If we are seriously going to be worried about our sun going nova in 500 million years, then I think we will have even more trouble building our own star along with a replacement earth.
I just don’t have the faith that we have either the technology, the resources, or the political will to replace everything we have here and now.
Our sun will never go ‘nova’…but it will render the surface of the Earth uninhabitable on that timescale. In addition, we get hit by really big rocks every few 10’s of millions of years. There are other things that are possible as well…on timescales much more compressed there are several super-volcanos that are overdue to make their appearance that might be a bit of a bother.
We don’t need to build a star either, nor a replacement Earth. You don’t seem to understand what I’m talking about but I’m not saying either of those things. I’m not sure what you find so fantastic about building megastructures out in the solar system, but it’s really not impossible…just difficult. But you know what is more difficult? Dealing with a 100-kilometer asteroid or a super-volcano, especially if we don’t have the ability to live and work in space, which is what you are saying.
Faith is not necessary.
I see others have already countered this point effectively, so I’ll just leave you with a clever analogy from Neil deGrasse Tyson. Which is when you consider how little of the universe we can actually observe, saying there is no other life in it is the equivalent of scooping up a cup of water from the ocean and from it deducing that there are no whales in the ocean.
This is entirely wrong, in my opinion. Artificially directed human evolution and neurotechnology could allow an explosion in diversity that would make the Cambrian radiation look trivial.
A myriad types of altered human types created by genetic engineering, humans enhanced with and bonded to mechanical parts, entirely electronic versions of human minds with various resolutions that can self-modify and improve themselves at will; I can almost guarantee that, a few hundred years from now, the human and post-human landscape will be so complex that it will be a major challenge just to catalog the diversity.
Not likely. A war, disease, or famine that kills 200 million people won’t even make a dent.
I just want to point out that the Fermi paradox is largely guess work. It takes a sample size of 1, applies a large number of places and attempts to make a prediction. I’m not saying that it’s completely worthless as a thought exercise, but the numbers aren’t real numbers. We guess that if there is water and the right chemical soup that life is bound to happen, but we don’t know. It’s completely possible that the emergence of life was a coincidence of unimaginably poor odds. We guess that once life gets going it survives and evolves. Again, that’s just a guess. It happened once, but does that mean that it’s normal? Maybe the evolution of cell walls is just such a crazy happenstance that it has never happened except here. We guess that once natural selection and multicellular organisms emerge that conciousness is bound to evolve, but is it? We don’t even really know what consciousness is, nor how what is essentially a collection of single-celled organisms who happen to share the same DNA and somehow agree to work together can create a thought. The point is that the Fermi paradox is us taking what we assume are educated guesses without really having much experience in knowing if those guesses are close or complete stabs in the dark. The reality is that there is a distinct possibility that in this crazily huge universe, maybe we’re the only spot where the lightning forked just right and the comet came just close enough and the water stayed just in the right place and the star was just the right temperature and the bazillion other coincidences that go into making things like us happened.
My top answers in order of likelihood:
We are doomed to destroy ourselves as a result of our growing technology which is exponentially increasing both destructive power and the number of people who wield it, eventually yielding an inevitable result.
We are living in a simulation. For purposes of the simulation aliens are irrelevant and have not been included.
The Universe is a “dark forest”.
“The universe is full of life. Life in the universe functions on two axioms: 1. Life’s goal is to survive, and 2. Resources are finite. Like hunters in a dark forest, life can never be certain of alien life’s true intentions. The extreme distance between stars creates an insurmountable “chain of suspicion” where any two civilizations cannot communicate well enough to relieve mistrust, making conflict inevitable. Therefore, it is in every civilization’s best interest to preemptively strike and destroy any developing civilization before it can become a threat, but without revealing their own location, thus solving the Fermi paradox.”
(From the Wikipedia page on the book of the same name)
We are the first.
Same as 4, except that God created the cosmos just for man.
If we colonize space, no. I think we have a good chance of sticking around indefinetly. However, long before we every evolve, I believe we will interface with technology to the point that calling us human is a stretch.
If we don’t colonize, absolutely yes. Some ahole is going to create a virus that will kill us all someday.
Not necessarily. You’re assuming that human progress is linear and points toward greater and greater technological prowess, but it’s possible that we encounter a global downturn, research dollars dry up, education no longer provides a good income, we might have a Malthusian-like crisis wiping out people with expertise in fields or simply a communications gap preventing experts from getting together, we begin to lose the capabilities to maintain our machinery and eventually we lose information that is only stored electronically and we end up an agrarian society again, only this time without enough easily accessible fossil fuels to fuel a technological leap back to our current point. I don’t know that that’s out of the question, nor that it necessarily requires some catastrophe to occur. Right now, I think we’re at the point that almost no one understands the technologies we use. I’m a computer engineer and if the factories got wiped out somehow, I don’t think I could start doping silicon in my garage and I certainly couldn’t make a PC from scratch. It’s not hard to imagine an expertise bottle-neck where very few if any people truly understand our technology at all. It’s not hard to imagine a scenario where as an example there’s a global anti-capitalist movement that takes over factories and educational facilities, but lacks the know how to maintain our current technological capabilities. We have countries now that have gone from very developed places to very undeveloped places in a short amount of time. It’s not out of the question for humanity as a whole to do the same thing. Anyway, just a thought, not making an argument that it will happen, but it’s a counter-point.
