’t think that controllable nuclear fusion can be commercialized in a short time in the future.

For them, they have never seen technology develop at a rapid pace.

In another area, there is particularly room for imagination.

In terms of space development, in previous lives and in the next seventy years, progress will be extremely slow.

What people imagined and expected at this moment, that in seventy years' time, human beings will spread throughout the solar system and the living space will undergo huge changes has not happened at all.

In the entire world, the vast majority of people still live on the earth.

Throughout human history, the number of humans who have left the earth and entered extraterrestrial space,

It just went from hundreds of people to barely 10,000 people.

It seems like a jump of two orders of magnitude, but compared to the billions of people on the earth, this ratio is still too small.

Humanity's expectations for large-scale migration to the outside world are still far away.

The means for humans to leave the surface of the earth is still rocket-propelled manned spacecraft.

After the preparations of the 1920s,

Throughout the 1930s, aerospace development actually entered a stage of prosperity.

In the early 1930s, China achieved manned landing on the moon.

And throughout the subsequent 1930s, a semi-permanent scientific research base was gradually built on the moon.

And stimulated by China,

A country in America followed suit and tried to establish a small scientific research base on the moon.

There are also some other countries that have also thrown a lot of things towards the moon.

In the subsequent 1940s,

China's semi-permanent base on the moon has also undergone some upgrades.

At most, China had more than fifty payload experts and astronauts stationed at the semi-permanent base on the moon.

And when the two waves of people changed shifts, it was briefly achieved that more than three digits of people were at the lunar base together on the lunar surface.

Then,

That's all.

Limited by the capacity and transportation costs of chemical rockets,

The development of semi-permanent bases on the moon has basically reached its upper limit.

The small base in the United States has even slumped in scale as the country's own economic situation has declined. At its lowest point, there were only two people in the entire base.

And even before Mo Dao comes back in every life,

Most of the materials for the lunar base still need to be transported from the ground via rockets.

final,

Over the past seventy years, mankind has explored and developed outer space.

Basically, there is a semi-permanent research base on the moon with forty or fifty people stationed there.

And to the extent that it has completed a manned landing on Mars and has a small, semi-intelligent research platform that is unmanned most of the time.

It can be said that the urban-scale migration that most people expect is still far away.

to some extent,

This is a chain result brought about by the lack of breakthroughs in the development of many important technologies.

The failure to achieve controllable nuclear fusion is largely an important reason for the slow progress of space exploration.

And besides that,

The same is true for many other important technologies. Even in the past seventy years, there has still been no breakthrough.

Medically, the pathogenesis and treatment of cancer are still not fully understood.

In terms of computers, quantum computers are still stuck in the laboratory.

In terms of communication, quantum communication can still only be used for quantum encryption under some special communication needs. There is still no hope of realizing quantum communication in a general sense.

In the field of life science research, there is still no breakthrough point in the upper limit of human lifespan.

The technology of the virtual world is still stuck in an embarrassing situation.

In seventy years, the entire world has indeed undergone many changes.

But they are all changes brought about by some details.

But there are basically no huge changes brought about by disruptive technological development and the gap in the entire lifestyle brought about.

…

In this case, the ideas and cognitions held by people at that time were basically,

The upper limit of what humans can achieve may be lower than most people thought before.

Many people think negatively,

The upper limit of human beings may be what it is now.

to this end,

People at that time put forward views in three directions.

The first is,

“The Paradox of the Upper Limit of Human Intelligence.”

The development of human science and technology has reached the upper limit that human general intelligence can support.

But humans do not have enough intelligence to support the development of technology that continues to enhance human intelligence.

This point can be regarded as a continuation of another point of view earlier: that is, human knowledge and technology are accumulating. If one day, a new generation of humans cannot finish learning the technology accumulated in this field before, it will take them a lifetime. Naturally, human technology has stagnated and cannot reach the border. How can we explore things beyond the border?

The second point of view is,

“A Single Theory of the Human Mind.”

This is basically a continuation of the previous statement that a certain technology exists on the "backside" of human beings.

The vast majority of human beings, despite their differences in intelligence and character.

But as human beings, we basically have a basic cognitive framework for the world that is common to all humans.

This cognitive framework allows humans to have basic human cognition.

But it also allows human thinking to have a convergence on a macro level.

Lack of differentiation among populations.

There may be a key theory existing in the corner of human thought,

But it is behind human thinking, and the commonality of human thinking means that humans will never be able to find it.

It's like the existence of the third direction for two-dimensional creatures.

Perhaps, through communication with a civilization different from humans on another planet, humans can find this blind spot in thinking.

But unfortunately, humans cannot get out.

If this is indeed the case, this is clearly an unspeakable despair.

The third point of view is.

"Earth Missing Key Matter Theory."

The earth’s material resources can be said to be quite abundant.

But I dare not say that there are all the materials that humans need on the earth.

Perhaps there is a key substance for mankind to enter the next stage that is not available on earth.

For example, materials that realize room temperature superconductivity, such as materials that can realize controllable nuclear fusion devices,

Perhaps on some distant planet, they are everywhere.

But still the same problem, humans can’t find it,

At this stage, humans cannot be too far away from the earth.

Without leaving the earth, there is no way to develop higher technology.

At the same time, we cannot leave the earth without developing higher technology.

This is also a paradox.

From these three perspectives,

In fact, they all reflected people's pessimism about the development of science and technology at that time.

to this end,

There were two more famous sayings at that time.

One sentence is,

"In the dark ocean of the universe, waves may splash at any time."

"The waves splashed high, and then fell again in an instant. They disappeared without a trace."

"We are also one of them. In the past, we may have always been optimistic that we humans are special."

"But it may actually turn out that we might not be that special after all."

Another sentence is,

"The science we develop is to study the laws of the world, but not every law is useful for our current technology at this stage."

"We can't expect that the world will be as we expected, and the development of science and technology will be like a ladder, and you can climb up from the bottom step by step. There is no such thing as a good thing."

"Science may progress endlessly, and it is not impossible for technology to stay in its current state forever."

"The development of science and technology may not be a uniform ladder, but each step is an island."