Tim's blog

One the one hand the human race has no given destiny but one the other hand there are in our universe given basic conditions. The universe expands and the distances between the galaxies are increasing. It may be argued the overall life cycle of the universe is unknown to us and it may expand until it is torn apart or shrink again but in the next billions of years it will continue to expand and this is something we have to live with. Another basic condition is the speed of light. In terms of our individual life experience light speed is incredible fast and without technology not possible to be grasped by humans. For the giant size of the universe, light speed is actually so very slow. Already the light from our sun takes 8 minutes to reach to earth. This fact separates us a lot from the rest of the universe as a living human cannot travel alive to the next oasis for us.
Earth is for us not anymore a large planet. The times we needed weeks to travel to another corner of a country are back in the last millennium and millions of people have by now experienced intercontinental aeroplane trips.
People say often we probably will invent something to travel faster than light or overcome the very large distances in the universe in some other way but this opinion is mostly formed by science fiction of the character of fairy tale stories. Scientifically speaking, we have no reason to believe this can be achieved.
So we humans are like a tree on an island. We cannot move to the next island. However, trees exist all over the world and there is no reason to believe that we will never reach to other planets with more or less comfortable life conditions for us.
So it is our destiny to not be able to just jump into a space ship and travel to another planet over the weekend. To have a phone call to another solar system is also not really a realistic scenario. We observe the universe and are unable to find useful natural effects which are faster than light. And to be crystal clear with this, information travelling light speed and matter moving that speed is a totally different thing. This believe is formed by Einstein’s theory of relativity and the needed energy to move something in light speed.
Another very basic conditions is the amount of energy available to us within the universe. There is no reason to believe we humans will ever be able to create energy. Energy can only be converted. Only existing energy is available to us and the core source of energy is a sun. The energy a sun emits is for us currently an unreachable subject. Nevertheless, the maximum energy in a solar system available to us is on the scale of a sun’s energy.
So all in all, we have to deal as humans with limited speed, limited energy and an expanding universe. This is setting a certain direction of what we can or cannot do and for a certain point of view a destiny we cannot overcome. Fully accepting this would cause different strategies we globally pursue. In the current era we humans are busy with globalization and country related issues. We are so very far away of dealing with our destiny.