That’s why Ashtura started off that post by stating that if we colonize space it won’t be the problem you are pointing towards, but if we don’t then what you say could very well be true. A few 10’s of billion humans forever on this planet will die out, sooner rather than later. A trillion of so humans spread out in this solar system and perhaps some of the other close ones probably not going to die out on anything but geological scales of time.
The lack of other creatures could just mean that:
But as to the question of whether we’ll make it or filter ourselves out of existence?
I think that most people view this as a question of whether anyone will ever pull the lever on all of the nukes. And while I won’t discount that possibility, I think that the larger issue is the advancing ability for any idiot to make stuff, between the easy spread of knowledge with the Internet, and the ability for people to craft things, with 3D printers and tiny, cheap integrated circuits. Fundamentally, making some horrible killer virus is just a matter of having the tooling to play around and the knowledge to do so. And you just need one psychopath that decides to make a go for it, to make it happen.
Our technology is advancing faster than evolution. And while we can set up institutions like the government that only give people that we trust a partial vote on how to go about things, there’s no such thing for the individual. There’s no real solution for them, except changing our genetics or developing technology to detect people who are a danger to society and being able to “correct” those individuals.
Nukes wouldn’t wipe out the species.
Depends on how nukey you get, but yeah I was in a hurry when I was writing that.
In any nuclear confrontation, there would likely be a build-up in hostilities beforehand so the two groups duking it out would have the means in place to save at least some of their people, and it’s unlikely that that would dump enough nukes into the system to take everything out. New Zealand will survive.
I’m not saying that’s a problem. The Ashtura claim was that if we stay on earth, we’ll develop something that kills us all. I’m saying that that only presumes that technology keeps ‘advancing.’ It’s quite possible that technology ‘regresses’ and we stay on this planet, but forever lack the means to destroy ourselves. We settle into a 19th century world where we have already exploited the resources necessary to reach this current state again.
We won’t need to develop something to kill us, though we are quite capable of doing that right now. But if we stay on this one planet we will become extinct at some point. Could be in the next few hundred years after a supervolcano hits Europe or North America (I think those are the two overdue to put in an appearance) that leads to economic collapse or a further strain on resources, already strained by global warming. Could be ourselves. But the timer is ticking, and most of the life on this rock only has about 500 million years, give or take, before everything on it is basically extinct.
Personally I think colonizing space (in habitats, or on Mars as planned by SpaceX and others) will lead to making Earth a sustainable enterprise.
It’s hard to imagine any more successful strategy for developing renewable energy / resource technologies than taking hundreds of Earth’s brightest minds, hurling them into space, and having them live for years in a tiny bubble of life surrounded by the harshest environments possible in nature.
That’s true, but we’re going to become extinct at some point regardless, if at no other point than the heat death of the universe. Realistically, some of us will evolve into other forms or we’ll likely be replaced by some other species that we don’t even know about yet. The clock on how long an individual species exists is relatively short. We like to pretend that we’re immune to being replaced, but it’s nearly inevitable that something will replace us. Besides, there’s a limit to how far we can colonize space due to light speed restrictions, so even if we colonize other planets, it’ll only take one supernova to wipe us all out anyway. Botyom line is that humanity is doomed just as all life is doomed. At some point, your descendants will cease to be.
Well sure. But there is a huge difference, at least from my perspective, between our species dying out a few centuries from now (or a few decades), or a few trillion years from now. 
Even if we make it to a billion years and then something wipes us out we could say we had a good run. Another century or two? That’s kind of really underperforming considering our potential. In addition, we could also do something similar for at least some of the other species on this planet. While I don’t have much to say about flies or slugs I’m kind of fond of dogs, so I’d like them to have a good run too if possible.
Really? Estimates of 200 billion galaxies. Estimates of 100 billion stars in our galaxy. Yeah, there’s life elsewhere. When did we first find other planets? The first scientific detection of an exoplanet began in 1988. It will take time to find truly habitable planets. Even harder to find life actually on the planet. But it’s ridiculous to think we are the only game in town.
Heck, I figured that each star would have planets orbiting them back in grade school in the 1970’s. It was simply logical that if ours did, so do the others in the sky.
Plenty of potential reason we don’ find other life. For instance, they may be so advanced, that they won’t allow us to see them. Maybe they are at the same point in their history and have yet to see our planet. etc.
Actually, the estimate on the number of galaxies in the universe was revised upward to 2 trillion in 2016:
And the Milky Way is also larger than previously estimated, coming in at 200 billion stars, rivaling Andromeda:
https://spaceplace.nasa.gov/review/dr-marc-space/solar-systems-in-galaxy.html
The most recent estimate of the number of Earth-sized planets in the habitable zones of their stars is 20 billion, in our galaxy alone:
Assuming these numbers don’t get revised upwards again, we’re talking about 20 billion planets in each of the 2 trillion galaxies that are similar to Earth in size and temperature. I hate to throw around phrases like “mathematical certainty” but… that’s just counting the planets that would have had similar conditions to Earth. There could be lots of other environments where life could evolve that could be a little, or wildly, different - the extremophiles here on Earth that thrive on radiation, extreme heat, extreme cold, extreme pressures, and extreme lack of resources, provide pretty good proof of that.
On the other hand, it’s somewhat plausible that the initial emergence of life is rare enough that even if there are 2 trillion alien civilizations out there (an average of 1 per galaxy), we may never detect any of them because the distances and time involved are so incredibly vast that you have to be cosmically right next door to each other to even be aware of the other civilization’s existence.