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To quote Babylon 5

Ask ten different scientists about the environment, population control, genetics, and you'll get ten different answers, but there's one thing every scientist on the planet agrees on. Whether it happens in a hundred years or a thousand years or a million years, eventually our Sun will grow cold and go out. When that happens, it won't just take us. It'll take Marilyn Monroe, and Lao-Tzu, and Einstein, and Morobuto, and Buddy Holly, and Aristophanes, and - all of this - all of this - was for nothing. Unless we go to the stars



The odds are against us. We will never go to the stars. But it doesn’t matter for us as we will likely die before any of this happpens.


And those stars will go out as well.


Well true.

That's the fallacy in the given argument.


By then we’d better understand how to implement a “Let there be light” procedure.

Might very well be the last question we need to ask ourselves.


"Implement Fiat Lux" is a hell of a title for a sci-fi story, if nothing else.


Happily when Asimov wrote the same story, he didn't give away the punchline in the title.


Sure, if you put it in the title you need a different punchline. :D


It would be a different tale altogether - probably engineers discussing how ludicrous the idea is, until it's feasible, and then debating the consequences before pressing the red button.


Yeah. I think I was really imagining it as a chapter title in something like Ra [0]. Sam is good at bombastic chapter titles.

[0] https://qntm.org/ra




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