To put it into perspective, we are effectively terraforming Earth today, though maybe not in a good way.
replyWe have converted most of the land to agriculture and released maybe trillions of tons of greenhouse gas in the atmosphere, there are 8 billions of us working on it. And what did we do? Increased the global temperature 2 degrees? Made the sea level rise a couple of meters?
It may be bad for us, but compared to terraforming a planet like Mars, that's nothing, and we have the entire humanity industrial complex to do it while on mars, we need to build everything, starting from a hostile environment.
Talking to computers and expecting computers to answer coherent English was science fiction 4 years ago. Don’t lose faith
replyI wouldn’t go that far. It was pretty clear a long time ago that humans spending so much time filling the internet with content was going to eventually enable neural networks to pretend to communicate.
replyThe advancements required to arrive at modern LLMs and the tech needed to get humans safely to Mars or live safely on the Moon are orders of magnitude in difference.
Keeping humans alive is hard.
Emergent complexity doesn’t really apply to material sciences and organic chemistry in the same way it does for machine learning and digital systems.
replyI would not be so pessimistic. Look what the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyanobacteria have done for our atmosphere.
replyMaybe we’ll turn all of Mars into paperclips with our efforts! Glorious paperclips. First Mars, then the universe!
replyIf you can kick off self-sustaining biological processes it’ll happen on its own eventually, but you’d just be looking at generational time scales to do it.
replyOf course you’ll probably have lots of side-effects.