Planet Maxwell 01 next stop
In all probability our descendants in less than four billion years' time will look a bit different to us or even a lot different but they will still have a problem with a sun that is nearing the end of its life and becoming a big red.
Some today think it will be cooked in only a quarter of a billion years. Did I hear you think “Only”.
This would necessitate finding a new home for us and all other life on Earth. Now that is a long time away. It is less than four billion years since our beginning ancestor formed as a simple cell. Great, great, great, great ...., great granddaddy was a single cell, and we are talking about a time as far in the future that we have to depart the Earth, so we can be confident we will be different.
We can also be confident that long, long before that event our great, great, great ..., great grandchildren will be witness to frequent commercial space travel. There are companies now that are proposing visiting the asteroid belt to bring back asteroids rich in resources needed on Earth, and they know which asteroids they need to go and get. So while your great, great, ..., great grandfather may have been used by the Romans to make roads in England your progeny as far in the future may be making roads on the Moon, Mars or Maxwell 02, a planet orbiting a sun ten light years away. Even today getting to the former two is feasible but Maxwell 01 requires something new.
The 4015 spaceship needed to take plants and animals to a destination ten light years away assumed we needed seeds or eggs and sperm from all living things. However in 2,000 years we will probably be able to reproduce life using the DNA data of the life form stored on a computer.
Hence all we need to send is computer data plus robots.
Hence no human cargo. No plant cargo. No need for anything but a very fast spaceship.
Hence the spaceship would not need rotation, air supply, crops.
Our spaceship is now going to be very much smaller and lighter.
It will be just a huge workshop and storeroom driven by BIG motors.
So in several hundred years we have got the DNA message of all Earth's life forms to Maxwell 01 on a computer with robots to implant the DNA message into organic matter. So we need to have sent along some fast growing algae spores to give a base for the new life or if we find life already on Maxwell we can convert it to Earth life.
This means that if there is a life form more advanced than ours on a distant planet and they have decided to expand their life forms to other planets including Earth we would not be seeing little green men coming out of a kilometre long spaceship but R2D2s out of it whose job it is to repopulate the planet. So you could be breakfast, lunch or dinner.
Most likely the planets we get to will be a barren waste with no life and no oxygen in the atmosphere.
Terraforming the planet will be a chore taking millions of years.
Initial life will be in domes or capable of living in an atmosphere devoid of oxygen.
Exciting possibilities for the life on Maxwell 01, 02, etc
Andy is on planet Maxwell 01 which is the first of the Maxwell Empire and is 4 light years away from Earth.
Andy and his siblings are the Ones. The first humans on Maxwell 01. He was born in the 4573 Earth year or 0000 Maxwell 01. They take Earth years, months to keep it simple for Earth people when they read messages from Maxwell 01. It is now 4587 or 0014. So he is 14 year old Andy One.
Andy makes many pertinent observations on Earth humans over the history of Earth. His diary was written in the year 4587 and Earthlings will read it in 4591 as he is four light years away.
You can read what Andy writes in his diary for the six months of his fourteenth year. He is one of the sixty Ones, the first humans on the planet Maxwell 01.
